Zarqawi: The New Face of Al-Qaeda

Zarqawi Zarqawi

THE NEW FACE OF AL-QAEDA

Preface

IF CIRCUMSTANCES ARE WHAT CREATE NOTORIETY FOR TERRORISTS, Iraq is for Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi what Afghanistan was for Osama Bin Laden: violence and more.

Afghanistan and Iraq are two jihadist countries with worldwide stakes. In the former, Bin Laden got himself accepted on the basis of his strategic intelligence; in the latter, Zarqawi predominates by main force. Bin Laden worked out a pragmatic position; Zarqawi advocates chaos as a form of politics. Bin Laden thinks of himself as bringing people together; Zarqawi is exclusionary.

When it comes to violence, Zarqawi brings terrorism back to its original meaning: terror. Always one war behind, he never succeeded in his undertaking until he found in the Iraqi conflict an outlet for his frustrations and complexes and a way to undo his failures. Draped in his personal religious convictions, he has declared war against the world and everyone in it. "I am global," he states, so as not to have to admit that all he can do is depict worst-case scenarios in order to justify his existence, this man who was never more than the shadow of his religious or military masters, starting with Osama Bin Laden, and who was always constrained, be it in the jails of his country or in acts of local terrorism.

The insignificance of his battles explains why, in his lifetime, the most hunted man in the world was just one more name on the endless list of candidates for jihad, and why no one, from Jordan to the United States, noticed the genesis of a criminal. He was let out of prison in the belief that confinement would drive him mad, but what actually happened was that a murderer, already fascinated by death, was uncaged. This blindness went on for a long time: as of the beginning of November two thousand four he was still not the subject of a "red notice," that is, a worldwide arrest warrant issued by Interpol.

Behind the mask of the bloody executioner who terrifies the planet vicariously on the Internet, Zarqawi is a terrorist with an atypical, chaotic career, profiting from the rout of Al-Qaeda to create a personal role for himself and build "his" organization, supplanting the Bin Laden networks in many countries.

Zarqawi became a professional terrorist, a cold-blooded killer, by learning a lot from others. First there was Al-Qaeda, which gave him scope for his ambitions and made him one of its leaders before letting him go off on his own. He took advantage of the weakness of several governments, or their ambiguous position toward terrorism and Islamic radicalism, to establish himself, protect himself, and, today, to extend his influence.

He is neither the tool of Saddam Hussein, as the Americans have claimed, nor the henchman of Osama Bin Laden, but an extremist exceptionally favored by circumstances. Zarqawi does not intend to make a career; what he is trying to do is take revenge on life. He follows no logic other than that of a violence that almost makes the Taliban seem like a band of jokesters in turbans. Zarqawi gives lessons to hell, to use André Malraux's expression, and others take him as a model. Iraq could be his tomb, but he himself sees it as a stepping stone. It is time to become aware of him.

This is how and why I set myself the task of understanding the personality and acts of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi.

IT ALL BEGAN IN OCTOBER TWO THOUSAND TWO. FOUR MONTHS EARLIER LAWYERS for the families of victims of the attacks of September eleventh-thousand such relatives-had put me in charge of an international investigation aimed at bringing to light and justice the people physically or morally supporting Al-Qaeda. My team had been relentlessly tracking the financial and logistical underpinnings of the terrorist group. From the mountains of Afghanistan to the desert of Yemen, by way of Chechnya and Bosnia-Herzegovina, more than fifteen investigators had been providing daily reports on Islamic terrorism, sometimes to the great displeasure of the official intelligence services.

One morning an investigator of ours in Afghanistan, a man who, several weeks earlier, had asked for automatic pistols, machine guns, and a dozen bodyguards for his protection, handed over to me a box stamped SECRET-AFG and containing a batch of unpublished doc- uments he recovered from the administrative quarters of a training camp that had been deserted after the American offensive. What I found there, all jumbled together, were individual military tags, a handbook for the manufacture of chemical and bacteriological sub- stances, an anti-Western pamphlet, and a practical guide to Al- Qaeda in Afghanistan for new recruits.

This last document, thirty pages in length, was a real treasure trove. It listed useful telephone numbers, detailed the methods of communication and code names to be used, and named people to be contacted, whether religious and military leaders or those responsible for lodgings. In addition to the already identified members of the organization, I noticed a name that had never attracted our attention: Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. He might have been an insignificant figure had he not had a place on this list, between the military chief of Al-Qaeda and the person in charge of Bin Laden's terrorist training camps.

After several days of research, it turned out that the man called Zarqawi, whose real name was Ahmad Fadil Nazzal Al-Khalayleh, was being sought in Jordan and appeared on a list of Al-Qaeda members who had fled to Iran.

In January two thousand three, one of my colleagues, whose task is to look into the new leaders of Al-Qaeda, was assigned the AMAZ file and began to seek information about Zarqawi, his intermediaries, and his men. Since that time, over ten thousand pages of documents have been gathered, emanating from the judicial, police, and intelligence services of more than ten countries ascertaining the doings of the "Zarqawi network." Over one hundred witnesses have been questioned, including not only magistrates and members of the police and intelligence services, but also relatives and close associates of Zarqawi, in order to define the nature of this man's career and the reality of his network. Over ten trips to the Middle East, especially to Jordan, were required to gather the elements of the investigation presented in this book. Most are unpublished, and some have had to be expur- gated so as not to harm ongoing governmental investigations into the man who has become the world's most wanted fugitive.