Anatomy of Terror by Ali Soufan

Author:Ali Soufan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

It began in Iraq. Just over four months after Zarqawi’s death in a U.S. air strike, his acolytes proclaimed themselves the Islamic State of Iraq. Initially, to curry support from Iraqi Sunnis, ISI pretended that its goal was merely to establish a safe haven for their sect—a necessary counterweight to the regime of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Shia-dominated government in the south and the Kurdish zone of control in the north. But behind the scenes, and occasionally in public, its backers would articulate a much grander vision. They called the Islamic State of Iraq’s titular ruler Commander of the Faithful, a title traditionally held by caliphs, and they sought to establish his descent from the Prophet Muhammad, another traditional sine qua non for anyone aspiring to rule as caliph.

Khorasan had repeatedly shown its inability to control Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. But now Zarqawi was dead, no doubt much to the relief of the al-Qaeda brass. Perhaps, they might have thought, they would have better luck with the new leadership. On paper, the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq was an Iraqi going by the nom de guerre Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. But Abu Omar was a nobody. Even his kunya, al-Baghdadi, was a lie. It was meant to suggest that he hailed from the Iraqi capital—a fitting background, ISI believed, for the successor to the Abbasid royal family, which had ruled from Baghdad for over half a millennium. In fact, Abu Omar was from a small town out in the sticks, 130 miles from the big city. He had served as a police officer in his home town, until he was dismissed when his religious extremism became too vocal for his superiors to stomach. For a while, he became an electronics repair man, before joining the insurgency in the run-up to the invasion. One ISI operative described Abu Omar as “nothing but a regular militant” with questionable qualifications and no right to the allegiance of anyone, much less the top leaders of ISI’s constituent groups.

The real leader, and the true successor to Zarqawi, was an Egyptian by the name of Abu Hamza al-Muhajir (his kunya, which translates as “The Immigrant,” suggests why ISI felt it necessary to mask him with a local figurehead). Officially, Muhajir was war minister in Abu Omar’s cabinet; in reality, he was the one pulling the strings. Muhajir had an incomparably longer history in the jihad than Abu Omar, and had been much closer to the al-Qaeda leadership than Zarqawi ever was. In 1982, he had joined Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the organization in which Ayman al-Zawahiri had made his name, and which he would later come to lead. Muhajir traveled to Afghanistan alongside Zawahiri and trained in al-Qaeda’s camps there. In early 2003, Zawahiri sent Muhajir to Iraq. A year and a half later, with Zarqawi’s merger into al-Qaeda, Muhajir began working for the Jordanian.

Initial signs were encouraging for Khorasan. Within a few days of Zarqawi’s death, Muhajir had issued a statement reiterating his loyalty to bin Laden and to al-Qaeda.

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