Times:
A TERRORIST mastermind has united insurgent groups in Baghdad to target the Iraqi Shia Muslim community with the aim of bringing civil war to Iraq, The Times has learnt.Zarqawi really has a knack for winning the hearts and minds. Representing a shrinking minority of the minority Sunnis he announces a campaign of genocide against the majority Shias. Cindy Sheehan must be pleased.According to US military intelligence sources, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the man responsible for the bloodiest acts of terror in Iraq over the past two years, now commands thousands of fighters from various rival groups and is set to order further waves of bombings.
Yesterday the self-styled “emir” of Iraq was blamed for a dozen co-ordinated bombings in Baghdad that killed 152 people, the single worst death toll in the city since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Most of the dead were poor Shia labourers killed by a huge car bomb in a busy square.
“The al-Qaeda organisation in Mesopotamia is declaring all-out war on the Rafidha [a pejorative term for Shias], wherever they are in Iraq,” said the 38-year-old in an audio message released on an Islamic website. He urged Sunni Muslims to “wake up from your slumber” and joint the fight.
Last night the threat was being taken seriously by US and Iraqi officials, who have offered a $25 million reward for his capture. “We have got reason to believe that al-Zarqawi has now been given tactical command in the city over groups that have had to merge under him for the sake of survival,” an American intelligence officer in Baghdad told The Times yesterday.
An intelligence summary, citing the conglomeration of insurgent groups under the al-Qaeda banner to be the result of rebel turf wars, money, weaponry and fear, concluded that of the estimated 16,000 Sunni Muslim insurgents, 6,700 were hardcore Islamic fundamentalists who were now supplemented by a possible further 4,000 members after an amalgamation with Jaysh Muhammad, previously an insurgent group loyal to the former Baathist regime.
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His organisation is believed already to have gained domination of smaller resistance groups in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province in western Iraq and a centre of gravity for the Sunni insurgency. An Iraqi resistance insider there last week told The Times that al-Zarqawi’s men had already caused thousands of Shia to flee the city over the past six weeks.
“His men announced through leaflets that all Shia should leave Ramadi or face ‘the iron fist’,” the Ramadi resident said. “At first local Sunnis didn’t want anything to do with it. But they know how powerful Zarqawi’s group is, that it doesn’t hesitate to kill and is not afraid to die.”
“They control Ramadi now. They have the best weapons and the most money, and more and more men. They walk openly on the streets when the Americans aren’t around. So the Shias left, by their thousands.”
The man, himself a supporter of the insurgency, claimed that public executions of coalition informers were a regular occurrence, and happened during daylight in the street. Such is the breakdown of any official authority in Ramadi that it was impossible to stop.
By taking charge of the remnants of the enemy in Iraq, Zarqawi makes it easier for the US to claim that the war in Iraq is a war against al Qaeda. His brutal tactics of leadership through intimidation and coercion is driving ever more Sunnis into the US camp as demonstrated by the voter registration which he has denounced. By putting all the remnant forces under his "leadership" he risk having a knock out blow with his capture or preferably death.
The murder of noncombatants is the strategy of the mongol hordes that killed thousands in Baghdad, but Zarqawi has a serious force to space problem. If everyone of his remnant forces became human bombs he still could not kill all the Shia and Kurds, and he would have no one left to defend him after his attempt at genocide. The man has lost the war and one can only hope that soon he will lose his life so that the senseless attacks on noncombatants is stopped.
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