Free Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East by Gwynne Dyer

for the attack. Zarqawi’s explanation for targeting the United Nations made much of the United Nations’ “gift” of Palestine to the Jews “so they can rape the land and humiliate our people,” but his specific grievance against Vieira de Mello was one that only an Islamist would harbour. He explained that the U.N. Special Representative deservedto die because in a previous posting he had helped East Timor win its independence back from Muslim-majority Indonesia, which was a crime against the integrity of the Muslim lands that would one day belong to the refounded Islamic caliphate.
    Zarqawi was born into poverty and Osama bin Laden into great wealth, but there are striking parallels in their ideas and their life histories. Like bin Laden, Zarqawi went to Afghanistan in the 1980s to wage jihad against the infidel occupiers, but being nine years younger than the founder of al Qaeda he got there only as the Soviet troops were pulling out, and saw no action. He met bin Laden and made a positive impression on him, although even then they had major differences about strategy: he disagreed with bin Laden’s focus on the “far enemy,” arguing that the priority was to establish an Islamic state on Arab soil. He then returned to Jordan and founded his own militant Islamist group, Jund al Sham.
    Zarqawi was imprisoned by the Jordanian government in 1992, after guns and explosives were found in his home, and was only released seven years later in a general amnesty after the death of King Hussein. He immediately set about planning a terrorist attack that would kill hundreds of foreigners celebrating the millennium new year in the Radisson SAS Hotel in Amman, but the plot was discovered and Zarqawi fled to Pakistan and thence to Afghanistan—where he met again with bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders in late 1999.
    There was no going back to Jordan for Zarqawi any more, and bin Laden agreed to give him “seed money” (the figure $200,000 has been mentioned) to set up his own training camp near Herat and the Iranian border for the new group Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (Organization for Monotheism and Jihad). It was from this seed that ISIS ultimately grew, but it had barely taken root when it had to be dug up again and moved to another country. Various Jordanian recruits arrived at the Herat camp, but their training was soon interrupted by the American response to al Qaeda’s attack on the United States in September 2001. The camp was destroyed by air attacks and Zarqawi escaped, wounded, across the Iranian border, where he reportedly received medical treatment in the Iranian city of Mashhad. His whereabouts in 2002 are subject to much debate, but he was most likely setting up a clandestine camp in Syria from which he planned to send Islamist fighters into Iraq once the much advertised American invasion happened. As indeed he did, once the occupation was in place.
    Zarqawi’s rapid rise to pre-eminence among the Islamist fighters who went to Iraq owed a great deal to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s depiction of him as al Qaeda’s man in Iraq in the period just before the American invasion. American propagandists, trying to create some link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, had seized upon a report by Kurdish intelligence that al Qaeda had funded a base in Iraqi Kurdistan for a new Islamist groupcalled Ansar al Islam. When the latter merged with a group of Jordanian Islamists who were in touch with Zarqawi, the Kurdish secret service leapt to the conclusion that Ansar al Islam’s dealings with al Qaeda were conducted via Zarqawi. Powell then used that report and turned Zarqawi into a terrorist megastar in his presentation to the United Nations just weeks before the war.
Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants.… When our coalition ousted the Taliban, the Zarqawi network helped establish