ZARQAWI’S DEMISE

AZG Armenian Daily
16/06/2006

There is a lesson for us all in the sudden, violent death of terrorist
leader Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq on Tuesday. It is this: Never call
a meeting.

Osama bin Laden probably hasn’t called a single meeting since 9/11,
so he’s still alive and kicking almost five years later. He sends out
inspirational video or audio tapes from time to time, but he’s not
actually running anything, because that would require him to be in
daily touch with lots of people — and if he were, he would be dead by
now. They’d spot him using a satellite phone and drop a missile on him,
like the Russians did to the Chechen rebel leader Dzhokhar Dudayev,
or somebody would just turn him in for the $25 million reward.

Zarqawi HAD to hold meetings, however. He had to organise atrocities,
coordinate logistics, talk on mobile phones, and thus expose himself
to attack on a daily basis, so eventually he ran out of luck. He will
not be missed, especially by the saner parts of the Iraqi resistance
movement — but he has probably already done the state of Iraq
fatal damage.

Zarawi was a foreigner, and most of his fighters were foreigners too,
religious fanatics from all over the Arab world who cared no more
about the lives of Iraqis than they did about their own lives. The
more doctrinally pure among them believed that there should not even
be an Iraqi state; like all Muslim countries, it should be absorbed
into a single world-spanning Muslim state run according to strict
Islamist principles.

It was the US invasion of Iraq that gave Zarqawi and his friends
the chance to move in, but they never dominated the resistance
movement. From the start, the great majority of the people fighting
the American occupation were native-born Sunni Arabs. Some of them,
mostly former Baathists, were nationalists who simply wanted the
Americans out. Others were religiously motivated radicals, long
repressed under Saddam, who also wanted to impose strict Islamic law
on the country. But none of them wanted to abolish the country. Most
of them did not even want a civil war.

That was where Zarqawi’s influence was greatest, and worst. His
gruesome enthusiasm for slowly beheading defenceless hostages and
circulating the videos was bad enough. Indeed, although bin Laden
and Zawahiri were eventually persuaded in 2004 to adopt "al-Qaeda in
Iraq," as Zarqawi named his organisation, they never had any control
over him, and they worried that his obvious delight in cruelty would
alienate people from the cause. But Zarqawi’s strategy of trying to
trigger a civil war in Iraq by murdering Shia Arabs in large numbers
was as infectious as it was effective.

Logically, Iraq’s Sunni Arabs should not seek a civil war because,
as a mere 20 percent minority in the country, they are almost certain
to lose it. But there is no other strategy that is likely to restore
the Sunnis’ former dominance over Iraq either. When no good strategy is
available, people will often opt for bad strategies rather than accept
defeat — and Zarqawi offered the Sunnis the strategy of civil war.

Like many religious fanatics, he hated people of his own religion
whom he saw as heretics even more than he hated infidels, so he had
no compunction about blowing Shia Arabs up in large numbers simply
because they were Shia. He saw a Sunni-Shia civil war as the best way
of destabilising the government that the US occupation was trying to
install in Baghdad, but also as the best way to ensuring the emergence
of a permanent base for Islamist radicals in the Sunni Arab parts
of the country, which would probably end up beyond Shia control even
after a eventual American withdrawal.

It was Zarqawi’s people who carried out all the early atrocities
against Shia civilians — the bombing of the Najaf shrine in August
2003 (85 dead), the coordinated attack on Shia mosques during Ashoura
ceremony in March 2004 (181 dead), the car bombs in Najaf and Karbala
in December 2004 (60 dead) — and they had the desired effect. Death
squads from Shia militias began killing Sunnis in retaliation,
the mainstream Sunni resistance started to fight back with the same
methods, and Iraq was trapped in the same spiral of violence that
doomed Lebanon to fifteen years of civil war.

Zarqawi is dead, but he has probably achieved his purpose. Baghdad
central mortuary is now receiving close to fifty mutilated bodies each
day, almost all of them victims of sectarian killings, and every month
the number rises. It’s probable that two or three times as many dead
end up in other mortuaries or are simply found and buried by their
relatives without any official record. The situation in Iraq will
probably get much worse, but it is already past saving.

By Gwynne Dyer, a London-based independent journalist whose articles
are published in 45 countries.