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

another poison and explosive training-center camp. And this camp is located in northeastern Iraq .…
Those helping to run this camp are Zarqawi lieutenants operating in northern Kurdish areas outside Saddam Hussein’s controlled Iraq [but] Zarqawi’s activities are not confined to this small corner of north east Iraq. He travelled to Baghdad in May 2002 for medical treatment, staying in the capital of Iraq for two months while he recuperated to fight another day. During this stay, nearly two dozen extremists converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there. These al Qaeda affiliates based in Baghdad now coordinate the movement of people, money and supplies into and throughout Iraq for his network, and they have now been operating freely in the capital for more than eight months.… We know these affiliates are connected to Zarqawi because they remain even today in regular contact with his direct subordinates.… From his terrorist network in Iraq, Zarqawi can direct his network in the Middle East and beyond .
    U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the UN Security Council on Iraq, February 5, 2003 17
    Almost none of this was true. Zarqawi was not then a member of al Qaeda, nor was he in Iraq in 2002. There were no al Qaeda affiliates in Iraq, nor was Zarqawi running a “terrorist network” there. The whole story was concocted to provide a justification for the American invasion. But when Zarqawi showed up in Iraq in 2003, his reputation preceded him, and he quickly emerged as the leader of the foreign jihadis who were flocking into the country to take advantage of the invasion.
    The bulk of the resistance activity in Iraq, including almost all the attacks on U.S. troops, continued to be carried out by Sunni Arab Iraqis through the latter half of 2003, and by November an average of three American soldiers were being killed each day. Zarqawi’s organization took relatively little part in these activities, preferring to stage specific high-profile attacks on targets that had major political significance. An example was the car bombing outside the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf, considered by Shia Muslims to be Islam’s third-holiest site, just after Friday prayers on August 29. At least eighty-four people were killed in the blast, including Ayatollah Sayed Mohammed Baqir al Hakim and fifteen of his bodyguards. Hakim was one of themost senior Iraqi ayatollahs and had spent the latter part of Saddam’s rule in exile in Iran. Indeed, it was Hakim who created the Badr Brigade, made up of Shia exiles from Iraq who volunteered to fight alongside the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war. Since his return to Iraq in 2003, he had begun to call for the abandonment of anti-American violence, at least for the moment, in order to give the interim governing council appointed by the American occupation authorities a chance to show its worth.
    That call for restraint could account for why Hakim became a target of Zarqawi’s wrath—but it could also simply have been the fact that he was a prominent Shia leader. Zarqawi was a takfiri, one whose interpretation of the Quran led him to believe that it was legitimate to declare Muslims “apostates” for their deviant beliefs and then kill them. In his view, all Shias fell into the category of apostates, so Iraq was a target-rich environment for him.
    Saddam Hussein was captured by U.S. forces in December, and the number of attacks carried out by the resistance dropped significantly in the following months, even though the ex-dictator had not been involved in the enterprise in any way. Then the country exploded in April 2004. There were major uprisings both in the Sunni city of Fallujah and in the Shia holy cities of Karbala and Najaf. Zarqawi was not directly involved in any of these uprisings, but they brought to a head his dispute with Osama bin Laden over the appropriate tactics for jihad. In essence, bin Laden was not keen on killing fellow Muslims andinstinctively