Word: zarqawi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Mousab Al-Zarqawi didn't have to be in a room to silence it. Dozens of times in the past three years, I have sat with insurgent leaders, listening to their bombastic pronouncements and boastful tales of "victorious battles" against U.S. forces, complete with verbal sound effects of gunfire and explosions. On such occasions, there was only one sure way to quiet them down: ask about al-Zarqawi. Suddenly, they would begin talking in hushed tones, almost whispers--as if saying his name out loud might conjure him like a malevolent spirit...
Many of 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...
...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...
...interrogations were suitably aggressive - the let's-pretend network must have been Fox News - though only a few newbie talking heads were rattled. One gentleman who came forward to playact a Q&A on the war in Iraq was asked if the recent capture and killing of terrorist al-Zarqawi showed that the Bush war was, in fact, working. Reviewing the tape afterwards, one of the workshop leaders complimented him on his quick recovery. He allowed that the feat was all the more impressive considering that he didn't even know Zarqawi was dead until he was asked about...