from the New York Times archives

155 Pages·2015·2.97 MB·English

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES ARCHIVES
THE RISE OF ISIS
TBook Collections
Copyright © 2015 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.
This ebook was created using Vook.
All of the articles in this work originally appeared in The New York Times.
eISBN: 9781508000518
The New York Times Company
New York, NY
www.nytimes.com
www.nytimes.com/tbooks
On Alert for Al Qaeda in Iraq, U.S. Is
Tracking 2 Suspects
By RAYMOND BONNER
September 28, 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 27 — As United States officials try to determine what role Al
Qaeda may have had in recent attacks in Iraq, investigators and Special Forces are also
pursuing two men known to have had previous connections to Osama bin Laden,
American officials said this week.
On a half-dozen occasions in recent weeks, one of the men, Abdul Rahman Yasin,
slipped through the net, officials said. He has been indicted in connection with the World
Trade Center bombing in 1993 and is on the F.B.I.’s most wanted terrorist list. He has
been living in Iraq for about 10 years.
The Americans have also been trying to track Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a more senior
Qaeda operative; according to American officials, he has been moving in and out of Iraq
since the war ended this spring. They say he has been bringing in money for local
terrorists, and trying to establish a beachhead for Al Qaeda.
While President Bush said recently that there was no evidence of a link between
Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 plot, investigators said they had concluded that Qaeda
operatives were in Iraq now. The investigators are trying to figure out how many there are
and what role they are playing.
On Friday, L. Paul Bremer III, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, said at
least 19 Qaeda members were in custody here, but he offered few details about where and
when they had been captured. It was the first public mention by an American official of
the detention of Qaeda members in Iraq.
Since before the war, United States officials have singled out Mr. Zarqawi to
illustrate Al Qaeda’s presence in Iraq. Officials say they believe that Mr. Zarqawi, a
Jordanian, has worked with Ansar al-Islam, which the Americans describe as a terrorist
group that had a base in the Kurdish region of Iraq.
German authorities have linked Mr. Zarqawi, who was in Iranian custody for a time,
to a militant Palestinian group, and said he ran training camps in Afghanistan alongside
Mr. bin Laden.
An American law enforcement official said Al Qaeda was seeking to form “new
alliances, new associations” with Baathists and other groups putting up resistance to the
Americans in Iraq.
It is not a natural alliance, however, because the Iraqis are far more secular than the
fundamentalists. But lately, an American official here said, some of the Iraqi resistance
groups have been wrapping themselves in more religious rhetoric.
It is an easy climate for terrorists to operate in, an American law enforcement
official said. Officials are quick to acknowledge, however, that they do not have a strong
sense of the dimension of the problem.
“Right now, I don’t think anybody has a good handle on it,” said a senior American
counterterrorism official.
Estimates of the number of Qaeda fighters here range widely, from a few hundred to
2,000. But those numbers are based largely on extrapolating from the number already
caught, an American diplomat in the region said.
Mr. Yasin’s roots in terrorism run deep, but he may have abandoned them. He was
born in 1960 in Bloomington, Ind., where his father was a graduate student, and grew up
in Baghdad.
He returned to the United States in the early 1990’s, to live with his mother and a
brother who were living in Jersey City.
It was then that he met Ramzi Yousef, an early operative for Mr. bin Laden long
before he had become a notorious public figure. Mr. Yousef recruited Mr. Yasin for the
plot to blow up the World Trade Center.
Mr. Yasin helped mix the chemicals, at one point severely burning his leg.
The F.B.I. detained Mr. Yasin after the attack and then released him, but only after
he provided information about Mr. Yousef, the mastermind. Mr. Yousef fled to Pakistan,
then Manila, where he was plotting to blow up 12 airliners over the Pacific, a precursor to
the Sept. 11 attacks, officials now say. He was later captured.
Mr. Yasin returned to Iraq.
Ostensibly, Mr. Hussein put Mr. Yasin under house arrest, but American officials
said this week that they now have evidence he was being liberally supplied with money,
women and alcohol.
In an interview with the CBS News program “60 Minutes” in June 2002, Mr. Yasin
expressed regret for what he had done. “I’m very sorry for what happened,” he said. “I
don’t know what to do to make it up.”
There is a $25 million bounty for information leading to his arrest. But officials say
it may not be money that brings him in.
“It will be some transgression,” said an American official involved in the search for
Mr. Yasin, Mr. Hussein and others.
That was the case with the $30 million reward that was offered for information
about Uday and Qusay Hussein, two of Mr. Hussein’s sons, Western officials said.
According to that account, the brothers’ landlord gave them away after they started
molesting his wife and daughter. Special Operations soldiers killed the brothers at the
home.
Zarqawi’s Journey: From Dropout to
Prisoner to an Insurgent Leader in Iraq
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN; Abdallah Abu Romman contributed reporting for
this article.
July 13, 2004
AMMAN, Jordan, July 10 — Ten years ago, fellow inmates remember, Abu Musab al-
Zarqawi emerged as the tough-guy captain of his cellblock. In the brutish dynamic of
prison life, that meant doling out chores.
“He’d say, ‘You bring the food; you clean the floor,’” recalled Khalid Abu Doma,
who was jailed with Mr. Zarqawi for plotting against the Jordanian government. “He
didn’t have great ideas. But people listened to him because they feared him.”
According to American officials, Mr. Zarqawi has come a long way from his
bullying cellblock days and is now the biggest terrorist threat in Iraq, accused of
orchestrating guerrilla attacks, suicide bombings, kidnappings and beheadings. [On
Sunday he claimed responsibility for a mortar barrage in Samarra last Thursday that
killed five American soldiers and one Iraqi soldier.]
American views of Mr. Zarqawi’s relationship to Al Qaeda have varied. Secretary of
State Colin L. Powell has described him as a Qaeda operative, but a senior American
military official said recently that sources now indicated that Mr. Zarqawi was “a separate
jihadist.”
He remains a singular target: American forces are stepping up airstrikes on buildings
they believe to be his safe houses in Falluja and have raised the bounty on him to $25
million, the figure offered for Osama bin Laden.
For all that, Mr. Zarqawi remains a phantom, with little known about his
whereabouts or his operations.
In Jordan, where he stamped strong impressions on people as he climbed the ladder
of outlaw groups, friends and associates described the making of a militant. They say he
grew up in rough-and-tumble circumstances and adopted religion with the same intensity
he showed for drinking and fighting, though he became far less a revolutionary
mastermind than a dull-witted hothead with gruff charisma.
These people, who knew Mr. Zarqawi until he disappeared into the terrorist murk of
Afghanistan four years ago, acknowledge that he may have changed. But they say that
while the man they knew could be capable of great brutality, they have a hard time
imagining him as the guiding light of an Iraqi insurgency.
“When we would write bad things about him in our prison magazine, he would
attack us with his fists,” said Yousef Rababa, who was imprisoned with Mr. Zarqawi for
militant activity. “That’s all he could do. He’s not like bin Laden with ideas and vision.
He had no vision.”
Mr. Zarqawi, thought to be 37, grew up fast and hard in Zarqa, a crime-ridden
industrial city north of Amman known as Jordan’s Detroit.
From his two-story concrete-block house, he looked out on hills dotted with
smokestacks. He came from a poor family and has seven sisters and two brothers. His
father was a traditional healer. His mother struggled with leukemia. His birth name was
Ahmed Fadeel al-Khalayleh.
Childhood friends say he was much like any other boy, chasing soccer balls through
gravely streets, doing average work in school, not going to the mosque much. But he
liked to fight. “He was not so big, but he was bold,” said a cousin, Muhammad al-
Zawahra.
At 17, family members say, he dropped out of school. Friends said he had started
drinking heavily and getting tattoos, both discouraged under Islam. According to
Jordanian intelligence reports provided to The Associated Press in Amman, Mr. Zarqawi
was jailed in the 1980’s for sexual assault, though no additional details were available.
By the time he cleared 20 he was adrift, his family said, and like other young Arab
men looking for a cause, he looked northeast, to Afghanistan.
Saleh al-Hami, Mr. Zarqawi’s brother-in-law —who, like many former guerrillas
who fought in Afghanistan, has a long black beard and a plastic leg —said Mr. Zarqawi
arrived in Khost, in eastern Afghanistan, in the spring of 1989 to join the jihad, or holy
war, against the Russians. But he got there a little late. The Russians had just pulled out.
So instead of picking up a gun, Mr. Zarqawi picked up a pen.
He became a reporter for a small jihadist magazine, Al Bonian al Marsous, whose
name means “The Strong Wall.” He was 22, with a medium build and shiny black eyes,
and roamed the countryside interviewing Arab fighters about the glorious battles he had
missed.
Mr. Hami was convalescing in a hospital after he stepped on a land mine when he
met Mr. Zarqawi. The two grew close, and he later married Mr. Zarqawi’s younger sister.
One night while they were camping in a cave, he recalled, Mr. Zarqawi shared a
special dream. He said he had seen a vision of a sword falling from the sky. “Jihad” was
written on its blade.
Mr. Zarqawi returned to Zarqa in 1992 and fell in with a militant Islamic group,
Bayaat al Imam, or Loyalty to the Imam. He was arrested in 1993 after the Jordanian
authorities discovered assault rifles and bombs stashed in his house.
His lawyer said Mr. Zarqawi lamely told investigators that he had found the
weapons while walking down the street. “He never struck me as intelligent,” said the
lawyer, Mohammed al-Dweik.
Mr. Zarqawi was sent to Swaqa prison, on the desert’s edge. He was housed with
other political prisoners in a large room with iron bunk beds. Cellmates said Mr. Zarqawi
turned his bunk into a cave, covering each side with blankets. He sat for hours bent over a
Koran, trying to memorize all 6,236 verses.
Friends said this was typical. When he was a drinker, they said, he was an extreme
drinker. When he was violent, he was extremely violent.
He strutted around in Afghan dress and a woolly Afghan hat and lived and breathed
old Afghan battles. “Back then, he liked Americans,” Mr. Abu Doma said. “Abu Musab
used to say they were Christian and they were believers.”
The Russians were his No. 1 enemy, but this, like many other beliefs, would change
behind bars. In the wing where Mr. Zarqawi lived, ideologies scraped up against one
other. But cellmates said he shied away from politics. Instead, he pumped iron. Cellmates
remember his barbells, made from pieces of bed frame and olive oil tins filled with rocks.
As the years passed, Mr. Zarqawi’s arms and chest grew — and so did his role. He
mapped out shifts for cleaning, bringing meals to cells and visiting the doctor. He did not
talk much. When asked to describe him during this period, almost everyone interviewed
began with the word “jad,” which means serious.
His firmness was his attraction, fellow inmates said, his remoteness his power. By
1998, when a prison doctor, Basil Abu Sabha, met him, Mr. Zarqawi was clearly in
charge.
“He could order his followers to do things just by moving his eyes,” Dr. Abu Sabha
said.
His religious views became increasingly severe. They had been marinating in a stew
of militant beliefs served up by the imams and sheiks in the iron bunks next to him. He
lashed out at cellmates if they read anything but the Koran.
Mr. Abu Doma said he got a threatening note for reading “Crime and Punishment.”
“He spelled Dostoyevsky ‘Doseefski,’ Mr. Abu Doma said, laughing. “The note was
full of bad Arabic, like a child wrote it.”
Fellow inmates said that around that time, 1998, just as Al Qaeda was emerging as a
serious threat blamed for the two bombings of United States Embassies in Africa, Mr.
Zarqawi started talking about killing Americans.
In March 1999, Mr. Zarqawi was released under an amnesty for political prisoners.
His associates said they expected him to return to jail.
“Because of his views, there was no place for him in Jordan,” said Mr. Rababa,
explaining that the country, tempered and mostly secular, was no place for an extremist.
As for himself, Mr. Rababa said he had found a place in Jordan because his views had
matured.
But for Mr. Zarqawi, Mr. Rababa said, “everyone was the enemy.”
Mr. Zarqawi also had hopes for a normal life, according to Mr. Hami, who said he
had at least two children and had thought of buying a pickup truck and opening a
vegetable stand.
“You could tell he was confused,” Mr. Hami said.
In early 2000, Mr. Zarqawi went to Peshawar, Pakistan, at the Afghan border. It was
a deeply religious city, which made it attractive to him. He even took his aging mother.
But at the doorstep to jihad, he hesitated.
“He said it was Muslims fighting Muslims in Afghanistan and he didn’t believe in
the cause,” Mr. Hami said. “And he liked the air in Peshawar and thought it was a good
place for his mother.”
Mr. Zarqawi’s family said he was especially close to her, kissing her forehead every
time he walked in the door.
While he was deciding what to do, his Pakistani visa expired. Around the same time,
Jordan declared Mr. Zarqawi a suspect in a foiled terror plot against a Christian
pilgrimage site.
“At that point, he had nowhere else to go,” Mr. Hami said.
In June 2000, Mr. Hami said, Mr. Zarqawi crossed into Afghanistan, alone. His
mother died of leukemia in February of this year at age 62. Mr. Hami said her last wish
was for her son to be killed in battle, not captured.
American intelligence officials said Mr. Zarqawi opened a weapons camp connected
to Al Qaeda in late 2000 in western Afghanistan. There he took up his nom de guerre,
with Zarqawi a reference to his hometown of Zarqa.
United States officials said he was wounded in a missile strike after the Sept. 11,
2001, terror attacks when American forces went after the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Intelligence officials say he then left Afghanistan, where he had taken a second
wife, and made his way to a corner of northern Iraq controlled by a Kurdish separatist
Islamic group called Ansar al-Islam.
The next sighting of Mr. Zarqawi was on Sept. 9, 2002, when Jordanian agents said