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January 26, 2005
Zarqawi's Bombmaker
On Monday, Iraqi security forces announced the capture of one of Zarqawi's top bomb-makers, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Omar al-Kurdi.Apparently, he has confessed not only to a major role in the bombing of the Jordanian embassy in August 2003 but also to involvement in the same month's assassination of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim (the head of SCIRI, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the Americans' staunch allies) via a car-bomb in front of the Imam Ali mosque, which killed about 95 people. The bombing of the U.N. headquarters, also in the same month, was, he said, the work of some of his close associates.
Oddly, this is the first concrete mention of Zarqawi's involvement in the attack on al-Hakim. Ever since his emergence into the public eye about a year ago, I have assumed his organization was responsible for the attack.
I remember trying to figure out what was going on when it happened. Despite the views of many Iraqis, it clearly wasn't the Americans. Not only was al-Hakim an ally, taking such a huge risk of damage to the mosque when they were depending so heavily on the Shi'a to stay calm made no sense at all.
The claims that it was Moqtada, which you still hear, were ridiculous. He is accused of assassinating Abdel Majid al-Khoei in the Ali mosque, a claim he denies, but in that incident, a stabbing, there was no risk of damage to the mosque. He has later shown, in April and August, that the inviolability of the mosque is essential to his political strategy.
Even "Saddam loyalists," it seemed to me, would have been more careful about the mosque, given their very precarious position.
Both the al-Hakim attack and the U.N. bombing bore the clear imprint of extremist Wahhabi/Salafi Sunnis (bin Laden hates the U.N. almost as much as Dick Cheney does, blaming it, for example, for helping to push Indonesia, a Muslim country, to end its genocidal occupation of East Timor, a Christian country).
Anyway, it's all so plausible that, notwithstanding the methods that might have been used to obtain al-Kurdi's confessions, I believe them. The al-Hakim assassination is a clear example of divergence of the Zarqawi group's attacks from any imaginable goals of the U.S. occupying forces. In fact, the loss of al-Hakim deprived the occupiers of any way to fight against Sistani's influence, with the result that when he puts his foot down, they have to capitulate -- as they did on the matter of elections.
Other Zarqawi attacks, like the U.N. and the frequent executions of Iraqi police and national guard, seem to me very much acts that had no U.S. involvement, but it's possible to figure out some tortured way in which they serve U.S. interests -- and conspiracy theories always rest on a purely functionalist view of human agency, whether individually or in organizations (and, of course, conspiracies do exist).
In particular, although the killings of security forces have scared many people away, they seem also, at long last, to have created a core of Iraqis in the security forces who are as gung-ho against the resistance as the Americans are. That's something the Americans were completely lacking at the beginning.
None of this will daunt the true conspiracists, of course.
Posted by rahul at January 26, 2005 02:53 PM
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