Interesting news on al Zarqawi:
atimes.com
Istanbul: Gateway to terror
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - The recent bomb blasts in Istanbul are neither isolated incidents nor simply local actions. All indications point towards global Islamic radicals determined to create a Muslim backlash against the West through more suicide attacks in both Turkey and Europe.
Initial European intelligence reaction suggests that the Istanbul suicide blasts were the work of the Tauheed group led by a Jordanian national of Palestinian origin, Abu Mosub al-Zarqawi, who, it is speculated, planned, helped finance and executed the attacks in conjunction with Turkish counterparts.
Al-Zarqawi, known in senior al-Qaeda circles, has recently been the focus of revived United States attempts to link al-Qaeda with Saddam Hussein. Last year, he had a leg amputated in Baghdad after being wounded in Afghanistan. During al-Zarqawi's two-month stay in Baghdad, the US has claimed, many al-Qaeda affiliates established cells in the city. Al-Zarqawi subsequently disappeared.
When the dust settles in Iraq, it could simply be the prelude to a much longer and less defined war involving any number of militant groups in addition to al-Qaeda.
A new war beyond the war (March 24, '03)
Asia Times Online
The US has offered up to US$5 million for clues leading to his arrest, as he is now accused of recruiting fighters in Iraq. The reward appears on the program's website, which is run in coordination with the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security. "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has had a long-standing connection to senior al-Qaeda leadership and appears to be highly regarded among al-Qaeda and a close associate of Osama bin Laden and Saif al-Adel," the announcement says. Al-Adel, for whom there is also a large reward, is thought to be bin Laden's number three and has been reported as being in Iran.
Abu Mosub al-Zarqawi is also thought to have provided weapons and money in connection with the murder of US diplomat Laurence Foley in Jordan last October. He is known to have been very active since the fall of the Taliban government in Afghanistan two years ago, and has variously been tracked in Iran's Kurdish region, northern and central Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine.
He is said to have actively developed networks with smaller groups in these regions, and he coordinated his activities, for example, with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Ansar al-Islam, a militant Iraqi Kurdish group in northern Iraq. This month's Istanbul attacks indicate that he also spent some time in the country making contacts with local radical groups there.
Al-Zarqawi appears to favor US and Jewish targets, as well as their allies. Initially, his main playing field was Palestine, and later on Jordan, where he established a network to bring down the monarchy which, he believes, is hand-in-glove with "Zionist and US interests".
Al-Zarqawi spent some time in Afghanistan, where he operated independent training camps for Jordanians. His Tauheed group is a part of bin Laden's International Islamic Front, an umbrella body that groups organizations which accept bin Laden as a mentor and his pan-Islamic ideology.
Al-Zarqawi's known modus operadi, gleaned from the few members of his network who have been captured by European intelligence, does not involve guerilla warfare, thus it is unlikely, as the US now claims, that he has any serious involvement in Iraq. Rather, his networks in different countries aim to take on the interests of the US and its allies, or specifically, in the language of the jihadis, "take on the Jewish and US unholy nexus".
The recent attacks in Istanbul - on November 15 in which 25 people were killed and last Thursday's bombings which killed 30 - are symbolic in many aspects, such as the choice of city, targets and the timing.
Choice of city
Istanbul was the capital of the last Ottoman caliph. Its Islamic undercurrents have always characterized this city and its Islamic links were so strong that the secular Turk leadership in the post-Caliph period thought that a modern secular state's affairs could not be run in this city, so they shifted the capital to Ankara. After World War II, Turkey gave shelter to many displaced German Jewish families who mainly settled in Istanbul, which now has a sizeable and influential Jewish population of more than 20,000.
Targets
The targets have been two synagogues, the British consulate and a British-based bank, HSBC. This could be interpreted as the opening up of a new campaign against "soft" Jewish and Western targets, with Istanbul, strategically located at the gateway between Asia and Europe, as the staging point.
Timing
US-led forces become more entangled by the day in Afghanistan and Iraq, while US relations with Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia are tense, and could easily turn confrontational.
Al-Zarqawi is believed to be typical of the jihadi mindset that September 11, 2001 was "zero hour" in relations between the Muslim and Western worlds, and that an entirely new world emerged. The subsequent attack on Afghanistan is viewed as a symbolic one on both Arabs and the Muslim world. Yet the reaction in Muslim societies was almost apologetic and submissive. Similarly, the invasion of Iraq drew little response from neighboring countries, where the rulers are more concerned with clinging onto their own power rather than confront the US.
Yet these rulers are moving further and further away from their people, as on the street anti-US feelings are running high. The attacks such as those in Istanbul in the past few weeks are aimed by radicals to ignite the sparks that exist in the Muslim world into an inferno of such intensity that a clash between the two civilizations will be inevitable. |
