Word: bin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Zarqawi merged his jihadi group under the umbrella of al-Qaeda and pledged fealty to bin Laden. But there was reason to believe the relationship was strained. Al-Zarqawi's jihad was more rigidly uncompromising than bin Laden's: it wasn't enough to kill Westerners, it was just as important to slaughter fellow Arabs who followed a different form of Islam. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had been suspicious of Shi'ites but learned to work with them. In al-Zarqawi's eyes, Iraq's Shi'ites were apostates because their practice of Islam differs...
...time he died, al-Zarqawi had not only rewritten the history of the insurgency in Iraq but also bequeathed to the world a deadly new type of terrorist. While Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri issued impotent threats from their hideouts, al-Zarqawi got his hands bloody in Iraq, turning it into the holy war's primary battlefield. He became the jihad's eminent fighter-superstar, embracing and embellishing his infamy with brazen declarations and brutal atrocities--he personally decapitated American Nicholas Berg on videotape, sent scores of suicide bombers to their doom, killed fellow Muslims and attacked their...
...just his insistence on remaining on the front lines of the battle that set him apart from his al-Qaeda elders. As the insurgency unfolded, al-Zarqawi articulated and then acted upon an ideology more forbidding and toxic than even bin Laden may have imagined. In branding Shi'ites as betrayers of the faith and calling for their liquidation, al-Zarqawi stoked a war within Islam itself--one that is being played out in the streets of Iraq every day, with Iraqis engaging in the kind of sectarian frenzy that al-Zarqawi had advocated all along...
...final months of his life, al-Zarqawi sought a different kind of legitimacy. In exclusive interviews with TIME, fighters from his inner circle said that al-Zarqawi wanted to be seen, like bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, as a religious authority as well as a military commander. He may also have been trying to project a more moderate image, mindful of the revulsion induced by his barbarism toward fellow Muslims. One jihadist contact says al-Zarqawi had a growing sense that he couldn't trust those around him. He took to mimicking the habits of the Prophet Muhammad recorded...
...bravado, al-Zarqawi knew he could be caught at any time. In January 2004, U.S. intelligence officers intercepted a 17-page letter addressed to Osama bin Laden in which al-Zarqawi expressed concern for his longevity. "[Iraq] has no mountains in which we can take refuge and no forests in whose thickets we can hide," he wrote. "Our backs are exposed and our movements compromised. Eyes are everywhere...