Zarqawi wants Sunnis in control

Terrorist mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi has proved an elusive prey in Iraq, but his agenda has never been secret: He wants the Americans out, the Jews destroyed and his fellow Sunni Muslims firmly in charge in the heart of Islam.

His handiwork appears in the news daily. This week, his terrorist kidnapping of a Philippine truck driver forced the total evacuation of a small Philippine military contingent from Iraq.

U.S. and Iraqi officials blame the Jordanian-born Zarqawi’s Islamist Monotheism and Holy War Group for a string of deadly attacks on Iraqi officials and foreign nationals of countries supporting the U.S.-led security force.

Some see him as the theorist of a radical Islamic restoration in the Middle East, which in volves ousting the United States, reclaiming Israel and overthrowing Arab leaders allied to Washington.

His service in Afghanistan in the 1980s and a series of shadowy links to al Qaeda made him the central figure in the prewar debate over operational links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

But some of those who have fought him the longest say his skills and his ideology are overrated.

“He was basically a street thug. That’s probably the best way I can describe it,” King Abdullah II of Jordan said in a CNN interview this week. As Zarqawi rose to international notoriety in Iraq, his first cause was overthrowing the Jordanian monarchy, a longtime U.S. ally in the region.

“I think the press made him much more capable, much smarter and much more of a threat than actually he really is,” the king said.

Zarqawi operatives took responsibility for the May car bombing that killed Iraqi Governing Council President Izzedin Salim, and the group has threatened to kill new Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.

Mr. Allawi yesterday said Zarqawi and his followers “are mentally ill and do not belong to this nation.”

“Those people are rejected by all Iraqis, and that is why they hide in the dark and try to spread their poison in our society.”

Samir Shakir Mahmood Sumaida’ie, interior minister before the June 28 installation of the current Iraqi government, said the insurgents’ tactics were part of a dead-end strategy.

“They know they have no future in a successful Iraq. Their only future is if they can make the country ungovernable,” he said. “They can only extend their control through thuggery and threats.”

But on his movement’s Web sites and in lengthy written analyses attributed to him, Zarqawi has presented a coherent — if bloody — strategy for achieving his ends in Iraq and the Middle East.

The Iraqi insurgency is vital to the greater Muslim cause, he argues, because it is a “holy war in the Arab heartland.”

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