Zarqawi

One may remember the name Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as one of the terrorists around Bush’s invasion of Iraq, who was able to disrupt the democratic elections.

Zarqawi is believed to have been born as Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh in Zarqa, Jordan in 1966. Born to a respected middle class civil servant, Zarqawi dropped out of high school and became a petty criminal during his youth. During his childhood, he was known to be violent as the leader of a gang, and his consumption of alcohol only exacerbated these radical tendencies. Although his mother tried to use church to provide him moral instruction, he was put in one of the most radical mosques in Jordan, where he learned jihad, providing the basis for his religious beliefs. In the 1980s, the Soviet-Afghan War was taking place, and Zarqawi arrived in Afghanistan during the end of the war in 1989 for the sake of joining jihad. As the Soviets were already leading, he became a reporter and was then recruited to fight.

Upon returning to Jordan in 1989, Zarqawi started the militant group Jund al-Sham, but was arrested and imprisoned in 1992 for possessing guns and explosives and trying to mount terrorist attacks. In prison, Zarqawi attempted to assert his dominance over other prisoners, trying to draft them in a ploy to overthrow Jordan. After leaving prison, he returned to Afghanistan to join al-Qaeda.

However, upon meeting Osama bin Laden, his criminal past and extreme views created distrust with bin Laden during their first meeting. Having been in prison for five years, the highest ranking al-Qaeda leaders saw him as possibly part of Jordan intelligence and thus potentially untrustworthy. Consequently Zarqawi’s training camp was distinct from the other al-Qaeda training camps so that he could prove that he was capable of becoming a leader.

Zarqawi’s new camp attracted militants from Jordan. When the 9/11 attacks hit, Zarqawi was in Iran, so he returned to Afghanistan to join fellow al-Qaeda fighters. After receiving a chest injury, Zarqawi fled back to Iran, and his whereabouts became uncertain to US intelligence. His alleged presence was used by Bush as justification for the US 2003 invasion of Iraq. Through 2003-2006, Zarqawi was claimed to be responsible for many deadly attacks across Iraq following the 2003 invasion, where he targeted mosques, civilians, UN representatives, and government institutions alike. Through these attacks, Zarqawi became the most wanted man in Jordan and Iraq, with a $25 million bounty for his capture.

One of Zarqawi’s most alarming actions was a video posted on an al-Qaeda website, where five men, one of which was confirmed by the CIA to be Zarqawi himself, abducted American civilian Nicholas Berg and beheading him, claimed to be in retaliation for the US brutalities in the Abu Ghraib prison. Overall, Zarqawi was held responsible for thousands of killings in Iraq, mostly from bombings. Believing that American democracy was an utter lie, Zarqawi dedicated himself to impeding the elections in Iraq.

Zarqawi was finally killed in an American airstrike in 2006. However, due to the structure of the terrorist groups in this area, although the most wanted terrorist in Iraq had been killed, this did little to stop terrorism, let alone the public unrest and instability outside of terrorism as well. Zarqawi’s role in the invasion of Iraq demonstrates the difficulties of establishing democracy in a foreign nation, no matter how easy the ousting of a dictator itself may appear.

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/world/middleeast/08cnd-iraq.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Musab_al-Zarqawi
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5461842