 |
| |
WEEKLY
SECTIONS |
 |
|
 |
| Al-Qaeda’s invisible man keeps Iraq guessing |
|
|
|
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
BAGHDAD: As Iraq prepares what it boasts will be its “decisive battle” against al-Qaeda, government forces face the challenge of tracking its shadowy leader, whose very existence has been called into doubt.
Within the virtual world of extremist Internet propaganda, Abu Omar Al-Baghdadi is leader of the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella organisation for al-Qaeda affiliated insurgent groups fighting US and Iraqi forces.
But for American commanders he’s a confidence trick, a straw man invented to put an Iraqi face on a terrorist group led by foreigners who infiltrated Iraq to sow chaos and undermine the US-backed government.
“We have seen no pictures of him. We don’t have irrefutable evidence that he actually exists, but we don’t discount that there may be a man named Omar al-Baghdadi,” a US military intelligence officer told reporters last month.
“It is clear that if he does exist he has little influence within the al-Qaeda hierarchy and that he is not responsible for all the things claimed in his name. This guy is a figurehead,” he said on condition of anonymity.
Abu Omar’s story began in October 2006, when Al-Qaeda announced in an Internet statement the founding of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq, a virtual caliphate which was supposed to unite Sunni insurgent factions.
On the model of Afghanistan’s former Taliban regime, the group would be led by an Amir al-Muminin or “Commander of the Faithful”.
In May 2007, Iraqi officials declared that Abu Omar had been killed, but their US allies soon stole their thunder, revealing that the dead man was only the Islamic State’s “information minister”, Muharib Abdelatif al-Juburi.
Two months later the Americans took another swipe at the Abu Omar legend, when US military spokesman General Kevin Bergner announced that this “fictional character” did not exist except as an al-Qaeda propaganda tool.
This new theory was based on an interrogation of a captive Iraqi al-Qaeda member, Khaled al-Mashhadani, who allegedly served as an intermediary between the movement’s Iraqi affiliate and its global figurehead, Osama bin Laden.
Mashhadani had been arrested on July 4 and had revealed to his US captors that the Islamic State was nothing more than a story invented to mask the identity of the group’s real — foreign — leaders, Bergner said. Abu Omar’s voice on recorded statements boasting of al-Qaeda’s violent operations in Iraq had been played by an Iraqi actor, Abdullah al-Naima, the American spokesman said.
For US commanders, the real leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq is one Abu Hamza al-Muhajir - better known as Abu Ayyub al-Masri or “Ayyub’s Father the Egyptian” — who is “minister of war” in the so-called ‘caliphate’.
Reportedly an expert bomb maker, the Egyptian militant was named leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq in June 2006 following the death of his better-known Jordanian predecessor Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in an American air strike.
|
|
|
| Back
| Send
this story to Friend | Print
Version |
|
|
|
ISSN 1563-9479 
