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.”

“We know from God’s religion that the true decisive battle between infidelity and Islam is in this land and its surroundings,” he wrote in a now-infamous January letter recovered by U.S. coalition forces. “Therefore, we must spare no effort and strive urgently to establish a foothold in this land.”

The author of the letter displays open contempt for both the American forces and non-Sunni elements in Iraqi society.

The invasion of Iraq, the letter argues, was a pretext to create a “State of Greater Israel” in the Middle East, a state that the “Zionized American administration” thought would speed the Christian prophecy of the Second Coming of the Messiah.

But Zarqawi saves his harshest criticism for Iraq’s Shi’ite majority and makes it clear that the real battle for Iraq will begin when the United States and its “Crusader forces” pull out.

Iraq’s Shi’ite Muslims are “the insurmountable obstacle, the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy” that dreams of a Shi’ite superstate including Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

Fear of a new Iraqi government is evident throughout Zarqawi’s writings. The letter anticipates the string of bombings and suicide attacks on Iraqi politicians, on police stations and other symbols of the authority of the fledgling government.

Iraq’s new police and military forces “are the eyes, ears and hands of the occupier, through which he sees, hears and delivers violent blows,” according to the letter. “God willing, we are determined to target them strongly in the coming period before the situation is consolidated and they control arrests.”

Many of the basic facts of Zarqawi’s life story are in dispute. Thought to be 38 or 39, he was born to a poor, religious ethnic-Palestinian family in Jordan and became radicalized after joining the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the late 1980s.

He received military training in Iraq, establishing at least some links with the Afghan operations controlled by bin Laden’s al Qaeda group.

He was arrested on his return to Jordan for plotting against the government. After his release in 1999, he first went to Pakistan and then to Afghanistan just as the U.S.-led war against al Qaeda and the Taliban government was getting under way.

Wounded in the leg, he fled Afghanistan and settled in northern Iraq with the militant Ansar al-Islam group. Zarqawi, at one point, received medical treatment for his wound in Baghdad — a critical piece of evidence cited by the United States in making its case for a Saddam-bin Laden link.

Just-released British intelligence reports say Zarqawi was setting up terrorist “sleeper cells” in Baghdad even before the U.S.-led invasion last year.