Trackbacked at basil’s blog:
From CENTCOM:
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BAGHDAD, Iraq – Gen. George W. Casey Jr., Multi-National Force-Iraq Commanding General, announced the death of al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi in the following statement during a press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad June 8: |
At 6:15 p.m. local time, June 7, 2006, Zarqawi, along with seven aides, was killed when American F16 fighters droppped 500lb bombs on a safehouse where he was hiding in a safehouse approximately 8 km north of Baqubah.
This doesn’t take much commentary, except to say a “well done” to our men and women in uniform fighting Islamic terrorism in Iraq. It is worth noting that it was tips from Iraqi civilians who led security forces to Al-Zarqawi’s location. They wanted him gone as much as we did.
He’s dead. Good. There needs to be more terrorists killed.
Al-Qaida in Iraq confirmed the death of its leader, Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, and vowed it will continue its “holy war” in a statement posted on the Web on Thursday.
Al-Zarqawi’s family had renounced him in the wake of the triple hotel bombings in Amman in November that killed 60 people, an attack for which al-Qaida in Iraq claimed responsibility. The family told King Abdullah II that they “severed links with him until doomsday.” The husband of one sister said: “We’re not sad that he’s dead.”
“I am happy he was killed because he used to kill Muslims just like non-Muslims. He did not distinguish,” said Sameh Dawood, a resident of Zarqa.
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Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (whose real name is Ahmed Fadheel Nazzal al-Khalayleh), born October 20, 1966, was a Salafi muslim militant, terrorist, a guerrilla leader, and the self-proclaimed leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. One or more individuals identifying themselves as Zarqawi took responsibility, on several audiotapes, for numerous acts of violence in Iraq, including the killing of civilians and the taking of hostages. He was also allegedly responsible for many other acts of violence, including the beheading of hostages in Iraq.
As an Islamist militant, Zarqawi opposed the presence of U.S., Israeli and Western military forces in the Islamic world. In September 2005, he reportedly declared “all-out war” on Shia Muslims in Iraq, and is believed responsible for dispatching numerous Al-Qaeda suicide bombers throughout Iraq, and especially to areas with large concentrations of Shia civilians. Even in the competitive world of international terrorism, al-Zarqawi’s crimes are considerable. A relative novice, he has transformed himself in the space of a decade from an unemployed delinquent in a poor industrial town in Jordan into a terrorist mastermind responsible for turning postwar Iraq into a bloody and ungovernable hotbed of resistance to America. Zarqawi, believed to be a long time ally of Osama bin Laden, was a high-ranking member of bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, and since October 2004 had referred to his own organization Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, or Monotheism and Holy War Group, an insurgent network operating in Iraq, as “Al-Qaeda in Iraq”. On October 21, 2004, Zarqawi officially announced his allegiance to Al Qaeda; on December 27, 2004, Al Jazeera broadcast an audiotape of bin Laden calling Zarqawi “the prince of al Qaeda in Iraq” and asked “all our organization brethren to listen to him and obey him in his good deeds.” Zarqawi was the most wanted man in Jordan and Iraq, having participated in or masterminded a number of violent actions against United States and Iraqi targets. The U.S. government offered a USD$25 million reward for information leading to his capture, the same amount offered for the capture of bin Laden before March 2004. On 15 October 2004, the U.S. State Department added Zarqawi and the Jama’at al-Tawhid wal Jihad group to its “list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations” and ordered a freeze on any assets that the group might have in the United States. On February 24, 2006, the U.S. Department of Justice’s FBI also added al-Zarqawi to the “Seeking Information – War on Terrorism” list, the first time that he had ever been added to any of the FBI’s three major “wanted” lists. |
Zarqawi was arrested in Jordan in 1992, and spent seven years in a Jordanian prison for conspiring to overthrow the monarchy to establish an Islamic caliphate. There are reports that in the mid-1990s, Zarqawi travelled to Europe and started the al-Tawhid militant organization, a group dedicated to installing an Islamic regime in Jordan.
Upon his release from prison in 1999, Zarqawi was involved in an attempt to blow up the Radisson SAS Hotel in Amman, Jordan where many Israeli and American tourists lodged.
Yousef Rababaa, who spent three years in jail with al-Zarqawi until both were freed under a royal amnesty in 1999, recalled his cellmate’s inflexible, radical Islamic ideology. “He divided the world between Muslim and infidels,” Rababaa said
Laurence Foley was a senior U.S. diplomat working for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Jordan. On October 28, 2002, he was assassinated outside his home in Amman. Under interrogation by Jordanian authorities, three suspects confessed that they had been armed and paid by Zarqawi to perform the assassination.
In May 2004, a videotape was released showing a group of five men beheading American Nicholas Berg, who had been abducted and taken hostage in Iraq weeks earlier. The speaker on the tape, wielding the knife that killed Berg, is rumoured to be al-Zarqawi.
U.S. officials believe that Zarqawi trained others in the use of poison, possibly ricin, for possible attacks in Europe, ran a terrorist haven in northern Iraq, and organized the bombing of a Baghdad hotel.
Zarqawi is responsible for the Canal Hotel bombing of the United Nations Headquarters in Iraq on August 19, 2003. This attack killed twenty two people, including the United Nations secretary general’s special Iraqi envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello.
On July 11, 2004, a group reportedly led by Zarqawi, claimed responsibility for a July 8 mortar attack in Samarra, Iraq. Five American soldiers and one Iraqi soldier were killed.
Jordan accuses Zarqawi of plotting to release a chemical cloud in Amman. Men were arrested in Amman who purportedly were planning to release the chemical attack. He was convicted in absentia on March 20, 2005, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison in addition to his two death sentences for earlier crimes in Jordan.
Zarqawi is believed to have masterminded the 2005 bombings in Amman that killed about seventy people in three hotels.
Zarqawi, al-Qaida, Baqubah, Islam, terrorism, Osama
