Al-Qaeda (47 page)

An accurate picture of al-Zarqawi’s career and activities should not have been difficult to construct. Members of a group of radicalized Jordanian immigrants arrested in Germany in 2002 had admitted to their interrogators that al-Zarqawi was their nominal leader, but made clear that he had set up their group to provide an alternative to bin Laden’s organization. This information was passed to the American authorities. In his speech, Powell called al-Zarqawi a ‘bin Laden associate’, revealing either a wilful misconception of the sheer variety of activists and radical groups that were based in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, or genuine ignorance about the real nature of modern Islamic militancy.
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However al-Zarqawi’s pre-war career was viewed, his post-invasion activities rapidly became notorious. He showed a combination of unrivalled brutality – executing several hostages by knife – and a talent for media manipulation – rapidly and effectively ensuring the broadcast
of the atrocious images of the executions by internet and video. Together with the continuing bomb attacks he and those associated with him were able to launch against American troops, Iraqi government forces and, increasingly, the country’s Shia population, these two dubious talents made him the pre-eminent Islamic militant fighting in Iraq. Al-Zarqawi folded the old structure of Ansar ul Islam (which had already been renamed once as Sunnah ul Islam) into a new group, the exact composition of which was never very clear, though its ability to strike targets across much of western and northern Iraq soon was.

Relations between the younger, unschooled and more brutal militant and the older, more politically astute ‘leadership’ of al-Qaeda remained very strained, however. Though al-Zarqawi changed the name of his organization once more, this time to Tanzeem Qaedat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn (al-Qaeda’s Organization for Jihad in the Land of the Two Rivers (i.e. the Tigris and Euphrates), expressing a nominal allegiance to the umbrella authority of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, he continued to challenge the primacy of the older man. Particularly obvious was his refusal to accept their calls to halt attacks on Iraq’s Shias.
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The other key question which began to emerge as resistance hardened in Iraq through late 2003 and 2004 was the role of ‘foreign fighters’ in attacks on American and other troops, NGOs, the United Nations and local security sources. Even early on it was clear that Iraq had become the newest and most attractive active ‘theatre of jihad’ in the world and that a considerable number of young men were making their way there to fight. Most were coming from Syria, the Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the Maghreb, though others came from further afield.
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One crucial aspect of the early activities of ‘the resistance’ in Iraq was the frequent co-operation, at a tactical level, between radical Muslims from outside Iraq and secular militants loyal to Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party regime or motivated by a distinctly un-Islamic nationalism. This pragmatic – and temporary – alliance was mutually beneficial. The Ba’athists needed suicide bombers, which the jihadis could provide. The jihadis needed funds, expertise, safe houses, munitions and other logistical support, all of which Saddam’s former henchmen had, at least in the early period of the occupation, in relative
abundance. As we have seen, Islamic militants have almost always been short of such essentials and have sought ideologically compatible partners capable of providing them.
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But how many foreign fighters were there in Iraq? Though British and American officials and politicians continued to stress the ‘foreign’ nature of the insurgency throughout 2004 and into 2005, facts on the ground told a different story. Nearly 95 per cent of suspected insurgents captured during fierce fighting in the western town of Falluja and elsewhere in April and May 2004 turned out to be Iraqi.
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Of the tens of thousands of prisoners detained in Abu Ghraib prison, and elsewhere in Iraq, only 300 were from overseas. Similarly, after a major sweep in northern Iraq in November 2005, not one of 1,200 alleged insurgents killed and captured were not of Iraqi citizenship. Even al-Zarqawi himself, in a letter to bin Laden, complained that the number of foreign militants in Iraq was ‘negligible… given the importance of the struggle’.
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In fact reasons for the developing violence in Iraq had little to do with the arrival of foreign militants and everything to do with the way the occupation of such a difficult, complex and sensitive society was being run. None of this was better demonstrated by the few hours I spent with ‘Abu Mujahed’ in a hotel just outside the centre of Baghdad in the late summer of 2004.

During the day, Abu Mujahed worked behind a desk in a major ministry. At night, he fought for ‘the resistance’. He was around 30 years old and had a shaven head, a pot belly, thick forearms and pudgy hands, and when I met him was wearing brown slacks, a sports shirt and a fake leather belt with a big, brass buckle.

First, Abu Mujahed, a Sunni from the big Baghdad quarter of Adhamiyah, had stressed that he had never been a member of the Ba’ath party and that when he had heard that the Americans were coming to ‘liberate Iraq’ he was ‘very happy’. American culture symbolized freedom, meritocracy and opportunity, he said. ‘Under Saddam, I liked listening to Bon Jovi [the American stadium rock group]. The only way to breathe was to watch American films and songs and this gave me a glimpse of a better life so I was happy when I heard that the US was coming.’

Two things had disillusioned Abu Mujahed. The first were the images of civilian casualties broadcast by Arabic-language satellite channels and watched via an illicit dish during the war itself. The second was the sight of Americans troops doing nothing to stop looting in Baghdad. The latter, he said, had convinced him that the Americans were not here to help the Iraqis but ‘to destroy them’. It was still several months before Abu Mujahed decided that he had to act. The deciding moment was when the Americans started ‘killing and arresting’ his ‘own people’, he said.

Over a period of weeks, Abu Mujahed told me, a group of six or seven like-minded men came together. There was no major effort at recruitment, certainly no direction from above or outside, just a band of people sharing a fairly indistinct goal and similar sentiments. It contained, Abu Mujahed said, ‘one man fighting for his nation, another fighting for a principle’ as well as someone who was ‘very religious’. Nor was the process by which his group sourced the various basic elements that all militants and terrorists require – weapons, expertise and somewhere to train and rest and hide – any less amateurish or haphazard. Casual if careful inquiries established that there was an underground network of arms suppliers already in existence. Finding people who had the specialized knowledge that the group needed to use the arms that were available took longer. But ‘step by step’, Abu Mujahed and his friends were able to locate experts in ‘weapons, concealment and communications’ among demobilized members of the once 350,000-strong Iraqi army. ‘They would help us out as a favour and did things like show us how to use a mortar in the front room of someone’s house,’ he said. ‘Bit by bit, we learned what we needed to know.’ One demobilized army officer joined the group.

Though Abu Mujahed was not an ‘Islamic militant’, only going to mosque on a Friday and rarely praying five times a day except during Ramadan, religion clearly paid a significant part in his worldview and was particularly important in unifying his group and, crucially, legitimizing its actions. ‘Always we discuss what we are going to do in religious terms so we can say we are fighting for the sake of religion,’ he said. ‘We have formed our group to fight for religion and the main thing for our group is religion.’

Also important was ‘the humiliation’ Abu Mujahed said he felt as well as his economic situation. The two went together as his pay as a minor government functionary was insufficient to feed his family decently. In addition, he said, none of the advantages he had hoped for from the invasion had come to pass. There was no democracy, he claimed, especially for Iraq’s Sunni Muslim minority, and no electricity or proper sanitation either. The latter charge was certainly indisputable. Before the overthrow of Saddam, 50 per cent of Iraqis had access to clean drinking water. By the end of 2005, the figure had dropped to 32 per cent. Though some $4bn was spent on increasing the power supply, production in April 2006, three years after the invasion, only reached half of the nation’s needs. Perhaps worst of all, 50 per cent of the working population had no jobs.
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Abu Mujahed and his friends soon began establishing contacts with other similar groups, all of which paid nominal allegiance to a single tribal sheikh. There were no specific commands as such but merely broad direction from more senior tribal leaders. Over the next months the group tried various tactics: sniping at Americans, remote-controlled bombs, laying mines where they knew patrols would pass and using mortars. One crucial element that came out of my interview with Abu Mujahed (which was reinforced by other discussions with radical Iraqi activists) was his disdain and dislike for foreign religious militants – something that was far more widespread among Iraqi insurgents than was generally believed.
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‘We met some of them but we have refused to work with them because it is too dangerous,’ Abu Mujahed said. ‘They are really blood-thirsty people. They do not care if they kill honest Iraqi people. They are crazy, I tell you. They are terrorists, really, they are terrorists, I mean it.’

Are you a terrorist? I asked him.

He looked horrified. ‘No, no, we attack American soldiers,’ he said. ‘We are freedom fighters. We are the resistance.’ I asked Abu Mujahed if his group had a name. ‘I am sure that the day will come when we are known as a group, inshallah. But we have no need for a specific name, like “al-Qaeda” or anything. We are a local organization. It doesn’t matter if we have a name or not.’

In absolutely every way, Abu Mujahed’s operations were typical. His motivations or those of the others in his group – a mixture of disappointed expectations, wounded pride, concepts of tribal and national honour, socioeconomic hardship and revenge for killed, injured or humiliated loved ones or associates – were broadly representative. The emergence and instrumentalization of religion is not surprising either. Islam, as we have seen in early chapters, has consistently played a role as a rallying flag and a discourse to concentrate, express and unify diverse grievance and impulses towards activism and potentially towards violence. In addition, in the last decade of Saddam’s rule, many young Iraqi men, realizing that the Ba’ath party had lost much of its ideological relevance and coherence, turned towards the political Islam prevalent as an ideology elsewhere in majority Arab countries as a programme for their own nation. The deteriorating economic situation of the last years of Saddam Hussein’s regime also saw a strengthening of kinship and tribal ties. These tribal and family associations sometimes clashed with more nationalist and religious identities, but were often easily combined – as in the case of Abu Mujahed’s band.

Operationally too, Abu Mujahed’s group was entirely characteristic of other groups. According to one American intelligence report on the groups responsible for the Improvized Explosive Devices (IEDs) that were proving so lethal to US troops, the groups in Iraq had ‘no hierarchical structure’. Instead, ‘vast numbers of small, adaptive insurgent cells operate independently without central guidance’. Though ‘there may be some loose co-ordination of attacks, cells go their separate ways afterwards’ the summary said, before stressing that the ‘highly decentralized characteristic of the IED cells’ made them ‘nearly impossible to penetrate’ and, worse still, their small size allowed them to focus on specific American units, to learn their tactics, patrol schedules, transportation routes and to readily adapt to any counter-IED techniques their targets might introduce.

Other classic operational elements of Abu Mujahed’s group would include the way in which they accessed military expertise – partly as a result of the hasty demobilization of the army in the post-invasion period which saw a rapid dissemination of such knowledge among the
civilian population. Also, though Abu Mujahed did not mention it, the internet aided some groups to learn both about ambush tactics and, crucially, about the media potential of the acts. Abu Mujahed was entirely typical of the modern Sunni Iraqi militant. It was men like him that were the backbone of the insurgency in Iraq, not al-Zarqawi, his ‘foreign fighters’ or even those relatively few Iraqis dedicated to the radical, ‘jihadi-Salafi’ or ‘al-Qaeda-ist’ project.
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In 2004 bin Laden issued four major statements. The first and the last – in January and in December – were largely addressed to the Muslim world and pursued well-trodden themes. In the January audiotape delivered to al-Jazeera, the Arab language satellite station, bin Laden placed the ongoing fighting in Iraq within a historical tradition stretching from the Prophet Mohammed’s first battle via the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to the creation of Israel and the ‘betrayal’ of Palestine by the Arab nations’ leaders. He described the rise and fall of secular ideologies such as pan-Arabism, socialism, communism and democracy and then launched into a lengthy tirade against the royal rulers of the Arabian Gulf before calling, once more, for a general uprising and jihad. The ‘miserable situation of Arab countries’ and the ‘deterioration in all walks of life’ suffered by Muslims was attributed to the fact that ‘many of us lack the correct and comprehensive understanding of the religion of Islam.’ The sole innovation in a fairly tired performance was the first, though extremely vague, outlining of something approximating the instrumentalities of a Shariat state. Bin laden talks of temporary councils to protect and unite the people, govern and distribute weapons. The 16 December communication, posted on an internet site frequently used by the al-Qaeda hardcore, was also a reprise of old themes.