The Short, Violent Life of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
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How a video-store clerk and small-time crook reinvented himself as America’s nemesis in Iraq
theatlantic.com
Excerpt:
"Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, barely forty and barely literate,a Bedouin from the Bani Hassan tribe, was until recently almost unknown outside his native Jordan. Then, on February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell catapulted him onto the world stage. In his address to the United Nations making the case for war in Iraq, Powell identified al-Zarqawi—mistakenly, as it turned out—as the crucial link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime. Since then, al-Zarqawi has become a leading figure in the insurgency in Iraq—and in November of last year, he also brought his jihadist revolution back home, as the architect of three lethal hotel bombings in Amman. His notoriety has grown with every atrocity he perpetrates, yet Western and Middle Eastern intelligence officials remain bedeviled by a simple question: Who is he? Is he al-Qaeda’s point man in Iraq, as the Bush administration has argued repeatedly? Or is he, as a retired Israeli intelligence official told me not long ago, a staunch rival of bin Laden’s, whose importance the United States has exaggerated in order to validate a link between al-Qaeda and pre-war Iraq, and to put a non-Iraqi face on a complex insurgency?" |
