Nir Rosen - Aftermath

The Jordanian authorities placed all the Islamist prisoners together and in isolation from other prisoners. They formed relationships, exchanged ideas and knowledge, and established trust in one another. They continued organizing jihadists, especially former criminals like Zarqawi, until their release from the Sawaqa prison in a 1999 amnesty. Wasfi was the movement’s spokesman. He explained that even while in prison Zarqawi and Maqdisi reached an outside audience, influencing people in the various cities where they were imprisoned. By then, the awkward and solemn Zarqawi had begun to bloom in his own jihadi way, while Maqdisi, despite the anger and violence of his ideas, avoided conflict. “Zarqawi was very charismatic,” said Wasfi. “Maqdisi was calm and passive. We were dealing with prison authorities in a very aggressive way, and Zarqawi was tribal, so his tribal position gave him more power than a Palestinian. If your root is pure Jordanian and you have a big tribe, then you have more power. Prisoners liked a strong representative like Zarqawi, and he fought with the guards. He was very harsh and strong when dealing with members of the organization. He prevented them from mixing with other organizations so they would not be influenced by other ideas, and he prevented them from moving around freely in the prison, even me, but I rebelled against him.” Few other jihadis dared to defy Zarqawi save Abdallah Hashaika, who was the emir of the Jordanian Afghans. Zarqawi organized a coup, forcing Maqdisi to hand over control of the movement. When Wasfi told me this, Abu Saad, who was present for the meeting, grew anxious—he didn’t want me to learn of tensions within the movement.

Zarqawi’s aggressive personality attracted the tough young men imprisoned with him, and Maqdisi was relegated to a theological position, issuing fatwas . Like jihadi Salafis outside prison, the jihadis in Sawaqa were embroiled in internal conflicts, declaring one another infidels. “In prison a disagreement of ideas led to problems,” said Wasfi. He refused to get into the details but added that “Abu Musab had many wrong decisions that I did not accept, like enmity with other groups.” Five months before his release, Wasfi abandoned the movement. After his release he focused on “personal dawa ,” or working to spread Salafism on his own. Though officially forbidden to teach, he still does in secret. “After Zarqawi was released, he asked me to work together, but I refused,” Wasfi said.

The men’s time in prison was as important for the movement as their experiences in Afghanistan were, bonding together those who suffered and giving them time to formulate their ideas. For some it was educational as well. Hudheifa Azzam was impressed with the changes prison wrought in the men. “Maqdisi returned to Jordan from Afghanistan and educated himself,” he told me. “He had a lot of time to read in jail. When I heard Zarqawi speak, I didn’t believe this is the same Zarqawi. Six years in jail gave him a good chance to educate himself.”

Shortly after his release in 1999, Zarqawi left for Pakistan, where he was temporarily arrested before making it to Afghanistan along with his key followers. Zarqawi was influenced by Egyptian jihadist groups such as Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Group, which held that the leader should be based outside the country in order to avoid harassment by the mukhabarat . Maqdisi opposed conducting operations within Jordan.

In Afghanistan Zarqawi found both Al Qaeda and the Taliban insufficiently extreme for him. Zarqawi also criticized Osama bin Laden for not calling Arab governments infidels and attacking them. For Zarqawi, the near enemy was the priority, while for bin Laden it was the far enemy. Hudheifa Azzam explained that bin Laden’s Front for Fighting the Jews and Crusaders, established in 1998, required its members to take an oath of allegiance and to fight rival movements, both of which Zarqawi refused to do. Al Qaeda was far more pragmatic; its members negotiated with Pakistan and Iran. Zarqawi was such a strict Salafi that he condemned the Taliban for lack of piety. He criticized them for not being Salafis, insufficiently imposing Sharia, and recognizing the United Nations, an infidel organization. And he condemned Al Qaeda for associating with the Taliban. Zarqawi established his own camp in the western Afghan city of Herat, near the border with Iran. Following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Zarqawi made his way through Iran to autonomous Kurdistan in northern Iraq—a point worth noting, since the Bush administration claimed Zarqawi’s presence in Iraq was proof of an Al Qaeda connection. But Zarqawi linked up with the terrorist group Ansar al-Islam in a region outside Saddam’s reach. With Saddam removed from power on April 9, 2003, Zarqawi had a new failed state to operate in. By the summer of 2003 he had claimed responsibility for the devastating attack against the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad’s Canal Hotel. Zarqawi allied himself with Ansar al-Sunna, the reconstituted Ansar al-Islam, which was composed mostly of Iraqis, whereas the members of Zarqawi’s Tawhid and Jihad group were mostly foreign Arabs.

In October 2004, Iraqi intelligence claimed that Zarqawi’s group consisted of 1,000 to 1,500 fighters, foreign and Iraqi. Zarqawi’s inner circle was made up of nine emirs, all of whom were non-Iraqi and close friends. The movement had stored weapons in secret depots in Iraq.

Their plan was to turn Iraq into hell for all its residents, to prevent an elected government from taking power, and to create a civil war between Sunnis and the hated Shiites. Zarqawi’s group was responsible for the gruesome videotaped beheadings of foreigners and Iraqis accused of collaborating with the occupation. Their bombs slaughtered masses of Shiites as well.

Though Zarqawi had run his own camp independently of bin Laden in Afghanistan, in October 2004 he swore an oath of allegiance to Al Qaeda, renaming his organization Al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers and also joining the Salafiya al-Mujahedia, or Salafi Mujahideen, movement in Iraq. Bin Laden soon announced that Zarqawi was the head of Al Qaeda’s operations in Iraq. Either Bin Laden wanted to co-opt a rival jihadi group that was getting most of the attention and actually confronting the Americans, or Zarqawi needed the Saudi financier’s help, or at least the connection with the hero of international jihad, in order to attract more foreign fighters and support. On December 9, 2004, Zarqawi’s military committee issued a statement about the upcoming January elections. It addressed “all the parties participating in the elections.” It threatened Shiites around the world for supporting the crusader occupation of Iraq. It called Ayatollah Ali Sistani the greatest collaborator with the crusaders. It condemned the apostate police, national guardsmen, and army for attacking Falluja. It warned the rejectionist Shiites and their political parties, the Kurdish pesh merga , the Christians, and the hypocrites such as the Islamic Party that the Tawhid movement would increase attacks on them.

Though Al Qaeda under bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri had not made Shiites their targets and did not publicly condemn them, Zarqawi held that Shiites were the most evil of mankind. He compared them to a snake, a scorpion, and an enemy spy, like the thirteenth-century cleric Ibn Taimiya, the father of Wahhabism and Salafism. Shiites were polytheists who worshiped at graves and shrines, he argued. They were to be avoided at all costs. They could not be married, they could not bear witness, and animals they slaughtered could not be eaten. Zarqawi defended operations that caused Muslims to die. Martyrdom operations, as he called suicide bombings, were sanctified by Muslim scholars, and defending Islam was even more important than defending the lives of Muslims.