Authors: Joby Warrick
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He surrounds himself with the scum of Anbar,” Zaydan complained. “The people accept him because they are sheep without a shepherd. But the men close to him are lowlifes, people with no conscience. And they are drawn to Zarqawi because he has a lot of money.”
Zarqawi himself was rarely seen in the town, but his Iraqi deputies quickly earned notoriety as colorful butchers. Most famous was a religious zealot called Omar the Electrician, a stocky tradesman with chipped teeth who, in his twenties, had shot a police officer in Saddam Hussein’s government in an act of revenge over the killing of a relative. He sought refuge with Ansar al-Islam, the Islamist group that had sheltered Zarqawi in Iraq’s northeastern mountains. When Zarqawi entered Baghdad, Omar the Electrician came along, and rose to become the leader of Zarqawi’s brigade in Fallujah. His band became among the most notorious in Iraq, staging hit-and-run attacks on American patrols and running kidnapping-for-ransom operations to raise money. Hostages who couldn’t pay up were killed, though not by Omar himself. He “
swore he’d never personally beheaded a hostage,” one of his comrades told journalists. “He said he chose men who don’t have hearts to do the actual killing.”
Zarqawi eventually began to solicit pledges of support—
bay’at
, a loyalty oath—from Anbar tribal leaders and elders. In the summer of 2004, word was passed to Zaydan through a cousin that Zarqawi was looking for a declaration of allegiance from him. The question was relayed over coffee, the first of two occasions when Zaydan would receive such a request. “Will you publicly pledge your support to Zarqawi?” the cousin asked.
How to respond? Inside, Zaydan was furious. The arrogance of this foreigner—this criminal—who dared to presume that he could assert authority over tribal traditions that had held sway for centuries!
For all he knew, Zarqawi was an American agent, sent by Washington to stir unrest so the Westerners and Iranians could have an excuse to destroy Iraq utterly and divide the spoils among themselves.
But even Zaydan dared not utter such opinions aloud. He chose to deflect the question, for now.
“Who is Zarqawi?” he shrugged. “I never met him.”
—
In July 2004, the Bush administration announced that it had increased the reward for information leading to Zarqawi’s capture, from ten million to twenty-five million dollars—identical to the bounty offered for Bin Laden’s head.
Zarqawi celebrated his rise in the most-wanted rankings with a video, posted to jihadist Web sites. In it, he was introduced under his new favorite moniker—“the sheikh of the slaughterers”—and his voice boomed with confidence. He talked about famous Muslim warriors such as Musa Ibn Nusayr, a hero of the Islamic conquest of Spain, implying his own place in the chain of great men. Then he made an impassioned plea for Muslims from across Iraq and around the world to join him.
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This is a call for help from the depths, to the lions in Baghdad and al-Anbar, and to the heroes in Diyala and Samarra, and to the tigers in Mosul and the north: Prepare for battle,” he said.
His intended audience by now knew exactly the kind of battle he meant. Since Berg’s savage murder, Islamist media were awash in Zarqawi-inspired gore. The Jordanian’s men carried out dozens of executions, many of them videotaped, including the beheadings of a Bulgarian truck driver, a South Korean translator, and an Egyptian contractor. Scores of others would follow, including Americans, Britons, Japanese, Austrians, and Italians. Lebanese kidnapping victims who were freed through ransom told stories of torture and unimaginable cruelty in makeshift prisons; of poor immigrant laborers who lacked money for ransom being killed slowly with electric drills; of other victims being held down while their tongues were hacked out. Young foreign-born Islamists who answered Zarqawi’s call to jihad most often ended in suicide-bomber school. Some would be called
upon to sacrifice their own lives to destroy targets with no discernible gain other than to kill a few innocent Iraqis who happened to be in the wrong place.
In recruiting volunteers for suicide bombings, Zarqawi was knowingly defying a Koranic commandment that strictly forbids Muslims from taking their own lives. Some Islamic scholars have held that military suicide missions might be permitted under extreme circumstances, and jihadists have argued for decades over exactly where the lines fall. Zarqawi seized on a small loophole in Islamic law and stretched it to absurd proportions, using hand-picked clerics to sanction the use of “martyrdom operations” for any purpose that suited him. The result was a torrent of suicide attacks unrivaled in the history of the jihadist movement, scholars later concluded.
As Zarqawi himself later wrote, such operations were
the most “deadly weapons we have in our possession: weapons with which we can inflict the deepest wound upon our enemy.” He added, somewhat cynically: “All of this is notwithstanding the fact that these kinds of operations are of little effort for us; they are uncomplicated and are the least costly for us.”
In the videotape appealing for new recruits, Zarqawi offered the usual platitudes about heavenly rewards. More appealing, perhaps, was his invitation to be part of a movement that transcended history itself. The liberation of Muslim lands was a worthy goal, but it was only the start. Zarqawi promised nothing short of a reshaping of the global order. “You shall overcome America, by Allah. You shall overcome America, though it may be after a while,” he said. “It shall remain a mole of shame on the cheek of time.”
For the first time, Zarqawi also revealed a conviction regarding his own destiny as a midwife for the new golden age of Islam. He referred to apocalyptic passages in the Hadith describing the end-times struggle that would lead to Islam’s ultimate triumph. According to the ancient prophecies, mankind’s final battle would be fought in northern Syria, near a village called Dabiq. The story echoes early Christian teachings about the epic contest between forces of good and evil at Armageddon.
Jihad’s “flames will blaze,” Zarqawi said, “until they consume the Armies of the Cross in Dabiq.”
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The claim was audacious. Around the world, other Islamist leaders and religious scholars argued furiously about Zarqawi.
Among his harshest critics were a number of fellow jihadists, including some who knew Zarqawi well. One of the sharpest rebukes came from the terrorist leader’s old cellmate and mentor from Jordan, the man who was first to recognize Zarqawi’s leadership potential within al-Jafr Prison. Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi had been in and out of detention during the years when Zarqawi was away, and the differences that emerged between the friends during their last weeks in jail had widened in the years since. Now Maqdisi watched in disapproval as his former protégé killed Muslim men, women, and children who had nothing to do with overthrowing a corrupt leader.
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I hear and monitor the chaos that rages today in Iraq, by means of which they seek to blemish the Jihad and its honorable image by blowing up cars, planting bombs in the roads, and firing mortars in the streets, markets, and other places where Muslims congregate,” Maqdisi wrote in a letter he posted on his personal Web site, assuming—accurately—that Zarqawi would see it. “The hands of the Jihad fighters must remain clean, so as not to be sullied with the blood of those whom it is forbidden to harm, even if they are rebellious sinners.”
Maqdisi had no qualms about using violence, but he was a stickler for the rules, as he understood them. Zarqawi, the pupil, had somehow missed some of the nuances.
“An example of this,” he wrote, “is when the fighter crosses the lines of Sharia by abducting or killing a Muslim for non-Sharia reasons—such as claiming he worked for the infidels when the work doesn’t reach the level of giving aid to the infidels.”
And there was another thing: suicide bombing. Islam forbids it, he declared, except in rare cases where there are no other means of waging the struggle. Zarqawi’s men had compounded the sin by using suicide bombers to kill the innocent, he said. That the intended victims were Shiites was no excuse.
“Even if our Sunni brothers in Iraq have many justifications, this does not justify blowing up mosques,” Maqdisi said. “Permitting the
[spilling of] blood of the Shiites is a mistake in which Jihad fighters had best not become entangled.”
A religious backlash to Zarqawism stirred among mainstream Muslims as well. The most significant repudiation of Zarqawi’s ideology came from his native country, organized by the man whose amnesty decree in 1999 had inadvertently given Zarqawi his chance.
In 2002, King Abdullah II had been scolded by American officials for warning that an invasion of Iraq would “open Pandora’s box,” and he was taking no pleasure in seeing his predictions coming true. Sickened by the bombings and beheadings carried out in Allah’s name, the monarch began a series of private meetings with religious scholars to talk about a way to draw a line between Islam, the ancient faith, and the hateful
takfiri
creed used by Zarqawi to justify the killing of those he regarded as apostates.
It was no easy assignment. Unlike Shiites or Roman Catholics, Sunni Muslims lack a centralized religious hierarchy that settles theological debates. Muftis, Sunni clerics of a certain rank, can issue religious edicts called fatwas, but any two can disagree wildly on the same topic: what is a damnable sin to one scholar may be regarded as permissible or even obligatory behavior to another. Since his arrival in Iraq, Zarqawi had become a master at exploiting the contradictions in the system, surrounding himself with like-minded clerics who issued fatwas to condone suicide bombings and the killing of Muslim innocents, actions that would be regarded as anti-Islamic under almost any reasonable interpretation of Koranic texts.
The best antidote, Abdullah felt, was a strong denunciation that carried the moral weight of all branches of Islam, everywhere in the world. It must be a statement of clarity and universality, equally acceptable to mainstream Sunnis and Shiites from Cairo to Kabul, and from Tehran to Timbuktu. To begin the task, Abdullah deputized one of his cousins, a Cambridge-educated Islamic scholar named Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad, and pulled together the country’s top clerics and religious experts to draft a declaration that sought to address three key questions:
Who is a Muslim? Who is empowered to issue fatwas? And under what circumstances can one Muslim brand another as an apostate?
On November 9, 2004, the king took a seat next to Jordanian Chief Justice Iz al-Din al-Tamimi as the judge read a short declaration that Abdullah hoped would serve as the template for Muslim rejection of
takfiri
beliefs.
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We denounce and condemn extremism, radicalism and fanaticism today, just as our forefathers tirelessly denounced and opposed them throughout Islamic history,” al-Tamimi read. “On religious and moral grounds, we denounce the contemporary concept of terrorism that is associated with wrongful practices, whatever their form may be. Such acts are represented by aggression against human life in an oppressive form that transgresses the rulings of God.”
The statement drew little notice in the West. In Washington, the news media and political establishment were busily dissecting President George W. Bush’s narrow reelection victory over his Democratic rival, John F. Kerry, the previous week. Within thirty-six hours of the declaration, the spotlight would shift to France, where the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat would die while receiving treatment for the flu, sending much of the Arab world into spasms of mourning.
Still, Abdullah continued to lobby Muslim leaders to support his declaration. Months later, more than two hundred Islamic scholars—representing more than fifty countries, from Saudi Arabia and Egypt to Iran and Lebanon—gathered in the Jordanian capital to craft a more expansive statement that carried the same blanket rejection of religion-inspired violence. Over the following year, a total of five hundred Islamic scholars and seven international Islamic assemblies would formally endorse what came to be called “the Amman Message.”
“It is neither possible nor permissible to declare as apostates any group of Muslims who believes in God,” the statement said.
It was the first time scholars and religious leaders from across the Islamic world had come together to denounce
takfiri
ideology collectively, in a consensus statement considered legally binding for observant Muslims. No one expected an immediate halt to the bloodshed in Iraq, and, indeed, the killings continued as before. Yet Abdullah, reflecting on the effort afterward, said there had been no choice but to speak out. Even though Zarqawi might be fighting Americans
and Shiites, his chief targets were ultimately the minds of young Muslims he hoped to win to his cause. Each bombing shown on the nightly news, each grotesque video uploaded to the Internet, brought Zarqawi closer to his goal. And until now, the rest of the Muslim world had offered nothing substantial in reply.
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The ability of a few extremists to influence perceptions through acts of barbarity places greater responsibility on the moderates, of all religions, to speak up,” the king said. “If the majority remains silent, the extremists will dominate the debate.”
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Another contender for the sympathies of young Muslims was beginning to see Zarqawi in a more charitable light. Osama bin Laden had never tried to disguise his personal dislike for the Jordanian. But three years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Zarqawi offered the potential for something that Bin Laden desperately needed: a win.
The al-Qaeda founder was trapped in an exile of his own making, able to do little more than pass along instructions and advice by courier to operatives hundreds of miles away. By co-opting Zarqawi, al-Qaeda could share the credit for his successes and draw in new energy from his suddenly white-hot celebrity. Over time, perhaps it could also rein in some of Zarqawi’s worst excesses.
The partnership was officially confirmed by Bin Laden in an audiotape broadcast on Arab cable-news channels. In his usual low-key manner, he announced a new branch of the al-Qaeda movement, and an impressive promotion for the man he designated as the leader.