Word: al-zarqawi
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...Iraqi police stations kill 34 people, after Saddam calls on insurgents to focus on Iraqi security and police forces rather than coalition troops. Former members of his Baathist Party help facilitate passage of suicide bombers, in the first evidence of collaboration between former regime elements and al-Qaeda's Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi. November...
...summer bombing campaign. On Aug. 7, a bomb went off outside the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, killing 19 people. Far more ominous was the Aug. 19 blast that destroyed the U.N.'s headquarters in Baghdad, killing U.N. representative Sergio Vieira de Mello and 22 others. Although al-Qaeda leader Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi claimed responsibility for the attack, U.S. intelligence officials believe that remnants of Saddam's Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) carried it out. "It was a pure Baathist operation," says a senior U.S. intelligence official. "The Iraqis who served as U.N. security guards simply didn't show...
...Alas, the cessation of sectarian hostilities was too good to last. A day after the tragedy, a brief gun battle broke out between Iraqi security forces on the bridge and some Sunni insurgents in Adhamiya. And al-Qaeda's Iraqi offshoot, led by Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, claimed credit for an earlier rocket attack on Kadhimiya, the Shi'ite district on the other side of the bridge. Drive-by shootings at Sunni mosques in southern Iraq last Friday suggested scapegoating by some Shi'ites. And calls for a peace march after the joint prayers in Baghdad proved futile: not enough...
European officials say the reports are based in part on U.S. officials' interrogation of suspected al-Qaeda deputy Abu Faraj al-Libbi, captured last May in Pakistan. (The CIA declined to comment.) Al-Zarqawi has written to al-Libbi about setting up camps in Jordan, Turkey, Syria or Lebanon, European officials say. He hoped the camps would provide instruction in European languages to facilitate jihadi attacks in Iraq and Europe...
...al-Zarqawi is still on the run from U.S. forces. So there are limits to how much global networking he can do. But he is a skilled delegator, says one French official. And he doesn't even have to contact far-flung cells to influence them; he just has to inspire them from afar. --By Bruce Crumley