Mosque Attack Pushes Iraq Toward Civil War

[GhostofMarcus]

[FRAME]http://my.earthlink.net/article/int?guid=20060222/43fbefd0_3421_1334520060222-2113930898[/FRAME]

[hide]Mosque Attack Pushes Iraq Toward Civil War
By ZIAD KHALAF (Associated Press Writer)
From Associated Press
February 22, 2006 4:45 PM EST
SAMARRA, Iraq - Insurgents detonated bombs inside one of Iraq's holiest Shiite shrines Wednesday, destroying its golden dome and triggering more than 90 reprisal attacks on Sunni mosques. The president warned that extremists were pushing the country toward civil war.

With the gleaming dome of the 1,200-year-old Askariya shrine reduced to rubble, leaders on both sides called for calm and many Shiites lashed out at the United States as partly to blame.

But the string of back-and-forth attacks seemed to push Iraq closer to all-out civil war than at any point in the three years since the U.S.-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

"We are facing a major conspiracy that is targeting Iraq's unity," said President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd. "We should all stand hand in hand to prevent the danger of a civil war."

President Bush pledged American help to restore the mosque after the bombing north of Baghdad, which dealt a severe blow to U.S. efforts to keep Iraq from falling deeper into sectarian violence.

"The terrorists in Iraq have again proven that they are enemies of all faiths and of all humanity," Bush said. "The world must stand united against them, and steadfast behind the people of Iraq."

British Prime Minister Tony Blair also condemned the bombing and pledged funds toward the shrine's reconstruction.

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and the top American commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, called the attack a deliberate attempt to foment sectarian strife and warned it was a "critical moment for Iraq."

No one was reported injured in the bombing of the shrine in Samarra.

But at least 18 people, including three Sunni clerics, were killed in the reprisal attacks that followed, mainly in Baghdad and predominantly Shiite provinces to the south, according to the Iraqi Islamic Party, the country's largest Sunni political group.

Major Sunni groups joined in condeming the attack, and a leading Sunni politician, Tariq al-Hashimi, urged clerics and politicians to calm the situation "before it spins out of control."

The country's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, sent instructions to his followers forbidding attacks on Sunni mosques, and called for seven days of mourning.

But he hinted, as did Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi, that religious militias could be given a bigger security role if the government cannot protecting holy shrines - an ominous sign of the Shiite reaction ahead.

Both Sunnis and the United States fear the rise of such militias, which the disaffected minority views as little more than death squads. American commanders believe they undercut efforts to create a professional Iraqi army and police force - a key step toward the eventual drawdown of U.S. forces.

Some Shiite political leaders already were angry with the United States because it has urged them to form a government in which nonsectarian figures control the army and police. Khalilzad warned this week - in a statement clearly aimed at Shiite hard-liners - that America would not continue to support institutions run by sectarian groups with links to armed militias.

One top Shiite political leader accused Khalilzad of sharing blame for the attack on the shrine in Samarra.

"These statements ... gave green lights to terrorist groups. And, therefore, he shares in part of the responsibility," said Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the former commander of its militia.

The interior minister, who controls the security forces that Sunnis accuse of widepsread abuses, is a member of al-Hakim's party.

The new tensions came as Iraq's various factions have been struggling to assemble a government after the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections.

The Shiite fury sparked by Wednesday's bombings - the third major attack against Shiite targets in as many days - raised the likelihood that Shiite religious parties will reject U.S. demands to curb militias.

The Askariya shrine, also known as the Golden Mosque, contains the tombs of two revered Shiite imams, who are considered by Shiites to be among the successors of the Prophet Muhammad.

No group claimed responsibility for the 6:55 a.m. assault on the shrine in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, carried out by four insurgents posing as police. But suspicion fell on Sunni extremist groups.

The top of the dome, which was completed in 1905, collapsed into a crumbly mess, leaving just traces of gold showing through the rubble. Part of the shrine's tiled northern wall also was damaged.

Thousands of demonstrators crowded near the wrecked shrine, and Iraqis picked through the debris, pulling out artifacts and copies of the Muslim holy book, the Quran, which they waved, along with Iraqi flags.

"This criminal act aims at igniting civil strife," said Mahmoud al-Samarie, a 28-year-old builder. "We demand an investigation so that the criminals who did this be punished. If the government fails to do so, then we will take up arms and chase the people behind this attack."

U.S. and Iraqi forces surrounded the Samarra shrine and searched nearby houses. About 500 soldiers were sent to Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad to prevent clashes.

National Security Adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie said 10 people were detained for questioning about the bombing. The Interior Ministry put the number at nine and said they included five guards.

In the hours after the attack, more than 90 Sunni mosques were attacked with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, burned or taken over by Shiites, the Iraqi Islamic Party said.

Large protests erupted in Shiite parts of Baghdad and in cities throughout the Shiite heartland to the south. In Basra, Shiite militants traded rifle and rocket-propelled grenade fire with guards at the office of the Iraqi Islamic Party. Smoke billowed from the building.

Shiite protesters later set fire to a Sunni shrine containing the seventh century tomb of Talha bin Obeid-Allah, a companion of Muhammad, on the outskirts of Basra.

Police found 11 bodies of Sunni Muslims, most shot in the head and including two Egyptians, in Basra, police Capt. Mushtaq Kadhim said.

Protesters in Najaf, Kut and Baghdad's Shiite slum of Sadr City also marched through the streets by the thousands, many shouting anti-American and anti-Israeli slogans and burning those nations' flags.
[/hide]

 

[QueEx]

<font size="4">Insurgents detonated bombs inside one of Iraq's holiest Shiite shrines ... the Golden Mosque, contains the tombs of two revered Shiite imams, who are considered by Shiites to be among the successors of the Prophet Muhammad</font size>

<font size="3">Okay. If publishing cartoon images of the Prophet stirred Muslim-worldwide protest and violence -- what does Muslims bombing one of the most important holy sites in all of Iraq containing the tombs of Imams considered to be successors of the Prophet bring in the Muslim world <u>outside of Iraq</u> ???

Haven't heard or read anything yet.</font size>

QueEx

 

[carlitos]

'No group claimed responsibility for the 6:55 a.m. assault on the shrine in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, carried out by four insurgents posing as police. But suspicion fell on Sunni extremist groups.'

 

[blackbull1970]

'No group claimed responsibility for the 6:55 a.m. assault on the shrine in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, carried out by four insurgents posing as police. But suspicion fell on Sunni extremist groups.'

Hmmmmm...........Interesting point.

Could be a Classic case of "Divide and Conquer".

Peace.

 

[Greed]

Hmmmmm...........Interesting point.

Could be a Classic case of "Divide and Conquer".

Peace.

perpetrated by whom?

 

[QueEx]

NEWS ANALYSIS

<font size="5"><center>Clerics Take Lead After Iraq Bombing</font size>

<font size="4">"The clerics are the kingmakers, the peacemakers and the
war-makers ... If the religious leaders decided to go all the way
to a civil war they could, in no time," ... And if they really wanted
to stop it, they could. The religious leaders are the ones
who have the real power"</font size></center>

Los Angeles Times
By Borzou Daragahi, Times Staff Writer
February 24 2006


BAGHDAD — Rarely since the U.S.-led invasion have Iraq's politicians appeared so insignificant and its religious leaders loomed so large as in the 48 hours since the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra.

Few Iraqis seemed to pay attention to statements by Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari and other political leaders who called for calm. But many winced with trepidation or smiled with satisfaction as, hours after the Wednesday morning attack, the office of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the paramount Shiite Muslim religious leader here, issued an unusually blunt statement suggesting it was time for "the faithful" to start protecting religious sites — an apparent endorsement of militias.

Others watched to see what radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr would do as he rushed back from Lebanon after the blast.

Even Sunni Muslim political leaders, who announced Thursday they were pulling out of talks on forming a new government to protest the current transitional government's failure to safeguard their mosques and offices, were outflanked by Sunni clerics.

The Muslim Scholars Assn., an umbrella group for Sunni religious leaders, issued a condemnation Thursday of their Shiite counterparts "for calling for demonstrations knowing that these demonstrations can be infiltrated and they cannot control the streets." The statement noted that "the resistance controlled Samarra for two years, and nothing happened to the shrines."

The dominance of clerics from both sects on the political scene marks a dramatic reversal of 85 years of secular rule in Iraq.

"The clerics are the kingmakers, the peacemakers and the war-makers," Ismael Zayer, editor in chief of Al Sabah al Jadid, a daily newspaper, said in dismay. "People are marching by order of clerics and stopping by order of clerics."

Iraq's political leaders and U.S.-led forces can shut down the country for a time and reduce the violence by setting up checkpoints and flooding the streets with soldiers. But few doubt who really hold the cards.

"If the religious leaders decided to go all the way to a civil war they could, in no time," said Hassan Bazzaz, a political scientist at Baghdad University. "And if they really wanted to stop it, they could. The religious leaders are the ones who have the real power."

Unlike Sunni religious leaders, who are usually associated with local mosques, the Shiite clerics emerge from a system of religious schools and have a loose hierarchy. At the top in Iraq are the marjaiyah, the four most respected grand ayatollahs, of whom Sistani is considered the head.

The reality of clerical power here discomforts U.S. officials, who have tried to promote secular leaders or moderate Islamic political groups. American officials have little sway with religious figures on either side of the Sunni-Shiite divide.

Indeed, the religious leaders are notable for their lack of direct contact with American officials. Sistani, for example, has refused to meet with any since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Forces loyal to Sadr fought U.S. Marines in Najaf in the summer of 2004. And the vehemently anti-U.S. Muslim Scholars Assn. is believed to have close ties to the insurgency.

By contrast, secular politicians perceived as being close to the Americans have steadily lost power. The most notable example is former interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. His attempt to build a coalition across Iraq's sectarian divisions was supported by U.S. officials, but the grouping fared poorly in the December parliamentary elections.

"We keep recirculating the same stale politicians over and over again," said Wayne White, a former State Department intelligence specialist who is a scholar at Washington's Middle East Institute. "A lot of Iraqis resent the occupation and associate a lot of the politicians who have been in circulation since 2003 with the United States."

Even leaders of Iraq's religious political parties, some of them scions of famous clerical families, have been so damaged by recent infighting that they have been sidelined in favor of the clerics themselves.

The rise of the clerics comes after decades in which secular politicians have failed to deliver decent government, culminating in the disastrous reign of Saddam Hussein.

Most of Iraq's current political leaders spent the Hussein years in exile, but the clerics mostly stayed in Iraq, often at great personal risk. They've been able to take positions that give them enormous moral authority among Iraqis, as opposed to politicians who have had to make compromises with one another and with the Americans.

Sistani, the top Shiite cleric, has barely budged from his house in Najaf for decades and has been outspoken in his insistence that the country's Shiite majority has the right to a direct say on the country's political future. He insisted on holding direct elections at a time when the U.S. was reluctant to do so.

After the Samarra bombing, the Iranian-born leader captured the discontent of Iraq's Shiites with his suggestion that people should consider taking their own action to make up for the security shortfalls. That stance contradicts the evolving policy of the recently elected government to curb militias.

Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric, has won support among the country's poorest and most angry Shiites with sermons that lambaste the "occupiers" and "crusaders," blaming them for Iraq's crises. His speeches denounce the same U.S.-led military forces that back and physically protect the country's secular political leaders.

Sunni clerics from the beginning have taken a hard line against the U.S. military presence. They express the sense of victimization felt by many in the Sunni Arab minority, a group that was favored under Hussein.

Blaming the Shiite clergy for stirring up reprisals after the Samarra bombing, they voice the anger many Sunnis feel about their elected representatives breaking bread with former enemies among the Shiites.

Meanwhile, all the politicians have been able to do since the explosion is issue pro forma condemnations while ordering a curfew in an attempt to curb violence. And the more the political leaders appear unable to stem the bloodshed, the more their prestige and authority wanes.

"We don't have a real government, and we don't have a real authority to apply law," said Bazzaz, the political scientist. "In the power vacuum, people retreat to their religions."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationw...24feb24,0,405063.story?coll=la-home-headlines

 

[QueEx]

<font size="3">AL-QAEDA WANTS TO DIVIDE ISLAM </font size>


<font size="5"><center>Total war: Inside the new Al-Qaeda</font size>
<font size="4">
Last week’s desecration of a Shi’ite shrine moved Iraq towards civil war.
Abdel Bari Atwan, who has had unique access to Osama Bin Laden,
explains why Al-Qaeda wants to divide Islam </font size></center>

The Sunday Times - Review
February 26, 2006

Osama Bin Laden, who had been sitting cross-legged on a carpet, placed his Kalashnikov rifle on the ground and got up. He came towards me with a warm smile that turned into barely repressed laughter as he took in the way I was dressed.

I had been kitted out in baggy trousers, a long shirt and a turban for my clandestine journey to his hideout in southern Afghanistan. The turban in particular made me feel self-conscious, as I had never worn such a thing in my life.

I spent three days with Bin Laden in Tora Bora, the only western-based journalist to spend such a significant amount of time with him, before or since. I talked at length to him, slept next to him in his cave and shared his modest food.

Listening to him during that visit 10 years ago I realised he was no ordinary figure, but it didn’t occur to me for one moment that this polite, soft-spoken, smiling and apparently gentle person would become the world’s most dangerous man, terrorising western capitals, inflicting hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of damage on the United States, threatening its economic stability and embroiling it in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As I had been eating so badly since coming to Afghanistan I was looking forward to our first meal. I’d imagined we would feast on roast deer or goat. When I saw what was available at the Eagle’s Nest, as his base was called, I thought chicken was perhaps a more likely dish.

It was still a great surprise to discover that dinner on the first night consisted of Arab-style potato chips soaking in cottonseed oil; a plate of fried eggs; salty cheese of a variety long extinct even in the villages of upper Egypt; and a bread bun that must have been kneaded with sand, as my teeth screeched and ground whenever I chewed it.

After a few bites I pretended that I did not usually eat dinner for health reasons.

Another meal featured Bin Laden’s favourite, bread with yogurt and rice, served with potatoes cooked in tomato sauce. Animal fat floated on the surface, and I could hardly force it down my throat. Afterwards I was sick under a pine tree outside the cave.

I was puzzled by Bin Laden’s chosen path. What motivates this man, from a well-known and honourable family in possession of billions, to lead such a comfortless life in these inhospitable and dangerous mountains, awaiting attack, capture or death at any moment, hunted by so many regimes?

We spoke about his wealth, and while he avoided saying exactly how much he was worth he acknowledged he still managed an extensive investment portfolio through a complex network of secret contacts. But this wealth, he said, was for the umma (the global Islamic community).

“It is the duty of the umma as a whole to commit its wealth to the struggle,” he said. “The umma is connected like an electric current.” (Surprising imagery for a man who would wish to take us back 1,500 years.) I discovered that, in contrast with the primitive accommodation, the base was well equipped with computers and up-to-the-minute communications equipment. Bin Laden had access to the internet, which was not then ubiquitous as it is now, and said: “These days the world is becoming like a small village.”

This modernity was quite at odds with the austerity recommended by the more extreme forms of Islamic fundamentalism and in particular that of his hosts, the Taliban. One of his aides laughed and said the base was “a republic within a republic”.

The next day Bin Laden took me on a guided tour, sporting the Kalashnikov so dear to him. (He told me it had belonged to a Soviet general killed in one of the Afghan jihad battles.) We walked through the trees and he explained that he loved mountains. “I would rather die than live in a European state,” he declared.

He told me about past Al-Qaeda attacks on the Americans — including the 1993 ambush on American troops in Mogadishu, which he said had been wrongly blamed on the Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid.

More attacks were in the planning stages, he said, and he emphasised that these “operations” took a long time to prepare. He hinted at a strike at the Americans on their home territory, but I confess I did not register the enormity of what he implied when he came out with an unforgettable statement: “We hope to reach ignition point in the not-too-distant future.”

Bin Laden also explained his long-term anti-American strategy. He told me he knew he would never be able to defeat America on its own soil using conventional weapons. He had another plan, one that would take years to reach fruition.

“We want to bring the Americans to fight us on Muslim land,” he said as we walked through the woods in the high mountains at Tora Bora. “If we can fight them on our own territory we will beat them, because the battle will be on our terms in a land they neither know nor understand.”

We are witnessing part of that plan now, in the battlefields of Iraq, which has become a breeding ground for the most ruthless and militant Al-Qaeda fighters we have seen. In the process we are discovering the new face of Al-Qaeda, as a movement involved in bloody sectarian strife against fellow Muslims.

PARADOXICALLY, the strike on American home territory in September 2001 was a setback to Bin Laden’s long-term plan. Al-Qaeda lost support among more moderate Muslims, who sympathised with the victims. It lost its safe haven and training camps in Afghanistan. And, crucially, there was dissent within the movement itself.

Some inner-circle Al-Qaeda members left as a result of what they considered to be a catastrophic decision, according to Abu Qatada, a radical cleric believed to be Al-Qaeda’s spiritual leader in Europe. (He is currently fighting a deportation order in Britain.) They predicted the US would respond with unparalleled ferocity.

Abu Qatada told me that the September 11 attacks were also opposed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who in 2001 was still a relatively obscure Jordanian associate of Al-Qaeda. Zarqawi was soon to shoot into the limelight as the central figure in this story. For, two years on, the arrival of 150,000 US troops in Iraq in March 2003 created exactly the turning point in Al-Qaeda’s history that Bin Laden had dreamt of.

Iraq is in many ways a better base for Al-Qaeda than Afghanistan. It provides an Arabic-speaking environment and culture. Geographically it is the heart of the region. In Islamic terms it is as important as Saudi Arabia and Palestine.

Furthermore, Al-Qaeda’s supporters in Iraq are the minority Sunni Arabs who have been marginalised by the aftermath of the occupation, isolated from the state institutions in a rather humiliating manner, and are eager for revenge and the resumption of power.

With chilling beheadings, Zarqawi rapidly emerged as the most ferocious insurgent chieftain — though he only became the official leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq after a long wrangle with Bin Laden over attacks on the Shi’ite majority.

Militarily, Al-Qaeda has since been increasingly hardline and ruthless in Iraq, demonstrating indifference to “collateral damage”. Zarqawi has long been waging an anti-Shi’ite campaign with the express intention of fomenting the sectarian strife we are now witnessing.

Last Wednesday’s bombing of the Shi’ite golden mosque at Samarra was in all probability the work of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Shi’ite majority have most to gain from maintaining stability, but by bombing their most sacred shrine Zarqawi has finally unleashed the threat of civil war. Previous attacks had failed to provoke the retaliatory Shi’ite violence that has claimed more than 130 — mostly Sunni — lives since the mosque attack.

Zarqawi’s rationale is threefold.

First, civil war will prevent the Sunni minority from joining the current political process. He has denounced democracy as heretical on the grounds that it makes man obedient to man instead of Allah.

Second, civil war will unseat the “heretic” Shi’ite leaders, render the country ungovernable and ensure the failure of the US project.

Third, Zarqawi is mindful of the huge reserves of Sunni military support in neighbouring countries — both on a national level and among the individual mujaheddin pouring into Iraq to aid their beleaguered brethren struggling against the Iran-backed Shi’ite militias.

Civil war in Iraq could rapidly spread through the region. Many Sunni leaders are already unnerved by the growing influence of Iran in Iraqi internal affairs, and sectarian tensions have been brewing in several countries including Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon.

Zarqawi’s language towards the Shi’ites is vitriolic. In a letter to Bin Laden dated June 15 2004 he describes them as “the lurking serpent”, claiming that “they can inflict more damage on the umma than the Americans”.

He elaborates: “These are people who have added to their heresy and atheism with political cunning and a burning zeal to seize upon the crisis of governance and the balance of power in the state . . . whose new lines they are trying to establish through their political organisations in collaboration with their secret allies, the Americans . . . they have been a sect of treachery and betrayal through all history and all ages.”

Initially Bin Laden was opposed to attacks on Shi’ites and urged Zarqawi to avoid civilian deaths. Zarqawi baldly states in his letter that if Bin Laden will not endorse an anti-Shi’ite campaign, he will not join Al-Qaeda.

Bin Laden apparently changed his mind. Any doubts he might have had about the legitimacy of targeting Shi’ite Muslims or the collateral deaths of Iraqi citizens have since been swept away in the relentless flood of bloody attacks unleashed by his latest ally.

HOW did Zarqawi become such a powerful and pivotal figure? He is a former street thug from a ghetto in the Jordanian city of Zarqa, 15 miles northeast of Amman. He was nicknamed “the Green Man” because of his tattoos. His real name is Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayilah — “Zarqawi” simply means “the one from Zarqa”.

The turnaround in his character seems to have happened towards the end of the 1980s, when he developed an interest in radical Islam — perhaps through contact with Palestinian refugees living near his home — and set off for the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan.

There he fell under the spell of a Palestinian religious scholar known as Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. Back in Jordan following the Afghan wars, both men were jailed after Jordanian police found them in possession of weapons.

Zarqawi became a prison Islamist leader, meting out violent punishments to anyone who dared disobey him. He gathered a following of hundreds of the most hardened criminals in Jordan.

Many sources testify to Zarqawi’s physical and mental resilience. He lost all his toenails under torture and endured 8½ months of solitary confinement.

Released under an amnesty in 1999, he resurfaced in Afghanistan, where he led his own movement, separate from Al-Qaeda. He fled with his men in late 2001 to avoid the American reprisals for September 11.

To understand what happened next, and to see how this obscure figure has emerged to such prominence, we have to look at the strange world of pre-invasion Iraq.

In enclaves in the Kurdish north, close to the Turkish and Iranian borders and beyond Saddam Hussein’s jurisdiction, several Sunni organisations opposed to Saddam’s secular regime had set up base. Jordanian contacts in one of these, Ansar al-Islam (Supporters of Islam), smoothed the way for Zarqawi to establish his own camp.

Ansar al-Islam is an important footnote to the invasion of Iraq. Much has been made of a possible connection between it and Al-Qaeda in the course of US intelligence efforts to link Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden.

I met its leader, Mullah Krekar, in Oslo last year and he vigorously denied Al-Qaeda had helped it in any way. He said he had personally asked Bin Laden for financial help and had been turned down. (It must be added that many sources dispute this was their last meeting.)

Like Zarqawi, many Arabs fleeing American retaliation in Afghanistan after 9/11 found refuge with Ansar al-Islam. But then came an unexpected development. According to Dr Muhammad al-Masari, a Saudi specialist on Al-Qaeda’s ideology, Saddam established contact with the “Afghan Arabs” as early as 2001, believing he would be targeted by the US once the Taliban was routed.

In this version, disputed by other commentators, Saddam funded Al-Qaeda operatives to move into Iraq with the proviso that they would not undermine his regime. Sources close to the Ba’ath regime have told me that Saddam also used to send messengers to buy small plots of land from farmers in Sunni areas. In the middle of the night soldiers would bury arms and money caches for later use by the resistance.

According to Masari, Saddam saw that Islam would be key to a cohesive resistance in the event of invasion. Iraqi army commanders were ordered to become practising Muslims and to adopt the language and spirit of the jihadis.

On arrival in Iraq, Al-Qaeda operatives were put in touch with these commanders, who later facilitated the distribution of arms and money from Saddam’s caches.

Most commentators agree that Al-Qaeda was present in Iraq before the US invasion. The question is for how long and to what extent. What is known is that Zarqawi took a direct role in Al-Qaeda’s infiltration. In March 2003 — it is not clear whether this was before or after the invasion began — he met Al-Qaeda’s military strategist, an Egyptian called Muhammad Ibrahim Makkawi, and agreed to assist Al-Qaeda operatives entering Iraq.

Makkawi is a shadowy figure. Little is known about him except that he used to be a war strategies expert in the Egyptian army. His greater strategy for Al-Qaeda, revealed on a jihadist website, is to “expand the (Iraqi) conflict throughout the region and engage the US in a long war of attrition . . . create a jihad Triangle of Horror starting in Aghanistan, running through Iran and southern Iraq then via southern Turkey and south Lebanon to Syria”.

With his new role as Al-Qaeda facilitator Zarqawi rapidly gained importance. Newly arrived Arab recruits were dependent on him for contacts and local knowledge, and — as the anti-American insurgency developed after the invasion — he provided the intelligence for co-ordinated attacks that were instantly more effective than random independent operations. As a result he effectively became the emir of the foreign jihadis in Iraq.

I believe that his aim was to drag the Shi’ites into a civil war. His choice of provocative targets bears this out: he was almost certainly behind the massacre of 185 Shi’ite pilgrims who were killed in Karbala and Baghdad in March 2004.

Zarqawi was in negotiations with the Al-Qaeda leadership for nearly a year before they finally announced an alliance and created “Al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers” (Iraq) in 2004. Already established as a formidable leader, he waited to negotiate from a position of strength over his insistence on an anti-Shi’ite campaign.

Perhaps he would have preferred to usurp Bin Laden as leader of Al-Qaeda, but he had the strategic sense to realise this was not going to be possible and therefore decided to submit. He needed Bin Laden’s blessing and the Al-Qaeda name to bring him thousands of new recruits from all over the world (not just from Arab countries).

Al-Qaeda needed him, too. At the time of the new alliance its fortunes were lagging. The attacks on Afghanistan and increased security measures the world over had seen its numbers dwindle; its 2003 attacks in Saudi Arabia had hit its popularity in the kingdom.

A new presence in Iraq, especially with such a high-profile, magnetic (if terrifying) leader as Zarqawi, promised a new lease on life. The Al-Qaeda leadership was not to be disappointed.

Zarqawi’s agenda was to prove even more radical than that of the Al-Qaeda leadership; in May 2005, firmly under the Al-Qaeda banner, Zarqawi declared that “collateral killing” of Muslims was justified under “overriding necessity”. He brought a new level of psychological terror to operations with his ferocious reputation.

In July last year his old spiritual mentor, Maqdisi — still in jail in Jordan — questioned Zarqawi’s attacks on civilians, especially women and children, and his targeting of Shi’ites. Zarqawi responded with an internet posting asserting that “al-Maqdisi is being lured into the path of Satan”.


WHAT of the future? Bin Laden remains unchallenged as Al-Qaeda’s spiritual leader, but his fugitive status has created a vacancy for an overall military commander. This will almost certainly be filled by Zarqawi: a recent communiqué from Al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers referred to him as the “most likely emir of the organisation in the Middle East and North Africa”.

Here I would like to introduce just one more name. When I first walked alone into Bin Laden’s dimly lit cave 10 years ago, a man was there to meet me; I was astonished to recognise him as a red-bearded Syrian writer I knew quite well from London, Omar Abdel Hakim, also known as Abu Musab al-Suri, a specialist on jihad and Islam.

We spoke for a few moments and I learnt that he had left Spain, where he had both citizenship and a wife, to join Al-Qaeda. Later he was to join the Taliban, and became its leader Mullah Omar’s media adviser. “Come,” he said, leading the way into another cave. “The sheikh is waiting for you.”

I heard from him again in 1998 when he gave me a detailed account by telephone of an angry confrontation between Mullah Omar and a Saudi delegation, which asked the Taliban leader to cede Bin Laden to the United States because he was a terrorist.

The visitors, led by Prince Turki of Saudi intelligence, flew to Kandahar in a private jet. They were heatedly ordered to leave by Omar, who was enraged by their request that a Muslim government would seek to deliver a fellow Muslim to an “infidel state”.

Suri was one of the key figures who, like Zarqawi, opposed the 9/ll attacks. They have since become close collaborators. The Syrian is said to be an Al-Qaeda recruiter.

Zarqawi has maintained connections in Europe for many years, and these are nurtured by Suri, who is believed to control several Al-Qaeda groups in the West. Both men are suspected of involvement in the attacks on Madrid and London claimed by “Al-Qaeda in Europe”.

The new generation of Al-Qaeda leaders is in place – with Zarqawi and the Suri among them – and the organisation has become even more hardline as a result. The new ruthlessness about relentless violence directed at a wide range of targets in Iraq is clearly designed to shock and terrorise their enemies. But Iraq has now become a platform from which to launch international operations.

Al-Qaeda is not only attempting to destabilise the western world, but the whole of the stagnated Middle East.


© Abdel Bari Atwan 2006 Extracted from The Secret History of Al-Qa’ida by Abdel Bari Atwan published by Saqi Books at £16.99. Copies can be ordered for £15.29 with free postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

The author, who has lived in London for 30 years, is editor in chief of the daily newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi

 

[carlitos]

Former CIA Analyst: Western Intelligence May Be Behind Mosque Bombing
Ray Mcgovern says US in most danger ever, from its own government
| February 26 2006

Former CIA analyst a and presidential advisor Ray McGovern does not rule out Western involvement in this week's Askariya mosque bombing in light of previous false flag operations that have advanced hidden agendas of the ruling elite.

During the mid-eighties, McGovern was one of the senior analysts conducting early morning briefings of the PDB one-on-one with the Vice President, the Secretaries of State and Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.

He joined Alex Jones to discuss many topics from martial law to government false flag terrorism and provocation tactics.

McGovern firstly suggested that Posse Comitatus, the law that forbids the military to take on a policing role within the US, is being systematically overthrown.

"Not only have the top ranks of the intelligence community been politicized and corrupted, so has the army. The military establishment is goose stepping around, saluting the President and saying whatever the President wants them to."

A former officer himself, McGovern declared that the unprecedented movement towards a martial law mentality within government and military is a deeply unsettling one and that the US is hurtling toward a dictatorship.

"As I look at the top Pentagon brass, I have to conclude that unlike my days as a US army officer, those folks have been so politicized that if the US President told them to go ahead and exercise police functions in this country they would go ahead and salute and they would do it, and that's really scary."

Moving on to the "war on terror", 27 year veteran McGovern concurred that staged terror has long been used by our governments in order to forward their own agendas at home and elsewhere:

"There's lots of evidence that the government in the past has used these things for its own purposes, for overthrowing governments, as it did in Iran in 1953, and in Guatemala in 1954, the Gulf of Tonkin was a little different...LBJ did deceive Congress and the war went on for seven years."



Concerning 9/11 McGovern declared that although he is still in two minds, he is deeply suspicious of the official version of events and "there is certainly a cover up." The amount of unanswered questions and blatant lies told by Cheney and the NeoCons makes it very easy for him to believe the government was involved.

Moving on to the recent Askariya mosque bombing in Samarra, Iraq McGovern commented;

"The main question is Qui Bono? Who benefits from this kind of thing? You don't have to be very conspiratorial or even paranoid to suggest that there are a whole bunch of likely suspects out there and not only the Sunnis. You know, the British officers were arrested, dressed up in Arab garb, riding around in a car, so this stuff goes on."

Ray McGovern is part of a collective of former Intelligence officers who call themselves Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). Their writing can be found on www.truthout.com

 

[carlitos]

Remember this false-flag op?


British Special Forces Caught Carrying Out Staged Terror In Iraq?
Media blackout shadows why black op soldiers were arrested

Paul Joseph Watson | September 20 2005

In another example of how the Iraqi quagmire is deliberately designed to degenerate into a chaotic abyss, British SAS were caught attempting to stage a terror attack and the media have dutifully shut up about the real questions surrounding the incident.

What is admitted is that two British soldiers in Arab garb and head dress drove a car towards a group of Iraq police and began firing. According to the Basra governor Mohammed al-Waili, one policeman was shot dead and another was injured. Pictured below are the wigs and clothing that the soldiers were wearing.



The Arab garb is obviously undeniable proof that the operation, whatever its ultimate intention, was staged so that any eyewitnesses would believe it had been carried out by Iraqis.

This has all the indications of a frame up.

This is made all the more interesting by the fact that early reports cited as originating from BBC World Service radio stated that the car used contained explosives. Was this another staged car bombing intended to keep tensions high? As you will discover later, the plan to keep Iraq divided and in turmoil is an actual policy directive that spans back over two decades.

The BBC reports that the car did contain, "assault rifles, a light machine gun, an anti-tank weapon, radio gear and medical kit. This is thought to be standard kit for the SAS operating in such a theatre of operations."

And are fake bushy black wigs and turbans standard kit for the SAS? What happened to the early reports of explosives? Why has the media relentlessly reported on the subsequent rescue effort and failed to address these key questions?

The soldiers were arrested and taken to a nearby jail where they were confronted and interrogated by an Iraqi judge.

The initial demand from the puppet authorities that the soldiers be released was rejected by the Basra government. At that point tanks were sent in to 'rescue' the terrorists and the 'liberated' Iraqis started to riot, firebombing and pelting stones at the vehicles injuring British troops as was depicted in this dramatic Reuters photo.



As the SAS were being rescued 150 prisoners escaped from the jail. Was this intentional or just a result of another botched black op?

From this point on media coverage was monopolized by accounts of the rescue and the giant marauding pink elephant in the living room, namely why the soldiers were arrested in the first place, was routinely ignored.

The only outlet to ask any serious questions was Australian TV news which according to one viewer gave, "credibility to the 'conspiracy theorists' who have long claimed many terrorist acts in Iraq are, in fact, being initiated and carried out by US, British and Israeli forces."

Iran's top military commander Brigadier General Mohammad-Baqer Zolqadr pointed the finger at the occupational government last week by publicly stating,

“The Americans blame weak and feeble groups in Iraq for insecurity in this country. We do not believe this and we have information that the insecurity has its roots in the activities of American and Israeli spies,” Zolqadr said.

“Insecurity in Iraq is a deeply-rooted phenomenon. The root of insecurity in Iraq lies in the occupation of this country by foreigners”.

“If Iraq is to become secure, there will be no room for the occupiers”.



That explanation has a lot of currency amongst ordinary Iraqis who have been direct witnesses to these bombings.

In the past we’ve asked questions about why so-called car bombings leave giant craters, in addition with eyewitness reports that helicopters were carrying out the attacks.

Throughout history we see the tactic of divide and conquer being used to enslave populations and swallow formerly sovereign countries by piecemeal. From the British stirring up aggression between different Indian tribes in order to foment division, to modern day Yugoslavia where the country was rejecting the IMF and world bank takeover before the Globalists broke it up and took the country piece by piece by arming and empowering extremists.

And so to Iraq, New York Times November 25th 2003, Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations writes,

"To put most of its money and troops where they would do the most good quickly - with the Kurds and Shiites. The United States could extricate most of its forces from the so-called Sunni Triangle, north and west of Baghdad.... American officials could then wait for the troublesome and domineering Sunnis, without oil or oil revenues, to moderate their ambitions or suffer the consequences."

Gelb argues for allowing the rebellion to escalate in order to create a divided Iraq.

And in 1982, Oded Yinon, an official from the Israeli Foreign Affairs office, wrote: "To dissolve Iraq is even more important for us than dissolving Syria. In the short term, it's Iraqi power that constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. The Iran-Iraq war tore Iraq apart and provoked its downfall. All manner of inter-Arab conflict help us and accelerate our goal of breaking up Iraq into small, diverse pieces."

So if the plan is to keep the different sects at each others' throats then who benefits from the chaos created by the endless bombings? President Bush's slip of the tongue when he stated, "it'll take time to restore chaos and order -- order out of chaos, but we will" seems less farcical in this light.

Plans for 4,000 NATO troops to replace US troops in Afghanistan will likely be mirrored in Iraq and the country will be used as a launch pad for the coming invasions of Syria and Iran.

It is certain that any reports coming out of Iraq accusing occupational forces of being behind car bombings will be brutally censored.

The Pentagon admitted before the war that independent journalists would be military targets and since then we've seen more journalists killed in Iraq over two and a half years than the entire seven year stretch of US involvement in Vietnam.

In many cases, such as that of Mazen Dana, an acclaimed hero who was killed after filming secret US mass graves, journalists are hunted down and executed because they record something that the occupational government doesn't want to reach the wider world.



Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena's car was fired upon and an Italian secret service agent killed after Sgrena was told by the group that kidnapped her that a threat to kill her if Italian troops didn't pull out of Iraq wasn't made by them. This means that Rumsfeld's Ministry of Truth in Iraq is putting out false statements by fake Jihad groups to try and maintain the facade that the resistance is run by brutal terrorists under the direction of Al-Qaeda/Iran/Syria or whoever else they want to bomb next.

Every high profile kidnapping brings with it eyewitness reports of white men in suits and police carrying out the abductions.

Many will find it hard to believe that ordinary soldiers would have it in them to carry out such brutal atrocities. The people carrying out these acts are not ordinary soldiers, they are SAS thugs who have been told that they have to be 'more evil than the terrorists' to defeat the terrorists. This is how they morally justify to themselves engaging in this criminal behavior.

We will update this story as and when new developments take place.