Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda’s Robespierre

By DHinMI

One of the more irritating and possibly disastrous miscalculations made by the Bush administration is their characterization of the leader of Al Queda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi has typically been represented as a lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, when in fact he’s probably more aptly described as a Jihadist “fellow traveler,” with many common goals but important differences. Other than bin Laden himself, most of the primary figures important to the rise of Al Qaeda were Egyptians, including bin Laden’s number two man, Ayman Zawahiri. The Egyptian cadre at the heart of Al Qaeda were profoundly shaped by their participation with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which arose out of the Muslim Brotherhood and looked for guidance in the writings of the Egyptian Islamist theorist Sayyid Qutb, with whose brother Mohammed Zawahiri studied after Sayyid Qutb’s execution by the Nasser regime in 1966.  Zawahiri wasn’t directly implicated in the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat, but he was scooped up in the roundup of possible suspects. Zawahiri, one-time Al Qaeda military chief Mohammed Atef and others important to the rise of Al Qaeda were born in the 50’s and early 60’s, and many were among the earliest adherents to radical politicized Islam, which was in reaction to the pan-Arabism of Nasser, which for many was discredited by the Arab defeat by the Israelis in the 1967 Six Day War, and later by Sadat’s negotiated peace arrangement with Israel, the act that led to his assassination. And the almost all were early combatants in the Jidadist insurgency in reaction to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Born in 1966, two months after Sayyid Qutb’s execution and just before Zawahiri’s radicalization, Zarqawi was a infant during the Six Day War, a pre-adolescent when Sadat visited Israel to explore the possibility of peace, when Zawahiri became involved with Egyptian Islamic Jihad. He was a teen when Sadat was assassinated.  In contrast to the highly educated Zawahiri, Zarqawi dropped out of school at 17. He arrived in Afghanistan in 1989, just in time to see the Soviets retreat back north. He does not appear to have undergone much tutelage in Islamist theory. After leaving Afghanistan he spears to have circulated through European Jihadi circles before landing in a Jordanian prison from 1992 to 1999 for plotting to overthrow the Jordanian monarchy. Upon release he went to Afghanistan, but instead of joining with Al Qaeda, he set up a rival training operation. Instead of planning sophisticated attacks in Western locales, or networking with Jihadis throughout Western Europe to work on financing and logistics, Zarqawi focused instead on more guerilla-oriented tactics. Rather than bin Laden or Zawahiri, the Islamist leader Zarqawi most resembles is Juma Namangani of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Killed by a US bomb while leading the foreign Jihadis aligned with the Taliban, Namangani—a former Soviet paratrooper radicalized during his service in Afghanistan—lacked any theoretical sophistication, but was known as a fierce, brutal but charismatic tactical leader of guerilla insurgency.  And like Zarqawi, he espouses a regeneration of the Caliphate, of neccesity by violent means.

But there is one important difference between Zarqawi and Namangani: while neither was politically or theoretically very sophisticated, Zarqawi has adopted without nuance a very pure Salafist dogma, in which Sufism and Shia’ism is viewed as a heinous heresy, and killing such heretics is, if not an obligation, at least something for which a pious (Sunni) Muslim has nothing to apologize.

Which brings us to Iraq:

Triple suicide bombings in Jordan this week marked a breakthrough for Islamic guerrilla leader Abu Musab Zarqawi in his efforts to expand the Iraqi insurgency into a regional conflict and demonstrated his growing independence from the founders of al Qaeda, according to Arab and European intelligence officials.

Zarqawi, 39, has sought for years to overthrow the monarchy in his native Jordan. But since he emerged over the past two years as the best-known leader of the insurgency in Iraq, his success in rallying Islamic extremists from other countries to fight U.S. forces there has enabled him to extend his reach and influence, officials and analysts say. His guerrilla network, they say, has established roots in Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

"This is really alarming, if Zarqawi is able to carry out these kind of attacks in Jordan and if Iraq is able to become the headquarters for terror attacks in the region," said Mustafa Alani, senior policy analyst for the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. "We're talking about the emergence of another Afghanistan."

Some terrorism analysts and officials say Zarqawi has already eclipsed al Qaeda's founder, Osama bin Laden, in terms of prominence and appeal to Islamic radicals worldwide. Both want to establish a new Islamic caliphate in the Middle East but have clashed over tactics, such as whether it is advisable to avoid targeting Muslims.

While bin Laden has been on the run for the past four years, largely cut off from the outside world, Zarqawi has attracted hundreds if not thousands of fighters to Iraq and has avoided capture despite the presence of as many as 150,000 U.S. troops. He also has raised his profile by embracing merciless tactics, including videotaped beheadings and suicide attacks on civilian targets, such as the bombings in Amman that killed nearly 60 people at three hotels Wednesday night...

"He's fashioned himself as the most important competitive force to al Qaedism," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert and director of the Washington office of the Rand Corp., a California-based research group. "For Zarqawi, Iraq is a means to an end, rather than an end to a means. His road runs through Baghdad, but it doesn't stop there. It goes on to Amman, Tel Aviv, Riyadh and perhaps even Western Europe."

Although he has formed an alliance with al Qaeda, Zarqawi has always worked as an independent operator. He met bin Laden in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 1999 and received some financial support from al Qaeda, but established a separate Afghan training camp for Jordanian fighters.

Last year, in a letter to bin Laden that was intercepted by the U.S. military, Zarqawi pledged his loyalty and changed the name of his Iraq-based Monotheism and Jihad network to al Qaeda in Iraq. But he also has squabbled with other al Qaeda leaders over tactics, strategy and fundraising.

In July, al Qaeda's deputy leader, Ayman Zawahiri, wrote a 16-page letter to Zarqawi that gently scolded him for kidnapping Arabs, killing rivals and sponsoring indiscriminate attacks that resulted in the deaths of innocent Muslims.

"The strongest weapon that the holy warriors enjoy is popular support from the Muslim masses," Zawahiri wrote. "In the absence of this popular support, the Islamic warrior movement would be crushed in the shadows, far from the masses who are distracted and fearful."

For all their radicalism, bin Laden and Zawahiri have always shown an awareness of public perception of their cause and their tactics.  Despite pledging fealty to the destruction of Israel and the attacks of 9-11, their goals have generally appeared to be directed at overthrowing the Saudi Monarchy (which Zawahiri and the other Egyptians appear to believe is more vulnerable than the secular Egyptian state).  And they and most other Jihadis advocate a more modest tactical approach to the "problem" of apostosy as respresented by non-Sunni Muslims.

Other erstwhile allies of Zarqawi have expressed similar misgivings about his approach. Abu Mohammed Maqdisi, a radical Jordanian cleric who became Zarqawi's mentor when both were imprisoned in the late 1990s, said in August that Zarqawi was hurting their shared cause by launching suicide attacks that often killed Muslim women and children "but barely one or two occupier Americans."

Maqdisi, also known as Isam Mohammad Taher Barqawi, said Zarqawi was making a serious tactical mistake by targeting Shiite Muslims. Shiites make up a majority of the population in Iraq, but Zarqawi, a Sunni, regularly denounces them as apostates.

"I am not ashamed or embarrassed at all to say that I do not sanction it, support it or approve it," Maqdisi told al-Jazeera television in July. "You blow up a Shiite mosque and the Shiites blow up a Sunni mosque and the circle of conflict shifts from fighting the occupier enemy. It becomes communal fighting between two factions who should be in one camp against the occupier."

Zarqawi doesn't appear to care that the actions he sanctions, leads or claims were the work of his organization are often deplored by fellow Muslims.  It's too soon to determiine whether the Amman bombings will diminish his stature in the Arab and Muslim societies.  But like fellow beheader Robespierre in the French Revolution, Stalin and Mao during their purges, or the deranged Khmer Rouge who perpetrated a savage, enormous class genocide in Cambodia, Zarqawi seems to be moving into a stage where he believes it's more important to pursue his vision of societal and culture-wide cleansing of impure elements, even if it results in the deaths of innocents. 

The same day, after thousands of Jordanians took to the streets to protest the Amman bombings and to denounce Zarqawi, his organization posted another statement. It said the Amman hotels were chosen as targets because they were known gathering places for intelligence agents from the United States, Israel, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

But the statement also rebuked the protesters, calling them hypocrites for remaining silent about Muslims killed or wounded by U.S. forces in Iraq. "By God, we did not see from them at any time sadness about Muslim spilled blood every day" in Iraq, it read.

Despite their differences, Zarqawi and the founders of al Qaeda share an overarching goal: to unify all Muslim lands under a caliphate, or a single theocratic state.

Since the late 1990s, bin Laden and al Qaeda strategists have sought to accomplish that primarily by attacking what they refer to as "the far enemy" -- the United States, Europe and other nations that have forged alliances with the secular states of the Middle East. The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, the train bombings in Madrid in March 2004 and the subway bombings in London last July all were designed to press Western powers to withdraw military forces from the Middle East and cease their support for countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

There's little to indicate that bin Laden-led or sanctioned individual actions have occurred in Iraq.  His penchant is for the spectacular, while Zarqawi's method is closer to standard guerilla warfare, a variation of which we're seeing in Iraq.  But it's a common interpretation of most international terrorism experts, including Rand's Hoffman, that terrorism often arises from frustrated national liberation movements.  A classic example supporting this theory is the PLO's rise immediately after the Arab loss in the Six Day War.  So, what happens if Zarqawi's operation isn't broken, but it also fails to turn Iraq into a sectarian battleground, much less overthrow the Jordanian monarchy and destroy Israel?

"The real goal of Zarqawi is to banish Israel from the region, or even annihilate Israel," Ernst Uhrlau, intelligence coordinator for German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, said at a security conference in Berlin on Thursday. Uhrlau characterized the Amman attacks as an attempt by Zarqawi "to demonstrate the ability to act against Israel from inside Jordan."

European security officials have become increasingly worried that, given his increased stature in the Middle East, Zarqawi might begin to shift his focus to the so-called far enemy as well.

That sounds remakably like Osama bin Laden prior to September 11, 20001, when he operated a worldwide terror network from his base in Afghanistan, and frustrated by his failure to overthrow the Saudi royal family directed his operations against the United States.  There would be, however, one obvious and cruelly ironic difference: intead of an anarchic failed state caused by a Soviet invasion, Zarqawi's base would be an anarchic failed state created with significant help from the U.S.-led coaltion that invaded and has occupied Iraq since March, 2003. 

In short, we would have seen who provided inadvertant hospitality to the terrorist enemy,  that the host would be us. 

Comments

[croatoan]

The Bush administration passed on three chances to kill Zarqawi before the invasion.

"People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president's policy of preemption against terrorists," according to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey.
...
Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi's operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.

Bush cited Zarqawi's presence in Iraq (in the Kurdish-controlled no-fly zone, out of reach of Hussein) as "proof" of Iraq's supoprt for terrorism, but didn't actually do anything about him, even though the Pentagon presented three plans to get him before the invasion.

Does the "flypaper theory" cover exporting terrorist attacks from Iraq?

[RonK, Seattle]

Also from RAND, CIA greybeard Graham Fuller -- expert on Middle East, Central Asia, and the Muslim world.

He'll remind you of things you know are true, but never want to hear: that "obvious" direct solutions blow up in your face ... not everyone who dumps on you is your enemy ... and you can't do just one thing.

One especially provocative thesis: By default, Islamic fundamentalists are the vanguard of democracy in their respective settings. Kingdoms, military regimes, one-party democracies can stamp out political movements ... but they can't crush the mosques.

All the natural "juice" that flows into asking "why aren't things different from the way things are?" ends up pooling and souring in fundamentalist cellars.

[adapted from a post of mine, April 2002]

[texas dem]

Also, that business about turning down three chances to kill Zarqawi is totally confirmed and verified, right? When exactly do Democrats get to get political mileage out of that horrendously cynical decision? Why couldn't we get any in 2004?

[Davis X. Machina]

Why couldn't we get any in 2004?

Because John Kerry windsurfs, and looks French.

We, as a nation, do have priorities, you know.

[Petey]

"Zawahiri wasn’t directly implicated in the 1977 assassination of Anwar Sadat..."

1981.

[DHinMI]

D'oh! Was thinking of the year Sadat went to Israel, and somehow mixed up the dates. Thanks for the correction.