Word: jihadi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...recent days a number of names - actually, noms de guerre - have surfaced as potentially rising stars. (Al-Qaeda in Iraq constantly changes its commanders - and switches their names - for security reasons and to throw the U.S. off track.) Whether any of these personalities will attain Zarqawi's superstar-jihadi status remains to be seen. But TIME spoke with Abu Bara, an insurgent commander in Zarqawi's organization, and came up with these assessments of the most prominent commanders...
...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...
...that "there was a Jordanian security role in this." The official said he believed the breakthrough was a result of "cumulative intelligence," including from the recent arrest last month of a senior Al-Qaeda operative in Iraq. U.S. officials have said fingerprint and photographic evidence confirm Zarqawi's identity. Jihadi websites are also reported to have announced his death...
...Tigers into what is widely acknowledged as the world's most ruthlessly effective rebel army. Extraordinarily disciplined, the Tigers make an art form of suicide attacks. They hide explosives around or even inside the body, and rig them to motorbikes, cars or boats. Prabhakaran's masterstroke, one that prefigured jihadi terrorism, was to instill an almost religious reverence for sacrifice and martyrdom in his army?all his fighters wear cyanide capsules around their necks. For the Tigers, many of whom are recruited as children, Prabhakaran is akin to a demi-god. Photographs of his chubby, affable-looking image hang...
...above all, Tiger leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran's real genius was to build a culture of sacrifice and martyrdom around his guerrilla force, with himself as demi-god leader - an almost exact forerunner of jihadi terrorism. In July 2002 TIME spent a few days with a female Tamil Tiger suicide squad at their base in northern Sri Lanka, and got a firsthand understanding of how he has been so successful...