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Iraqi suicide bombers from saudi arabia Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6885875/site/newsweek/.......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.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6885875/site/newsweek/
Iraq: Unmasking the Insurgents
Shadow war: The elections won't stop the bombers, but quality intel--and luck--might help.
By Rod Nordland, Tom Masland and Christopher Dickey
Newsweek
Feb. 7 issue - 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.
Taken to a hospital with third-degree burns over 70 percent of his body, al-Shayea was thought to be just another bystander wounded in the blast. But when police got a tip the second week in January that men were willing to offer money to get him out, or kill him, the cops got interested. If terrorists wanted him, so did they. "Our intelligence agents kidnapped him from the hospital," says Brig. Gen. Hussein Ali Kamal, deputy minister of the Interior for intelligence affairs. Speaking to NEWSWEEK at his heavily guarded headquarters in Baghdad last week, Kamal described the scene. Al-Shayea was brought into the office swathed in bandages and propped up on a makeshift seat without a back. A pillow was put on his lap to ease the pain of his burned arms. Then the interrogators began their questioning, threatening to hand al-Shayea to the Americans, and at one point putting him on the phone with his father in Saudi Arabia. "You see those drops," Kamal said, pointing out several stains on the carpeted floor. "This is the suicide bomber's blood. We interrogated him right here."
A video obtained by NEWSWEEK shows some of al-Shayea's half-whispered testimony, prompted by the commanding voice of an interrogator. He seems terrified, confused. Yet according to Kamal, the information he supplied offered startling insights into the relentless insurgency that has grown dramatically since U.S. troops toppled the statue of dictator Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003. 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.)
General Kamal says information supplied by al-Shayea helped Coalition forces round up several of Zarqawi's key lieutenants within a matter of days. Among them is Abu Umar al-Kurdi, real name Sami Muhammad Saeed al-Jafi, a terrorist demolition man who confessed to 32 car bombings over the last two years. Even if Zarqawi continues to elude capture, nailing al-Kurdi was a critical score. It might--just might--eventually help change the course of this war that has seemed to defy political or military solutions, despite last weekend's elections, and despite an enormous toll in blood that included the loss just last week of 31 Americans in a nighttime helicopter crash.
To understand how the breakthrough arrests of al-Shayea, al-Kurdi and other jihadists can be exploited, however, first you need a sense of how a growing array of soldiers and security men from Saddam's devastated military, members of his old Baathist regime, rebellious desert tribesmen, fierce nationalists, common thugs and a relatively few itinerant fanatics from around the Muslim world have come together to challenge American power and all it stands for in Iraq. Interviews with guerrilla veterans of the Iraqi war, tribal leaders and Baathists, as well as American, Coalition and Iraqi officials, make it clear this is not one insurgency, but many. What Zarqawi and al-Kurdi have brought to the fight is not numbers but a particular talent for horror, for videotaped beheadings and for delivering suicide bombs.
The key to defeating the insurgents, Iraqi officials now believe, is to find ways to separate and eliminate the most radical groups, like Zarqawi's, from those others that may be willing to make peace. (Similar strategies were tried, and succeeded, in Algeria and Egypt in the 1990s.) Taking out a key bombmaker producing Zarqawi's arsenal is a solid step in the right direction. But to understand how this might work, it's important to look at the very beginnings of the insurrection, in those months when the Bush administration first seriously threatened war against Saddam and started massing its troops, but hadn't yet made its move. As the world pondered the question of whether Saddam would give up the weapons of mass destruction that, in fact, he no longer had, he was preparing another kind of surprise for the Americans.
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.
Saddam, a paranoid with real enemies, was deeply suspicious of his top aides. But there was one he considered "blindly loyal," as Ballout puts it: Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, vice chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. Pale, with wispy red hair when he was younger, and a face that seemed to show the skull beneath the skin, 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 drink-ing 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."
Al-Duri was also assigned the task of repairing relations with the ruling Baath Party next door in Syria. The rival factions had been conspiring against each other since the 1960s, but a series of diplomatic missions--and concessionary oil sales--helped improve relations with the young dictator Bashar al-Assad after he inherited Syria's presidency in 2000. As the American invasion loomed, all these connections became increasingly important for Saddam's guerrilla strategy.
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.
When at last the American-led "shock and awe" blitzkrieg began, many of those well-laid plans went awry. Saddam's guerrilla strategy had called for Baghdad to battle on for months, but once the American tanks thundered through town, resistance evaporated. Very quickly, many of Saddam's top officials were killed or captured. One by one their faces were X'd out on the "pack of cards" listing the most-wanted men and women from the old regime. Among the few who got away, however, was the skull-faced al-Duri, the king of clubs. Another was Habush al-Tikriti, the jack of diamonds. The jihadists who had come from abroad--those who hadn't succeeded in getting themselves killed--meanwhile fell back in disarray toward the Syrian border.
The threat might have been contained, but in those early days of invasion and occupation, the U.S. forces made critical mistakes. "We're bleeding from so many self-inflicted wounds," says an American official in Baghdad. On April 11, two days after American Marines pulled down the statue of Saddam, American warplanes tried to kill one of the dictator's half brothers by dropping six JDAM-guided bombs on a large villa about 11 miles outside the city of Ramadi. They didn't get the brother, if he was ever there, but they did kill Malik al-Kharbit, a tribal leader who, since the mid-1990s, had actually worked with the CIA and Jordanian intelligence trying to overthrow Saddam Hussein. In addition to al-Kharbit, 21 more members of his family died under those bombs, including a dozen children. Potential friends were now enemies. And members of the Kharbit clan are considered the leading figures in an extended tribe called the Dulaimi, who number as many as 2 million. Their strongholds are in Fallujah, Ramadi, Qaim, Rutbah--places now well known as the Sunni Triangle.
The first weeks of American occupation were also marked by a dramatic rise in crime and looting, as U.S. soldiers, for the most part, stood by and watched. Saddam had released thousands of criminals from his jails. Now they saw there was no force on the streets willing to rein them in. In May, the U.S. administrator in Iraq issued Order No. 2, dissolving what was left of the old Iraqi armed forces, rendering hundreds of thousands of soldiers officially jobless, humiliating many officers who had seen decades of combat in Saddam's wars, and swelling the ranks of potential insurgents.
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."
Still the Americans and the Iraqis working with them underestimated the scope of the movement taking shape. Often they talked as if Zarqawi and his jihadist recruits were the only threat, and a limited one. "During the initial period after the invasion, the Baath and its security apparatus was in total disarray, and our security apparatus became more focused on the terrorists and foreigners," said Barham Salih, the Iraqi government's deputy prime minister, who is in overall charge of security affairs. This, he said, was a miscalculation. For one thing, much more Baathist infrastructure remained in place than was first realized. "They were moving aboveground before April 9 [2003], and they just moved underground after," says Iraqi national-security adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie.
For the Coalition troops fighting to contain the rebellion, the insurgency seemed as faceless, chaotic and disorganized as it was lethal. "There are distinct groups, but there's no single goal or single leader," says Maj. James West, an intelligence officer with the First Marine Expeditionary Force in Anbar province. Some are politically motivated, like the Baathists, some are criminals, some religious zealots, and sometimes they work with each other, sometimes not. "You don't know where the next alliance is going to be," says West. "There are so many ways Iraqis are tied together--by tribe, business dealing, family, religion or where they live. So some groups you never think are tied together may have other links."
The insurgents had a ready-made intelligence network through these connections that told them very quickly who was collaborating with the occupation and who wasn't. Intimidation aimed at those people was sometimes massive, as car bombs targeted people signing up for jobs with the Coalition, and sometimes very personal, but always ferocious. The Coalition and the government started losing control of the streets, even in Baghdad. Today in many neighborhoods you can come across "renunciation centers," where those who get death threats must go to publicly proclaim they'll no longer work with any organization targeted by the insurgents. Sometimes these are crowded street corners; other times a courtyard in a mosque. In some cases, people are required to make their renunciations in writing, and post that on a wall, next to the written death threat directed against them.
This savagely intimate network of resistance grew quickly and erupted publicly in the city of Fallujah last April, when four American security contractors were ambushed, their bodies burned, dismembered, strung up on a steel bridge--and the whole atrocity was caught on videotape. The Marines quickly mounted an assault on the city, a punitive mission that outraged many Iraqis and was called to a halt before it achieved any of its goals. A compromise deal was cut in which former Baathists agreed to provide security. In fact, the town of some 200,000 people quickly became a safe haven for insurgents and terrorists.
"When we talk about the security situation here," says a Coalition official in Baghdad, "we talk about before April and after April." That same month, a separate rebellion erupted in Shiite parts of the country, led by the renegade cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Eventually, in August, his forces were decimated by American Marines, and the Venerable Ayatollah Ali Sistani imposed a truce. But the Coalition's worst nightmare lingered--the prospect of some sort of Islamist nationalist alliance between Sunni insurgents and Shiite rebels that would spread violence the length and breadth of the country.
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."
Jihadi sources told NEWSWEEK last summer they were getting sick of Zarqawi, who seemed to be hijacking the insurgency. A series of grisly video clips on the Web that showed him beheading foreign hostages did not draw the kind of attention that many would-be resistance leaders wanted. His attacks on Iraqis ran counter to the nationalist ideas of many rebels. Some jihadist groups in Fallujah talked of arresting Zarqawi or killing him, according to a source in frequent contact with them. As late as November, when U.S. troops finally made an all-out assault on Fallujah, a senior Coalition official tells NEWSWEEK, the attack was delayed in hopes Zarqawi would be turned over peacefully.
But something had happened in August or September that Iraqi government officials have not yet fully deciphered. Suddenly the hostile rhetoric between nationalist rebels and Zarqawi ended. His open letters to Osama bin Laden, and his statements on the Internet, no longer belittled Iraqi colleagues in arms. And officials saw more and more instances of coordination between military-style units and terrorist operators: suicide bombs followed by ambushes; efforts to --breach heavy defenses with combined attacks including platoon-size forces.
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.
The strategy targets not only people, but the economy, and the Baathists draw on an intelligence network penetrating deep into the government. Attacks on oil pipelines, for instance, are precisely targeted for maximum effect. "They choose the right time and the right place," says one senior Iraqi official, "as if the man planning attacks were sitting in the Ministry of Oil and knows the inner circle is saying 'God willing, they will not hit this place.' And the very next day it's hit."
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.
Since September the pace of these bombings has picked up dramatically. Through the beginning of August, NEWSWEEK was able to count 108 suicide bomb attacks cited in news reports and military press releases--about 1.5 a week over the span of the occupation. But according to military intelligence officials in Baghdad, there were 49 car bombs in September alone, 103 in October, 133 in November (when the United States launched its assault on Fallujah) and 84 in December. Not all these were suicide attacks: the military estimates that 50 percent were. 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.
With Babak Dehghanpisheh in Baghdad and Mark Hosenball in Washington
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
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