He wasn't supposed to live, and the way he tells the story today, this "suicide bomber" wasn't quite ready to die. Twenty-one-year-old Ahmed Abdullah al-Shayea had come to Iraq from Saudi Arabia to join the infamous terrorist known as Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi in a holy war against the American infidels. On Christmas morning, 2004, he got his first assignment, to park a tanker truck full of explosives near the high walls around the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad. He didn't know that four fellow terrorists in a Jeep Cherokee following a safe distance behind held the remote-control trigger. When they pushed it, an explosion thundered across the city, killing 10 Iraqi policemen. But al-Shayea, unlike scores of other bombers who've been vaporized beyond recognition, was blown through the windshield and, against all odds, survived.
Al-Shayea claimed the Iraqi police even had Zarqawi himself under arrest in Fallujah last October, but despite a $25 million reward?and perhaps not knowing whom they had?they let go the most ruthless and notorious killer in Iraq. (According to the deputy minister, security officials who have checked the circumstances now believe that may well be true.)
A NEWSWEEK investigation shows that long before U.S. and other Coalition troops blasted across the border into Iraq on March 20, 2003, Saddam had put aside hundreds of millions of dollars (some sources claim billions) and enormous weapons caches to support a guerrilla war. Since the aftermath of his defeat in the 1991 gulf war, Saddam had started preparing secret cells of younger officers from his military and intelligence services, according to Ali Ballout, a Lebanese journalist who had close ties to the former dictator. They were meant, at first, to help him defend against a coup. "He was very good at that," says Ballout, who often acted as an intermediary between Saddam and foreign leaders. Later, some of these officers would provide core leadership in the resistance.
al-Duri had been a Saddam crony since the 1950s. But in the largely secular Baath Party, al-Duri stood out for his mystical religiosity. In the 1990s, when Saddam put the phrase GOD IS GREAT on the national flag and banned the drinking of alcohol, al-Duri's influence began to show. Now Islamists were welcome. In January 1993, as the official Baghdad Observer newspaper reported, al-Duri hosted a convention for "more than 1,000 religious, political and cultural dignitaries from 51 countries," urging them "to conduct holy jihad against the U.S. and its allies."
By July 2002, Saddam had distributed a circular to his top leadership, warning that if and when the United States attacked, "Iraq will be defeated militarily due to the imbalance in forces," but could prevail by "dragging the U.S. military into Iraqi cities, villages and the desert and resorting to resistance tactics." By December of that year, one of his key intelligence chiefs, Gen. Taher Jalil Habush al-Tikriti, was bragging, "We'll be angry if the Americans don't come." (Al-Tikriti is now a leader of the insurgency.) A memo distributed to Saddam's secret police in January 2003, and later obtained by NEWSWEEK, assigned a series of tasks to the organized resistance, including looting and burning government buildings and sabotaging electricity and water stations.
Saddam was not the only one preparing for a cataclysmic battle. After the United States crushed Afghanistan's Taliban regime and tore up Al Qaeda's infrastructure in the winter of 2001-02, would-be holy warriors started eying Iraq as a place where they could make a new stand. One of them was Zarqawi. Working with a group of Kurdish Islamic radicals known as Ansar Al-Islam, he established an underground railroad, bringing zealots to northern Iraq through Europe, Turkey and Syria. Other would-be holy warriors started finding their own way to Baghdad. As the American invasion approached, Osama bin Laden's head of military operations, a former Egyptian commando known as Saif al-Adel, laid out a detailed strategy for jihad in Iraq. Bin Laden himself called on holy warriors to join the fight in March and April.
A spark was needed to turn the building rage into something more like open rebellion, and Zarqawi was ready to supply it. In July and August 2003, an al-Kurdi car bomb was used to devastating effect against the Jordanian Embassy (for the first time), and then another suicide attacker detonated a huge bomb at the United Nations headquarters. In custody, al-Kurdi has allegedly confessed to the bombing that murdered Shiite leader Muhammed Baqr al-Hakim, and to suicide operations against police stations and recruitment centers. The attacks by other groups had been little more than harassment compared with this. Now for the first time the American military started to use the word "insurgency."
Fortunately, Zarqawi was becoming as much a divisive influence on the insurgency as an inspiration to it. Aspiring to be named a prince in the Qaeda hierarchy, he wrote a letter to Osama bin Laden that was intercepted early last year. In it, the Jordanian called for sectarian war with the Shiites, and bragged of the suicide bombings that he and al-Kurdi carried out against them. He also denounced the Sunni nationalists as weak-willed men who "dislike the Americans and wish for their withdrawal, yet they look for a bright shining future and they are very easy prey for the cunning media and deceptive politics." Their tribal leaders and religious scholars were not really interested in holy war, said Zarqawi. They'd rather "dance [ceremonial dances] and finish with a big meal."
What happened? Barham Salih's theory: "The Baathists regrouped and in the last six or seven months reorganized. Plus they had significant amounts of money, in Iraq and in Syria." Those contacts and networks that Saddam's key cronies began developing months before the invasion now paid off. An understanding was found with the Islamic fanatics, and the well-funded Baathists appear to have made Syria a protected base of operations."The Iraqi resistance is a monster with its head in Syria and its body in Iraq" is the colorful description given by a top Iraqi police official. (Syrian officials interviewed by NEWSWEEK adamantly deny this, while jihadi foot soldiers speak openly of an underground network that smuggles fighters via Syria.) Zarqawi's people supply the bombers, the Baathists provide the money and strategy. Brig. Gen. Hussein Ali Kamal says the alliance has proved a potent combination. "Now between the Zarqawi group and the Baathists there is full cooperation and coordination," he told NEWSWEEK.
But the key to the insurgency's psychological and military impact lies with what the insurgents call martyrdom operations. "We see the suicide car bomb as the insurgents' precision-guided weapon," Gen. John DeFreitas III, head of American military intelligence in Iraq, told NEWSWEEK. More than any other mode of attack, suicide operations have stalled reconstruction efforts, forcing Coalition troops, officials and contractors to live behind ever-bigger blast walls, while the public bears the brunt of the horror. "No other weapon is so efficient at terrorizing and intimidating the population," says one U.S. officer.
The Allawi government has tried to reach out to some key figures in the insurgency, including Mudher al-Kharbit, brother of the sheik bombed by the Americans in 2003. One informed source says Allawi has even tried to initiate contact with Younes al-Ahmed, a key Baathist commander. "The crucial point in the whole of our antiterrorism strategy is how to split these groups," says national-security adviser al-Rubaie. But to begin to do that, the threat of the suicide bombers has to be contained?because most of them have no roots in Iraq, and no stake in its future.
Among those who have been identified are Yemenis, Syrians, Palestinians and even some European citizens. But Iraqi and U.S. officials, as well as sources inside the resistance, say there are especially large numbers of young Saudis who have taken the same path that al-Shayea did to the streets of Baghdad. According to DeFreitas, most of those suicide bombers whose identities have been ascertainable in the last six months were from Saudi Arabia. The typical profile is much like Ahmed al-Shayea's, twentysomethings and even teenagers from comfortable middle-class families. "They have got no experience, they are not trained," a Palestinian jihadi told NEWSWEEK. "They just have to drive the vehicle. But these boys?17, 18 years old?are important." What motivates them? "I think their religion is better than others'," he says. "They are rich, they are educated, and they need nothing, but they see that in this fight they will win either victory or heaven. This is their ideology. Either way, they win." Unless, like al-Shayea, they live to tell the tale.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6885867/site/newsweek/
I would put the whole story but its six pages long I took a bunch of pieces out so you guys can look at the so called freedom fighters.Newsweeks magazine with the story is going to be out Feb. 7th if any of you guys want to pick it up.
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