Word: jihadeers
(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...
...those men had worked with al-Zarqawi, plotted with him, fought alongside him. But they remained in awe of him, citing his capacity to take any situation and bend it to his will. "Three years ago, Abu Mousab was asking us for advice on how to start a jihad in Iraq," said an insurgent commander who had first met al-Zarqawi in Fallujah in the weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein. "But in a few months, we were, one way or another, fighting the jihad by his rules...
...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 houses of worship. He extended his reach beyond Iraq, dispatching suicide bombers...
Although the Bush Administration at times overstated al-Zarqawi's indispensability to a predominantly homegrown insurgency, al-Zarqawi himself was a master of self-promotion. The high school dropout learned to use the Internet to burnish his image, recruit fighters and propagate his dream of perpetual jihad against infidels everywhere. It was his name that filled collection boxes in extremist mosques across the Islamic world. The National Counterterrorism Center believes that militants linked to al-Zarqawi may be operating in as many as 40 countries. In Iraq his dark charisma turned him into a figure of myth and legend...
...equally in the prisoners' interests for one of their number to die. In a global jihad in which suicide bombers are cheered as heroes, suicide at Guantanamo could be seen as an act of passive resistance, like the self-immolations of Buddhist monks in the early days of the Vietnam War. The Gitmo deaths may have had religious significance for the men who committed them. Colonel Mike Bumgarner, who oversees the detention camps, said in May that several inmates told him of a "vision, or a dream--implicitly a message from God--that if three detainees die, it will attract...