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THE RISE OF ISIS

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On Alert for Al Qaeda in Iraq, U.S. IsTracking 2 SuspectsBy RAYMOND BONNER

September 28, 2003

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 27 — As United States officials try to determine what role Al

Qaeda may have had in recent attacks in Iraq, investigators and Special Forces are also

pursuing two men known to have had previous connections to Osama bin Laden,

American officials said this week.

On a half-dozen occasions in recent weeks, one of the men, Abdul Rahman Yasin,

slipped through the net, officials said. He has been indicted in connection with the World

Trade Center bombing in 1993 and is on the F.B.I.’s most wanted terrorist list. He has

been living in Iraq for about 10 years.

The Americans have also been trying to track Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a more senior

Qaeda operative; according to American officials, he has been moving in and out of Iraq

since the war ended this spring. They say he has been bringing in money for local

terrorists, and trying to establish a beachhead for Al Qaeda.

While President Bush said recently that there was no evidence of a link between

Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 plot, investigators said they had concluded that Qaeda

operatives were in Iraq now. The investigators are trying to figure out how many there are

and what role they are playing.

On Friday, L. Paul Bremer III, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, said at

least 19 Qaeda members were in custody here, but he offered few details about where and

when they had been captured. It was the first public mention by an American official of

the detention of Qaeda members in Iraq.

Since before the war, United States officials have singled out Mr. Zarqawi to

illustrate Al Qaeda’s presence in Iraq. Officials say they believe that Mr. Zarqawi, a

Jordanian, has worked with Ansar al-Islam, which the Americans describe as a terrorist

group that had a base in the Kurdish region of Iraq.

German authorities have linked Mr. Zarqawi, who was in Iranian custody for a time,

to a militant Palestinian group, and said he ran training camps in Afghanistan alongside

Mr. bin Laden.

An American law enforcement official said Al Qaeda was seeking to form “new

alliances, new associations” with Baathists and other groups putting up resistance to the

Americans in Iraq.

It is not a natural alliance, however, because the Iraqis are far more secular than the

fundamentalists. But lately, an American official here said, some of the Iraqi resistance

groups have been wrapping themselves in more religious rhetoric.

It is an easy climate for terrorists to operate in, an American law enforcement

official said. Officials are quick to acknowledge, however, that they do not have a strong

sense of the dimension of the problem.

“Right now, I don’t think anybody has a good handle on it,” said a senior American

counterterrorism official.

Estimates of the number of Qaeda fighters here range widely, from a few hundred to

2,000. But those numbers are based largely on extrapolating from the number already

caught, an American diplomat in the region said.

Mr. Yasin’s roots in terrorism run deep, but he may have abandoned them. He was

born in 1960 in Bloomington, Ind., where his father was a graduate student, and grew up

in Baghdad.

He returned to the United States in the early 1990’s, to live with his mother and a

brother who were living in Jersey City.

It was then that he met Ramzi Yousef, an early operative for Mr. bin Laden long

before he had become a notorious public figure. Mr. Yousef recruited Mr. Yasin for the

plot to blow up the World Trade Center.

Mr. Yasin helped mix the chemicals, at one point severely burning his leg.

The F.B.I. detained Mr. Yasin after the attack and then released him, but only after

he provided information about Mr. Yousef, the mastermind. Mr. Yousef fled to Pakistan,

then Manila, where he was plotting to blow up 12 airliners over the Pacific, a precursor to

the Sept. 11 attacks, officials now say. He was later captured.

Mr. Yasin returned to Iraq.

Ostensibly, Mr. Hussein put Mr. Yasin under house arrest, but American officials

said this week that they now have evidence he was being liberally supplied with money,

women and alcohol.

In an interview with the CBS News program “60 Minutes” in June 2002, Mr. Yasin

expressed regret for what he had done. “I’m very sorry for what happened,” he said. “I

don’t know what to do to make it up.”

There is a $25 million bounty for information leading to his arrest. But officials say

it may not be money that brings him in.

“It will be some transgression,” said an American official involved in the search for

Mr. Yasin, Mr. Hussein and others.

That was the case with the $30 million reward that was offered for information

about Uday and Qusay Hussein, two of Mr. Hussein’s sons, Western officials said.

According to that account, the brothers’ landlord gave them away after they started

molesting his wife and daughter. Special Operations soldiers killed the brothers at the

home.

Zarqawi’s Journey: From Dropout toPrisoner to an Insurgent Leader in IraqBy JEFFREY GETTLEMAN; Abdallah Abu Romman contributed reporting forthis article.

July 13, 2004

AMMAN, Jordan, July 10 — Ten years ago, fellow inmates remember, Abu Musab al-

Zarqawi emerged as the tough-guy captain of his cellblock. In the brutish dynamic of

prison life, that meant doling out chores.

“He’d say, ‘You bring the food; you clean the floor,’” recalled Khalid Abu Doma,

who was jailed with Mr. Zarqawi for plotting against the Jordanian government. “He

didn’t have great ideas. But people listened to him because they feared him.”

According to American officials, Mr. Zarqawi has come a long way from his

bullying cellblock days and is now the biggest terrorist threat in Iraq, accused of

orchestrating guerrilla attacks, suicide bombings, kidnappings and beheadings. [On

Sunday he claimed responsibility for a mortar barrage in Samarra last Thursday that

killed five American soldiers and one Iraqi soldier.]

American views of Mr. Zarqawi’s relationship to Al Qaeda have varied. Secretary of

State Colin L. Powell has described him as a Qaeda operative, but a senior American

military official said recently that sources now indicated that Mr. Zarqawi was “a separate

jihadist.”

He remains a singular target: American forces are stepping up airstrikes on buildings

they believe to be his safe houses in Falluja and have raised the bounty on him to $25

million, the figure offered for Osama bin Laden.

For all that, Mr. Zarqawi remains a phantom, with little known about his

whereabouts or his operations.

In Jordan, where he stamped strong impressions on people as he climbed the ladder

of outlaw groups, friends and associates described the making of a militant. They say he

grew up in rough-and-tumble circumstances and adopted religion with the same intensity

he showed for drinking and fighting, though he became far less a revolutionary

mastermind than a dull-witted hothead with gruff charisma.

These people, who knew Mr. Zarqawi until he disappeared into the terrorist murk of

Afghanistan four years ago, acknowledge that he may have changed. But they say that

while the man they knew could be capable of great brutality, they have a hard time

imagining him as the guiding light of an Iraqi insurgency.

“When we would write bad things about him in our prison magazine, he would

attack us with his fists,” said Yousef Rababa, who was imprisoned with Mr. Zarqawi for

militant activity. “That’s all he could do. He’s not like bin Laden with ideas and vision.

He had no vision.”

Mr. Zarqawi, thought to be 37, grew up fast and hard in Zarqa, a crime-ridden

industrial city north of Amman known as Jordan’s Detroit.

From his two-story concrete-block house, he looked out on hills dotted with

smokestacks. He came from a poor family and has seven sisters and two brothers. His

father was a traditional healer. His mother struggled with leukemia. His birth name was

Ahmed Fadeel al-Khalayleh.

Childhood friends say he was much like any other boy, chasing soccer balls through

gravely streets, doing average work in school, not going to the mosque much. But he

liked to fight. “He was not so big, but he was bold,” said a cousin, Muhammad al-

Zawahra.

At 17, family members say, he dropped out of school. Friends said he had started

drinking heavily and getting tattoos, both discouraged under Islam. According to

Jordanian intelligence reports provided to The Associated Press in Amman, Mr. Zarqawi

was jailed in the 1980’s for sexual assault, though no additional details were available.

By the time he cleared 20 he was adrift, his family said, and like other young Arab

men looking for a cause, he looked northeast, to Afghanistan.

Saleh al-Hami, Mr. Zarqawi’s brother-in-law —who, like many former guerrillas

who fought in Afghanistan, has a long black beard and a plastic leg —said Mr. Zarqawi

arrived in Khost, in eastern Afghanistan, in the spring of 1989 to join the jihad, or holy

war, against the Russians. But he got there a little late. The Russians had just pulled out.

So instead of picking up a gun, Mr. Zarqawi picked up a pen.

He became a reporter for a small jihadist magazine, Al Bonian al Marsous, whose

name means “The Strong Wall.” He was 22, with a medium build and shiny black eyes,

and roamed the countryside interviewing Arab fighters about the glorious battles he had

missed.

Mr. Hami was convalescing in a hospital after he stepped on a land mine when he

met Mr. Zarqawi. The two grew close, and he later married Mr. Zarqawi’s younger sister.

One night while they were camping in a cave, he recalled, Mr. Zarqawi shared a

special dream. He said he had seen a vision of a sword falling from the sky. “Jihad” was

written on its blade.

Mr. Zarqawi returned to Zarqa in 1992 and fell in with a militant Islamic group,

Bayaat al Imam, or Loyalty to the Imam. He was arrested in 1993 after the Jordanian

authorities discovered assault rifles and bombs stashed in his house.

His lawyer said Mr. Zarqawi lamely told investigators that he had found the

weapons while walking down the street. “He never struck me as intelligent,” said the

lawyer, Mohammed al-Dweik.

Mr. Zarqawi was sent to Swaqa prison, on the desert’s edge. He was housed with

other political prisoners in a large room with iron bunk beds. Cellmates said Mr. Zarqawi

turned his bunk into a cave, covering each side with blankets. He sat for hours bent over a

Koran, trying to memorize all 6,236 verses.

Friends said this was typical. When he was a drinker, they said, he was an extreme

drinker. When he was violent, he was extremely violent.

He strutted around in Afghan dress and a woolly Afghan hat and lived and breathed

old Afghan battles. “Back then, he liked Americans,” Mr. Abu Doma said. “Abu Musab

used to say they were Christian and they were believers.”

The Russians were his No. 1 enemy, but this, like many other beliefs, would change

behind bars. In the wing where Mr. Zarqawi lived, ideologies scraped up against one

other. But cellmates said he shied away from politics. Instead, he pumped iron. Cellmates

remember his barbells, made from pieces of bed frame and olive oil tins filled with rocks.

As the years passed, Mr. Zarqawi’s arms and chest grew — and so did his role. He

mapped out shifts for cleaning, bringing meals to cells and visiting the doctor. He did not

talk much. When asked to describe him during this period, almost everyone interviewed

began with the word “jad,” which means serious.

His firmness was his attraction, fellow inmates said, his remoteness his power. By

1998, when a prison doctor, Basil Abu Sabha, met him, Mr. Zarqawi was clearly in

charge.

“He could order his followers to do things just by moving his eyes,” Dr. Abu Sabha

said.

His religious views became increasingly severe. They had been marinating in a stew

of militant beliefs served up by the imams and sheiks in the iron bunks next to him. He

lashed out at cellmates if they read anything but the Koran.

Mr. Abu Doma said he got a threatening note for reading “Crime and Punishment.”

“He spelled Dostoyevsky ‘Doseefski,’ Mr. Abu Doma said, laughing. “The note was

full of bad Arabic, like a child wrote it.”

Fellow inmates said that around that time, 1998, just as Al Qaeda was emerging as a

serious threat blamed for the two bombings of United States Embassies in Africa, Mr.

Zarqawi started talking about killing Americans.

In March 1999, Mr. Zarqawi was released under an amnesty for political prisoners.

His associates said they expected him to return to jail.

“Because of his views, there was no place for him in Jordan,” said Mr. Rababa,

explaining that the country, tempered and mostly secular, was no place for an extremist.

As for himself, Mr. Rababa said he had found a place in Jordan because his views had

matured.

But for Mr. Zarqawi, Mr. Rababa said, “everyone was the enemy.”

Mr. Zarqawi also had hopes for a normal life, according to Mr. Hami, who said he

had at least two children and had thought of buying a pickup truck and opening a

vegetable stand.

“You could tell he was confused,” Mr. Hami said.

In early 2000, Mr. Zarqawi went to Peshawar, Pakistan, at the Afghan border. It was

a deeply religious city, which made it attractive to him. He even took his aging mother.

But at the doorstep to jihad, he hesitated.

“He said it was Muslims fighting Muslims in Afghanistan and he didn’t believe in

the cause,” Mr. Hami said. “And he liked the air in Peshawar and thought it was a good

place for his mother.”

Mr. Zarqawi’s family said he was especially close to her, kissing her forehead every

time he walked in the door.

While he was deciding what to do, his Pakistani visa expired. Around the same time,

Jordan declared Mr. Zarqawi a suspect in a foiled terror plot against a Christian

pilgrimage site.

“At that point, he had nowhere else to go,” Mr. Hami said.

In June 2000, Mr. Hami said, Mr. Zarqawi crossed into Afghanistan, alone. His

mother died of leukemia in February of this year at age 62. Mr. Hami said her last wish

was for her son to be killed in battle, not captured.

American intelligence officials said Mr. Zarqawi opened a weapons camp connected

to Al Qaeda in late 2000 in western Afghanistan. There he took up his nom de guerre,

with Zarqawi a reference to his hometown of Zarqa.

United States officials said he was wounded in a missile strike after the Sept. 11,

2001, terror attacks when American forces went after the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Intelligence officials say he then left Afghanistan, where he had taken a second

wife, and made his way to a corner of northern Iraq controlled by a Kurdish separatist

Islamic group called Ansar al-Islam.

The next sighting of Mr. Zarqawi was on Sept. 9, 2002, when Jordanian agents said

he illegally entered Jordan from Syria.

A month later Laurence Foley, a senior American diplomat, was fatally shot outside

his home in Amman. Jordanian agents arrested three men who, the agents said, told them

that they had been recruited, armed and paid by Mr. Zarqawi. He was sentenced to death

in absentia.

On Feb. 5, 2003, Secretary of State Powell made his assertions about Mr. Zarqawi at

the United Nations.

Mr. Powell stands by his statement, a spokesman said this month, even though other

parts of that speech have been discredited and Mr. Powell mistakenly identified Mr.

Zarqawi as Palestinian. He actually is of the Beni Hassan tribe, with roots deep in the

Jordanian desert.

Other American information about Mr. Zarqawi has also been incorrect. At first it

was said that he had a leg amputated during a Baghdad hospital visit, but now, a senior

United States military official said in an e-mail message, “we believe Zarqawi has both

legs, and reporting of the missing limb was disinformation.”

At the beginning of the war in Iraq, Mr. Zarqawi and the Ansar fighters were driven

out of the country. In August a car bomb blew up the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, the

first in a deadly wave of bombings. Mr. Zarqawi, because of his history as an anti-Jordan

militant, was immediately a suspect.

In February, American officials in Baghdad released a 6,700-word letter —

outlining a terror strategy to drag Iraq into civil war —that they said had been found on a

CD from Mr. Zarqawi to Al Qaeda’s leadership. But people who know Mr. Zarqawi

wonder if he was the author. They said the lengthy political analysis, the references to

seventh-century kings and embroidered phrases like “crafty and malicious scorpion” do

not sound like him.

“The man was basically illiterate,” Mr. Abu Doma said, though he acknowledged

that a learned acolyte could be helping him.

Americans officials stand by their identification. They said the letter had been seized

from a courier working for Mr. Zarqawi, who calls his group the Tawid and Jihad

Movement.

The mystery remains. On May 11, a video appeared, titled “Sheik Abu Musab

Zarqawi Slaughters an American Infidel.” It showed the beheading of Nicholas Berg, the

young Pennsylvania businessman. American officials believe that Mr. Zarqawi may have

been the killer.

Back in Amman, there are questions. The killer on the video cuts with his right

hand. While Mr. Hami said he thought Mr. Zarqawi was right-handed, Mr. Rababa and

Mr. Abu Doma, who shared the same room with him for several years, insisted that he

used his right hand only for eating and shaking hands.

Rebel Fighters Who Fled Attack MayNow Be Active ElsewhereBy EDWARD WONG and ERIC SCHMITT

November 10, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Wednesday, Nov. 10 — Insurgent leaders in Falluja probably fled

before the American-led offensive and may be coordinating attacks in Iraq that have left

scores dead over the past few days, according to American military officials here. Abu

Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who is the most wanted man in Iraq, has almost

certainly fled, military officials believe. Americans say his group is responsible for

attacks, kidnappings and beheadings that have killed hundreds in more than a year.

Before the offensive began, some military officials said Mr. Zarqawi could be operating

out of Falluja, but his precise whereabouts have not been known. “I personally believe

some of the senior leaders probably have fled,” Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, commander of

the multinational forces in Iraq, said in a video conference with reporters on Tuesday. “I

would hope not, but I’ve got to assume that those kinds of leaders understand the combat

power we can bring.”

Insurgent attacks continued to exact a heavy toll across Iraq on Tuesday. Two

American soldiers died in a mortar attack in Mosul, where government authority appears

to be ebbing. Gunmen assassinated a senior government official in Samarra. Guerrillas

fired mortars at police stations in downtown Baghdad while hundreds of fighters massed

in the center of the provincial capital of Ramadi, just 30 miles west of Falluja.

A suspected car bombing outside an Iraqi National Guard base in Kirkuk killed

three people and wounded two others, Reuters reported. The attacks on Tuesday followed

several others over the weekend, both in Baghdad and the Sunni triangle.

The American military said on Tuesday that six people had been killed in the car

bomb attack Monday night outside Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad. Five were Iraqi

policemen, and the sixth was a civilian, the military said. In the two church bombings the

same night, one Iraqi was killed and several wounded, and one of the bombers was

disguised as an Iraqi policeman, according to a report put out by a Western security

contractor.

This spate of what appear to be coordinated attacks, as well as the dispersal of top

insurgent leaders, suggests that the Falluja offensive alone will not crush an insurgency

that has been gathering strength. And it raises the prospect that insurgents will try to

regroup and infiltrate Falluja after the fighting is over, as they have done in Samarra.

American military officials said that they anticipated a surge in violence timed to the

Falluja invasion and Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting that is supposedly auspicious

for martyrdom. They say they are not under the illusion that an attack on Falluja will

break the back of the insurgency, or that the capture of Mr. Zarqawi is a realistic goal.

The objectives of the offensive are to deny a safe haven to the insurgents, install the

presence of the Iraqi government in the city and ensure the area is secure enough so

residents can freely vote in the upcoming elections, General Metz said.

“The important idea to consider is that this is not an operation against Zarqawi or his

network,” said a senior military official in Washington who has been monitoring the

battle. “It is just one of many steps that need to be taken in order to defeat a complex and

diverse insurgency in which the Zarqawi network is but one element.”

But other military officials in Baghdad and Washington are expressing concern that

the operation could end up being both a public relations disaster and strategic setback if

some top leaders are not captured.

“This is causing some concern because if Falluja comes up a ‘dry hole,’ after all the

operations, we will have to explain it,” said a military official in Baghdad. “We will have

to address it if this happens. If we don’t retain any senior leadership, it may cause

backlash.”

An insurgent who gave his nom de guerre as Abu Khalid and identified himself as a

mid-level commander said in a telephone interview that leaders had decided two days

before the offensive to flee the city and leave only half of the insurgents behind to fight.

“From a military point of view, if a city is surrounded and bombarded, then the

result of the battle is preordained,” Abu Khalid, a major in the former Iraqi army, said.

“It’s not a balanced battle. So we told half of our fighters to leave the city and the other

half to stay and defend it.”

General Metz said the absence of insurgent leaders could explain why the defense of

Falluja seemed to lack military cohesiveness. Though some forces are engaged in fierce

house-to-house combat, several Marine commanders on the ground have said they have

been surprised by the relative lack of resistance from the guerillas. By early Wednesday,

the Marine and Army units that punched through the northern barricades at the start of the

assault had swept past the main east-west highway.

The recent wave of assaults that prompted Prime Minister Ayad Allawi to declare a

state of emergency appeared to have been a loosely coordinated counterattack to the

American-led offensive, senior military officials said.

They have shown the guerrillas can strike with great effect outside of Falluja, and

even while that city is under siege. Since last Saturday, scores of Iraqis, many of them

security officers, have been killed in attacks ranging from bomb and mortar attacks on

police stations in Samarra to suicide car bombings of Christian churches in Baghdad. At

least six American troops and one British soldier have been killed in assaults outside of

Falluja. The American military reported 130 attacks on Monday, well above the average

of 80 a day over most of the summer.

Other senior officers said that an unknown number of the estimated 2,000 to 3,000

insurgents in Falluja had escaped, but not necessarily all the leaders. The American

military did not seal off Falluja completely until Sunday night, when soldiers stormed a

hospital and two bridges on the western edge of the city. American commanders on the

ground in Iraq say up to 90 percent of the city’s residents fled in the build-up to the

offensive, and guerillas could well have been among them.

Abu Khalid, the guerrilla fighter, said insurgent leaders had debated how many men

to leave in the city.

“There were different views about that,” he said. “They discussed percentages like

20 percent inside the city and 80 percent outside, to save as many fighters as possible for

future operations. In the end, they settled on a 50-50 split.”

“We told the fighters that those who want to stay alive and fight should leave, and

those who want to become martyrs in this battle should stay,” he said.

Abu Khalid argued that even if the Americans take the city, they will lose in the

long run, because “the Americans will raid houses and arrest a lot of people, and this will

increase resentment and hatred and give the resistance more support in the city.”

Canny insurgents rarely stand and fight, and they often take advantage of their

ability to blend in with civilians and melt away. And for them, the propaganda campaign

is as important, if not more so, than the strictly military one, since the most immediate

goal is to win the support of the people.

Starting Monday, as American and Iraqi forces swept through Falluja from the

north, they found insurgents falling back.

Even in the warren of alleyways of the northwest Jolan neighborhood, the scene of

the some of the toughest fighting in April, when the Marines first tried an ill-fated

invasion, American commanders said they had encountered less resistance than they

thought they would.

In a recent offensive in Samarra, American-led forces swept through rebel-held

territory, only to have the insurgency return soon afterward.

On Saturday, as final preparations were under way for the Falluja assault, insurgents

in the Samarra area staged coordinated car bomb and mortar attacks that left at least 30

dead, many of them policemen.

Now insurgents are touting Samarra, as well as other violence-ridden towns around

Iraq, as a model of their own tenacity.

“The Americans are mistaken if they think they are going to end the resistance by

occupying Falluja,” Abu Khalid said. “What about Samarra? Baquba? Tal Afar? And

maybe also in some cities in the south in the future. The resistance is not in Falluja only.”

Edward Wong reported from Baghdad for this article and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

Thom Shanker, in Washington, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times, in

Baghdad, contributed reporting.

Suicide Bombers Aim at a Shiite HolyDay in IraqBy DEXTER FILKINS

February 20, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 19 — Six suicide bombers, including one on a bicycle, hurled

themselves into Iraqi crowds and set off explosives on Saturday, killing as many as 39

people and wounding about 150 in a wave of mayhem intended to disrupt Ashura, the

holiest day in Shiite Islam.

The attacks came on a day of huge and often delirious celebrations by hundreds of

thousands of Iraqi Shiites around the country, marking the seventh-century martyrdom of

the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Hussein. The bombings Saturday pushed the two

day death-toll here to at least 74, following five suicide attacks Friday.

The celebrations, banned during the time of Saddam Hussein, are a symbol of the

religious and political resurgence of the Shiites, a long-suppressed majority now poised to

take political power for the first time. That resurgence was codified by the victory in

nationwide elections on Jan. 30 and the negotiations now under way to form a new

government.

The rise of the Shiites is viewed by many in Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority as a direct

threat to its nearly five centuries of political dominance. Saturday’s attacks, thought to be

carried out by Sunni Muslim insurgents, are believed to be aimed at sparking a civil war

between the two sects.

In two of the attacks on Saturday, witnesses and Iraqi officials said the bombers had

probably been Sudanese nationals. Witnesses at both scenes said they saw the bombers

and that they had black skin. It was not clear how the officials determined the exact

nationality of the men; Iraq has a large community of Sudanese, most of them Sunni

Muslims, who were brought here as guest workers during Mr. Hussein’s rule.

In one of the deadliest incidents, a suicide bomber who had climbed aboard a yellow

American-made school bus set off his explosives at a checkpoint near the Kadimain

shrine in northern Baghdad, killing at least 5 Iraqis and wounding 46. The explosion

came while the bus was halted at a checkpoint, which prevented the vehicle from

approaching a huge street celebration under way outside the shrine.

The Kadimain shrine was the scene of another deadly attack, in which a suicide

bomber blew himself up after an exchange of gunfire with security forces. An American

soldier and an Iraqi security officer were killed.

In another assault aimed at Shiite devotees, a man wearing an explosive vest blew

himself up as he entered a procession near the Nida mosque in the Dhubat neighborhood

of northern Baghdad. The bomb killed at least 3 people and wounded 55.

In Baquba, north of Baghdad, a suicide bomber detonated a white Chevrolet Caprice

full of explosives outside an Iraqi Army building, killing four people, including three

civilians. In a posting on an Islamist Web site, a group claiming to be led by the militant

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said that one of its “martyrs” had carried out the attack.

It was Mr. Zarqawi who, in a letter captured by Kurdish forces last year, called on

his followers to launch sectarian attacks against Iraqi Shiites in hopes of provoking an all-

out civil war. Mr. Zarqawi’s group is believed responsible for a wave of bombings at

Ashura last year that killed more than 170 people. In the months since then, Mr. Zarqawi

has pledged his allegiance to Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda.

In a fifth suicide attack, a suicide bomber rode a bicycle into a tent full of mourners

at a funeral in southwest Baghdad, killing at least three people and wounding 55.

Afterward, from a high building nearby, it could be seen that parts of human bodies

below had been gathered together in piles.

“I was going out from the mosque when I saw a black man riding a bicycle into the

tent and blow himself up,” said Muhammad Hassan, 34. “I was thrown back into the

mosque.”

Unlike the day’s other attacks, which were carried out against Shiites, this bomber

struck a crowd of Sunnis. The act was not lost on the survivors, who were taken to

Yarmouk Hospital.

“He was an idiot,” said Um Seif, a 37-year-old housewife, who lay in a bed, her

black abaya striped with white bandages. “It was a Sunni funeral, not a Shia one.”

The Sunni insurgents have used several means to deliver bombs, putting them in

cars, hiding them under men’s clothing, and even concealing them inside dead animals.

Saturday appeared to be the first time a suicide bomber had used a bicycle.

Though only 18 deaths could be confirmed Saturday evening, Interior Ministry

officials said the final toll in the Baghdad area was 30. The Associated Press reported that

a suicide bomber had struck a military checkpoint in the town of Latifiya, south of

Baghdad, killing nine soldiers.

For all of the day’s carnage, it was significantly less than the same holiday a year

ago, perhaps because of tighter security. Last year, bombers killed dozens of people at the

Kadimain shrine. But this year, Iraqi police officers and American and Iraqi soldiers

formed a nearly impenetrable cordon around the area, stopping and searching cars and

people who tried to come close. The suicide bomber in the yellow school bus, for

instance, blew himself up after the vehicle was stopped on a checkpoint on the way to the

shrine.

The scene in Karbala and in Kadimain mosque was frenzied but peaceful, with tens

of thousands of pilgrims marching, chanting and striking their foreheads, in ritual fashion,

with swords. Many of the pilgrims, wearing the traditional white robes, were covered in

their own blood, crying out in ecstasy to their fallen martyr, Hussein.

The processions are meant to commemorate the death of Hussein, killed near

Karbala in 680 A.D. in a battle with troops loyal to the Umaayyad caliphate. The death of

Hussein lies at the heart of Islam’s historic rift between Sunnis and Shiites, with the

Shiites regarding Hussein’s death a redemptive act.

In the face of the continuing violence, a group of United States senators visiting Iraq

said they had been encouraged by the recent elections and by signs that the Iraqis were

beginning to take responsibility for governing themselves and defending their

government.

In a news conference, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York,

noted that in her previous visit to Iraq, in late 2003, she had been able to drive from the

Baghdad airport to the heavily fortified Green Zone. Such a drive was no longer possible.

Indeed, senators said Saturday that they had not left the Green Zone.

But Senator Clinton said the bombings against religious sites, such as those that

occurred Saturday, were a measure of the insurgency’s failure.

“The desperation of the so-called insurgency is becoming clearer by the day,” she

said.

While some of the senators in attendance stressed the need for the United States to

stay in Iraq for as long as was necessary, the leader of the delegation, Senator John

McCain, Republican of Arizona, said the factor that would ultimately determine the

length of America’s time in Iraqi would be American public opinion, as determined by

the number of American casualties.

“We’ve been in South Korea for 50 years, and Americans are perfectly happy with

that,” Senator McCain said. “If we can bring American casualties down as the Iraqis take

over military and law enforcement responsibilities, then I think the American people will

be satisfied to see significant progress.

“That is the key to it,” he said, “rather than whether you withdraw or not.”

Voice on Tape Calls Zarqawi’s WoundsMinorBy SABRINA TAVERNISE

May 31, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 30 — In a rambling 17-minute audio message addressed to

Osama bin Laden, the voice of a man claiming to be Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the United

States’ most wanted man in Iraq, acknowledged reports that he had been wounded but

said that his wounds were slight and that he was still in Iraq.

In Hilla, south of Baghdad, on Monday, two suicide bombers with explosives

strapped to their chests had blown themselves up 10 minutes apart in a crowd of police

officers protesting a layoff. A hospital official said 27 people had been killed and at least

120 wounded in the attack, which Mr. Zarqawi’s group claimed to have engineered.

The authenticity of the audiotape, which was posted on an Islamic Web site late

Monday night but bore Saturday’s date, could not immediately be verified. But Rita Katz,

director of the SITE Institute, an American nonprofit group that monitors Islamist Web

sites and news operations, said the voice sounded like Mr. Zarqawi’s.

The tape came after days of conflicting reports about Mr. Zarqawi’s health, some of

which described him as near death and others saying he had left Iraq to seek medical care.

In a message “from a soldier to his emir,” the taped voice spoke in measured tones

on topics ranging from Islamic history to recent battles in Qaim, a city near Iraq’s western

border with Syria, where 1,000 American marines fought Islamic militants this month.

The message also expressed personal warmth toward Mr. bin Laden.

“I want you, my sheik, to know, that all that far distance between us is because of

jihad, and I pray to God that we will be brought together again,” the voice said. “We are

here to fight, to raise the Islamic flag very high again.”

In claiming responsibility for the double bombing in Hilla, Mr. Zarqawi’s group

said the police officers, a vast majority of whom were Shiites, had been working with

“crusaders” — Americans.

The attackers walked into a large crowd of police commandos shortly after 8 a.m.,

said Abdul Ridha Essah, a spokesman for the Babil Province government who was in the

area the time. He said the men blew themselves up, staggering the attacks by 10 minutes

for maximum damage.

Television images of the devastation showed pools of blood and pieces of flesh

scattered before a municipal building. The officers had recently been relieved of their

duties because their paperwork was not in order, and they were lobbying to be rehired.

The attack came as an Iraqi Air Force aircraft crashed about noon in the eastern

province of Diyala, northeast of Baghdad, with four Americans and one Iraqi on board.

[On Tuesday, the American military confirmed that the crash killed four United States

Air Force personnel and one Iraqi, The Associated Press reported.]

Reports of Mr. Zarqawi’s wounds have circulated for days. An Iraqi general was

quoted in a report by the BBC’s monitoring service earlier this month as saying Mr.

Zarqawi had suffered critical head wounds during an American bombing raid in Qaim,

where more than 100 insurgents and at least 9 American marines died in about a week of

fighting. The officer said Mr. Zarqawi had been treated for his wounds at a Ramadi

hospital.

The audiotaped voice disputed that claim. “I’m sure you heard the news that I’m

badly injured and that I entered the Ramadi hospital,” it said, “but I want to tell you that

is not true and it is all only rumor.”

In remarks that underscored the increasingly sectarian tinge to the insurgency here,

the message said the American military was in better shape than militants would like

because it had been helped by Iraqi Shiites, namely by their top cleric, Grand Ayatollah

Ali al-Sistani.

Ayatollah Sistani has refused to meet with American officials but has called for

restraint among Shiites, who have died in the hundreds in recent attacks during the

insurgency led by Sunni Arabs.

Later in the speech, in a chilling reference to the extreme danger posed by the

insurgents to Iraqi government officials, who are assassinated almost daily, the voice

referred to remarks by President Jalal Talabani that the new Shiite-led government would

surround and isolate insurgents.

“I challenge Jalal Talabani to go outside his palace to see the people in Baghdad or

Ramadi or Mosul,” he said, referring to two troubled Sunni Arab cities in northern and

western Iraq that have slipped increasingly out of control of the central government. “I

want to understand who is isolated from the people, Talabani or the mujahedeen.” The

speaker called Mr. Talabani a “Zionist-American enemy of God.”

In the address, which began with Islamic singing and a reading from the Koran, the

speaker showed himself to be press savvy. He cited recent statements from American

officials, including Gen. Richard B. Meyers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well

as articles about Ayatollah Sistani, including one by Thomas L. Friedman, a columnist for

The New York Times, which was cited as evidence that the cleric was a friend of the

United States.

The speaker bemoaned the arrest by Pakistan this month of a Libyan named Abu

Faraj al-Libbi, a senior operative for Al Qaeda who is suspected of directing two failed

assassination attempts there against President Pervez Musharraf, but gloated over the

deaths of American marines killed in battles in Qaim.

He ended by telling Mr. bin Laden, “We pray to God to keep you alive and

protected, and we are waiting for your orders.”

Also on Monday, the American military arrested and then promptly released a

prominent Sunni political figure, Mohsen Abdul Hamid of the Iraqi Islamic Party. The

military said in a brief statement that it had determined that Mr. Hamid had been

“detained by mistake.”

A spokesman for the party, Tarik al-Hashimy, declined to say who he thought was

behind the arrest. Since the new government came to power a month ago, sectarian

tensions here have risen, with Sunni leaders accusing Shiite militias of killing and

arresting Sunnis.

An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Hilla for this

article.

Book Review: ‘Zarqawi’: Face of theInsuranceBy DANIEL BENJAMIN

September 18, 2005

There is no substitute for war as a way of separating out talented field commanders from

the rest. In Iraq, America’s terrorist enemies have benefited from these winnowing effects

as much as any conventional force. Now the jihadists have a hardened cadre of leaders,

and none is more brutally distinguished than Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

With a $25 million price on his head and the United States military desperately

trying to corner him, Zarqawi has become the face of the insurgency, if not exactly “the

new face of Al Qaeda,” as the subtitle of Jean-Charles Brisard’s disjointed biography,

“Zarqawi,” asserts. His organization may be committing only a fraction of the attacks in

Iraq, but, as Brisard and his collaborator, Damien Martinez, rightly observe, “His are the

ones that are commented on throughout the world.” These attacks have included the

destruction of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad and large-scale bombings of

Shiite targets in Najaf and Karbala, which have helped speed the way toward wider

sectarian violence and the current undeclared civil war.

A Jordanian with a background as humble as Osama bin Laden’s is grand, Ahmad

Fadil Nazzal al-Khalayleh (Zarqawi’s nom de guerre is taken from his hometown near

Amman) traveled a route sharply different from that of Al Qaeda’s first generation of

leaders. Unlike the patrician surgeon Ayman al-Zawahiri, the group’s second-in-

command and chief ideologist, or bin Laden himself, a member of the Saudi elite who

studied engineering and economics, Zarqawi was a high school dropout, an abuser of

alcohol, a drug dealer and possibly a participant in an attempted rape.

According to Brisard, this rebel from a criminal background went to fight in the

Afghan jihad in 1989 after a quarrel with his father, a minor city official. He missed the

glorious struggle against the Soviets but saw action in later battles among the various

Afghan factions. He was arrested in his native country in 1994 for trying to bring the

jihad home. In prison, Zarqawi came under the tutelage of a prominent radical imam, Abu

Mohammed al-Maqdisi, and matured into a hard-edged takfiri, a believer in the

excommunication — and slaughter — of Muslims deemed guilty of apostasy. He became

the leader of a jailhouse Islamist cell, acquiring a reputation for being relentlessly

aggressive against those he opposed and extravagantly devoted to those who supported

him.

These qualities have served him well in Iraq. While bin Laden, who is fastidious

about the details of his violence, has been off making video addresses from the caves of

Waziristan and casting himself as a world leader, Zarqawi is claiming credit for a dozen

bombings a week. His videos show him personally beheading captives, like the young

American Nick Berg. His passionate hatred of Shiites, whom he has compared

unfavorably to Americans, has made him perfectly suited to be the catalyst for an Iraqi

civil war — a role that probably could not have been filled as well by bin Laden, since Al

Qaeda has historically sought to avoid provoking Shiite Iran.

Zarqawi could be an excellent window into understanding radical Islam’s appeal to

the Arab world’s swelling underclass, the various currents running through the movement

(including its powerful anti-Shiite sentiment) and the way the jihadist struggle has been

changed by the war in Iraq. But this biography has little to say about any of this. Nor is it

helpful in explaining Zarqawi’s volatile relationship with Al Qaeda. In the period

preceding the war, while the Bush administration was portraying Zarqawi as the key

intermediary between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, many Western intelligence services

saw him less as a lieutenant of bin Laden than a rival — a view now widely accepted.

(The charge that Zarqawi was collaborating with Hussein’s regime has long since

crumbled.) The merger of his Tawhid and Jihad group with Al Qaeda in 2004 was a case

of mutual exploitation. Zarqawi was able to show that he had the blessing of the greatest

jihadist and bin Laden could create the illusion that he was a real presence in today’s

central field of battle.

Brisard describes a chaotic series of conspiracies, mostly failed, and he provides the

names of legions of insignificant co-conspirators, but he scarcely explores Zarqawi’s

differences with the Al Qaeda leaders over doctrine (it may be hard to believe there are

people more radical than bin Laden, but takfiris, with their “slaughter them all approach,”

are just that). There is also little discussion of the disagreements over strategy, in which

Zarqawi pushed for bringing the jihad to the Middle East to topple Jordan’s rulers and

attack Israel, while bin Laden favored a global focus on the United States.

What’s more, numerous errors of fact and a shabby use of sources makes this a self-

undermining book. For example, Brisard refers to a mid-90’s plot “to crash several

airplanes simultaneously over the United States”; the goal of that plot was actually to

blow up 12 wide-bodies over the Pacific. Brisard appears not to know that Pakistan’s

ruler in the late 90’s was Nawaz Sharif, and he identifies Benazir Bhutto as the victim of

Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s 1999 coup, when in fact she was in exile at the time. Most

bizarre is Brisard’s claim that the United States has been trying to incite a “direct clash”

between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq “so as to justify its presence in Iraq.”

Charges like this only reinforce the reputation for reckless conspiracy theorizing that

Brisard acquired with his last book, “Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil

Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden.” (There he alleged that the 9/11 attacks

were a response to American pressure on the Taliban to permit oil and gas pipelines to be

built in Afghanistan.) In a letter early this year, Osama bin Laden asked Zarqawi to start

work on an operation against the United States. The world’s foremost jihadist evidently

thinks the Jordanian upstart has the resources to carry out such an attack, and surely this

is reason enough for us to know more about him. But “Zarqawi” is a squandered

opportunity.

Daniel Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is

a co-author, with Steven Simon, of the forthcoming “Next Attack: The Failure of the War

on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right.”

U.S. Strike Hits Insurgent at SafehouseBy JOHN F. BURNS

June 8, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 8 — Al Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was

killed in an American airstrike on an isolated safe house north of Baghdad at 6:15 p.m.

local time on Wednesday, top American and Iraqi officials said today. Islamic militant

Web sites linked to Al Qaeda quickly confirmed the death, saying Mr. Zarqawi had been

rewarded with “martyrdom” for his role in the war here.

At a joint news conference with Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the top

American military commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., said Mr. Zarqawi’s

body had been positively identified by fingerprints, “facial recognition” and “known

scars.”

Six people were killed in the strike: Mr. Zarqawi, his spiritual adviser and four other

people including a woman and a child, the military said. The strike had been

accompanied by a ground assault involving American and Iraqi troops.

The announcement of Mr. Zarqawi’s death, shortly before noon today in Baghdad, 4

a.m. Eastern time, marked a major watershed in the war. With a $25 million American

bounty on his head, the Jordanian-born Mr. Zarqawi has been the most-wanted man in

Iraq for his leadership of Islamic terrorist groups that have carried out many of the most

brutal attacks of the war, including scores of suicide bombings, kidnappings and

beheadings. In his late 30’s, he had been named “Prince of Al Qaeda” in Iraq by Osama

bin Laden, Al Qaeda’s fugitive leader.

“Today, we have managed to put an end to Zarqawi,” said Mr. Maliki, who took

office three weeks ago at the head of Iraq’s first full-term government since the

overthrow of Saddam Hussein. He said the death should be a warning to other insurgent

leaders.

“They should stop now,” he said. “They should review their situation and resort to

logic while there is still time.”

Mr. Maliki, the prime minister, said the raid that killed the Al Qaeda leader had

taken place in an area known as Hibhib in Diyala province, which stretches north and east

of Baghdad to the Iranian border. The area, 55 miles north of Baghdad, has drawn

intensified American military activity in recent weeks in response to a new wave of

sectarian killings, including one on Sunday in which Sunni Arab gunmen pulled 20

people, including 7 high school students, off minibuses near Baquba, and killed them.

General Casey said an American airstrike had targeted “a single dwelling in a

wooded area surrounded by very dense palm forest” five miles west of Baquba, and that

“precision munitions” had been used, a phrase that usually refers to laser-guided bombs

or missiles. Scenes shown on BBC’s World Service television showed a large pile of

rubble, apparently from a concrete-framed building of at least two stories, set in an area

bounded by palm trees.

The BBC footage showed Iraqi villagers clambering over the rubble, with no sign of

American or Iraqi troops. The villagers pulled an array of belongings from the 10-foot-

high pile of cinder blocks, twisted concrete pillars and steel reinforcing words, and laid

them out on the bare earth beside the obliterated building. Cooking utensils, torn carpets

and a child’s green T-shirt were visible, as was the wreck of a white, Japanese-made

pickup truck.

A CNN broadcast showed youths picking up a child’s sandal and a stuffed toy after

the airstrikes, which took place in a neighborhood of about 50 buildings, all in close

proximity.

The senior American military spokesman in Iraq, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell,

speaking at a news conference in Baghdad, said the identities of the woman and child

killed in the strike had yet to be confirmed.

A framed image of Mr. Zarqawi’s face after he was killed was displayed at the

briefing, as was an aerial video of the two air strikes by F-16 jets, which dropped 500-

pound bombs. General Caldwell said dirt and rubble had been cleaned off Mr. Zarqawi’s

face before the photograph was taken. He also said that Iraqi security forces had been the

first to arrive at the scene and that Mr. Zarqawi’s body had been removed.

General Caldwell said it took many weeks of painstaking exploitation of

intelligence, until Wednesday night they had “definitive, unquestionable” knowledge of

Mr. Zarqawi’s location for the first time. He said after Mr. Zarqawi was killed forces

went after other targets in 17 simultaneous raids in Baghdad and on the outskirts,

obtaining a “treasure trove” of information.

Mr. Maliki said the attack that killed Mr. Zarqawi had resulted from a tip that came

from Iraqi civilians in the area, which lies in a province, Diyala, that has an evenly

balanced population of Shiite and Sunni Arabs, as well as Kurds.

The British prime minister, Tony Blair, at a news conference in London, paid tribute

to the role played in the attack by coalition intelligence agencies.

“There has been very close cooperation, of course, between everyone — I mean, the

Iraqis, the coalition intelligence services and so on,” Mr. Blair said.

President Bush, speaking in the Rose Garden of the White House, gave another hint

of what happened by thanking American special forces for their role. “Special operation

forces, acting on tips and intelligence from Iraqis, confirmed Mr. Zarqawi’s location, and

delivered justice to the most wanted terrorist in Iraq,” Mr. Bush said.

Mr. Zarqawi, whose adopted name was taken from the town of Zarqa in Jordan

where the insurgent leader was raised, had assumed an almost mythic status for his long

run of terrorist attacks and statements issued on Islamic militant Web sites that declared

his goal to be the establishment of a new “caliphate” in Iraq. The term is taken from the

term given to the vast areas of the Arab world that came under strict Islamic rule within

100 years of the death of the Prophet Mohammed in the 7th century A.D.

After twice narrowly escaping capture by American troops in the past 18 months,

Mr. Zarqawi became increasingly bold in recent months, issuing videotaped speeches on

Islamic militant Web sites, vowing victory against the “crusaders” who had invaded Iraq,

meaning American, British and other Western forces. The speeches also called on Sunni

Arabs to kill “converters,” meaning Iraqi Shiites, effectively inciting civil war here.

American military commanders have said that Mr. Zarqawi personally beheaded

some of those kidnapped by his followers, and identified him as the mastermind of one of

the first major suicide bombing attacks, a strike in August 2003 that destroyed the United

Nations headquarters in Baghdad and killed 22 people, including Sergio Viera de Mello,

the head of the United Nations Mission here.

A message posted by Al Qaeda on one of its Web sites, confirming Mr. Zarqawi’s

death, vowed to continue what it called “the holy war” in Iraq. “We want to give you the

joyous news of the martyrdom of the mujahid sheikh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” the

message said. It was signed by a man calling himself “Abu Abdel-Rahman al-Iraqi,” who

was identified as the deputy “emir,” or leader, of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

The atmosphere at the news conference announcing the killing of Mr. Zarqawi was

reminiscent of a similar occasion on Dec. 13, 2003, when L. Paul Bremer III, the head of

the American occupation then ruling Iraq, announced the capture of Saddam Hussein in a

stifling underground bunker near Mr. Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, 100 miles north of

Baghdad.

The mood then was one of triumph, with Mr. Bremer declaring “Ladies and

Gentlemen, we got him!” and American military commanders describing the capture as a

major turning point in the war. Those hopes were quickly disappointed as the insurgency

rapidly worsened, and Mr. Hussein, now on trial in Baghdad, has used the courtroom

dock as a platform to encourage the insurgents to intensify their attacks on American and

Iraqi targets.

This time, the mood of the American and Iraqi leaders was more cautious, though

Mr. Maliki, opening the news conference with the formal announcement of the Zarqawi

killing, was greeted by celebratory shouts and cries of “Peace Be Upon Him,” the

traditional Islamic obeisance to the Prophet Mohammed that Muslims make at moments

of joy or special significance.

General Casey, nearing the end of his second year as the American commander

here, confined his remarks to a spare summary of the raid that killed Mr. Zarqawi.

Unsmiling in his rimless spectacles, the 57-year-old general shook Mr. Maliki’s hand

vigorously after the Iraqi leader made the formal announcement of Mr. Zarqawi’s death,

but otherwise seemed at pains not to overstate the significance of the moment.

Mr. Zarqawi, he said, “is known to be responsible for the deaths of thousands” with

his terror attacks, and his death would be a major blow to Al Qaeda.

But he added a sober note, saying that “although the designated leader of Al Qaeda

in Iraq is now dead,” hard fighting in the war lay ahead. “This is just a step in the

process,” he said.

The American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, took a similar approach. Smiling

broadly, the 55-year-old envoy described Mr. Zarqawi’s death as “a great success for

Iraq” in its war with terrorists, and congratulated General Casey, “whose forces carried

out this very vital mission.” In a personal nod to General Casey, he noted that the

American commander “has been here now for more than 700 days” — an oblique way,

perhaps, of saying that Mr. Zarqawi’s death marked a rare upturn in the war for the force

of 135,000 American troops General Casey leads, who have lost more than 2,400 soldiers

dead and more than 17,000 wounded, with no end to the war in sight.

“Zarqawi was the godfather of sectarian killing in Iraq,” Mr. Khalilzad said. “He led

a civil war within Islam and a global war of civilizations.”

To this, the ambassador added a note of caution. “Zarqawi’s death will not end the

violence in Iraq,” he said, “but it is an important step in the right direction.” He said it

was also an important step for the Maliki government, new in power and facing an uphill

struggle to bolster the flagging confidence of Iraqis in the ability of the Baghdad

leadership to bring an end to killing that human rights groups say has cost at least 30,000

civilian lives, and possibly many more.

But “there will be difficult days ahead,” Mr. Khalilzad said. He added, “I call on

Iraq’s various communities to take responsibility for bringing sectarian violence to an

end, and for all Iraqis to unite” behind the Maliki government, which, though dominated

by figures from Shiite religious groups, has a cabinet composed of representatives from

all three of Iraq’s principal ethnic and religious groups, Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds.

For Mr. Maliki, a Shiite, the killing of Mr. Zarqawi brought immediate political

results in the form of parliamentary approval, immediately after the news conference, of

Mr. Maliki’s nominees for the vacant security posts in the cabinet, the ministers of

defense, interior and national security. After the prime minister’s repeated failures to win

agreement of contending groups within the government on earlier nominees, he stood at

the lectern in the Parliament chamber and presented the three men who emerged from

weeks of overlapping vetoes by the main Sunni and Shiite political groups.

Named as ministers were Gen. Abdul Qadr Mohammed Jassim, a former general

under Saddam Hussein who was jailed in 1994 and sentenced to seven years

imprisonment, as minister of defense; Jawad Kadem al-Bolani, a 46-year-old Shiite

engineer who was a member of Saddam Hussein’s armed forces and became a member of

the Iraqi Governing Council in 2003, as minister of the interior, responsible for the

police; and Shirwan al-Waili, a 49-year-old Shiite with a background in military

engineering who was arrested in the Shiite uprising after the first Persian Gulf war, as

minister of national security.

In line with an agreement reached several weeks ago between Sunni and Shiites

groups, General Jassim, who has until recently been commander of land forces in the new

American-trained Iraqi army, is a Sunni Arab, and Mr. Polani, the interior minister, is a

Shiite. Both men stressed in remarks to the Parliament that they had no ties to any of the

rival political parties in the government, a qualification that American officials had

insisted on after the former government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari was virtually

immobilized over allegations that the interior ministry was sheltering Shiite death squads

targeting Sunnis.

Christine Hauser contributed reporting from New York for this article.

Bombs Aimed at G.I.’s in Iraq AreIncreasingBy MICHAEL R. GORDON, MARK MAZZETTI and THOM SHANKER

August 17, 2006

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 — The number of roadside bombs planted in Iraq rose in July

to the highest monthly total of the war, offering more evidence that the anti-American

insurgency has continued to strengthen despite the killing of the terrorist leader Abu

Musab al-Zarqawi.

Along with a sharp increase in sectarian attacks, the number of daily strikes against

American and Iraqi security forces has doubled since January. The deadliest means of

attack, roadside bombs, made up much of that increase. In July, of 2,625 explosive

devices, 1,666 exploded and 959 were discovered before they went off. In January, 1,454

bombs exploded or were found.

The bomb statistics — compiled by American military authorities in Baghdad and

made available at the request of The New York Times — are part of a growing body of

data and intelligence analysis about the violence in Iraq that has produced somber public

assessments from military commanders, administration officials and lawmakers on

Capitol Hill.

“The insurgency has gotten worse by almost all measures, with insurgent attacks at

historically high levels,” said a senior Defense Department official who agreed to discuss

the issue only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for

attribution. “The insurgency has more public support and is demonstrably more capable

in numbers of people active and in its ability to direct violence than at any point in time.”

A separate, classified report by the Defense Intelligence Agency, dated Aug. 3,

details worsening security conditions inside the country and describes how Iraq risks

sliding toward civil war, according to several officials who have read the document or

who have received a briefing on its contents.

The nine-page D.I.A. study, titled “Iraq Update,” compiles the most recent empirical

data on the number of attacks, bombings, murders and other violent acts, as well as

diagrams of the groups carrying out insurgent and sectarian attacks, the officials said.

The report’s contents are being widely discussed among Pentagon officials, military

commanders and, in particular, on Capitol Hill, where concern among senior lawmakers

of both parties is growing over a troubling dichotomy: even as Iraq takes important steps

toward democracy — including the election of a permanent government this spring — the

violence has gotten worse.

Senior Bush administration officials reject the idea that Iraq is on the verge of civil

war, and state with unwavering confidence that the broad American strategy in Iraq

remains on course. But American commanders in Iraq have shifted thousands of soldiers

from outlying provinces to Baghdad to combat increased violence in the Iraqi capital.

The increased attacks have taken their toll. While the number of Americans killed in

action per month has declined slightly — to 38 killed in action in July, from 42 in

January, in part reflecting improvements in armor and other defenses — the number of

Americans wounded has soared, to 518 in July from 287 in January. Explosive devices

accounted for slightly more than half the deaths.

An analysis of the 1,666 bombs that exploded in July shows that 70 percent were

directed against the American-led military force, according to a spokesman for the

military command in Baghdad. Twenty percent struck Iraqi security forces, up from 9

percent in 2005. And 10 percent of the blasts struck civilians, twice the rate from last

year.

Taken together, the new assessments by the military and the intelligence community

provide evidence that violence in Iraq is at its highest level yet. And they describe twin

dangers facing the country: insurgent violence against Americans and Iraqi security

forces, which has continued to increase since the killing on June 7 of Mr. Zarqawi, the

leader of the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and the primarily sectarian

violence seen in Iraqi-on-Iraqi attacks being aimed at civilians.

Iraq is now locked in a cycle in which strikes by Sunni Arab militants have

prompted the rise of Shiite militias, which have in turn aggravated Sunni fears. Beyond

that, many Sunnis say they believe that the new Shiite-dominated government has not

made sufficient efforts to create a genuine unity government. As a result, Sunni attitudes

appear to have hardened.

As the politics in Iraq have grown more polarized since the elections in December,

in which many Sunni Arabs voted, attacks have soared, including sectarian clashes that

have killed an average of more than 100 Iraqi civilians per day over the past two months.

In addition to bombs, attacks with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and small-

caliber weapons against American and Iraqi military forces have also increased,

according to American military officials. But the number of roadside bombs — or

improvised explosive devices as they are known by the military — is an especially

important indicator of enemy activity. Bomb attacks are the largest killer of American

troops. They also require a network: a bomb maker; financiers to pay for the effort; and

operatives to dig holes in the road, plant the explosives, watch for approaching American

and Iraqi forces and set off the blast when troops approach.

With the violence growing in Iraq, American intelligence agencies are working to

produce a National Intelligence Estimate about the security conditions there — the first

such formal governmentwide assessment about the situation in Iraq since the summer of

2004.

In late July, D.I.A. officials briefed several Senate committees about the insurgent

and sectarian violence. The presentation was based on a draft version of what became the

Aug. 3 study, and one recipient described it as “extremely negative.” That presentation

was followed by public testimony on Aug. 3 by Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top American

military commander in the Middle East, who told the Senate Armed Services Committee

that the sectarian violence was “probably as bad as I’ve seen it, in Baghdad in particular”

and said if it was not stopped, “it is possible that Iraq could move towards civil war.”

General Abizaid later emphasized that he was “optimistic” that the slide toward civil war

could be prevented.

Officials who have read or been briefed on the new D.I.A. analysis said its

assessments paralleled both aspects of General Abizaid’s testimony.

The newest accounts of the risks of civil war may already be altering the political

dynamic in Washington. After General Abizaid’s testimony, the chairman of the Armed

Services Committee, Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, said that if Iraq fell into civil

war, the committee might need to examine whether the authorization provided by

Congress for the use of American force in Iraq would still be valid. The comments by

Senator Warner, a senior Republican who is a staunch supporter of the president, have

reverberated loudly across Congress.

Bush administration officials now admit that Iraqi government’s original plan to rein

in the violence in Baghdad, announced in June, has failed. The Pentagon has decided to

rush more American troops into the capital, and the new military operation to restore

security there is expected to begin in earnest next month.

Yet some outside experts who have recently visited the White House said Bush

administration officials were beginning to plan for the possibility that Iraq’s

democratically elected government might not survive.

“Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering

alternatives other than democracy,” said one military affairs expert who received an Iraq

briefing at the White House last month and agreed to speak only on condition of

anonymity.

“Everybody in the administration is being quite circumspect,” the expert said, “but

you can sense their own concern that this is drifting away from democracy.”

U.S. Identifies Successor to ZarqawiBy DEXTER FILKINS

June 15, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 15 — American military officers today put a face to the new

chief of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, releasing a photograph and details of the man they

believe succeeded Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, who was killed in an airstrike last week.

In a briefing here, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, the American military

spokesman, identified Mr. Zarqawi’s probable successor as Abu Ayyub al-Masri, an

Egyptian man who he said trained in one of the terrorist camps in Afghanistan run by Al

Qaeda in 1999 or 2000.

Mr. Masri, he said, was a “founding member” of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and had

become one of Mr. Zarqawi’s “closest remaining associates.” The group is believed

responsible for dozens of suicide and car bombings across Iraq that have been killed

thousands of Iraqi civilians.

General Caldwell said that Mr. Al Masri, which means “the Egyptian” in Arabic, is

the same person as Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, who Al Qaeda in Iraq declared in an Internet

posting on Monday was their new leader. American officers believe that both names are

probably pseudonyms; shortly after Mr. Zarqawi was killed, they predicted that Mr.

Masri was the likely successor.

“We think they are one and the same at this point,” General Caldwell said of the two

names.

Also Thursday, American officers provided a detailed timeline of events leading up

to the June 7 air strike that killed Mr. Zarqawi and five others, including another senior

Al Qaeda leader, a girl and two women, in a safe house 35 miles northeast of Baghdad.

While American officers declined to discuss specific details, elements in the

timeline suggested that a mole working inside Al Qaeda tipped off the Americans about

Mr. Zarqawi’s location and left the scene just before it was hit with two bombs.

In the photograph released Thursday, the man the Americans claim to be Mr. Masri

is wearing traditional Arabic headwear and sporting a wispy mustache and goatee. He is

staring directly into the camera, as if he is sitting for a passport photograph. He seems a

young man and he is not smiling.

The Americans said Mr. Masri joined the Egyptian militant group, Islamic Jihad, in

1982 and went to Afghanistan to train in the Al Farouq militant camp, where he received

explosive training, in 1999 or 2000.

If that timeline is accurate, it seems likely that Mr. Masri is now at least in his early

40s and that the photograph given out by the Americans is several years old.

Islamic Jihad was headed by Ayman Al-Zawahiri, a middle-class Egyptian

physician who later became the deputy to Osama bin Laden in Al Qaeda. The Al Farouq

camp, set up by Mr. Zawahiri and Mr. bin Laden, was one of the main Al Qaeda training

camps before it was destroyed by the Americans during the war in Afghanistan in late

2001.

General Caldwell said he was not sure whether Mr. Masri had developed a

relationship with either Mr. Zawahiri or Mr. bin Laden.

But, General Caldwell said, it was in Afghanistan that Mr. Masri developed a

relationship with Mr. Zarqawi.

Mr. Masri, he said, came to Iraq in early 2003 and set up the original Al Qaeda cell

in Baghdad. More recently, General Caldwell said, Mr. Masri was one of Al Qaeda in

Mesopotamia’s senior operational commanders, supplying Al Qaeda commanders with

suicide bombers and car bombs. He was responsible for all operations in southern Iraq,

General Caldwell said.

Mr. Masri is believed to be currently operating in Baghdad, General Caldwell said.

The link between Mr. Masri and Mr. Zawahiri is interesting, in part because of a

letter that American officials captured last year which they believe was written by Mr.

Zawahiri to Mr. Zarqawi. In the letter, Mr. Zawahiri, an Egyptian physician believed to

be hiding along the mountainous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, questioned

Mr. Zarqawi’s emphasis on killing Shiite civilians, suggesting that such killings alienated

Iraqis and detracted from the larger goal of driving out the Americans.

That raises the possibility that the leadership of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia maybe be

contemplating a change in tactics.

Earlier this week, a man identifying himself as Abu Hamza al-Muhajir — who the

Americans believe is Mr. Masri — issued a statement through a jihadist Internet site

pledging to continue attacks against “crusaders and Shiites.”

Still, American officials said they believe that the killing of Mr. Zarqawi had

severely disrupted Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia’s leadership and that a struggle for control

of the organization may be unfolding.

In his remarks, General Caldwell suggested that others in the organization might be

challenging Mr. Masri for control, including a man presumed to be an Iraqi, Abdullah Al

Rashid Al Iraqi.

“As we continue looking at the Al Qaeda network, there is no question that it is in

some kind of disarray and disorganization at this point,” General Caldwell said.

Despite the apparent choice of Mr. Masri to lead Al Qaeda, Iraq’s national security

adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, said in an interview with CNN that others were vying for

power with the organization.

“Al Qaeda now is suffering really seriously of this power vacuum,” Mr. Rubaie said.

“And we believe that his lieutenants are going to start jockeying for power to fill in his

shoes.”

“We believe that this organization will split and will divide into several

organizations,” Mr. Rubaie said.

Also today, the Iraqi government released what it said was a document drawn up by

Al Qaeda that purported to show the difficult state of the insurgency in Iraq, and which

called for efforts to sabotage America’s relationship with Iraq’s Shiites — and start a war

between America and Iran — to salvage it.

The document said the insurgency was being weakened by the American military’s

program to train Iraqi security forces, which, it said, were making headway in arresting

militants, seizing weapons and disrupting the insurgents’ financial networks.

“Time is now beginning to be of service to the American forces and harmful to the

resistance,” the document said.

“We mean specifically attempting to escalate the tension between America and Iran,

and American and the Shiites in Iraq,” the document said.

There was no way to verify the authenticity of the document. General Caldwell said

the document was discovered in a raid carried out before the air strike that killed Mr.

Zarqawi.

Sabrina Tavernise contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article.

Qaeda Figure in Iraq Is Killed, U.S.Military SaysBy DAMIEN CAVE and JON ELSEN

May 3, 2007

BAGHDAD, May 3 — American troops killed a senior propagandist for Al Qaeda in Iraq

who was involved in kidnapping westerners, including Jill Carroll, the American

journalist, American military officials said today. But they denied claims from Iraqi

officials that the body was identified as the leader of the group.

On a day that mortar or rocket fire continued to rain down on the Green Zone in

Baghdad, the American spokesman, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, identified the Al

Qaeda official who was killed as Muharib Abdul Latif al-Jubouri, a “senior information

minister” from Saladin province. He was killed in a firefight Tuesday during a raid north

of Baghdad, General Caldwell said, and photos and DNA tests confirmed his identify.

But that death appears to have spawned confusion about other Al Qaeda figures

being killed, which suggested a temporary breakdown in either communication or

cooperation between American and Iraqi security officials.

Iraq’s interior ministry claimed earlier this week that an even more senior Al Qaeda

figure, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the group’s leader, had been killed in roughly the same area.

Today, Abdul Kareem Khalaf, the spokesman for the ministry, told an Iraqi

television channel that, in fact, Mr. Jubouri was dead. He then went on to claim that Mr.

Jubouri was also Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the supposed leader of the Islamic State of Iraq,

an umbrella organization for several Sunni groups including Al Qaeda in Iraq. Mr.

Khalaf, the source of false claims about the capture of Mr. Masri in February, cited an

audio tape as evidence.

But General Caldwell said there may not be any Mr. Baghdadi.

“If that person even exists,” he said, the American military is not aware of anyone

fitting his supposed description whose body “is going through any kind of testing or

analysis at this point.”

The competing claims seemed to arise from repeated recoveries of the same body.

General Caldwell said that after Mr. Jubouri’s corpse was released to a tribesman on

Wednesday for burial, it was seized again at an Iraqi-run checkpoint in Baghdad.

“They didn’t know exactly who he was,” he said. “They recognized he was on some

kind of wanted list.”

He added: “That led to the ensuing report that they had in fact captured him,

although he had been killed.”

The Iraqis then brought the body back to the Americans, who identified it for a

second time.

General Caldwell said communication between Iraqi and American forces was being

reviewed, but that Iraqi troops should be praised for their efforts.

“They were alert, they were attentive,” he said. “They were paying attention.”

Mr. Jubouri was involved in the movement of foreign fighters and money into Iraq

from Syria, said General Caldwell, who described Mr. Jubouri’s death as “significant.”

The general also said Mr. Jubouri was involved in hiding and moving Jill Carroll; she was

held for two months before being released.

Detainees told American officials that Mr. Jubouri had personal custody of Mr. Fox,

an American, and was the last one seen holding him before Mr. Fox was killed, according

to General Caldwell. Mr. Fox, one of four men from the Chicago-based peace group

Christian Peacemaker Teams working in Iraq, was found shot to death in Baghdad on

March 10, 2006.

The two Germans were kidnapped in January 2006.

Mr. Jubouri was first captured by coalition forces in 2003 and then was released in

2004, after which he traveled to Syria, where he has family, General Caldwell said. He

described Mr. Jubouri as a close associate of Mr. Masri.

General Caldwell said that Mr. Jubouri was killed while resisting detention at 1:42

a.m. on Tuesday, during coalition military strikes against 29 targets over three days. He

said that in all, 95 militants were detained in the raids and 15 were killed.

The raid in which Mr. Jubouri was killed with four other people was conducted on

four buildings in a town north of Baghdad and four miles west of the Taji air base. Six

people were detained.

In April, American forces conducted 139 operations specifically aimed at Al Qaeda

in Iraq, killing 87 and detaining 465, General Caldwell said.

The United States Embassy, meanwhile, said that a rocket or mortar attack on the

Green Zone in central Baghdad on Wednesday killed four civilian contractors — two

from India, one from the Philippines and one from Nepal.

Today, the repeated boom of another attack rocked the fortified area for the fourth

night in a row. There were no reports of casualties.

Terrorist or Mythic Symbol: A Tale ofIraqi PoliticsBy CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

May 31, 2009

BAGHDAD — Abu Omar al-Baghdadi was captured again several weeks ago. By now

it’s old hat. Mr. Baghdadi is the leader of the most zealous group of jihadists fighting in

Iraq, and he has been reported captured and killed several times before. As many times,

he has also been declared not real.

Usually, whether a man is in custody is a fairly straightforward proposition: He is,

or he is not. But even casual Iraqologists would find the notion of a straightforward

proposition here amusingly naïve, especially in a case as politically loaded as this one.

Politics here plays out in endless equivocations and manipulations that turn even

hard facts — demographics, borders and crime statistics — into uncertainties. So the tale

of Abu Omar is worth keeping in mind as the jockeying intensifies for the all-important

national elections to be held next January.

Mr. Baghdadi has long been a symbolic figure, regardless of whether he exists.

For jihadists, he is the purist who fights under the banner of the Islamic State of

Iraq, the would-be caliph of a rising Islamic empire. For the authorities, he is the snake’s

head of the organization in Iraq most closely involved with Al Qaeda.

He has not appeared publicly, though, except by voice — in recordings of his florid

lectures condemning the West, Israel, Iran and insufficiently zealous Sunnis. This has

given him a mystique that has only made him more powerful in the eyes of jihadists, and

has spared him the kind of public relations embarrassments that befell his now-dead

forerunner, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. (Mr. Zarqawi first linked the jihad in Iraq with Al

Qaeda, but was caught on film wearing New Balance sneakers and having amateurish

difficulties with a machine gun.)

Mr. Baghdadi’s legendary reputation does raise the question as to whether he

actually exists. The Americans said in 2007 that he did not, that an actor had been playing

the role, and many Iraqis agree. Oddly, that did not change when the government

announced that they had nabbed him in late April. At the same time, his usefulness as a

symbol only grew, as different political factions projected onto the arrest their

preconceived notions about their rivals.

The truth of the matter, meanwhile, remained as obscure as ever.

Iraqi officials gleefully described the arrest as more significant than the capture of

Saddam Hussein. They identified the arrested man as Ahmed Abd Ahmed Khamis al-

Majmaie, and said he was the one known as Abu Omar al-Baghdadi.

At least some officials did. The minister of national security, in a newspaper

interview, gave a different name and biographical account of the man in custody. And

puzzled Iraqi police officials in a neighboring province said his picture did not match the

Abu Omar al-Baghdadi they had been tracking.

Then, in mid-May, the government released a videotape in which an unimposing

man with a closely shaved beard confessed to being Mr. Baghdadi and expressed regret

for hurting the Iraqi people. Even to those convinced that this was him, the statements

seemed off key, coming from a man who claimed to be the destined defender of the

Islamic faith.

In describing how the insurgency worked, the man also implicated targets that the

Shiite-led government already considered adversaries or at least competitors; they

included former regime loyalists, several Sunni countries in the region and the main

Sunni political party. For skeptics, it was all a little too convenient.

Sunni politicians even said they know who the man is: a bad guy involved in the

insurgency, but not somebody who has ever been looked upon as Abu Omar. They called

the episode a face-saving distraction by a government dealing with a spate of new attacks

and failures in combating widespread corruption, as well as another step in a campaign to

discredit and dismantle the Sunni political establishment.

The Americans here, for the most part, have played it safe.

“It’s not really what he calls himself,” Maj. Gen. David Perkins, the chief military

spokesman here, told reporters. “It is really, at the end of the day, what role did he play.”

That is still being determined, he added, and he was careful not to dismiss the

government’s claims out of hand. “We have nothing that would contradict the

intelligence they have so far,” he said.

The Islamic State itself, meanwhile, has released two recordings of a man who

claims to be the real Mr. Baghdadi and mocks the government reports that he is under

arrest. The voice is very similar to the one on earlier recordings.

Nibras Kazimi, a visiting scholar at the Hudson Institute who has been following the

case on his blog, Talisman Gate, says the Iraqi government has only bolstered the

jihadists’ morale by trumpeting the capture and mishandling the public relations.

The jihadists, he wrote in an e-mail message, “have a new sense of their importance

and, in their eyes, the government’s fumbling of this news reeks of weakness. “

Furthermore, Mr. Kazimi wrote, the Americans are dangerously misreading the

situation if they discount Mr. Baghdadi’s importance by thinking of him as a mere media

stunt or a tactical feint by the jihadists. Mr. Baghdadi’s significance, he wrote, is that “the

jihadists have been pledging allegiance to a state and a man they can’t see, and they have

willingly given up their lives for that.”

The case of Mr. Baghdadi is not the only example of how easy it is, here in Iraq, to

become disoriented by various versions of reality: the thicket of accusations, the wild

rumors, the often wildly divergent casualty figures reported after attacks. All of those can

divert attention from other evidence, tragic and irrefutable and available daily, that in the

streets of Baghdad, as Donald Rumsfeld once noted, real stuff does happen.

Meanwhile, there is a man in jail, whoever he is or claims to be. A few days ago, his

wife showed up, begging a prominent lawyer to free her husband. According to the

lawyer, she said she knows her husband well enough to know he is not the leader of the

jihadist insurgency. The lawyer has not yet agreed to take the case, since the facts are still

too unclear.

Top Qaeda Leaders in Iraq ReportedKilled in RaidBy TIM ARANGO

April 19, 2010

BAGHDAD — Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki announced Monday that two top

insurgent leaders had been killed, including a somewhat mythic figure who has operated

under the name Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. Mr. Baghdadi has been reported dead or detained

several times previously, and his very existence had been called into question a few years

ago by American military leaders.

After Mr. Maliki’s press conference, the American military released a statement

verifying that Mr. Baghdadi was killed in a joint raid between Iraqi and United States

forces in the dark hours of Sunday morning near Tikrit, near Saddam Hussein’s

hometown.

Also killed, according to Mr. Maliki and American officials, was Abu Ayyub al-

Masri, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, also known as Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a largely

Iraqi group that includes some foreign leadership.

Both men were found in a hole in the ground.

“The security forces surrounded the hole, and when they got them out they were

dead,” Mr. Maliki said at the news conference. Mr. Maliki said computers and letters

were found that included communication between the men and Osama bin Laden.

One United States soldier died during the operation in a helicopter crash, which

officials said was not caused by enemy fire.

“The death of these terrorists is potentially the most significant blow to Al Qaeda in

Iraq since the beginning of the insurgency,” said Gen. Ray Odierno, the top American

military commander in Iraq, in a statement. “The Government of Iraq intelligence

services and security forces supported by U.S. intelligence and special operations forces

have over the last several months continued to degrade A.Q.I. There is still work to do

but this is a significant step forward in ridding Iraq of terrorists.”

The American military said Mr. Masri had replaced the former leader of Al Qaeda

in Mesopotamia, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in 2006. The American military

described Mr. Masri as being “directly responsible for high profile bombings and attacks

against the people of Iraq.”

While violence is down dramatically in Iraq compared to the worst days of the

insurgency and sectarian violence in 2006 and 2007, the country still faces daily attacks

in the form of car bombs, improvised explosive devices and assassinations.

The Sunni insurgency, whose face was Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, deteriorated in

recent years after American forces persuaded groups of fighters to switch sides by paying

them cash and promising them jobs, a movement that became known as the Awakening.

Iraq Insurgency Group Says It BombedBaghdad HotelsBy NADA BAKRI

January 27, 2010

BAGHDAD — An insurgent group known as the Islamic State of Iraq claimed

responsibility Wednesday for this week’s bombings in Baghdad that wrecked three

landmark hotels catering to foreigners and warned of more strikes.

The coordinated bombings, occurring within minutes of one another on Monday,

ruined the Hamra Hotel, the Ishtar Sheraton and the Babylon Hotel, killing 41 people.

The attacks renewed fear of a stubborn insurgency that has demonstrated its ability in the

past six months to carry out spectacular attacks requiring sophisticated planning.

The hotels were all well fortified, surrounded by blast walls, and their entrances

were guarded by armed men. In at least one case, militants engaged in a shootout with the

guards to distract them as a suicide bomber drove past barricades.

The attacks followed three others — in August, October and December — that

concentrated on ministries, government offices, colleges and a bank, leaving hundreds

dead. The same group, affiliated with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown insurgent

group believed to be led by foreigners, claimed responsibility for those attacks.

“In the fourth seismic attack, the knights of Baghdad struck at the heart of this

wounded city, targeting another group of iniquitous dens,” said the statement, posted on

several militant Web sites. “There will be other targets soon, God willing.”

The group declared the targets legitimate because they housed what it called

“infidels, lawmakers, foreign intelligence agents and security companies, and poisonous

and hostile media outlets.”

The bombings have cast a pall across an already tense city, with many residents

saying they expect more attacks ahead of parliamentary elections on March 7.

“Unfortunately the security situation is still complicated,” Ayad al-Samarrai, the

speaker of Parliament, said Wednesday. “Terrorist organizations can still precisely plan

and carry out operations simultaneously and in coordinated fashion.”

At the bomb scenes and in everyday conversations, many Iraqis have cast blame on

the security forces for the attacks, baffled as to why hundreds of checkpoints across the

city have been unable to stop the insurgents. Hand-held devices said to detect explosives

and used at almost every checkpoint are believed to be useless. Britain, where the device

is manufactured, has banned the device’s export.

The government has ordered an investigation but says that security forces will not

stop using the devices until the results are announced.

At War: Iraqi Insurgent Group NamesNew LeadersBy ANTHONY SHADID

May 16, 2010

BAGHDAD — The Islamic State of Iraq, the insurgent group that serves as a front for al-

Qaeda in Iraq, announced Sunday that it had replaced two senior leaders killed in a raid

last month.

A statement, circulated on the Internet, was another indication that the group was

seeking to reconstitute itself after a series of defeats that American and Iraqi military

officials have described as a crucial setback for the group.

Officials say scores of its fighters have recently been killed or arrested and that the

network, long the most formidable and resilient militant group, is in disarray.

Unlike past statements that were often replete with florid language, Sunday’s

announcement was subdued. It said the group had named Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi al-

Husseini al-Qurashi as the new leader after consultations with the group’s leaders,

influential people and “opinion makers.”

The statement said his deputy would be Abu Abdallah al-Husseini al-Qurashi.

“We implore God to help them make the right decisions,” the statement continued.

The men’s names are almost certainly noms de guerre. Mohammed al-Alawi, a

spokesman for Iraq’s minister of national security affairs, Sharwan al-Waili, said he had

not yet seen the statement and had no immediate information on the two men.

The men replace Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, an Egyptian

known as Abu Ayyub al-Masri, who were killed in an American and Iraqi raid near

Tikrit. Al-Muhajir also served as the group’s military commander. In a statement Friday,

the group said that position would be filled by Al-Nasser Lideen Allah Abu Suleiman.

In that statement, Abu Suleiman vowed revenge for the killing of the group’s two

leaders. He warned of “a long gloomy night and dark days colored in blood” and urged

followers not to “become accustomed to having a loose hand on the trigger.”

Despite American and Iraqi contentions that the movement has been dealt a perhaps

crippling blow, insurgents have proven resilient enough to keep launching coordinated

and far-reaching attacks.

Last week, more than 100 people were killed and hundreds more were wounded in a

series of assaults that included ambushes of police and military checkpoints in Baghdad

and devastating bombings in three cities.

Church Attack Seen as Strike at Iraq’sCoreBy ANTHONY SHADID

November 1, 2010

BAGHDAD — Blood still smeared the walls of Our Lady of Salvation Church on

Monday. Scraps of flesh remained between the pews. It was the worst massacre of Iraqi

Christians since the war began here in 2003.

But for survivors, the tragedy went deeper than the toll of the human wreckage: A

fusillade of grenades, bullets and suicide vests had unraveled yet another thread of the

country’s once eclectic fabric.

“We’ve lost part of our soul now,” said Rudy Khalid, a 16-year-old Christian who

lived across the street. He shook his head. “Our destiny, no one knows what to say of it.”

The massacre, in which 58 people were killed by an affiliate of Al Qaeda, paled

before the worst spectacles of violence in Iraq. Since the American invasion, tens of

thousands have died here — Sunni and Shiite Muslims — and few of the deaths

generated the outrage expressed Monday.

Iraq was once a remarkable mélange of beliefs, customs and traditions; the killings

on Sunday drew another border in a nation defined more by war, occupation and

deprivation. Identities have hardened; diversity has faded. Nearly all of Iraq’s Jews left

long ago, many harassed by a xenophobic government. Iraq’s Christians have dwindled;

once numbering anywhere between 800,000 and 1.4 million, at least half are thought to

have emigrated since 2003, their leaders say.

“They came to kill Iraq, not Iraqis,” said Bassam Sami, who huddled in a room for

four hours before security forces managed to free him. “They came to kill the spirit of

Iraq. They came to kill the reason to live, every dream that you want to make true.”

Down the street was Mr. Khalid, as upset as he was anxious at a country that seems

to grasp at the mirage of normalcy, fleeting as it might be, only to turn away in disgust at

the resilience of violence.

“No one has any answers for us,” he said.

On the morning after security forces stormed the Syrian Catholic church, freeing

hostages but leaving far more dead and wounded behind, there were no answers. Not in

the statements of outrage from Iraqi leaders, themselves blamed for the dysfunction of the

Iraqi state. Not from Pope Benedict XVI, who condemned the “absurd and ferocious

violence.” Not from security officials, whose accounts contradicted one another’s and

prompted suggestions they might have inadvertently worsened the carnage.

Most of all, not from the survivors, one of whom said the gunmen who seized the

church on Sunday evening had only one task in mind.

“They came to kill, kill, kill,” Mr. Sami said.

Not even the police who stood guard at the church, its doors barricaded with barbed

wire and its walls lined with roses, orange trees and a plant Iraqis call “the ears of an

elephant,” knew quite what to say. One discouraged anyone from entering the shattered

doors, under a portico that celebrated the glory of God “on the land of peace.”

“Blood, flesh and bones,” he described the scene. “You can’t bear the smell.”

Knots of survivors, as well as their friends and relatives, stood in the street amid

bullet casings and bandage wrappers, some of them crying. The Rev. Meyassr al-

Qasboutros, a priest, was among them. His cousin, Wassim Sabih, was one of the two

priests killed. Survivors said Father Sabih was pushed to the ground as he grasped a

crucifix and pleaded with the gunmen to spare the worshipers.

He was then killed, his body riddled with bullets.

“We must die here,” Father Qasboutros said defiantly. “We can’t leave this

country.”

Some survivors echoed his sentiments.

“If we didn’t love this country, we wouldn’t have stayed here,” said Radi Climis, an

18-year-old who wore a floppy bandage on his forehead, where he was wounded by

shrapnel from a grenade thrown by the gunmen.

Christians Are Casualties of 10 BaghdadAttacksBy JOHN LELAND and OMAR AL-JAWOSHY

December 30, 2010

BAGHDAD — One week after an Islamic extremist group vowed to kill Christians in

Iraq, a cluster of 10 bomb attacks rattled Baghdad on Thursday night and sent additional

tremors of fear through the country’s already shaken Christian minority.

Two people were killed and 20 wounded, all of them Christians, according to the

Ministry of the Interior. The bombs were placed near the homes of at least 14 Christian

families around the city, and four bombs were defused before they could explode.

Christians have been flooding out of the country since the siege of Our Lady of

Salvation, a Syrian Catholic church, in October that left nearly 60 people dead, including

two priests. Many Muslim clerics and worshipers offered support to Christians after the

siege. The Islamic State of Iraq, an extremist group affiliated with Al Qaeda, claimed

responsibility for the attack, and on Dec. 22 it promised more on its Web site.

For some Christians here, the latest attacks represented the last straw.

Even before the coordinated assault, Baghdad had come to resemble a battle zone

for Christians, who have come increasingly under attack since the American-led invasion

in 2003. Before Christmas, several churches fortified their buildings with blast walls and

razor wire, and many canceled or curtailed Christmas observances. The day passed

without an attack.

At the Sacred Church of Jesus, a Chaldean Catholic church, the Rev. Meyassr al-

Qaspotros said Thursday night that he would urge followers not to flee after the latest

attacks.

“I just wonder, when does this ignorance end?” he said in an interview. “When does

this bigotry end? When is there an end to weak-minded people not treating or thinking of

other people as a human?”

He added, “I want to tell the Christians in Iraq not to leave their country despite the

dangers. Let’s die here — better than living oppressed in another country. It’s our

responsibility to sacrifice for this country in order to take it out of the deep hole and to

live peacefully again among the people of Iraq as we used to live before, and even

better.”

Since October, at least 1,000 Christian families have left Iraq for the relative safety

of semiautonomous Kurdistan in the north, and others have sought refuge in Syria,

Turkey and Jordan, according to the United Nations. By most estimates, more than half of

Iraq’s Christians have left the country since 2003. Though the exact size of the Christian

population is unclear, by some estimates it has fallen to about 500,000 from a high of as

many as 1.4 million before the American-led invasion.

The bombings occurred within a span of a half-hour between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. on

Thursday, according to the Ministry of Information. The first bomb exploded near a

house in the Jadeeda neighborhood, killing two people and wounding three. The other

explosions were less lethal, but all resulted in injuries.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks.

During the siege in October, the Islamic State of Iraq said on its Web site that the

assault was in response to actions by the Coptic Church in Cairo, where the wives of two

priests had tried to convert to Islam to escape their marriages; the militant group asserted

that the church was holding the women against their will and forcing them to convert

back to Christianity. It called for their release and threatened more violence if its demand

was not met.

In Cairo on Wednesday, the Coptic pope said in a sermon that the threats against the

church were both a blessing and a curse, because they had brought Egyptian Christians

and Muslims together, according to the Arabic news agency Al Arabiya.

In response to the coordinated bombings in Baghdad, Younadim Yousif, a Christian

member of Iraq’s Parliament, blamed the security forces for failing to prevent the attacks,

especially after the extremist group had announced its intentions. “The government bears

full responsibility for these attacks, because they already promised to secure the

Christians,” Mr. Yousif said.

“I think there is complicity by security forces helping insurgents to implement their

attacks, because it is unbelievable that they could plant more than 10 I.E.D.’s in different

areas targeting Christians,” he said, referring to improvised explosive devices.

Maj. Hashim Ahmed, a police investigator, said the broad scale of the attacks

surprised security forces. “The failure of our commanders and the government was clear,

because they didn’t take serious measures,” he said.

An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting.

2 Car Bombs Target Shiites in BaghdadBy DURAID ADNAN and TIM ARANGO

June 16, 2012

BAGHDAD — A security clampdown aimed at protecting Shiite pilgrims failed to

prevent a new round of carnage on Saturday as two car bombings in Baghdad killed more

than 30 at the end of a weeklong celebration.

Both attacks occurred in the early afternoon, as pilgrims, after a day of lively

religious reverence, including chest-beating and carrying a symbolic coffin, filled the

streets.

The attacks represented an embarrassment to the army and police, and their top

commander, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and raised questions about the ability

of Iraq’s security forces to protect the population. Roads had been closed and both the

army and police had been deployed to protect the thousands of pilgrims who came to the

capital to commemorate the martyrdom of an eighth-century imam.

In one attack, a parked car exploded in the Kadhimiya area of Baghdad, not far from

the shrine that is the focal point of the festival of Imam Musa Kadhim, a descendant of

the Prophet Muhammad. At least 18 people were killed and 35 were wounded, many of

them women and children, an Interior Ministry official said.

In the other attack, a suicide bomber detonated his car on a highway leading

northwest from Baghdad, killing 14 and wounding at least 32, according to a security

official.

Hours later, at the scene of the suicide attack — in a parking lot where pilgrims had

gathered for rides back to other provinces — blood and human remains could be seen

amid more than a dozen burned vehicles. A leather bag of toys, covered with blood, lay

next to a destroyed minibus.

“What crime did I do?” asked Jawad Ali, 34, who had come to Baghdad from

Karbala and had a bloodied bandage on his head. “The Sunnis did this, I know it. I don’t

think we will be silent anymore. There will be a reaction from us. Me walking in this heat

in the street to see my imam is not a crime. I love my imam and will never stop.”

At a nearby hospital, a man from Najaf stood crying for his dead brother, screaming,

“Why did you leave me alone? Why?”

The attacks came three days after dozens of explosions, mostly targeting Shiite sites,

killed at least 90 people and wounded more than 300, in the deadliest day since the

American military withdrawal in December.

Khalad Fadhel, a military analyst, said that security officials had placed too much

emphasis on deploying large numbers of soldiers and police officers and not enough on

intelligence work to detect terrorist plots.

“It shouldn’t be a military parade,” Mr. Fadhel said. “We need a security strategy

that addresses these shortcomings. I think that what we’ve really missed after the

withdrawal of the United States is intelligence information. They were good providers of

this kind of information about possible attacks.”

On Friday, the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella group of Sunni insurgents that

includes Al Qaeda in Iraq, claimed responsibility for the wave of violence last week,

calling it the “blessed Wednesday invasion.”

No group immediately took responsibility for Saturday’s blasts.

Yasir Ghazi contributed reporting.

U.S. Places Militant Syrian Rebel Groupon List of Terrorist OrganizationsBy MICHAEL R. GORDON and ANNE BARNARD

December 10, 2012

WASHINGTON — The United States has formally designated the Al Nusra Front, the

militant Syrian rebel group, as a foreign terrorist organization.

The move, which was expected, is aimed at building Western support for the

rebellion against the government of President Bashar al-Assad by quelling fears that

money and arms meant for the rebels would flow to a jihadi group.

The designation was disclosed on Monday in the Federal Register, just before an

important diplomatic meeting Wednesday in Morocco on the political transition if Mr.

Assad is driven from power. The notice in the register lists the Al Nusra front as one of

the “aliases” of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

In practical terms, the designation makes it illegal for Americans to have financial

dealings with the group. It is intended to prompt similar sanctions by other nations, and to

address concerns about a group that could further destabilize Syria and harm Western

interests.

France, Britain, Turkey and the Gulf Cooperation Council have formally recognized

the Syrian opposition. European Union foreign ministers met Monday with the head of

the Syrian opposition coalition, Ahmed Mouaz al-Khatib, in Brussels.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said that he hoped the European Union

would soon grant the group full recognition.

The Al Nusra Front comprises only a small minority of the Syrian rebels, but it

includes some of the rebellion’s most battle-hardened and effective fighters.

“Extremist groups like Jabhat al-Nusra are a problem, an obstacle to finding the

political solution that Syria’s going to need,” the American ambassador to Syria, Robert

Ford, said last week in an appearance hosted by the Foundation for the Defense of

Democracies, a nongovernmental group.

But a growing number of anti-government groups — including fighters in the loose-

knit Free Syrian Army that the United States is trying to bolster — have signed petitions

or posted statements online in recent days expressing support for the Nusra Front. In

keeping with a tradition throughout the uprising of choosing themes for Friday protests,

the biggest day for demonstrations because it coincides with Friday Prayer, many called

for this Friday’s title to be “No to American intervention — we are all Jabhat al-Nusra.”

Many Syrian fighters consider the Nusra Front a key ally because of its fighters’

bravery and reliable supply of money and arms. It has never come under the banner of the

Free Syrian Army, shunning the Western aid and input that other groups have sought, but

it coordinates closely with many who do.

Adding to the complication is that some groups in the Free Syrian Army have

similar ideologies, follow the strict Salafist interpretation of Islam, and count among them

fighters who joined the insurgency in Iraq — though they are not known to share the

Nusra Front’s direct organizational connections to Al Qaeda in Iraq.

The Nusra Front celebrated another apparent battlefield achievement on Monday,

declaring it had captured part of a large base outside the commercial hub of Aleppo.

Activist groups and video posted online said that it had fought alongside other Islamic

battalions including the Mujahedeen Shura Council and the Muhajireen Group.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based group that tracks events

in Syria through a network of activists in the country, said that the rebels had taken

control of the command center of the sprawling base and that many soldiers had fled.

Videos showed gunmen taking possession of tanks and anti-aircraft weapons.

The decision to designate the group, the register noted, was made by Secretary of

State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Nov. 20, in consultation with Attorney General Eric H.

Holder Jr., and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner.

The State Department appeared to delay the publication of the decision to

synchronize it with the expected announcement in Morocco that the United States will

formally recognize the Syrian opposition. The United States closed its embassy in

Damascus in February because of escalating violence in the capital.

Because Mrs. Clinton is not feeling well, she will not travel to North Africa and the

Middle East this week as planned. Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns will lead

the United States delegation at the Morocco meeting, an aide to Mrs. Clinton said

Monday.

Michael R. Gordon reported from Washington and Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon.

Qaeda Group in Iraq Says It KilledSyrian SoldiersBy HANIA MOURTADA and RICK GLADSTONE

March 11, 2013

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A Sunni militant jihadist group in Iraq claimed responsibility on

Monday for killing dozens of Syrian soldiers who had sought temporary safety on the

Iraqi side of the border last week, boasting about the massacre in an Internet posting that

used demeaning references to Shiites and President Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect.

The message from the group, the Islamic State of Iraq, which is affiliated with Al

Qaeda, reflected the hardened sectarian animus spreading from the Syrian conflict, in

which insurgents from the Sunni majority are battling to topple Mr. Assad and his

Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shiite Islam. The conflict, now two years old, has

increasingly become a proxy for a Sunni versus Shiite struggle in the Middle East.

The group’s claim of responsibility for the massacre, one of the worst episodes of

cross-border violence in the conflict so far, coincided with news of a religious decree

from Syria’s grand mufti, Sheik Ahmad Badr Eddin Hassoun, who is Sunni but is closely

linked to Mr. Assad’s government. In the decree, Sheik Hassoun exhorted “all mothers

and fathers in the homeland” to enlist their children in the Syrian Army to vanquish what

he called a conspiracy of foreign enemies, including traitorous Arabs, Zionists and

Westerners.

The decree is notable because it suggests that Mr. Assad’s armed forces are in need

of more recruits and may begin to strictly enforce compulsory service laws for the first

time since the conflict began.

It also appeared to be a call to jihad — a marked departure for Mr. Assad, who has

always sought to portray himself as secular and tolerant. He has often denounced the

Sunni extremist calls to jihad against him propagated by some elements of the

insurgency.

Sheik Hassoun issued the decree in a statement by the Dar al-Ifta Council, the

highest official Muslim body in Syria linked to the government. It was read on Syrian

television news on Sunday evening, sprinkled with some of the same fevered jihadist

language used by Sunni insurgents to recruit more fighters. Sheik Hassoun repeated the

same ideas in interviews on Syrian television and the official SANA news agency.

“Today we are fighting on several fronts,” said Sheik Hassoun, whose own son was

ambushed and killed by Syrian insurgents in October 2011. “Against our cousins who

have betrayed us and some sons of this nation who have been brainwashed and whose

identities have been wiped and who are sitting with the French, British, Americans,

asking them for weapons to destroy and dismantle Syria and to tear the Muslim and Arab

world apart.”

Apparently referring to the Sunni Arab nations supporting the insurgents, notably

Saudi Arabia and Qatar, he said that “targeting Syria, the land of divine messages, is

basically targeting the Arab and Islamic nation.”

Syrian social media traffic surged in reaction to Sheik Hassoun’s decree, especially

from young men in Syria who expressed concern they would now be seized at

checkpoints and made to enlist. One antigovernment group posted an altered picture on

Facebook of a Syrian television news anchorwoman on a pro-government channel

wearing a hijab with a caption joking that it was her “new garment after the mufti’s call

for jihad.”

In a posting on jihadist forums about the March 4 massacre, the Islamic State of Iraq

described how its fighters had ambushed a convoy of Syrian soldiers in Iraq’s Anbar

Province who were traveling under Iraqi military escort back to the Syrian border. The

Syrian soldiers had taken shelter in Iraq a day earlier from an insurgent attack on a

different frontier post, on the border with Iraq’s Nineveh Province.

The ambush area, the posting said, “became a graveyard in which the blood of the

filthy ones from the Rafidah and the Nusaryis is mixed.” Rafidah is a derogatory term for

Shiites, and Nusaryi is a derogatory reference to Alawites.

According to a transcript of the posting by the SITE Intelligence Group, a service in

Bethesda, Md., that monitors jihadist Internet traffic, the Islamic State of Iraq’s fighters

detonated bombs that hit the bus convoy, then opened fire on the occupants with light and

medium weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. At least 42 Syrian soldiers and officials

and as many as 14 Iraqis were killed.

The sectarian theme of the conflict was also underscored in an updated report on

Syria released on Monday by a United Nations Human Rights Council panel in Geneva,

which said that mass killings, some of them sectarian in nature, had been committed by

local community “Popular Committees” acting as auxiliary government forces.

“The war displays all the signs of a destructive stalemate,” Paulo Pinheiro, a

Brazilian rights investigator who has been leading the Syria panel of inquiry, told the

Human Rights Council in the update. “Neither party seems able to prevail over the other

militarily. The result has been an escalation in the use of force in the fallacious belief that

victory is within reach.”

As a result, the areas in which civilians could find refuge from violent conflict had

shrunk in the past two months, the panel’s report said.

Mr. Pinheiro said the panel was investigating about 20 massacres, some of them

apparently committed by the insurgent side.

Hania Mourtada reported from Beirut, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Tim Arango

and Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Istanbul, and Nick Cumming-Bruce from

Geneva.

Al Qaeda Taking Deadly New Role inSyria’s ConflictBy ROD NORDLAND

July 24, 2012

CAIRO — It is the sort of image that has become a staple of the Syrian revolution, a

video of masked men calling themselves the Free Syrian Army and brandishing AK-47s

— with one unsettling difference. In the background hang two flags of Al Qaeda, white

Arabic writing on a black field.

“We are now forming suicide cells to make jihad in the name of God,” said a

speaker in the video using the classical Arabic favored by Al Qaeda.

The video, posted on YouTube, is one more bit of evidence that Al Qaeda and other

Islamic extremists are doing their best to hijack the Syrian revolution, with a growing

although still limited success that has American intelligence officials publicly concerned,

and Iraqi officials next door openly alarmed.

While leaders of the Syrian political and military opposition continue to deny any

role for the extremists, Al Qaeda has helped to change the nature of the conflict, injecting

the weapon it perfected in Iraq — suicide bombings — into the battle against President

Bashar al-Assad with growing frequency.

The evidence is mounting that Syria has become a magnet for Sunni extremists,

including those operating under the banner of Al Qaeda. An important border crossing

with Turkey that fell into Syrian rebels’ hands last week, Bab al-Hawa, has quickly

become a jihadist congregating point.

The presence of jihadists in Syria has accelerated in recent days in part because of a

convergence with the sectarian tensions across the country’s long border in Iraq. Al

Qaeda, through an audio statement, has just made an undisguised bid to link its

insurgency in Iraq with the revolution in Syria, depicting both as sectarian conflicts —

Sunnis versus Shiites.

Iraqi officials said the extremists operating in Syria are in many cases the very same

militants striking across their country. “We are 100 percent sure from security

coordination with Syrian authorities that the wanted names that we have are the same

wanted names that the Syrian authorities have, especially within the last three months,”

Izzat al-Shahbandar — a close aide to the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki —

said in an interview on Tuesday. “Al Qaeda that is operating in Iraq is the same as that

which is operating in Syria,” he said.

One Qaeda operative, a 56-year-old known as Abu Thuha who lives in the Hawija

district near Kirkuk in Iraq, spoke to an Iraqi reporter for The New York Times on

Tuesday. “We have experience now fighting the Americans, and more experience now

with the Syrian revolution,” he said. “Our big hope is to form a Syrian-Iraqi Islamic state

for all Muslims, and then announce our war against Iran and Israel, and free Palestine.”

Although he is a low-level operative, his grandiose plans have been echoed by Al

Nusra Front for the People of the Levant, which military and intelligence analysts say is

the major Qaeda affiliate operating in Syria, with two other Qaeda-linked groups also

claiming to be active there, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades and Al Baraa ibn Malik

Martyrdom Brigade.

Since the start of the uprising, the Syrian government has sought to depict the

opposition as dominated by Al Qaeda and jihadist allies, something the opposition has

denied and independent observers said just was not true at the time. The uprising began as

a peaceful protest movement and slowly turned into an armed battle in response to the

government’s use of overwhelming lethal force.

Syrian state media routinely described every explosion as a suicide bombing — as

they did with a bombing on July 18 that killed at least four high-ranking government

officials.

Over time, though, Syria did become a draw for jihadists as the battle evolved into a

sectarian war between a Sunni-dominated opposition and government and security forces

dominated by the Alawite sect. Beginning in December, analysts began seeing what many

thought really were suicide bombings.

Since then, there have been at least 35 car bombings and 10 confirmed suicide

bombings, 4 of which have been claimed by Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front, according to data

compiled by the Institute for the Study of War.

In some cases, such as on June 1, when a bomb struck at government security

offices in Idlib, or on April 27, when a suicide bombing killed 11 people in Damascus, Al

Nusra claimed credit for the attacks in postings on a jihadist Web site, according to the

SITE monitoring group. Al Nusra also claimed responsibility for a June 30 attack on Al

Ikhbariya TV, a pro-government station, which it said “was glorifying the tyrant day and

night.” Seven media workers were killed, to international condemnation. Syrian

opposition spokesmen denied any role.

In February, the United States’ director of national intelligence, James Clapper, told

a Congressional hearing that there were “all the earmarks of an Al Qaeda-like attack” in a

series of bombings against security and intelligence targets in Damascus. He and other

intelligence community witnesses attributed that to the spread into Syria of the Iraqi

branch of Al Qaeda.

Shortly before Mr. Clapper’s testimony, Ayman al-Zawahri, the apparent leader of

Al Qaeda since the killing of Osama bin Laden, released an audio recording in which he

praised the Syrian revolutionaries lavishly, calling them “the lions of the Levant,” a

theme that has since been taken up repeatedly in public pronouncements by the group.

Iraq’s Branch of Al Qaeda Merges WithSyria JihadistsBy HANIA MOURTADA and RICK GLADSTONE

April 9, 2013

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Iraq’s branch of Al Qaeda said Tuesday that it had merged with the

Nusra Front, a group of jihadists fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, in

a marriage that appeared to strengthen the role of Islamic militants in the Syrian

insurgency and further complicate Western assistance efforts.

The United States has already blacklisted the Nusra Front over evidence of its links

with the Islamic State of Iraq, the Qaeda branch. But the news of the merger, made by the

branch’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in an audio statement posted on jihadist Web

sites, was the first time he had announced that they were a single organization.

“The time has come for us to announce to the people of the Levant and to the whole

world that Al Nusra Front is merely an extension of the Islamic State of Iraq and a part of

it,” Mr. Baghdadi said. He also said the combined group would be called the Islamic State

in Iraq and the Levant and would dedicate half its budget to the Syrian insurgency.

In a warning to other Syrian fighters who want Mr. Assad to go but do not share Mr.

Baghdadi’s views, he said, “Don’t make democracy a price for those thousands among

you who have been killed.”

The warning was quickly rejected by the Free Syrian Army, the rebels’ main

fighting organization, which has sought to distance itself from the jihadist groups. “No

one has the right to impose any form of state on Syrians,” said Louay Mekdad, a

spokesman for the Free Syrian Army. “Syrians will go to the polls to choose their leaders

and form their own state.”

Mr. Baghdadi’s announcement came as a backlash appeared to be spreading in Syria

over the indiscriminate civilian killings believed to be carried out by jihadist groups,

including the Nusra Front, aimed at further weakening Mr. Assad’s power in the two-

year-old conflict. These groups have fearsome fighters but do not take orders from the

Free Syrian Army, which has criticized attacks on civilians including a recent spree of

deadly car bombings.

The jihadist merger also comes as Secretary of State John Kerry hinted during a trip

to the Middle East and Europe that the United States was preparing to step up its

assistance to the Syrian rebel cause.

While the United States and other Western nations have backed the Free Syrian

Army and contributed nonlethal aid to its combatants, American officials have been

reluctant to supply weapons, particularly because of concerns that they could fall into the

hands of the Nusra Front or affiliates loyal to Al Qaeda. Differences in the degree of

Western commitment to the insurgency have been a source of frustration to the Syrian

political opposition.

The opposition movement also has struggled with its own divisions over rebel

behavior. On Tuesday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an anti-Assad group

based in Britain, accused a rogue insurgent battalion operating in Aleppo of arresting,

torturing and extorting dozens of residents, mostly between the ages of 18 and 20.

“The Syrian Observatory demands that this battalion stop engaging in these

practices immediately, as such behavior does not represent the values of the revolution,”

said the group, whose information network inside Syria has emerged as a major source of

insurgency news. “On the contrary, they are an extension of the oppressive and brutal

methods practiced by the Syrian security apparatus.”

In Geneva, the United Nations refugee agency said Tuesday that the pace at which

families are fleeing the destruction in Syria threatens to double or even triple the number

of total refugees seeking shelter in neighboring countries by the end of the year. The

agency also renewed an urgent appeal for money to deal with the crisis.

“The numbers look horrendous,” Panos Moumtzis, the refugee agency’s regional

coordinator for Syrian refugees, told reporters.

A year ago, the number of Syrian refugees stood at 30,000, and the figure now

exceeds 1.3 million, he said. With 200,000 people fleeing across Syria’s borders every

month and no political solution in sight, humanitarian agencies fear that they will be

trying to support up to three million refugees by the end of the year, Mr. Moumtzis said.

Hania Mourtada reported from Beirut, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Nick

Cumming-Bruce contributed reporting from Geneva.

Syrian Rebels Break With Group OverQaeda Wing AllianceBy HANIA MOURTADA and RICK GLADSTONE

April 12, 2013

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A leading coalition of Syrian Islamist insurgents broke with a more

radical group on Friday, sharply criticizing its announced alliance with Al Qaeda’s Iraq

branch as a moral and political mistake that would benefit only their common enemy,

President Bashar al-Assad.

“The relentless pursuit of power should not be one of our goals,” said a statement by

the coalition, the Syrian Islamic Liberation Front, referring to the alliance between

Syria’s Nusra Front and the Qaeda branch. “This is not the right time to declare states, or

to unify a state with another state.”

Expressing “surprise and dismay” at the development, the coalition statement said,

“We don’t need imported charters or a new understanding of the nation’s religion.” And

in a further criticism of Nusra’s loyalty to outsiders, the statement said, “We won’t be

doing our population, and our nation, any service if we pledge our allegiance to those

who don’t know a thing about our reality.”

The criticisms were the most strident in a series of negative reactions to the Nusra-

Al Qaeda combination by other members of Syria’s armed opposition. Such a

combination could further complicate the two-year-old civil war in Syria by

strengthening the radical jihadist component of the insurgency, undermining efforts by

other rebels to obtain weapons from Western powers.

Mr. Assad has long contended that his enemies are foreign-backed terrorists

affiliated with Sunni extremist groups like Al Qaeda. The news that Al Qaeda and Nusra

were joining together not only appeared to partly validate his claims but reflected the

divergent paths of the insurgency against him.

Nusra members have been at the forefront of the insurgency’s battlefield triumphs in

recent months, admired for bravery in fighting Mr. Assad’s military. But moderate

compatriots consider them worrisome because of the group’s intolerant and extremist

views, including a disregard for civilian casualties and its call for a strict Islamist

religious state to take over in Syria. Some Syrian rebels are skeptical of Nusra’s ultimate

motives and allegiances because most of the leaders of its units are not even Syrians.

Some are Jordanians and Iraqis.

“Look, I respect their prowess and their struggle,” said Abu al-Hasan, an activist in

Marea, an Aleppo suburb, reached via Skype. “I respect their ideology, even if I strongly

disagree with it, on one condition! They must remain one faction among many other

factions of the revolution and one component of Syrian society which has many other

components.”

The leader of Iraq’s Qaeda branch, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, announced the

combination of the two groups on Tuesday in an Internet posting, characterizing it as a

merger, saying that it would be known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and

that half of its budget would be committed to toppling Mr. Assad.

The Nusra Front leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, distanced himself somewhat

from Mr. Baghdadi’s announcement, saying that he had not been informed in advance

and that Nusra would keep its own name. But Mr. Jawlani confirmed that they were

working together and pledged fealty to Al Qaeda’s top leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, the

former second-in-command to Osama bin Laden.

Mr. Assad appears to have lost no time in exploiting the news for his own political

advantage.

The Syrian delegation to the United Nations requested that the Security Council,

which has long been paralyzed over how to address the conflict, pursue sanctions against

the Nusra Front as a terrorist group. French diplomats said Friday that discussions were

under way in a Security Council committee to explore that possibility.

The United States, which supports the effort to topple Mr. Assad, already considered

the Nusra Front a terrorist group, in effect agreeing with him on that point. The Obama

administration has resisted requests to supply weapons to the array of loosely affiliated

anti-Assad forces, partly out of concern that Nusra fighters would receive them.

Worried about the political implications on their requests for Western aid, other

Syrian opposition figures began criticizing the Al Qaeda-Nusra combination immediately

after it was announced, including Moaz al-Khatib, the leader of the National Coalition of

Syrian Opposition and Revolutionary Forces, the main political group.

“The bottom line: the ideology of Al Qaeda doesn’t suit us, and the revolutionaries

in Syria must take a clear stance on this matter,” Sheik Moaz wrote on his Facebook

page.

Louay Mekdad, a spokesman for the Free Syrian Army, the umbrella group of

armed fighters inside Syria, was less emphatic in his criticism, possibly reflecting its

respect for Nusra’s combat skills. While he asserted that “no one has the right to impose

any form of state on Syrians,” he acknowledged that there had been “de facto

cooperation” with Nusra fighters on the ground.

Other rebel subsidiaries of the Free Syrian Army distanced themselves from Nusra

while respecting their common goals. Col. Khaled al-Hbous, commander of the group’s

Damascus military council, said it had “not established any contact with this faction and

does not claim its mistakes.” At the same time, Colonel Hbous said, he recognized “their

role in defending our oppressed population.”

The harsh criticism by the Syrian Islamic Liberation Front, however, appeared to

portend the potential for hostilities, possibly even armed confrontation with Nusra

fighters. The front is an alliance of 20 rebel groups that are among the opposition’s most

important insurgent forces. One of those groups, the Tawheed Brigade, has clashed with

Nusra fighters before.

Andrew J. Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy,

said the Al Qaeda-Nusra combination had brought further into the open the factionalism

and diverging motives of the anti-Assad insurgency. “They’re important because they

show the Islamist-nationalist divide,” he said. “Not all the opposition is speaking with

one voice.”

He said Mr. Assad, recognizing Western fears about the possibility of Syria’s

disintegration, was seeking to turn that to his advantage and “trying to spin a story that

we’re fighting on a common front here.”

Hania Mourtada reported from Beirut, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Hwaida Saad

contributed reporting from Beirut, and Hala Droubi from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Extremists Take Syrian Town NearTurkey BorderBy BEN HUBBARD and KARAM SHOUMALI

September 18, 2013

BEIRUT, Lebanon — An extremist group linked to Al Qaeda routed Syrian rebel fighters

and seized control of a gateway town near Syria’s northern border with Turkey on

Wednesday, posting snipers on rooftops, erecting checkpoints and imposing a curfew on

the local population.

The takeover of the town, Azaz, by fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,

or ISIS, reflected the rising strength of extremist fighters in northern and eastern Syria

and their rapidly deteriorating relations with more mainline rebels.

By early Thursday, Islamist rebel leaders had intervened to stop the fighting,

although most of the town appeared firmly in the hands of the extremists, opposition

activists said. The extremists had not seized the nearby Bab al-Salameh border crossing

with Turkey. Azaz sits just south of the border crossing on the road to Aleppo, Syria’s

largest city, and has served as an important artery for the rebellion in northern Syria,

allowing arms, fighters and supplies to move in and refugees fleeing the violence to leave

the country.

Its seizure is likely to alarm Syria’s neighbors. Turkey, which has vocally supported

the fight against forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and allowed fighters and arms

to flow freely across its southern border, now faces a bold Qaeda affiliate.

Lebanon has sought information for more than a year about nine Lebanese Shiites

held captive by rebels in Azaz. The town’s seizure by a group that considers Shiites

heretics who deserve execution is sure to increase worries about their fate.

The takeover also signals a new low in relations between the rebels fighting a civil

war against Mr. Assad’s forces and international jihadists who have flocked to rebel-

controlled areas to lay the groundwork for an Islamic state.

For much of the 30-month-old conflict, the rebels welcomed jihadist fighters for the

know-how and battlefield prowess they brought to the anti-Assad struggle. In recent

months, however, jihadist groups have isolated local populations by imposing strict

Islamic codes, carrying out public executions and clashing with rebel groups.

In the eastern city of Deir al-Zour on Wednesday, extremist fighters took dozens of

rebels captive after a gunfight near a rebel base, activists said.

Reached by telephone, a rebel commander who gave only his first name, Khattab,

said that Wednesday’s violence in Azaz began when ISIS fighters stormed the town and

tried to detain German doctors who were visiting a hospital.

As local doctors tried to keep out the fighters, rebel brigades arrived and clashes

erupted, Khattab said. At least three rebel fighters were killed, he said, as well as an

opposition media activist, who was shot dead in the street by a sniper.

“He was left bleeding, and the ISIS fighters did not allow anyone to take his body,”

he said.

Dr. Moayyad Qieto, also reached by phone, said the German doctors worked for a

group that financed the Azaz hospital. They were evacuated, unharmed, to the nearby

border with Turkey.

“The situation is so tense, like a volcano that might erupt at any time,” Dr. Qieto

said.

Ben Hubbard reported from Beirut, and Karam Shoumali from Istanbul. Hwaida Saad

contributed reporting from Beirut.

Qaeda Branch in Syria Pursues Its OwnAgendaBy BEN HUBBARD

October 1, 2013

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Fighters from the fastest-growing Qaeda franchise in Syria have

repeatedly clashed with other rebel brigades, seizing towns, replacing crosses on churches

with black flags and holding classes to teach Syrian children about the importance of

battling “infidels,” meaning anyone who is not a Sunni Muslim.

Since the group, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, announced its presence

in Syria this year, it has emerged as the leading force for the foreign fighters streaming

into the country, exploiting the chaos of the civil war as it tries to lay the groundwork for

an Islamic state.

“They want to carve out a jihadi state or a jihadi territory and obviously anything

above that is gravy, like overthrowing the Assad regime,” said Bruce Hoffman, director

of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University. “I don’t think they have

ambitions of taking over the entire country, although they’d be happy to.”

While the Syrian rebels initially welcomed the group as a powerful ally in the civil

war against President Bashar al-Assad, many now resent it for putting its international

jihadi agenda ahead of the fight to topple the government. Antigovernment activists say

they detest the group’s brutality and imposition of strict social codes, and even other

Islamist rebels say the struggle’s focus should remain on leadership change.

The tensions have set off frequent fighting between rebel groups that has

undermined the effort to combat the government and could complicate efforts to dispose

of Syria’s chemical weapons. An advance team from the Organization for the Prohibition

of Chemical Weapons arrived in Damascus on Tuesday to discuss with Syrian officials

the logistics of destroying the country’s chemical arsenal. Officials from the group said

keeping its personnel safe during a raging civil war would be extremely difficult.

The rise of extremist groups has exacerbated Syria’s instability. ISIS has attacked

rebel bases to capture supplies, and routed rebel groups last month to seize control of

Azaz, a strategic city near the Turkish border, leading to a tense cease-fire. Last week,

Qaeda fighters tried to storm a village in Idlib Province to kidnap some rebels, leaving 20

dead from both sides, including the jihadis’ Libyan commander.

“We want to keep Syria together as a country of freedom and equality,” a leader in

an Islamist rebel group opposed to ISIS, called Suqour al-Sham, who gave his name as

Abu Bashir, said via Skype. “They want to form an Islamic state that comes together with

Iraq.”

In an audio statement released online late Monday, a Qaeda spokesman defended

the group, saying its contributions to the anti-Assad fight had been underappreciated and

denying that it had started fights with rebel groups.

“Those who aspire to sideline the state are many because of incorrect beliefs and

doctrines,” said the spokesman, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani al-Shami. “They are greedy

for power and for the worthless things of this world.”

Analysts say the group is a revival and extension of Al Qaeda in Iraq, whose

sectarian-fueled insurgency pushed that country to the brink of civil war in 2006 and

2007, before the group suffered major defeats at the hands of tribal fighters and American

troops.

In Syria, however, the group has found the vast territories that have fallen into rebel

hands near Syria’s northern and eastern borders as an ideal environment to regroup and

advance its agenda.

The area is stateless, covered by a weak patchwork of local councils and rebel

groups struggling to administer their towns and often competing with one another for

resources. This gives the group a wide area to work in with no immediate enemies. The

porousness of the Iraqi and Turkish borders also makes it easy for the group to bring in

supplies and fighters.

Brian Fishman, a former director of research at the Combating Terrorism Center at

West Point and now a fellow at the New America Foundation, said those factors gave Al

Qaeda a more favorable environment in Syria than it ever had in Iraq.

“The conditions in Syria will be ripe for ISIS for quite some time,” he said.

The group is headed by an Iraqi named Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Its fighters hail from

across the Arab world, Chechnya and other parts of Europe and are commanded by local

emirs to whom they pledge obedience, according to rebels in contact with the group.

While ISIS fighters have lined up alongside rebels against the government, rebels

said the group appears to focus on areas already wrested from Mr. Assad, even if that

means displacing rebels.

“The idea is that they are trying to control the areas that are already liberated,” said

Thaer Shaib, a rebel fighter from Idlib Province. “We go to the front, we liberate areas

and leave a few fighters behind in order to advance, and then they come and hit us in the

back.”

Throughout the scattered areas the foreign jihadis control along Syria’s northern

border, they have banned smoking in public and attacked Kurdish villages, some of

which had truces with the rebels.

In Raqqa, the only regional capital to fall under full rebel control, ISIS has set up

bases in government buildings, publicly executed members of the minority Alawite sect,

to which Mr. Assad belongs, and detained activists who have protested against it.

“They control through fear, by holding public executions, walking around in masks,

showing their weapons, and killing and kidnapping anyone who stands against them or

their acts,” said an activist in Raqqa who declined to give his name for fear that

extremists would hunt him down.

Although the group sometimes cooperates in battle, ISIS is separate from the first

Qaeda group to emerge in Syria, the Nusra Front, whose leader rejected a proposed

merger this year.

Since then, foreign fighters have flocked to ISIS, while the Nusra Front has been

more clearly accepted by mainline rebels for keeping its focus on the fight against Mr.

Assad.

An American official said that ISIS was smaller than Nusra and a “tiny” part of the

armed opposition, but that the group appears to be growing by attracting some of the most

extreme foreign fighters.

The official also said that the group’s fights with other rebel brigades could harm it

if the clashes lead to a popular reaction against it.

Last week, 10 Islamist brigades signed a statement with the Nusra Front calling for

an Islamic state and rejecting the exile opposition, the Syrian National Coalition.

Members of the groups that signed said the statement was also intended to project unity

among Islamic rebel brigades that do not share ISIS’s agenda.

ISIS makes its vision for Syria clear in videos it releases on militant Web sites,

showing its fighters seeking to help the poor, spread their strict interpretation of Islam

and kill those they consider infidels.

One video about a recent ISIS offensive in the central province of Hama showed a

commander laying out battle plans to a group of fighters with images from Google Earth

projected on a wall.

“We have to give them a lesson that their plans will fail,” said the unidentified

commander, who had a long beard and shoulder-length hair. “Syria will be nothing but an

Islamic caliphate, God willing.”

Later footage showed scores of well-armed fighters, some speaking broken Arabic,

riding off to battle and singing, “For slaughter we came for you, O Alawites,” a reference

to Mr. Assad’s sect.

The group does not hide its cross-border operations or its brutality toward those it

deems enemies. In another video, a group of fighters stops three truck drivers on a

highway believed to be across the Iraqi border and asks them how many times they bow

during dawn prayer, an easy question for a pious Muslim.

The men, who are Alawites, guess incorrectly. The fighters pronounce them infidels,

make them kneel by the side of the road and gun them down. Then one fighter throws a

Molotov cocktail into one of the trucks, setting it on fire.

Karam Shoumali contributed reporting from Istanbul, Eric Schmitt from Washington, and

an employee of The New York Times from Beirut.

Iraq Fighters, Qaeda Allies, ClaimFalluja as New StateBy YASIR GHAZI and TIM ARANGO

January 3, 2014

BAGHDAD — Black-clad Sunni militants of Al Qaeda destroyed the Falluja Police

Headquarters and mayor’s office, planted their flag atop other government buildings and

decreed the western Iraqi city to be their new independent state on Friday in an escalating

threat to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, whose forces were struggling to retake

control late into the night.

The advances by the militants — members of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or

ISIS — came after days of fighting in Falluja, Ramadi and other areas of Anbar Province.

The region is a center of Sunni extremism that has grown more intense in reaction to Mr.

Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad and the neighboring civil war in Syria.

Assertions by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria fighters that they were in complete

control of Falluja were disputed by government security forces and an alliance of tribal

leaders who have joined them. By nightfall, the security forces and tribal militia members

had recaptured a part of the main street and a municipal building.

Mohamed al-Isawi, the head of the Falluja police, said in a telephone interview that

he was gathering men in an area north of Falluja, as a staging ground for what he hoped

would be a decisive battle to retake full control of the city.

“We succeeded today with the tribesmen in getting back the main street of Falluja

after a big fight,” Mr. Isawi said, “and now we are keen to fight the terrorists and liberate

our city from any traces of the criminals.”

But Islamic State of Iraq and Syria fighters still appeared to have the upper hand,

witnesses and others reached by telephone said, and there was no question that the group

had scored a propaganda victory against Mr. Maliki, whose authority over Anbar

Province has been severely undermined in the two years since American forces left the

country.

The group’s fighters cut power lines in Falluja late in the day and ordered residents

not to use their backup generators. In one area of Falluja, a militant said over a mosque

loudspeaker: “We are God’s rule on Earth! No one can defeat God’s will!”

The group advanced hours after a short period of calm had returned to the city,

where the traffic police and street cleaners resumed work during the day and mosque

loudspeakers exhorted stores to reopen so hungry residents could buy food.

The calm evaporated when the militants appeared at the close of Friday Prayer —

which had been moved by local imams to a public park, away from the combat zones —

and seized the stage, waving the Qaeda flag and daring the authorities to evict them.

“We declare Falluja as an Islamic state, and we call on you to be on our side!” one

fighter shouted to the crowd, according to witness accounts.

Referring to Mr. Maliki’s government and its Shiite ally Iran, the fighter shouted,

“We are here to defend you from the army of Maliki and the Iranian Safavids!” The

Safavid dynasty ruled present-day Iran and Iraq hundreds of years ago.

The resumed fighting included other areas of Anbar Province, including its largest

city, Ramadi.

It has pitted Qaeda-affiliated Sunni extremists, who now control large amounts of

territory in the desert province, against the forces of the Shiite-dominated central

government, backed by local tribesmen who are not strong supporters of the government

but, in this struggle, have decided to side with the army and the police against Al Qaeda.

The fight has become a severe test of Mr. Maliki’s ability to hold the country

together.

The combat scenes in Anbar, which was the heart of the Sunni insurgency during

the American occupation and was where more than 1,300 American soldiers were killed,

have provided the sharpest evidence yet of a country descending into a maelstrom of

violence.

For the Qaeda militants in Iraq, who are fighting under the same name as the most

extremist Sunni rebels in Syria, the gains they have made in Anbar appear to be a

significant step toward realizing the long-held goal of transforming Iraq and Syria into

one battlefield for the same cause: establishing a Sunni Islamist state.

Falluja residents reached by telephone late Friday said the seesaw battle had

traumatized them.

“We are scared — my kids keep crying from the sounds of shelling,” Azher Qasim

said. “I have a sick son, and I need to buy medication for him, and no stores are open. We

have no food, or heat, and our only light is candles.”

An Iraqi special forces soldier reached by telephone on Friday said he was holed up

with his men in Ramadi, sending information for airstrikes to superiors. The soldier, who

spoke on the condition that his name not be used, described fierce fighting on Friday, and

said his patrol had been targeted by suicide bombers.

“We have orders to kill any gunmen in the street,” he said. “When we catch one, we

kill him immediately. There is no arrest.”

The soldier said he had been facing some of the most intense fighting of his life.

“When we first entered Ramadi, it was like hell opened a door,” he said. “For me, I have

one idea in my mind — that I have to fight with no mercy, or I will die.”

The government has reportedly used airstrikes, with Russian helicopters that were

recently purchased.

Since the withdrawal of American soldiers at the end of 2011, the United States, in

an effort to influence the government, has maintained a multibillion-dollar program to sell

weapons to the Iraqis. But the slow pace and the bureaucracy involved — not to mention

the fact that many of the weapons, like F-16 fighter jets, have little practical use against

Qaeda cells — have frustrated the Iraqis, who have increasingly looked elsewhere,

especially Russia.

More recently, as the Sunni insurgency has gained strength, the United States has

said it was rushing missiles and surveillance drones to Iraq.

By Friday evening, reports emerged from contested areas in Anbar of government

shelling and civilian casualties. An official at a hospital in Falluja said the hospital had

received the bodies of three civilians killed in the shelling and had treated 30 others who

were wounded, including at least four children. Late Friday, security officials in Anbar

said 86 people had been killed in the day’s fighting.

Yasir Ghazi reported from Baghdad, and Tim Arango from Istanbul. An employee of The

New York Times contributed reporting from Anbar Province.

Power Vacuum in Middle East LiftsMilitantsBy BEN HUBBARD, ROBERT F. WORTH and MICHAEL R. GORDON

January 4, 2014

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The images of recent days have an eerie familiarity, as if the

horrors of the past decade were being played back: masked gunmen recapturing the Iraqi

cities of Falluja and Ramadi, where so many American soldiers died fighting them. Car

bombs exploding amid the elegance of downtown Beirut. The charnel house of Syria’s

worsening civil war.

But for all its echoes, the bloodshed that has engulfed Iraq, Lebanon and Syria in the

past two weeks exposes something new and destabilizing: the emergence of a post-

American Middle East in which no broker has the power, or the will, to contain the

region’s sectarian hatreds.

Amid this vacuum, fanatical Islamists have flourished in both Iraq and Syria under

the banner of Al Qaeda, as the two countries’ conflicts amplify each other and foster

ever-deeper radicalism. Behind much of it is the bitter rivalry of two great oil powers,

Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose rulers — claiming to represent Shiite and Sunni Islam,

respectively — cynically deploy a sectarian agenda that makes almost any sort of

accommodation a heresy.

“I think we are witnessing a turning point, and it could be one of the worst in all our

history,” said Elias Khoury, a Lebanese novelist and critic who lived through his own

country’s 15-year civil war. “The West is not there, and we are in the hands of two

regional powers, the Saudis and Iranians, each of which is fanatical in its own way. I

don’t see how they can reach any entente, any rational solution.”

The drumbeat of violence in recent weeks threatens to bring back the worst of the

Iraqi civil war that the United States touched off with an invasion and then spent billions

of dollars and thousands of soldiers’ lives to overcome.

With the possible withdrawal of American forces in Afghanistan looming later this

year, many fear that an insurgency will unravel that country, too, leaving another

American nation-building effort in ashes.

The Obama administration defends its record of engagement in the region, pointing

to its efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis and the Palestinian dispute, but

acknowledges that there are limits. “It’s not in America’s interests to have troops in the

middle of every conflict in the Middle East, or to be permanently involved in open-ended

wars in the Middle East,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, a White House deputy national security

adviser, said in an email on Saturday.

For the first time since the American troop withdrawal of 2011, fighters from a

Qaeda affiliate have recaptured Iraqi territory. In the past few days they have seized parts

of the two biggest cities in Anbar Province, where the government, which the fighters

revile as a tool of Shiite Iran, struggles to maintain a semblance of authority.

Lebanon has seen two deadly car bombs, including one that killed a senior political

figure and American ally.

In Syria, the tempo of violence has increased, with hundreds of civilians killed by

bombs dropped indiscriminately on houses and markets.

Linking all this mayhem is an increasingly naked appeal to the atavistic loyalties of

clan and sect. Foreign powers’ imposing agendas on the region, and the police-state

tactics of Arab despots, had never allowed communities to work out their long-simmering

enmities. But these divides, largely benign during times of peace, have grown steadily

more toxic since the Iranian revolution of 1979. The events of recent years have

accelerated the trend, as foreign invasions and the recent round of Arab uprisings left the

state weak, borders blurred, and people resorting to older loyalties for safety.

Arab leaders are moving more aggressively to fill the vacuum left by the United

States and other Western powers as they line up by sect and perceived interest. The Saudi

government’s pledge last week of $3 billion to the Lebanese Army is a strikingly bold bid

to reassert influence in a country where Iran has long played a dominant proxy role

through Hezbollah, the Shiite movement it finances and arms.

That Saudi pledge came just after the assassination of Mohamad B. Chatah, a

prominent political figure allied with the Saudis, in a downtown car bombing that is

widely believed to have been the work of the Syrian government or its Iranian or

Lebanese allies, who are all fighting on the same side in the civil war.

Iran and Saudi Arabia have increased their efforts to arm and recruit fighters in the

civil war in Syria, which top officials in both countries portray as an existential struggle.

Sunni Muslims from Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere have joined the

rebels, many fighting alongside affiliates of Al Qaeda. And Shiites from Bahrain,

Lebanon, Yemen and even Africa are fighting with pro-government militias, fearing that

a defeat for Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s president, would endanger their Shiite brethren

everywhere.

“Everyone fighting in Syria is fighting for his own purpose, not only to protect

Bashar al-Assad and his regime,” said an Iraqi Shiite fighter who gave his name as Abu

Karrar. He spoke near the Shiite shrine of Sayida Zeinab near Damascus, where hundreds

of Shiite fighters from around the region, including trained Hezbollah commandos, have

streamed to defend a symbol of their faith.

Some Shiite fighters are trained in Iran or Lebanon before being sent to Syria, and

many receive salaries and free room and board, paid for by donations from Shiite

communities outside of Syria, Abu Karrar said.

Although the Saudi government waged a bitter struggle with Al Qaeda on its own

soil a decade ago, the kingdom now supports Islamist rebels in Syria who often fight

alongside Qaeda groups like the Nusra Front. The Saudis say they have little choice:

having lobbied unsuccessfully for a decisive American intervention in Syria, they believe

they must now back whoever can help them defeat Mr. Assad’s forces and his Iranian

allies.

For all the attention paid to Syria over the past three years, Iraq’s slow disintegration

also offers a vivid glimpse of the region’s bloody sectarian dynamic. In March 2012,

Anthony Blinken, who is now President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, gave a

speech echoing the White House’s rosy view of Iraq’s prospects after the withdrawal of

American forces.

Iraq, Mr. Blinken said, was “less violent, more democratic and more prosperous”

than “at any time in recent history.”

But the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, was already pursuing an

aggressive campaign against Sunni political figures that infuriated Iraq’s Sunni minority.

Those sectarian policies and the absence of American ground and air forces gave Al

Qaeda in Iraq, a local Sunni insurgency that had become a spent force, a golden

opportunity to rebuild its reputation as a champion of the Sunnis both in Iraq and in

neighboring Syria. Violence in Iraq grew steadily over the following year.

Rebranding itself as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, the group seized

territory in rebel-held parts of Syria, where it now aspires to erase the border between the

two countries and carve out a haven for its transnational, jihadist project. Sending 30 to

40 suicide bombers a month to Iraq from Syria, it has mounted a campaign of violence

that led to the deaths of more than 8,000 Iraqis in 2013, according to the United Nations,

the highest level of violence there since 2008.

In recent days, after ISIS fighters rode into the cities of Falluja and Ramadi, they

fought gun battles with Sunni tribal fighters backed by the Iraqi government, illustrating

that the battle lines in the Middle East are about far more than just sect. Yet the tribal

fighters see the government as the lesser of two evils, and their loyalty is likely to be

temporary and conditional.

As the United States rushed weapons to Mr. Maliki’s government late last year to

help him fight off the jihadis, some analysts said American officials had not pushed the

Iraqi prime minister hard enough to be more inclusive. “Maliki has done everything he

could to deepen the sectarian divide over the past year and a half, and he still enjoys

unconditional American support,” said Peter Harling, a senior analyst at the International

Crisis Group. “The pretext is always the same: They don’t want to rock the boat. How is

this not rocking the boat?”

The worsening violence in Iraq and Syria has spread into Lebanon, where a local

Qaeda affiliate conducted a suicide bombing of the Iranian Embassy in Beirut in

November, in an attack meant as revenge for Iran’s support of Mr. Assad.

More bombings followed, including one in a Hezbollah stronghold on Thursday,

one day after the authorities announced the arrest of a senior Saudi-born Qaeda leader.

“All these countries are suffering the consequences of a state that’s no longer

sovereign,” said Paul Salem, vice president of the Middle East Institute in Washington.

“On the sectarian question, much depends on the Saudi-Iranian rivalry. Will these two

powers accommodate each other or continue to wage proxy war?”

For the fighters on the ground, that question comes far too late. Amjad al-Ahmed, a

Shiite fighter with a pro-government militia, said by phone from the Syrian city of Homs,

“There is no such thing as coexistence between us and the Sunnis because they are killing

my people here and in Lebanon.”

Ben Hubbard reported from Beirut, Robert F. Worth from Washington, and Michael R.

Gordon from Jerusalem. Peter Baker contributed reporting from Washington.

Rebels in Syria Claim Control ofResourcesBy BEN HUBBARD, CLIFFORD KRAUSS and ERIC SCHMITT

January 28, 2014

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Islamist rebels and extremist groups have seized control of most of

Syria’s oil and gas resources, a rare generator of cash in the country’s war-battered

economy, and are now using the proceeds to underwrite their fights against one another

as well as President Bashar al-Assad, American officials say.

While the oil and gas fields are in serious decline, control of them has bolstered the

fortunes of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, and the Nusra Front, both of

which are offshoots of Al Qaeda. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is even selling fuel

to the Assad government, lending weight to allegations by opposition leaders that it is

secretly working with Damascus to weaken the other rebel groups and discourage

international support for their cause.

Although there is no clear evidence of direct tactical coordination between the group

and Mr. Assad, American officials say that his government has facilitated the group’s rise

not only by purchasing its oil but by exempting some of its headquarters from the

airstrikes that have tormented other rebel groups.

The Nusra Front and other groups are providing fuel to the government, too, in

exchange for electricity and relief from airstrikes, according to opposition activists in

Syria’s oil regions.

The scramble for Syria’s oil is described by analysts as a war within the broader

civil war, one that is turning what was once an essential source of income for Syria into a

driving force in a conflict that is tearing the country apart. “Syria is an oil country and has

resources, but in the past they were all stolen by the regime,” said Abu Nizar, an

antigovernment activist in Deir al-Zour. “Now they are being stolen by those who are

profiting from the revolution.”

He described the situation in his oil-rich province as “overwhelming chaos.”

The Western-backed rebel groups do not appear to be involved in the oil trade, in

large part because they have not taken over any oil fields.

Syria was once an important supplier of oil to Europe, and attracted international oil

companies like Royal Dutch Shell and Suncor to develop its fields. Declining even before

the anti-Assad uprising began, the oil industry has taken a beating since, with production

down to no more than 80,000 barrels a day at the end of 2013 from about 400,000 barrels

a day in 2011. Violence has damaged pipelines and other infrastructure, aggravating

energy shortages and leaving the country heavily dependent on imports from its allies.

As the war has progressed, rebel groups have seized control of the oil and gas fields

scattered across the country’s north and east, while Kurdish militias have taken over areas

near the border with Iraqi Kurdistan.

Filling the void left by the government’s withdrawal is a Wild West-like patchwork

of local efforts to try to wring any possible profit from the remnants of the oil industry. In

some areas, locals have used primitive methods to extract usable products from crude

they drain from pipelines or storage tanks, often causing environmental and health

problems in their communities.

Elaborate trade networks have also evolved, with oil being smuggled across borders

in plastic jugs and transported by trucks and on donkeys into Iraq and Turkey.

“The government practically doesn’t control anything anymore,” said Dragan

Vuckovic, president of Mediterranean International, an oil service company that operates

across the Middle East and North Africa. “The oil is controlled by crooks and extremists.

They sell it for a bargain wherever they can find a buyer.”

Oil has proved to be a boon for the extremists of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,

who have seized control of most of the oil-rich northern province of Raqqa. The group

typically sells crude to middlemen who resell it to the government but sometimes sells it

directly to the government, said Omar Abu Laila, a spokesman for the rebels’ Supreme

Military Council.

“Selling the oil brings in more cash, so why not sell it to the regime, which offers

higher prices?” he asked.

An American official said the United States had received multiple credible reports

that the Syrian government had purchased crude from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

that was delivered in tanker trucks from areas the group controls to behind Syrian

government lines.

The official also said Mr. Assad’s government had refrained from bombing the

group’s headquarters in Raqqa and elsewhere, although their locations are well known

and clearly marked with black flags and banners.

A second American official said that while Mr. Assad’s government is growing ever

more desperate for oil, the group is becoming increasingly independent of wealthy donors

in the Persian Gulf and other funding sources. As the group has gained control of more

territory, it has been able to sustain its operations through a combination of oil revenues,

border tolls, extortion and granary sales, the official said.

While other American officials discounted the possibility of tactical military

cooperation between the group and Mr. Assad’s government, they said that Syrian

intelligence had almost certainly infiltrated opposition groups, including the Islamic State

of Iraq and Syria and the Nusra Front, to track their activities.

The Nusra Front and other groups are providing fuel to the government, too, in

exchange for electricity and relief from airstrikes, according to opposition activists in

Syria’s oil regions.

“The Syrian regime is as Machiavellian as they come, and there is little it won’t do

to hold on to power,” said an American counterterrorism official. “If the regime could

strike a tactical accord with an enemy faction to achieve its larger strategic goals, it

probably would.”

Denied access to Syria’s oil regions, Mr. Assad’s government has become

increasingly dependent on its foreign allies and imports most of its fuel from Iran and

Iraq, while Hezbollah smuggles diesel and gasoline over the border from Lebanon,

according to regional oil experts. The opposition also accuses Syria’s Kurds of providing

the government with oil.

While rebel oil revenues are small by world market standards, they can help groups

exercise local power as well as finance their operations.

“Even sold at discounted prices, this oil could be generating significant revenue for

rebels to arm themselves,” said Badr H. Jafar, chairman of Crescent Petroleum, a regional

oil and gas company based in the United Arab Emirates.

The politics of the local oil trade can be complex, insiders say. When the Nusra

Front and other rebel groups took over a natural gas facility in the northern province of

Hasaka, they sought to cut the supply to a government facility, said Amer Abdy, a local

activist.

But local tribal leaders objected, saying that would simply invite government

airstrikes to destroy the plant. So they brokered a deal to keep a limited amount of gas

flowing so the area would not be bombed, Mr. Abdy said.

When the government first withdrew from the oil fields of Deir al-Zour Province in

the country’s east, said Abu Nizar, an activist there, rebel brigades and local tribes took

control of wells and sold or tried to refine whatever oil they could extract to buy arms.

Recently, however, most of the area’s rebel brigades have left the administration of the

wells to an Islamic legal commission set up to run local affairs, he said.

One facility the group controls is a natural gas plant that feeds a major power station

near Homs that is still controlled by the government.

“We can’t cut off the gas because it would lead to a power cut in a large part of

Syria,” Abu Nizar said, adding that he hoped the new commission would effectively

manage the area’s resources.

“Let’s be honest. Some of the wells were used to arm the rebels and to fund aid

operations,” he said, “but unfortunately the majority were robbed and exploited by

thieves.”

Ben Hubbard reported from Beirut, Eric Schmitt from Washington, and Clifford Krauss

from Houston. Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting from Washington, and Karam

Shoumali from Istanbul.

Al Qaeda Breaks With Jihadist Group inSyria Involved in Rebel InfightingBy BEN HUBBARD

February 3, 2014

ISTANBUL — Al Qaeda’s central leadership has officially cut ties with a powerful

jihadist group that has flourished in the chaos of the civil war in Syria and that rushed to

build an Islamic state on its own terms, antagonizing the wider rebel movement.

The animosity between the group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, and

other rebel groups has fueled the deadliest infighting yet between the foes of President

Bashar al-Assad and has sapped their campaign to depose him.

Though the isolation of the group could lead to greater unity among other rebel

forces, it is unlikely to assuage fears in the United States and elsewhere about the

increasing power of extremists in Syria.

The break between Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, announced late

Sunday on jihadist websites, served both sides, said William McCants, a scholar of

militant Islam at the Brookings Institution. Al Qaeda cut ties with a group that was

besmirching the Qaeda name among other militants, while the Islamic State of Iraq and

Syria bolstered its image as a force to reckon with.

“ISIS is now officially the biggest and baddest global jihadi group on the planet,”

Mr. McCants said. “Nothing says ‘hard-core’ like being cast out by Al Qaeda.”

The rise of the group has largely reflected what many analysts see as the diminished

clout of the original Al Qaeda organization and the rise of affiliates and other militant

groups that share its ideology but run their own affairs.

Rifts between Al Qaeda and the group emerged last year when the Qaeda leader,

Ayman al-Zawahri, ordered it to withdraw from Syria and leave the insurgency there to

be run by the official Qaeda affiliate, the Nusra Front. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

refused.

Its haste to seize resources like oil fields and border crossings brought it into conflict

with other rebels, and widespread clashes between the sides in recent weeks have left

thousands dead across northern and eastern Syria, according to partisan activist groups.

That violence has led to harsh criticisms of the group from other rebel leaders who

consider it just as dangerous as Mr. Assad.

On Monday, a bomber from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria detonated himself at

a rebel base in northern Syria, killing 16 fighters and wounding 20, activists said.

Such attacks have led an influential Saudi cleric who is based in Syria and was once

close to the group to disown it and call on its fighters to defect.

In a video posted online on Sunday, the cleric, Abdullah al-Muheiseni, said one of

the group’s suicide attacks had killed a 12-year-old boy. Another destroyed a water

facility and killed a civilian.

“That brother who blew himself up, what is his destiny now before the almighty

God?” Sheikh Muheiseni said.

In a written statement posted on jihadist forums, Al Qaeda accused the Islamic State

of Iraq and Syria of not working with other groups, naming its own leaders and trying to

impose its own authority.

The statement called on all groups in Syria to work together to spare the blood of

Muslims and to remain loyal to the teachings of Osama bin Laden.

American intelligence and counterterrorism analysts said the group’s increasing

economic independence — largely through revenue from commandeered oil fields,

border tolls, extortion and granary sales — had allowed it to thrive without links to Qaeda

leaders in Pakistan.

“Although the Al Qaeda brand still carries weight among jihadists worldwide, ISIS

has never been dependent on the Al Qaeda core for resources or direction, so the tangible

impact of the decision may not be that significant,” a counterterrorism official said.

The official, who requested anonymity to speak about intelligence reports, said the

Nusra Front was likely to try to benefit from its exclusive Qaeda credentials.

Inside Syria, however, those credentials appeared to be less significant than the

Nusra Front’s efforts to maintain good relations with other rebel groups.

“We have no problems with Nusra, and we fight with them sometimes in the same

trench,” a rebel fighter, Nader Ramandan, said in a Skype conversation from northern

Idlib Province. While he disagrees with the Nusra Front’s ideology, he said, he does not

consider the group a threat and hopes it will help get rid of the Islamic State of Iraq and

Syria.

Nearly three years of civil war in Syria have left more than 130,000 people dead and

destabilized neighboring countries. On Monday, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a

bus south of the Lebanese capital, Beirut, killing himself and wounding other passengers.

The bombing was the latest in a series of attacks that have targeted civilian areas across

Lebanon.

Also on Monday, at least 30 people, including 13 children and three women, were

killed in aerial bombardments by the Syrian government in the northern city of Aleppo,

according to the opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Similar attacks had

killed scores of people in the city in recent days.

International efforts have so far failed to stop the war, and a first round of

international peace talks concluded in Geneva last week with no concrete progress.

In what appeared to be a concession to the Syrian government, the United Nations

announced on Monday that the deputy to Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations special

envoy for Syria, was resigning, effective this week.

The deputy, Nasser al-Kidwa, a former foreign minister of the Palestinian Authority,

is also the nephew of Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader who died in 2004. Mr. Assad’s

father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad, was said to have despised Mr. Arafat, and Syrian

officials objected to Mr. Kidwa’s role in the talks.

A statement posted online by the office of Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations

secretary general, gave no reason for Mr. Kidwa’s departure.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Rick Gladstone from New York.

Iraqi Militants Stage Political Rally,Then Bombs Go OffBy TIM ARANGO and DURAID ADNAN

April 25, 2014

BAGHDAD — A campaign rally at a ramshackle old soccer stadium on Friday afternoon

began with open-air theater that crossed centuries of Shiite lore, from the martyrdom of a

revered religious figure to the fight today against Sunni extremists, played by actors

dressed as fighters for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, a radical Islamist group.

It ended with an outbreak of violence, three explosions, one after the other, in the

parking lot, as thousands of people were leaving: a car bomb, a suicide bomber and a

roadside bomb. More than 30 people were killed and many others wounded in an attack

that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria said in a statement it had carried out.

The bombings struck a rally held by a Shiite militant group, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, that

is trying to transform itself into a political force by fielding candidates in Iraq’s coming

national elections. But rather than emphasize empowerment through politics, the rally and

the subsequent Sunni militant attack underscored two troubling realities of today’s Iraq:

the merging of the civil war in Syria with Iraq’s own strengthened Sunni insurgency and

the rising influence of Iran, the event organizers’ most important patron.

The event at times felt more like a wartime rally than a political event, especially

with boasting by Asaib Ahl al-Haq that it was sending its members to fight in the Syrian

civil war.

Festooned around the stadium were banners bearing the names and faces of the men

the group had lost in Syria, more than 80 names in all. Men in militia uniforms — green

camouflage with Asaib Ahl al-Haq patches on the sleeves — some of them just back

from the battlefield in Syria, lined the track surrounding the soccer field. As the group’s

parliamentary candidates filed into the stadium, a campaign song played through scratchy

stereo speakers.

“We send real men to Syria,” was one verse.

“We are protecting Zeinab,” was another, a reference to an important Shiite shrine

in Syria.

Just before the formal program was to begin, the group’s leader, Qais al-Khazali,

rode into the stadium in a convoy of black armored sport utility vehicles, black-suited

security men hanging off the sides. Mr. Khazali was once a lieutenant for another cleric

and militia leader who was also an implacable foe to the Americans, Moktada al-Sadr.

Now Mr. Khazali commands his own movement that will compete for Mr. Sadr’s

constituency among the Shiite underclass in the elections, scheduled for Wednesday.

On Friday he stepped to the podium and began by reciting the names of fighters

killed in Syria.

“You are the reason we are here today,” he said. “And we will accomplish what you

have died for.”

Then he addressed his men who are still fighting in Syria.

“To those that are defending Iraq in Syria, because they are fighting there the

enemies of Iraq, I tell you all,” he said, “congratulations for having the honor to fight

there. Congratulations for making history.”

The group was welcomed into Iraq’s political system a few years ago by Prime

Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, just as American troops were leaving, and his acceptance

of it was regarded as a move that further empowered Iran at the expense of the United

States.

Iran has provided the money and training for the group’s Syria recruitment effort,

analysts say. In the Shiite-dominated provinces of southern Iraq, posters urge men to go

and fight, and there is a phone number to call. The rallying cry for Iraqi Shiites is the

defense of the shrine of Sayeda Zeinab, the Shiite holy site in a Damascus suburb. But

they often fight alongside the Syrian government, as well as alongside fighters from Iran

and Hezbollah, a Shiite militant movement based in Lebanon, against the rebel fighters,

who are largely Sunni Muslims.

The group is not only fighting in Syria. It is also back on the streets in Baghdad and

in other areas of the country, including Anbar Province, where large sections of territory

are in the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Sometimes Asaib Ahl al-Haq’s

members fight alongside government forces, and at other times they carry out their own

operations, militiamen say. The group was widely blamed for atrocities against Sunnis

during the sectarian war of 2005 to 2007; that it is now working hand in hand with the

government on the battlefield and vying for votes in the elections is further evidence of

Iraq’s rising sectarian tensions.

The group’s remobilization has alarmed Iraq’s Sunnis, who recall its role in

sectarian fighting just a few years ago. It also highlights the weaknesses of Iraq’s security

forces and has raised alarms that the country is backsliding to the days when it was a

patchwork of militias and armed groups controlled the streets.

Salam al-Jazari, an Asaib Ahl al-Haq parliamentary candidate from Baghdad, said:

“All Iraqis are calling for security, and we have experiences in this field. We have

military experience. Abroad, we have fighters protecting Zeinab, and inside Iraq we have

fighters supporting the security forces. We have many operations inside Baghdad

capturing terrorists and car bombs, and we even have our men in all the provinces, as our

military wing, to impose security.”

In this environment, the group, as it campaigns for seats in Parliament, is not only

celebrating its role in the war in Syria but also putting itself forward as the protector of

Iraq’s Shiites.

One man at the rally on Friday said that as soon as he returned from Syria his

superiors asked him to fight in Anbar.

“I just came back from Syria three days ago,” said Majeed Khadum, 25. “I still have

the smell of the war in Syria on me. And my bosses just contacted me yesterday to join

them on a mission, but I said no because I am still tired from the war in Syria.”

He said he was attracted to Asaib Ahl al-Haq because “they are protecting the Shiite

community inside Iraq and abroad as well.”

As a full display of Iraqi politics, Friday’s event was especially emblematic, with

emotional expressions of Shiite empowerment; slogans for unity between Iraq’s three

main factions, Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, that felt cynical given the group’s history; and

little in the way of actual policy proposals.

And then, at the end, another burst of horrific violence.

Iraq’s Sunni Militants Take to SocialMedia to Advance Their Cause andIntimidateBy ROD NORDLAND

June 28, 2014

BAGHDAD — The extremist group battling the Iraqi government, the Islamic State in

Iraq and Syria, may practice a seventh-century version of fundamentalist Islam, but it has

demonstrated modern sophistication when it comes to using social media, particularly

Twitter and other sites like WordPress and Tumblr.

On Twitter, ISIS has hijacked World Cup hashtags, flooding unsuspecting soccer

fans with its propaganda screeds. It has used Facebook as a death-threat generator; the

text-sharing app.

JustPaste to upload book-length tirades; the app SoundCloud for jihadi music; and

YouTube and Twitter for videos to terrify its enemies.

One Twitter account that purports to be linked to ISIS even altered a picture of

Michelle Obama to boast about its capture of American-made war matériel. The sign in

her hands was changed from one saying “#BringBackOurGirls,” referring to the

worldwide campaign to save the schoolgirls abducted in Nigeria, to one saying

“#BringBackOurHumvee.”

ISIS has outfought both its Syrian rivals and the Iraqi government online, as well as

on the battlefield. The Iraqi government’s response has been to order Internet providers in

the country to block most social media sites.

What ISIS realized, more quickly and effectively than its rivals, was that

“smartphones and social media accounts are all that is needed to instantly share material

in real time with tens of thousands of jihadists,” said Rita Katz, a terrorism analyst who

on Friday published a study of ISIS and Twitter on the website of the SITE Intelligence

Group, which monitors extremist activity online.

“ISIS, as well as its fighters and supporters, quickly adopted these tools and has

been utilizing the latest Internet technologies and social media outlets to maintain

massive, sophisticated online media campaigns used to promote jihad, communicate,

recruit and intimidate,” Ms. Katz wrote.

Soon, ISIS was posting Twitter messages from the battlefield in Syria and later in

Iraq. When the governments it was fighting pulled the plug on its cellphone connections,

it had engineers come in to set up mobile hot spots offering Internet access.

ISIS has also actively looked for ways to increase its traffic internationally, as part

of its recruitment drive aimed at Europeans and Americans. At one point, the group

hijacked several Twitter hashtags related to the World Cup and fed soccer enthusiasts

ISIS propaganda instead of news about the current tournament in Brazil.

In one particularly gruesome instance, the organization posted a video of the

beheading of a police officer on Twitter, with the message: “This is our ball. It’s made of

skin #WorldCup.”

Aside from sowing terror and winning extremist admirers, ISIS’s use of social

media has also had both strategic and tactical impacts on the battlefield.

In Mosul, two weeks before ISIS attacked and overran the city, it began

broadcasting individualized death threats on its Facebook accounts to every Iraqi

journalist working in the city, said one of those singled out.

Most of them fled or stopped working, which was probably one of the reasons the

militants’ advance on the city received such little outside attention.

During those weeks, ISIS also greatly stepped up its Twitter campaign, a kind of

online equivalent of a pre-invasion artillery barrage, posting scores of videos and

photographs of Iraqi soldiers being executed.

Officials at the Ministry of Communications later said that they shut down social

media because the campaign by ISIS had undermined the morale of Iraqi soldiers in

Mosul, contributing to the stunning overnight collapse of two full divisions.

Many experts on extremists’ online activity have complained that the social

networking sites should be policing their platforms better.

“Twitter must adapt to these new circumstances and become more proactive in

deterring such activity,” Ms. Katz said. “It has the capability to carry out account

monitoring and suspensions on much larger scales than it has thus far.”

In response to inquiries about ISIS’s Twitter presence, Nu Wexler, a Twitter

spokesman, said: “We don’t comment on individual accounts or suspensions. We do not

proactively monitor content on the platform, but we review accounts when they’re

reported to us and suspend them if they violate our rules.”

Mr. Wexler declined to answer any other questions about ISIS’s use of Twitter.

An official of a social networking site, who said he would speak frankly only if his

name was not used, said the huge size of the major sites made it impossible to enforce

rules against terrorists’ use. “It’s kind of like whack-a-mole,” he said.

“We constantly look at these things and when we find them we take them down,” he

said. “Our policy is any terrorist organization, we take down.”

For instance, Facebook has shut down a half-dozen accounts linked to ISIS, the

social networking official said.

ISIS’s use of Twitter is even more pervasive than its use of Facebook, since its

brevity lends itself to posts from the field. It runs Twitter campaigns in each of the

provinces where it operates, and also has campaigns based on activities on the battlefield

and elsewhere.

One of ISIS’s newest Twitter hashtags trending in jihadi forums is

#CalamityWillBefallUS, a response to reports that the United States is sending advisers

and armed drones to Iraq.

The feed is full of invective and praise for 9/11, as well as photographs of the World

Trade Center attacks, wounded American troops and coffins draped in American flags.

Russian Jets and Experts Sent to Iraq toAid ArmyBy ROD NORDLAND

June 29, 2014

BAGHDAD — Iraqi government officials said Sunday that Russian experts had arrived

in Iraq to help the army get 12 new Russian warplanes into the fight against Sunni

extremists, while the extremists declared their leader the caliph, or absolute ruler, of all

jihadi organizations worldwide.

The Russian move was at least an implicit rebuke to the United States, which the

Iraqis believe has been too slow to supply American F-16s and attack helicopters —

although the United States is now in the process of providing both.

“In the coming three or four days the aircraft will be in service to support our forces

in the fight” against the insurgents of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, said Gen. Anwar

Hama Ameen, the commander of the Iraqi Air Force, referring to five SU-25 aircraft that

were flown into Iraq aboard Russian cargo planes Saturday night, and two more expected

later Sunday.

Also on Sunday, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria released a 34-minute audio

recording of a speech by its official spokesman, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, who said

that the insurgency’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was now the world’s caliph and as

such had declared all other jihadi organizations void and under his direct control,

according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremists’ online presence.

The audio speech was released on an ISIS-linked Twitter feed, the group said.

ISIS’ bombastic announcement of its hegemony over the world’s Islamic extremists

was little more than a propaganda ploy, but it was indicative of its growing ambitions.

ISIS, originally formed from the broken remnants of Al Qaeda in Iraq, split with Al

Qaeda last year when that group’s leaders ordered it to leave Syria.

Since then, ISIS has battled with Qaeda-linked jihadis in Syria, as well as with non-

extremist rebel forces there, for control of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad

of Syria.

The ISIS announcement also revealed Mr. Baghdadi’s alleged real name — Ibrahim

Ibn Awwad Ibn Ibrahim Ali Ibn Muhammad al-Badri al-Hashimi al-Husayni al-Qurashi

— and said he would be known as Caliph Ibrahim for short.

A caliphate is a Muslim empire that in theory encompasses all Muslims worldwide,

and is a term used to describe empires like that of the Ottomans in Turkey in the 15th to

20th centuries, as well as those that did rule much of the civilized world in the early days

of Islam.

In present-day Baghdad, the Iraqi Air Force commander, General Ameen, said that

Russian military experts had arrived to help set up the new SU-25 warplanes, but that

they would stay only a short time. The last five Russian aircraft would arrive by Monday,

he said.

Last week, President Obama ordered 300 American military advisers into the

country, and the Iranians have reportedly sent advisers from their Republican Guards’

Quds Force.

At least three United States Special Forces teams are said to have been deployed

north of Baghdad in recent days, tasked with carrying out a survey of Iraqi forces to

determine their condition and needs.

This was the first report of Russian military aides in the country, although General

Ameen said they were experts, not advisers.

American officials, citing intelligence reports, have said that Iran has been sending

surveillance drones over Iraq as well as supplying the government with military

equipment and support.

On Thursday, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said the Iraqis, in an

arrangement with the Russian Ministry of Defense, had ordered a dozen SU-25s, a

ground-attack fighter jet useful for close air support operations.

“They are coming very fast,” General Ameen said in a telephone interview,

“because we need them in this conflict against the terrorists as soon as possible.” He said

the Russians would leave within around three days after the aircraft were ready for

service.

The Iraqi military used SU-25 jets extensively during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s,

but they have not been used in Iraq since 2002 or earlier.

Still, General Ameen said they would soon see action again. “We have pilots who

have long experience in this plane and of course we have the help of the Russian friends

and the experts who came with these aircraft to prepare them,” he said. “This will

produce a very strong punishment against the terrorists in the coming days.”

Sunni jihadi fighters were reported on Sunday to have stalled a government

offensive to retake the central Iraqi city of Tikrit. Insurgents had apparently regained

control of key government buildings in the center of Tikrit, according to witnesses who

reported seeing the black flag of ISIS flying over many important buildings.

The day before, Iraqi flags had been hoisted on many of them, as Iraqi troops carried

out a ground assault after a three-day operation intended to take the city and roll back the

insurgents’ advance toward Baghdad.

Iraqi forces carried out repeated airstrikes, mostly using helicopters, on insurgent

targets throughout the city on Sunday for the fourth day in a row, witnesses said.

The Iraqi Army remained in control of roads leading into Tikrit — Saddam

Hussein’s birthplace and a longtime stronghold of Sunni hard-liners, about 100 miles

north of Baghdad — as well as the campus of Salahuddin University in Tikrit and a

military base, Camp Speicher, on the outskirts of the city.

The military’s advance, supported by tanks and helicopter gunships, was hampered

by a large number of bombs planted along the roads, a common tactic of the insurgents.

According to a security official in Tikrit, speaking on the condition of anonymity as

a matter of government policy, ISIS fighters had kidnapped six relatives of Maj. Gen.

Jumaa al-Jabouri, deputy commander of Iraqi military operations in Salahuddin Province,

holding them hostage and destroying their homes in the eastern part of the city.

What appeared to be a jumbo Russian transport aircraft, from which the SU-25

warplanes were unloaded, was shown Saturday night on Iraqiya, the state television

network, at what was believed to be an air base in Taji, a short distance north of Baghdad.

The new aircraft “will increase and support the strength and capability of the Iraqi

air forces to eliminate terrorism,” a statement issued by the Iraqi Ministry of Defense

said.

The Iraqis have sought to buy American F-16s and Apache helicopter gunships. The

sale of the Apaches had been delayed by concerns in Congress, which feared Mr. Maliki

would use them to suppress his political opponents, but the United States has now agreed

to provide them.

The first two F-16s are expected to be delivered in September or October, and the

first six Apaches will arrive this fall as part of a lease. But it will take months to train the

Apache pilots.

The Iraqi Air Force currently has only two propeller-driven Cessna aircraft equipped

to fire guided Hellfire missiles, which the Iraqis ran out of last week. Over the past three

days, 75 new Hellfires were delivered to Iraq by the American government.

The air force also had about 180 helicopters, many of them gunships, but six of

those were destroyed in the insurgents’ attack on Mosul, and an additional 60 were

damaged.

There have also been unconfirmed reports that Iran was prepared to return some of

the Iraqi warplanes that Saddam Hussein flew to Iran in 1991 to escape American

destruction. Those included 24 French F-1 Mirage fighters and 80 Russian jets.

Duraid Adnan contributed reporting from Baghdad, an Iraqi employee of The New York

Times from Tikrit and Michael R. Gordon from Washington.

Militant Leader in Rare Appearance inIraqBy ALISSA J. RUBIN

July 5, 2014

BAGHDAD — Wearing a black turban and black robes, the leader of the self-proclaimed

Islamic state that stretches across eastern Syria and much of northern and western Iraq

made a startling public appearance, his first in many years, at a well-known mosque in

the Iraqi city of Mosul, according to a video released on Saturday whose contents were

confirmed by experts and witnesses.

Until then, there had been very few photographs on the Internet of the insurgent

known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or

ISIS. But on Friday he delivered a public sermon in a city once under American control

with an audacity that even Osama bin Laden never tried.

ISIS released a 21-minute video of the sermon on Saturday.

Previously he had been all but invisible, seemingly reluctant to risk a public

appearance as his group grew in strength and he became the United States’ second-most

sought-after terrorist, after Ayman al-Zawahri, the leader of Al Qaeda. The United States

government has offered a $10 million reward for information leading to his capture.

But on Friday at the pulpit of Mosul’s Great Mosque, Mr. Baghdadi appeared

confident, calm and measured as he urged the faithful to fast during Ramadan and

undertake jihad. He also asserted his position as caliph, or spiritual leader, of the Muslim

faithful, calling himself “Khalifa Ibrahim,” or caliph Abraham, a reference to the prophet

Abraham, who appears in the Quran. Mr. Baghdadi’s militant group declared its territory

in Iraq and Syria a caliphate, or Islamic state, on June 29.

“Do jihad in the cause of God, incite the believers and be patient in the face of this

hardship,” he admonished the congregation. “If you knew about the reward and dignity in

this world and the hereafter through jihad, then none of you would delay in doing it.”

ISIS militants took over Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, on June 10, after the Iraqi

Army fled. ISIS fighters patrol the streets, although far fewer than in the first days after

the takeover, and while some people have gone back to work, the city is far from normal.

The congregation at the mosque in the video had been ordered to come to Friday Prayer,

said a man who was there but who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution.

When worshipers arrived at the mosque, they were searched thoroughly by armed

ISIS fighters, and the congregants were told where and how to sit, said the man. No one

was allowed to leave until 10 minutes after the end of Mr. Baghdadi’s sermon, the man

said.

The sermon was no extemporaneous cameo, but a carefully crafted speech in which

he asked for the congregation’s support and struck an almost humble and pious tone that

was difficult to square with the group’s tactics on the ground, which include kidnapping

for ransom, summary executions and beheadings.

“I was placed as your caretaker, and I am not better than you,” he said, according to

a translation by SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist activity online. “So if

you found me to be right, then help me, and if you found me to be wrong, then advise me

and make me right.”

“I do not promise you, as the kings and rulers promise their followers and

congregation, luxury, security and relaxation; instead, I promise you what Allah promised

his faithful worshipers,” he said.

Mr. Baghdadi’s address appeared to be aimed at several audiences, analysts said. He

seemed to be appealing to followers of other militant groups in Syria and Iraq to join

ISIS, and also to Iraqi Sunnis to look to him as a leader rather than the Iraqi government.

Daniel Benjamin, a senior counterterrorism official in the State Department from

2009 to 2012, said that if the video was authentic, Mr. Baghdadi’s appearance would be a

“remarkable event.”

“If Baghdadi has emerged from hiding, it suggests that he is adopting a posture as a

different kind of leader from Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahri and the like, and by

implication a greater one,” said Mr. Benjamin, now a scholar at Dartmouth College. “He

is demonstrating that ISIS has what they didn’t: territory that is secure, and he is its ruler.

“As a public demonstration of leadership, you’d have to go back to April 1996,

when Mullah Omar appeared on top of a building in Kandahar in a cloak that was said to

belong to the prophet and was declared commander of the faithful,” Mr. Benjamin added.

Peter Neumann, a professor of security studies at Kings College London, said the

appearance was “a sign of confidence” and a “message to all these other jihadists, this is

really happening, it’s not going to go away anytime soon.”

The video was still being authenticated late Saturday by the Central Intelligence

Agency. A spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry, Brig. Gen. Saad Maan, told Reuters

that the ministry thought it was fake, but Mr. Neumann said he had little doubt that it was

authentic, in part because ISIS would have little to gain from a falsified video. An

American official who spent extensive time in Iraq said that the man in the video

appeared to be Mr. Baghdadi.

Two people who were in the mosque when Mr. Baghdadi spoke said they had no

question it was him. But they had never seen him before, so their certainty was based

primarily on how the ISIS fighters treated him.

Also on Saturday, official Iranian news agencies reported that an Iranian pilot had

been killed in fighting in Iraq, which appeared to be the first confirmation of the

deployment of Iranian forces there. There have been unconfirmed reports that Iran had

sent military advisers and jets to Iraq. The Islamic Republic News Agency said that the

pilot, Col. Shoja’at Alamdari, was killed in Samarra defending a Shiite shrine. The Fars

News Agency said that he was a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

The agencies provided no further details about his death, and it was not clear

whether he died on the ground or in the air. There have been no reports of planes shot

down by the rebels.

An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Mosul, Michael R.

Gordon from Washington, and Thomas Erdbrink from Tehran.

Opinion: The Caliph Has No ClothesBy CHASE F. ROBINSON

July 16, 2014

Ramadan, which began this year on June 28, gives Muslims the chance to look to the past

and future. It calls for fasting, but fasting for a purpose, above all for renewing ties with

family and with faith.

But this year the start of Ramadan was punctuated by a sinister audio message,

sonorously delivered in just short of 20 minutes by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the

increasingly notorious leader of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, the Qaeda

offshoot that now controls a large swath of Syria and Iraq. A video released on July 5

purported to show him in a mosque in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, which fell to ISIS

in early June.

Mr. Baghdadi’s ambitions don’t end in Mosul. ISIS has proclaimed nothing less

than the re-establishment of the caliphate, that venerable institution of Islamic rule that

was abolished in 1924, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. And while he’s been

elusive on camera, Mr. Baghdadi betrays a great deal of himself in the recorded speech.

Anyone looking for a detailed understanding of ISIS’ political vision will be

disappointed, but to dismiss the speech as mere bombast is to miss its jihadist target. Mr.

Baghdadi’s rhetoric — however opaque or abhorrent to Western observers — makes

claims to religious authority through style and allusion that are plain to fellow jihadists.

In other words, what the recording shows is Mr. Baghdadi’s donning the mantle of

anticolonial redeemer and trumping jihadist rivals, like the Qaeda leader Ayman al-

Zawahiri, in a war of words and symbols. Osama bin Laden was said to have been

nervous about the quality of his preaching, fearing that recordings would document his

mistakes. Mr. Baghdadi, who according to jihadist websites comes from a learned family

and has a doctorate in Islamic studies, is turning that training to his advantage.

The style of his address is formal, loosely rhyming classical Arabic infused with

Quranic words and phrases. The form is a “letter addressed to those undertaking jihad and

the Islamic community.” The mode of persuasion is to adduce scriptural truths to induce

action — above all that Muslims are to fear God and fight on God’s behalf. In these and

other respects, the address bears striking similarities to the letters, sermons and speeches

of Islam’s caliphates in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, powerful empires that

legitimized their rule by claiming succession from the Prophet Muhammad.

The medium being the message, its symbols are deliberately archaic. When Mr.

Baghdadi calls metaphorically for the conquest of “Rome,” he’s signaling to his audience

command of a repertory of tropes and symbols: When early Muslim caliphs announced

their ambition to conquer “Rome,” they had in mind Constantinople (now Istanbul) — the

“new Rome” as it was then understood, the Greek-speaking capital of Byzantium, and the

caliphate’s only rival for religious and political supremacy.

The few contemporary references in Mr. Baghdadi’s remarks — to Burma, America,

the veil in France, democracy, secularism — are not intended to show off any command

of current affairs, but are gestures intended to illustrate the mythic conflict between belief

and unbelief, between God’s justice and human tyranny.

Mr. Baghdadi is introduced in the recording as “our master, commander of the

faithful, Abu Bakr al-Husayni al-Qureishi al-Baghdadi.” The phraseology is at once

formulaic (“commander of the faithful” was the conventional title of address for a caliph)

and cynical. The nom de guerre “Abu Bakr” recycles the name of Muhammad’s father-in-

law and Islam’s first caliph, chosen by contemporaries over the objection of those who

favored Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali — the Shiites. Meanwhile, Mr. Baghdadi’s alleged

descent from the Qureish tribe fulfills one of the qualifications for the office held crucial

by pre-modern Muslim scholars, who required that caliphs share Muhammad’s kinship.

Baghdad, of course, was the principal seat of the caliphate from the eighth through the

13th centuries, when it was conquered by the Mongols.

In sum, Mr. Baghdadi deploys language that valorizes violence in religious terms

drawn from a venerable history. Here there is a real irony, one that is lost on those who

accept Islamists’ claims about “returning” to a glorious past. For all its archaizing

features, his address plainly reflects modern Islamists’ distinctively 20th-century ideas of

revolution.

Little of what he says is new, although his extended apologetics in favor of “striking

fear” into the heart of the enemy — that is, terrorism — are noteworthy. What he mainly

recycles is a series of slogans and ideas that enjoin Muslims to immigrate to his territory

in order to carry out jihad, and anathematize as non-Muslims those who fail to do so —

thus making them the target for his crusade. In seeking to justify their overthrow of

Muslim states, Mr. Baghdadi and his ilk are reactivating a long extinct strain of Islamic

thought and practice known as Kharijism, which had its origin in the seventh century.

Already in the ninth century the Kharijites’ violent politics had driven them out of

the Islamic mainstream, intellectually and geographically. Caliphs and scholars alike

rejected their views on the office of caliph, which didn’t require descent from the

Qureish, along with their cult of jihad.

Some have argued that Mr. Baghdadi’s call for a reconstructed caliphate betrays the

cosmopolitan history of pre-modern caliphates, where rationalism ruled and Muslims and

non-Muslims lived in glorious coexistence. This is credulous history, however. Although

wealthy and tolerant by contemporary Christian standards, those polities were a mixed

bag.

In any event, modernity has sent the institution into permanent obsolescence.

Serious Muslim scholars understand that irreversible forces of nationalism and

globalization have transformed subjects into citizens. By the time of its abolition by the

Turkish Republic, the institution had long lost any effective power, its theocratic

underpinnings having collapsed. Mr. Baghdadi’s dystopian vision may have some appeal

to those brutalized by war and radicalized by sectarian strife, but it has no legs.

Chase F. Robinson is a professor of history and the president of the Graduate Center of

the City University of New York.

Militant Group Says It Killed AmericanJournalist in SyriaBy RUKMINI CALLIMACHI

AUG. 19, 2014

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria posted a video on Tuesday that it said showed the

beheading of James Foley, an American journalist who was kidnapped in Syria nearly

two years ago, according to a transcript released by the SITE Intelligence Group.

The authenticity of the video, which was also posted on YouTube, could not be

verified, and a telephone call placed to Mr. Foley’s family was not immediately returned.

YouTube later took down the four-minute, 40-second video.

Titled “A Message to America,” the video shows the journalist kneeling in a desert

landscape, clad in an orange jumpsuit — an apparent reference to the uniforms worn by

prisoners at the American military detention camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Standing to

his left is a masked ISIS fighter, who begins speaking in English, with what sounds like

an East London accent. Pulling out a knife, he says that Mr. Foley’s execution is in

retaliation for the recent American airstrikes ordered by President Obama against the

extremist group in Iraq.

“I call on my friends, family and loved ones to rise up against my real killers — the

U.S. government — for what will happen to me is only a result of their complacent

criminality,” Mr. Foley says in the video, which was uploaded to the online account of

the al-Furqan Media Foundation, according to SITE, an organization that follows jihadist

groups. He ends saying that when American soldiers began dropping bombs on Iraq this

month, “they signed my death certificate.”

On Tuesday night, Mr. Foley’s mother, Diane Foley, issued a statement on the

Facebook page the family had created to publicize their son’s disappearance: “We have

never been prouder of our son Jim. He gave his life trying to expose the world to the

suffering of the Syrian people. We implore the kidnappers to spare the lives of the

remaining hostages. Like Jim, they are innocents. They have no control over American

government policy in Iraq, Syria or anywhere in the world.”

Two weeks ago, in the wake of American-led airstrikes against the terrorist group,

which was fanning out across Iraq, jihadists had taken to social media to call for attacks

on American interests. In the three hours after the graphic video of Mr. Foley’s beheading

was uploaded on YouTube, jihadists using the hashtag “#NewMessageFromISIStoUS”

surpassed 2,000 tweets, according to a survey by SITE, with many fighters gloating over

his death, and calling it just retribution for the air raids.

Mr. Foley, 40, a freelance journalist who was working for GlobalPost, an online

publication based in Boston, as well as for Agence France-Presse, disappeared in Syria on

Nov. 22, 2012. He was held alongside several other Americans, whose families have

asked for a news blackout.

The video concludes with the fighter threatening to kill Steven Sotloff, another

American freelance journalist, who was being held alongside Mr. Foley. Mr. Sotloff is

seen kneeling in the same position, in the same landscape and wearing the same style of

orange-colored jumpsuit. “The life of this American citizen, Obama, depends on your

next decision,” the fighter says.

Mr. Obama was briefed about the video by Benjamin J. Rhodes, the deputy national

security adviser, on Air Force One as he returned to Martha’s Vineyard, according to Eric

Schultz, the deputy White House press secretary.

In Washington, a National Security Council spokeswoman, Caitlin Hayden, said in a

statement: “We have seen a video that purports to be the murder of U.S. citizen James

Foley by ISIL. The intelligence community is working as quickly as possible to

determine its authenticity. If genuine, we are appalled by the brutal murder of an innocent

American journalist,” she said, using an alternative name for ISIS.

Reached by telephone, Philip Balboni, the chief executive and a founder of

GlobalPost, said that the newsroom and Mr. Foley’s family were also trying to establish

the veracity of the footage. “We are still evaluating the video at this time,” he said.

Mr. Foley, who was last seen in Binesh, Syria, was also abducted in Libya in 2011,

where he was held for several weeks after running into troops loyal to Col. Muammar el-

Qaddafi’s crumbling government.

He was among dozens of journalists — many of them freelancers without the formal

backing of a news organization — who disappeared in 2012 and 2013 in Syria.

Julie Davis contributed reporting from Washington.

Obama, ‘Appalled’ by Beheading, WillContinue AirstrikesBy MICHAEL D. SHEAR and JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

AUG. 20, 2014

EDGARTOWN, Mass. — President Obama declared on Wednesday that the entire world

was “appalled” by the videotaped beheading of an American journalist by Islamic

militants, speaking as American warplanes conducted 14 airstrikes in Iraq and the State

Department asked the Pentagon to send as many as 300 more American troops to Iraq for

security.

“The United States of America will continue to do what we must do to protect our

people,” the president said from Martha’s Vineyard, where he was vacationing. “We will

be vigilant, and we will be relentless.”

Mr. Obama’s remarks came hours before administration officials said that the

president had authorized a secret mission in July to rescue the American, James Foley,

and other American hostages in a remote area of Syria. But when commandos arrived, the

hostages were not there, American officials said.

Mr. Obama’s harsh remarks, the failed rescue mission and Wednesday’s military

action reflected new pressure on the administration not to step back from the assault on

the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, as well as a recognition of the grim reality that other

American hostages held by ISIS face a similar threat.

The events were also a shift in the complexion of the American confrontation with

the terrorist group — until now an abstraction to most Americans — after its release of a

gruesome video depicting the beheading of Mr. Foley, which ISIS militants said was in

retaliation for the American airstrikes in Iraq. ISIS threatened to kill another American

journalist held hostage, Steven J. Sotloff, if the airstrikes continued.

Within an hour after Mr. Obama’s remarks, in which he pronounced ISIS a “cancer”

that had to be expelled from the Middle East, the United States Central Command, which

oversees American military operations in the Middle East, announced it had carried out

14 more airstrikes around the Mosul Dam and destroyed more ISIS military vehicles and

equipment. There have been 84 American airstrikes so far since Mr. Obama first

announced the offensive against the militants on Aug. 7.

Secretary of State John Kerry stepped up the administration’s tough tone. “Make no

mistake: We will continue to confront ISIL wherever it tries to spread its despicable

hatred,” he said in a statement, using an alternative acronym for ISIS. “The world must

know that the United States of America will never back down in the face of such evil.

ISIL and the wickedness it represents must be destroyed, and those responsible for this

heinous, vicious atrocity will be held accountable.”

The graphic video of Mr. Foley’s beheading — released Tuesday night and verified

by intelligence officials on Wednesday as authentic — spurred renewed debate about

American objectives in Iraq, where the Pentagon’s warplanes unleashed a barrage of

bombs this week in an expansion of the limited goals of protecting Americans and

providing humanitarian aid initially set forth by Mr. Obama. Despite the attacks, ISIS

continued its sweep across Iraq and laid siege to Amerli, a small town in the nation’s

center, where residents and an Iraqi Army unit stuck inside are running low on food,

medicine and water. Aid dropped by Iraqi army helicopters has failed to meet the town’s

needs.

“The situation here is going from bad to worse because we are running out of all

things needed for life,” said Adel al-Bayati, a local official reached by phone in the town

on Wednesday.

The plight of Amerli — home to members of Iraq’s Turkmen minority, who are

Shiite Muslims considered infidels by ISIS — has raised alarm in Iraq and abroad

because it bears similarities to other areas where the Sunni militant group has committed

mass killings as they have seized territory across northern and western Iraq.

On Martha’s Vineyard, Mr. Obama said he had spoken by phone to Mr. Foley’s

parents, telling them that Americans “are all heartbroken at their loss.” He described Mr.

Foley as a journalist, a son, a brother and a friend who was “taken from us in an act of

violence that shocked the conscience of the entire world.”

He made no mention of Mr. Sotloff, whose life, according to the masked

executioner standing by his side in the video, hinges on Mr. Obama’s “next move.”

At the State Department, Marie Harf, a spokeswoman, said American plans for

additional airstrikes would not change even though other American hostages were being

held by the militants. “We don’t make concessions to terrorists,” she said.

Mr. Obama’s fear that ISIS militants would massacre Yazidis, another religious

minority, as they fled across the rugged Sinjar mountains was one of his stated reasons

for authorizing American airstrikes on Aug. 7.

“Let’s be clear about” the Islamic State, Mr. Obama said in his remarks Wednesday.

“They have rampaged across cities and villages killing innocent, unarmed civilians in

cowardly acts of violence. They abduct women and children and subject them to torture

and rape and slavery.”

Republican lawmakers who have been pressing for a more aggressive strategy

against ISIS seized on the beheading as evidence that Mr. Obama had not done enough to

confront the Sunni militants and acknowledge them as a direct threat to Americans.

“Just as Al Qaeda’s initial killings of Americans abroad foretold the carnage they

would unleash within our borders,” Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, said in a

statement after the video’s release, “this barbaric beheading of a defenseless hostage is

the clearest indication to date that ISIL has declared war on the United States, on the

American people, and on freedom-loving people everywhere.”

Reporting was contributed by Ben Hubbard, Tim Arango and Omar al-Jawoshy from

Baghdad, and Azam Ahmed from Khanke, Iraq.

Struggling to Starve ISIS of OilRevenue, U.S. Seeks Assistance FromTurkeyBy DAVID E. SANGER and JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

September 13, 2014

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is struggling to cut off the millions of

dollars in oil revenue that has made the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria one of the

wealthiest terror groups in history, but so far has been unable to persuade Turkey, the

NATO ally where much of the oil is traded on the black market, to crack down on an

extensive sales network.

Western intelligence officials say they can track the ISIS oil shipments as they move

across Iraq and into Turkey’s southern border regions. Despite extensive discussions

inside the Pentagon, American forces have so far not attacked the tanker trucks, though a

senior administration official said Friday “that remains an option.”

In public, the administration has been unwilling to criticize Turkey, which insists it

has little control over the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq and Syria across its borders, or

the flow of oil back out. One senior official, calling President Obama’s recent

conversations with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “sensitive,” said the

decisions about what the country will do to counter ISIS “will be theirs to make.”

But behind the scenes, the conversations about the Sunni extremist group’s ability to

gather vast sums to finance its operations have become increasingly tense since Mr.

Obama’s vow on Wednesday night to degrade and ultimately destroy the group.

Turkey’s failure thus far to help choke off the oil trade symbolizes the magnitude of

the challenges facing the administration both in assembling a coalition to counter the

Sunni militant group and in starving its lifeblood. ISIS’ access to cash is critical to its

ability to recruit members, meet its growing payroll of fighters, expand its reach and

operate across the territory of two countries.

“Turkey in many ways is a wild card in this coalition equation,” said Juan Zarate, a

senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and author of

“Treasury’s War: The Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare.” “It’s a great

disappointment: There is a real danger that the effort to degrade and destroy ISIS is at

risk. You have a major NATO ally, and it is not clear they are willing and able to cut off

flows of funds, fighters and support to ISIS.”

Turkey declined to sign a communiqué on Thursday in Saudi Arabia that committed

Persian Gulf states in the region to counter ISIS, even limited to the extent each nation

considered “appropriate.” Turkish officials told their American counterparts that with 49

Turkish diplomats being held as hostages in Iraq, they could not risk taking a public

stance against the terror group.

Still, administration officials say they believe Turkey could substantially disrupt the

cash flow to ISIS if it tried.

“Like any sort of black market smuggling operation, if you devote the resources and

the effort to attack it, you are unlikely to eradicate it, but you are likely to put a very

significant dent in it,” a senior administration official said on Saturday.

A second senior official said that Mr. Obama’s national security team had spoken

several times with Mr. Erdogan and other top Turkish officials in the past two weeks

about what they can do to help counter ISIS, and that ISIS’ financing was part of those

discussions. “Stopping the flow of foreign fighters, border security and dismantling ISIL

funding networks are also key aspects of our strategy, and we will continue to work

closely with Turkey and our other partners in the region on these efforts in the days

ahead,” the official said, using a different acronym to describe the militant organization.

At the core of the talks are the dozen or so oil fields and refineries in Iraq and Syria

on territory the group has controlled. The output has provided a steady stream of

financing, which experts place at $1 million to $2 million a day — a pittance in terms of

the global oil market, but a huge windfall for a terror group.

“Oil is a huge part of the financing equation” that empowers ISIS, said James

Phillips, the senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Heritage Foundation, a

Washington-based research center.

The territory ISIS controls in Iraq alone is currently producing anywhere from

25,000 to 40,000 barrels of oil a day, which can fetch a minimum of $1.2 million on the

black market, according to Luay al-Khatteeb, a visiting foreign policy fellow at the

Brookings Doha Center, who also directs the Iraq Energy Institute. Some estimates have

placed the daily income ISIS derives from oil sales at $2 million, though American

officials are skeptical it is that high.

“The key gateway through that black market is the southern corridor of Turkey,”

Mr. Khatteeb said. “Turkey is becoming part of this black economy” that funds ISIS.

But targeting the smuggling network has proved a major challenge, and so far the

Turkish authorities have been unwilling to cooperate.

“They’ve been turning a blind eye to it, because they benefit from the lower price of

smuggled black-market oil,” Mr. Phillips said, “and I’m sure there are substantial

numbers of Turks that are also profiting from this, maybe even government officials.”

The supply chain of routes, individuals, families and organizations that allow the oil

to flow are well-established, some dating back decades, to when President Saddam

Hussein of Iraq smuggled oil during the United Nations’ oil-for-food program. “Those

borders have never been sealed, and they never will be sealed,” Mr. Phillips said.

For the Obama administration, getting at ISIS’ oil revenue is far more complex than,

say, its crackdown on Iran. That has been the administration’s most successful use of

sanctions, and officials credit the effects on Iran’s economy, along with American

sabotage of its nuclear facilities, for Iran’s reluctant decision to negotiate on the future of

its nuclear enrichment program.

But Iran used fairly conventional means of reaching oil markets, and not one of its

techniques applies to ISIS’ black-market sales, which take place mostly through networks

of smugglers.

The long-term American plan appears focused on persuading Turkey to crack down

on the smuggling networks — some of which, one Western diplomat noted, “benefit a

powerful Turkish elite” — and aiming at the refiners who would ultimately have to turn

the crude oil into petrochemical products. But gathering the intelligence is a slow process,

analysts say.

“It’s hard to use any of the suite of tools that are available to the U.S. Treasury

Department to sanction people in this case,” said Patrick B. Johnston, a RAND

Corporation researcher who is working on a top-to-bottom study of ISIS’ financing and

organization. “Getting a grip on who the right financial targets would be at the Treasury

Department would be difficult.”

That is equally true of the other major source of ISIS money — its extortion

activities in the areas it controls, said Mr. Johnston, who is examining declassified

documents that detail the group’s funding streams. ISIS demands anywhere from 10

percent to 20 percent of revenue from businesses in its territories and operates other

“mafia-style” rackets that yield as much as $1 million a day.

ISIS’ Harsh Brand of Islam Is Rooted inAustere Saudi CreedBy DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

September 24, 2014

BAGHDAD — Caliph Ibrahim, the leader of the Islamic State, appeared to come out of

nowhere when he matter-of-factly proclaimed himself the ruler of all Muslims in the

middle of an otherwise typical Ramadan sermon. Muslim scholars from the most

moderate to the most militant all denounced him as a grandiose pretender, and the world

gaped at his growing following and its vicious killings.

His ruthless creed, though, has clear roots in the 18th-century Arabian Peninsula. It

was there that the Saud clan formed an alliance with the puritanical scholar Muhammed

ibn Abd al-Wahhab. And as they conquered the warring tribes of the desert, his austere

interpretation of Islam became the foundation of the Saudi state.

Much to Saudi Arabia’s embarrassment, the same thought has now been revived by

the caliph, better known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as the foundation of the Islamic State.

“It is a kind of untamed Wahhabism,” said Bernard Haykel, a scholar at Princeton.

“Wahhabism is the closest religious cognate.”

The Saudis and the rulers of other Persian Gulf states — all monarchies — are now

united against the Islamic State, fearful that it might attack them from the outside or win

followers within. Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have all

participated with Washington in its attacks on the Islamic State’s strongholds in Syria.

For their guiding principles, the leaders of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or

ISIL, are open and clear about their almost exclusive commitment to the Wahhabi

movement of Sunni Islam. The group circulates images of Wahhabi religious textbooks

from Saudi Arabia in the schools it controls. Videos from the group’s territory have

shown Wahhabi texts plastered on the sides of an official missionary van.

This approach is at odds with the more mainstream Islamist and jihadist thinking

that forms the genealogy of Al Qaeda, and it has led to a fundamentally different view of

violence. Al Qaeda grew out of a radical tradition that viewed Muslim states and societies

as having fallen into sinful unbelief, and embraced violence as a tool to redeem them. But

the Wahhabi tradition embraced the killing of those deemed unbelievers as essential to

purifying the community of the faithful.

“Violence is part of their ideology,” Professor Haykel said. “For Al Qaeda, violence

is a means to an ends; for ISIS, it is an end in itself.”

The distinction is playing out in a battle of fatwas. All of the most influential jihadist

theorists are criticizing the Islamic State as deviant, calling its self-proclaimed caliphate

null and void and, increasingly, slamming its leaders as bloodthirsty heretics for

beheading journalists and aid workers.

The upstart polemicists of the Islamic State, however, counter that its critics and

even the leaders of Al Qaeda are all bad Muslims who have gone soft on the West. Even

the officials and fighters of the Palestinian militant group Hamas are deemed to be

“unbelievers” who might deserve punishment with beheading for agreeing to a cease-fire

with Israel, one Islamic State ideologue recently declared.

“The duty of a Muslim is to carry out all of God’s orders and rulings immediately

on the spot, not softly and gradually,” the scholar, Al Turki Ben-Ali, 30, said in an online

forum.

The Islamic State’s sensational propaganda and videos of beheadings appear to do

double duty. In addition to threatening the West, its gory bravado draws applause online

and elsewhere from sympathizers, which helps the group in the competition for new

recruits.

That is especially important to the Islamic State because it requires a steady flow of

recruits to feed its constant battles and heavy losses against multiple enemies — the

governments of Iraq and Syria, Shiite and Kurdish fighters, rival Sunni militants and now

the United States Air Force.

For Al Qaeda, meanwhile, disputes with the Islamic State are an opportunity “to

reposition themselves as the more rational jihadists,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a

researcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

The Islamic State’s founder, Mr. Baghdadi, grafted two elements onto his Wahhabi

foundations borrowed from the broader, 20th-century Islamist movements that began

with the Muslim Brotherhood and ultimately produced Al Qaeda. Where Wahhabi

scholars preach obedience to earthly rulers, Mr. Baghdadi adopted the call to political

action against foreign domination of the Arab world that has animated the Muslim

Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and other 20th-century Islamist movements.

Mr. Baghdadi also borrowed the idea of a restored caliphate. Where Wahhabism

first flourished alongside the Ottoman Caliphate, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded

shortly after that caliphate’s dissolution, in 1924 — an event seen across the world as a

marker of Western ascent and Eastern decline. The movement’s founders took up the call

for a revived caliphate as a goal of its broader anti-Western project.

These days, though, even Brotherhood members appear almost embarrassed by the

term’s anachronism, emphasizing that they use caliphate as a kind of spiritual idea

irrelevant to the modern world of nation-states.

“Even for Al Qaeda, the caliphate was something that was going to happen in the far

distant future, before the end times,” said William McCants, a researcher on militant

Islam at the Brookings Institution. The Islamic State “really moved up the timetable,” he

said — to June 2014, in fact.

Adhering to Wahhabi literalism, the Islamic State disdains other Islamists who

reason by analogy to adapt to changing context — including the Muslim Brotherhood; its

controversial midcentury thinker Sayed Qutb; and the contemporary militants his writing

later inspired, like Ayman al-Zawahri of Al Qaeda. Islamic State ideologues often deem

anyone, even an Islamist, who supports an elected or secular government to be an

unbeliever and subject to beheading.

“This is ‘you join us, or you are against us and we finish you,’ ” said Prof. Emad

Shahin, who teaches Islam and politics at Georgetown University. “It is not Al Qaeda, but

far to its right.”

Some experts note that Saudi clerics lagged long after other Muslim scholars in

formally denouncing the Islamic State, and at one point even the king publicly urged

them to speak out more clearly. “There is a certain mutedness in the Saudi religious

establishment, which indicates it is not a slam dunk to condemn ISIS,” Professor Haykel

said.

Finally, on Aug. 19, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, the Saudi grand mufti, declared

that “the ideas of extremism, radicalism and terrorism do not belong to Islam in any way,

but are the first enemy of Islam, and Muslims are their first victims, as seen in the crimes

of the so-called Islamic State and Al Qaeda.”

Al Qaeda’s ideologues have been more vehement. All insist that the promised

caliphate requires a broad consensus, on behalf of Muslim scholars if not all Muslims,

and not merely one man’s proclamation after a military victory.

“Will this caliphate be a sanctuary for all the oppressed and a refuge for every

Muslim?” Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a senior jihadist scholar, recently asked in a

statement on the Internet. “Or will this creation take a sword against all the Muslims who

oppose it” and “nullify all the groups that do jihad in the name of God?”

Another prominent Qaeda-linked jihadist scholar, Abu Qatada al-Falistini, echoed

that: “They are merciless in dealing with other jihadists. How would they deal with the

poor, the weak and other people?”

Both scholars have recently been released from prison in Jordan, perhaps because

the government wants to amplify their criticism of the Islamic State.

Omar Al-Jawoshy and Sarmad Chalabi contributed reporting.

ISIS Releases Video of Execution ofBritish Aid WorkerBy RUKMINI CALLIMACHI and KIMIKO DE FREYTAS-TAMURA

October 3, 2014

Moved by the plight of the Syrian people, a middle-aged taxi driver from Manchester,

England, stood on street corners to raise money for an ambulance. Last December, the

man, Alan Henning, skipped Christmas with his family to become the sole non-Muslim

on an aid convoy traveling to northern Syria, only to be abducted within 30 minutes of

crossing into the war-ravaged country.

On Friday, the extremist group calling itself the Islamic State released a graphic

video of his beheading.

The militants killed the 47-year-old aid worker over the protests of leading Muslim

clerics — including one of the top Qaeda theorists — making it clear that the Islamic

State is so extreme it cannot be reined in even by the men who helped shape the ideology

of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization.

“Hi, I am Alan Henning,” the aid worker is forced to say in the moments before his

death. “Because of our Parliament’s decision to attack the Islamic State, I — as a member

of the British public — will now pay the price for that decision,” he says in the one

minute, 11 second clip, which was uploaded to YouTube on Friday afternoon.

He is shown wearing an orange jumpsuit and kneeling in a rocky landscape, in the

same pose as the three other Western hostages killed in the same manner in roughly two-

week intervals since August. After the camera pans over the dead body, the black-clad

executioner shows a man whom the militants identify as their next victim: an American

aid worker, Peter Kassig, a former Army Ranger, who founded an organization that

provides medical care in Syria, according to a statement from his family.

Holding him by the scruff of his neck, the masked fighter declares: “Obama, you

have started your air bombardment in Sham which keeps on striking our people. It is only

right that we continue to strike the necks of your people,” using a name for a region that

includes Syria.

Two weeks ago, residents of Raqqa, in northern Syria, which is where the hostages

were believed to be held for most of this year, said they saw Islamic State fighters driving

a captive in an orange suit, believed to be Mr. Henning — the residents were too far away

to identify him — to a hill. It is the same place where the first hostage, the American

journalist James Foley, was executed, they said.

One of the cars was “carrying a big TV camera,” said a member of an underground

activist group, who declined to be identified out of fears for his safety.

If the person beheaded on Sept. 20 was indeed Mr. Henning, it indicates the terrorist

group is carrying out its executions weeks before releasing the videos, timing their release

for maximum effect. In Mr. Henning’s case, they appear to have waited until after the

start of Britain’s airstrikes on the group.

Obama Calls Islamic State’s Killing ofPeter Kassig ‘Pure Evil’By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI

November 16, 2014

GAZIANTEP, Turkey — Islamic State militants released a chilling videotape on Sunday

showing they had beheaded a fifth Western hostage, an American aid worker the group

had threatened to kill in retaliation for airstrikes carried out by the United States in Iraq

and Syria.

President Obama on Sunday confirmed the death of the aid worker, Peter Kassig, a

former Army Ranger who disappeared more than a year ago at a checkpoint in

northeastern Syria while delivering medical supplies.

Mr. Kassig “was taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group,” Mr.

Obama said in a statement from aboard Air Force One that was read to the news media in

Washington.

In recent days, American intelligence agencies received strong indications that the

Islamic State had killed Mr. Kassig, the group’s third American victim. The president’s

announcement was the first official confirmation of his death.

The footage in the video released Sunday was of poorer quality than some of the

group’s previous, slickly produced execution videos.

The video shows a black-robed executioner standing over the severed head of Mr.

Kassig. Though the end result of the footage was grimly familiar, it was strikingly

different from the executions of four other Western hostages, whose recorded deaths were

carefully choreographed.

In the clip released early Sunday, the Islamic State displays the head of Mr. Kassig,

26, at the feet of a man with a British accent who appeared in the previous beheading

videos and has been nicknamed Jihadi John by the British news media. Unlike the earlier

videos, which were staged with multiple cameras from different vantage points, and

which show the hostages kneeling, then uttering their last words, the footage of Mr.

Kassig’s death is curtailed — showing only the final scene.

“This is Peter Edward Kassig, a U.S. citizen of your country. Peter, who fought

against the Muslims in Iraq while serving as a soldier under the American Army, doesn’t

have much to say. His previous cellmates have already spoken on his behalf,” the fighter

with a British accent says in the video. “You claim to have withdrawn from Iraq four

years ago. We said to you then that you are liars.”

Analysts said that the change in the videos suggested that something may have gone

wrong as the militants, who have been under sustained attack from a United States-led

military coalition and have faced a series of setbacks in recent weeks, carried out the

killing.

“The most obvious difference is in the beheading itself — the previous videos all

showed the beheading on camera,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the

Foundation for Defense of Democracies, in Washington, and a former director of the

Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization. “This one just shows the severed head

itself. I don’t think this was the Islamic State’s choice.” He added, “The likeliest

possibility is that something went wrong when they were beheading him.”

Among the things that could have gone wrong, analysts surmise, is that the

extremists did not have as much time outdoors as they did when they killed the others.

The United States announced soon after the first beheading in August that they would

send surveillance aircraft over Syria and residents contacted on social media have

reported seeing objects in the sky that they believe are drones.

The first four beheadings were carried out in the open air, with a cinematic precision

that suggests multiple takes, filmed over an extended period of time. Carrying out a

similar level of production as surveillance planes crisscrossed the skies above would

result in extended exposure — heightening risk.

Another possibility, Mr. Gartenstein-Ross said, is that Mr. Kassig resisted, depriving

the militants of the ability to stage the killing as they wanted.

“We know that this is a very media-savvy organization, and they know that you only

have one take to get the beheading right,” he said.

An Indianapolis native, Mr. Kassig turned to humanitarian work after a tour as an

Army Ranger in Iraq in 2007. He was certified as an emergency technician, and by 2012

he returned to the battlefield, this time helping bandage the victims of Syria’s civil war

who were flooding into Lebanon. He moved to Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, where he

founded a small aid group and initially used his savings to buy supplies, like diapers,

which he distributed to the Syrian refugees in Lebanon.

In the summer of 2013, he relocated to Gaziantep in southern Turkey, roughly an

hour from the border, and began making regular trips into Syria to offer medical care to

the wounded.

He disappeared on Oct. 1, 2013, when the ambulance he and a colleague were

driving was stopped at a checkpoint on the road to Deir al-Zour, Syria. He was

transferred late last year to a prison beneath the basement of the Children’s Hospital in

Aleppo, and then to a network of jails in Raqqa, the capital of the extremist group’s self-

declared caliphate, where he became one of at least 23 Western hostages held by the

group.

His cellmates included two American journalists, James Foley and Steven J. Sotloff,

as well as two British aid workers, David Haines and Alan Henning, who were beheaded

in roughly two-week intervals starting in August. Mr. Kassig was shown in the video

released in October that showed the decapitation of Mr. Henning.

The previous videos of beheadings produced by the Islamic State, also known as

ISIS or ISIL, appeared to be filmed in the same location, identified by analysts using geo-

mapping as a bald hill outside Raqqa. Each video was relatively short — under five

minutes on average — and included a speech by the hostage, in which he is forced to

accuse his government of crimes against Muslims, while the masked killer stands by

holding the knife.

By contrast, Mr. Kassig’s death appears in the final segment of a nearly 16-minute

video, which traces the history of the Islamic State, from its origins as a unit under the

control of Osama bin Laden to its modern incarnation in the region straddling Iraq and

Syria. In one extended sequence, a mass beheading of captured Syrian soldiers is shown,

filmed with long close-ups of details, like the shining blade of the executioner’s knife,

mirroring the high production quality of the first four beheading videos.

The part showing Mr. Kassig’s body is amateurish compared with both the footage

of the soldiers being killed and previous executions of Westerners.

“The final Kassig execution section is definitely different from previous videos,”

said Jarret Brachman, a counterterrorism expert who advises the United States

intelligence community. The “message to President Obama from Jihadi John is sloppy,

jumbled and redundant. His joke about Kassig having nothing to say seems like a

defensive way of covering up the fact that they don’t have a video of his actual beheading

or weren’t able to make one.”

In the months leading up to his death, Mr. Kassig seemed to know the end was near.

In a letter to his parents smuggled out this summer, he described his fear: “I am

obviously pretty scared to die but the hardest part is not knowing, wondering, hoping, and

wondering if I should even hope at all,” he wrote. “Just know I’m with you. Every

stream, every lake, every field and river. In the woods and in the hills, in all the places

you showed me. I love you.”

Karam Shoumali contributed reporting from Gaziantep, Turkey, and Michael S. Schmidt

and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.

Islamic State Imposes Strict New Orderin Mosul, and Deprivation Is a ResultBy BEN HUBBARD

December 13, 2014

ERBIL, Iraq — As the school year began in Mosul, the largest city controlled by the

Islamic State, the extremists sent a message to teachers: Report for work or lose your

jobs.

Then, directives bearing the group’s black flag and hung in schools dictated the new

order. Males and females were split up. Girls were to swap their gray skirts and blouses

for black gowns and veils that covered their faces. Sports were only for boys. Civics

classes were scrapped. At the University of Mosul, one of Iraq’s top institutions, the

schools of fine arts, political science and law were deemed un-Islamic and shuttered.

The teachers were in a bind. Not showing up meant defying a group that often

murdered its foes. But going to work could anger the government in Baghdad, which still

paid their salaries. Out of fear, many teachers complied.

Six months after the Islamic State seized Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, its

efforts to overhaul the school system reflect the limits of its progress toward building a

self-governing caliphate on the land it controls in Iraq and Syria.

Although the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, presents itself as a liberating,

governing force for the region’s Sunnis, it has largely failed to provide civilian services,

instead focusing its limited manpower on social control.

The result has been a life of deprivation, fear and confusion for the city’s roughly

one million remaining residents, according to interviews with 15 people, reached by

phone inside Mosul, whose full identities have been withheld to prevent retribution.

Electricity has been cut off for months, and spotty maintenance has made tap water

undrinkable. Residents now chlorinate it, boil it or filter it through rugs. The Islamic State

trucks in fuel from Syria for cars and generators, but the fuel is expensive and fills the

street with black smoke. Shops still sell food, but prices are up because the Islamic State

taxes trucks entering its areas.

The salaries of public sector workers illustrate the paradox of jihadist governance.

Although the Islamic State has vowed to erase the Iraqi government, it relies on Baghdad

to pay doctors, nurses, teachers and others who keep civil institutions running.

Mohammed, a high school teacher, said that since the Islamic State looted Mosul’s

banks, one of his colleagues has crossed the front lines to Kurdish-held Kirkuk to fetch

salaries. Back in Mosul, an Islamic State fighter monitored distribution, seizing cash

meant for those who did not show up.

In hospitals, factories and schools, the Islamic State has appointed “emirs” to

oversee operations. From his office in the Islamic State-occupied education

administration, an Egyptian known as Thu al-Qarnain, a name from the Quran, has called

for wide-ranging changes, including striking the word “Iraq” from textbooks.

But implementation has been spotty, Mohammed said, because the Islamic State

lacks personnel. Gunmen near his school ensure there is no gender mixing, but there are

too few to redact material in textbooks or to monitor classes. “They are too occupied with

their war,” Mohammed said. “The most important thing for them is that we say they are

the state.”

The Islamic State has used similar means to shape life in other cities it controls.

Many of Falluja’s residents have fled since the militant fighters took over this year, and

services are minimal. But morality police patrol, and recently castigated young men for

swimming in the Euphrates River because women might see them.

“We don’t want to keep you from swimming,” a man said in a video posted online.

“But we must follow the Shariah that Prophet Muhammad brought to us.”

The group has made the most progress in the Syrian city of Raqqa, which it has

controlled for nearly a year. But the United States and its allies often bomb Islamic State

bases and oil facilities near the city, interrupting the group’s operations. And the Syrian

government regularly bombs the city itself, killing civilians.

In Mosul, the group’s fighters have become less visible since the United States and

its allies launched an air campaign in August that has struck near the city. They drive

civilian cars and have moved into homes vacated by Christians and Shiites, sometimes

with their wives and children. Dozens of fighters sleep in a historic church, a target the

United States is unlikely to bomb.

This month, amid talk of gathering ground troops from the area to fight the Islamic

State, the group instituted a “sponsorship” system, whereby anyone wishing to leave the

city must register with a “sponsor” who would remain in the city and could be arrested if

the traveler did not return.

The group maintains some local support. It has heavily recruited men from Mosul’s

poor hinterlands for its Islamic Police, giving them guns, salaries and patrol cars, and

arranging their marriages. Other residents distrust Baghdad and its heavy reliance on

Shiite militias, which have committed abuses in Sunni areas.

“The question is: If not ISIS, then who? The militias and the military?” asked

Haidar, a shopkeeper. “People say it is better to have ISIS.”

Mosul is largely free of the daily car bombs that shake other Iraqi cities, although

the Islamic State broadcasts its violence, screening videos of battles and executions at

media booths at intersections and mosques.

Navigating the new order is a struggle for many residents.

After the militants seized the city, Ban, a 46-year-old pharmacist, donned the veil

and stopped driving herself to work. But the Islamic Police confronted her in her

pharmacy, asking where her husband was and why she did not cover her face.

“I was thinking that they might take me somewhere and of all the stories of the

women who have been kidnapped and raped,” she said.

Her husband visited the Islamic Police and signed a pledge that his wife would stop

working. But to keep the pharmacy open, the family hired a man to work in the front

while Ban hid in the back and filled prescriptions for patients she could not see.

Checkpoints appear randomly. Gunmen check IDs and search men’s cellphones,

looking for secular songs or chats with girls. Punishments range from religious lectures to

fines to lashings.

One man, Khalid, said that gunmen came to his house in July while his family was

eating breakfast and arrested his father, who is in his 60s, along with other men from the

neighborhood.

Khalid was too scared to follow up, but his neighbors went to a Shariah court set up

by the Islamic State to ask about their relatives.

“They never responded,” he said. “All of their talk is lies, lies, lies. They said that

he’d be back in a few days, but there has been no news.”

In videos released online, the Islamic State portrays itself as a benevolent force and

characterizes resistance as an attack on Islam.

After the Egyptian jihadist group Ansar Beit al-Maqdis pledged allegiance to the

Islamic State, the group released a video of its fighters parading through Mosul and

distributing candy.

Another video showed it training a few dozen young boys in black uniforms to fight

with knives and carry rifles. Yet another showed bearded men giving toys to children in a

park and quizzing them.

“What is the name of the month when we fast?” one man asks.

“Ramadan!” a crowd of young girls screams.

“Who is the leader of the believers?” the man asks.

“Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi!” the girls yell, giving the name of the leader of the Islamic

State.

Yasir Ghazi contributed reporting.

Departing From Japan’s Pacifism,Shinzo Abe Vows Revenge for KillingsBy MARTIN FACKLER

February 1, 2015

TOKYO — When Islamic State militants posted a video over the weekend showing the

grisly killing of a Japanese journalist, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe reacted with outrage,

promising “to make the terrorists pay the price.”

Such vows of retribution may be common in the West when leaders face extremist

violence, but they have been unheard of in confrontation-averse Japan — until now. The

prime minister’s call for revenge after the killings of the journalist, Kenji Goto, and

another hostage, Haruna Yukawa, raised eyebrows even in the military establishment,

adding to a growing awareness here that the crisis could be a watershed for this long

pacifist country.

“Japan has not seen this Western-style expression in its diplomacy before,” Akihisa

Nagashima, a former vice minister of defense, wrote on Twitter. “Does he intend to give

Japan the capability to back up his words?”

As the 12-day hostage crisis came to a grim conclusion with the killing of Mr. Goto,

the world has suddenly begun to look like a much more dangerous place to a peaceful and

prosperous nation that had long seen itself as immune to the sorts of violence faced by the

United States and its Western allies.

Some described a level of shock not unlike that experienced by the Americans after

the 2001 terrorist attacks, or the French after last month’s assault on the newspaper

Charlie Hebdo and the murders in a kosher supermarket.

“This is 9/11 for Japan,” said Kunihiko Miyake, a former high-ranking Japanese

diplomat who has advised Mr. Abe on foreign affairs. “It is time for Japan to stop

daydreaming that its good will and noble intentions would be enough to shield it from the

dangerous world out there. Americans have faced this harsh reality, the French have faced

it, and now we are, too.”

The crisis also comes at a crucial moment in Japan’s modern history. Since taking

office two years ago, Mr. Abe, a strong-willed conservative, has tried to push his nation

into shedding the passive brand of pacifism that it repentantly embraced after defeat in

World War II, and playing a more active role in world events. Analysts and former

diplomats say the stark savagery of the killings will be an important test of how ready

Japan really is to step onto the global stage.

The question, analysts and diplomats say, is whether the trauma of the killings will

drain Japan’s will to seek a higher international profile, or stiffen its resolve.

This new challenge came in the form of two videos released within a week of each

other, both by the Islamic State, whose militants control large parts of Syria and Iraq. The

first video, posted online last weekend, showed the decapitated body of Mr. Yukawa, 42,

an adventurer who was captured last August by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or

ISIL. The second video, which surfaced over the weekend, showed the doomed journalist,

Mr. Goto, 47, stoically kneeling as his dagger-wielding executioner criticizes Japan for

joining the American-led coalition against the Islamic State.

He then menacingly warns that no Japanese are safe anywhere in the world.

“Let the nightmare for Japan begin,” the masked militant proclaims before reaching

down to kill Mr. Goto.

Japan reacted with an outpouring of fury and sorrow at the death of Mr. Goto, a

respected journalist who was a veteran of war zones. Local television stations showed

clips from his reports from places like Syria and Iraq, where he often reported on the

plight of children and noncombatants. It was also noted that Japan was not even involved

in the United States-led bombing campaign against the Islamic State, but its citizens were

taken hostage and killed in the same cruel manner as those from other countries.

“I feel a deep despair that I’ve never felt before and an unfocused anger,” Taku

Nishimae, a filmmaker who began an online campaign to free Mr. Goto by holding up a

placard saying “I am Kenji,” told Kyodo News.

For now at least, such anger appears to have given Japan the resolve to reject the

Islamic State’s threats, and to support Mr. Abe’s efforts to raise Japan’s profile in the

Middle East.

At the same time, many Japanese also appeared ready to adapt to this new reality by

discussing ways to reduce their nation’s vulnerability. On Japan’s Sunday morning

political debate programs, politicians seemed to compete with one another in offering

proposals to increase security, by such steps as more screening of foreigners entering the

country, creating an overseas spy agency or writing new legislation to give Japan’s tightly

constrained military more freedom to act overseas to protect the more than 1.5 million

Japanese who live abroad.

“I don’t see any sign of the Japanese people wanting to back down; to the contrary,

they are quite angry,” said Ichiro Fujisaki, a former Japanese ambassador to the United

States. “It’s actually surprising the extent to which people are united in standing against

the terrorist group.”

Other analysts agree that the Japanese public seems to be rallying around its leaders

in a time of crisis. They added, however, that as the shock wears off, there will be more

questioning of how Mr. Abe’s government handled the crisis. In particular, they expect

growing attention on how much responsibility Mr. Abe should bear for creating the crisis

in the first place.

“The debate starts from now,” said Fumiaki Kubo, a political expert at the

University of Tokyo. “Opinions were divided before the hostage crisis, but they may

prove even more divided after it.”

Critics on the left are already starting to fault Mr. Abe for provoking the Islamic

State two weeks ago when he offered $200 million in nonlethal aid to countries that were

confronting the group. In its initial ransom demand, the Islamic State made a point of

demanding the same sum, $200 million, and later criticizing Mr. Abe for what it called

his “reckless decision to take part in an unwinnable war” waged by the United States-led

coalition against the militant group.

This has already been enough to renew fears among many Japanese that Mr. Abe’s

efforts to raise Japan’s profile could end up entangling the country in distant wars. These

concerns were apparent on Sunday in interviews with citizens on their views of Japan’s

response to the hostage crisis.

Hiroyuki Hamada, 61, an engineer who lives in a Tokyo suburb, said he was

opposed to getting any more deeply involved in the United States-led effort against the

Islamic State.

“I fear we will just fall into an unending cycle of violence begetting violence,” Mr.

Hamada said.

But there have also been strong popular shows of support for Mr. Abe and his

efforts to make Japan a more global partner of the United States, on whom it still relies

for its defense. In coming weeks, Mr. Abe will seek legislative changes to expand the role

of the military; for instance, by allowing it to go to the aid of a friendly nation under

attack, something it cannot now legally do. But Mr. Abe has also carefully insisted that he

still wants to restrict Japan to a largely nonmilitary role.

“No country is completely safe from terrorism,” Mr. Abe told Parliament last week.

“How do we cut the influence of ISIL, and put a stop to extremism? Japan must play its

part in achieving this.”

He has also emphasized that the $200 million in aid he offered two weeks ago was

solely for humanitarian purposes. On Sunday, Mr. Abe proclaimed that he wanted to

increase Japan’s nonlethal aid to countries opposing the Islamic State.

“The cruelty of the Islamic State has made Japan see a harsh new reality,” said Mr.

Kubo of the University of Tokyo. “We now realize we face the same dangers as other

countries do.”

Makiko Inoue contributed reporting from Sayama, Japan.

Jordanian Pilot’s Death, Shown in ISISVideo, Spurs Jordan to Execute PrisonersBy ROD NORDLAND and RANYA KADRI

February 3, 2015

AMMAN, Jordan — When relatives learned Tuesday night that the Islamic State had

released a video showing the death of a Jordanian fighter pilot, First Lt. Moaz al-

Kasasbeh, they tried to keep it from his mother, Issaf, and his wife, Anwar. They

switched off the television and tried to wrest a smartphone out of his wife’s hand, but she

had already seen a mobile news bulletin.

Anwar ran crying into the street, calling her husband’s name and saying, “Please,

God, let it not be true.” Issaf fell to the floor screaming, pulled her head scarf off and

started tearing at her hair.

That was even before they knew how he had been killed. No one dared let them

know right away that Lieutenant Kasasbeh’s tormentors had apparently burned him alive

inside a cage, a killing that was soon described as the most brutal in the group’s bloody

history.

Jordan responded rapidly, executing Sajida al-Rishawi, who was convicted after

attempting a suicide bombing, and Ziad al-Karbouli, a top lieutenant of Al Qaeda in Iraq,

before dawn on Wednesday, according to the official news agency Petra.

On Tuesday, Anwar Kasasbeh had been laughing at the memory of her husband’s

delight when he discovered that her family kept rabbits in their home. After they married,

her parents gave them the rabbits to take care of.

“It was so funny, he was so happy about those rabbits,” Anwar told a visiting

reporter about her 26-year-old husband. “He told me how he always wanted rabbits.”

The video, with its references to the Islamic State’s punishment of nations like

Jordan that joined the American-led coalition against it, appeared to be an attempt to cow

the Arab nations and other countries that have agreed to battle the militants in Syria. So

far, it appeared to have had the opposite effect in Jordan, which suggested its resolve had

been stiffened. But the capture of the pilot had already hurt the coalition, with the United

Arab Emirates suspending its own airstrikes in December and demanding that the group

improve its search and rescue efforts for captured members.

The release of the video came after weeks of growing anxiety in Jordan as the

country’s leaders tried desperately to win the release of Lieutenant Kasasbeh, a member

of an important tribe and the first fighter for the coalition bombing the Islamic State to be

captured. Their attempts became more complicated late last month when the Islamic

State, also called ISIS or ISIL, suddenly entangled the pilot’s fate with that of a Japanese

man it held hostage, demanding that Jordan release Ms. Rishawi in exchange for him.

If Jordan failed to do so by last Thursday, they said, Lieutenant Kasasbeh would be

killed. Jordanian officials expressed willingness to bargain, a major concession to the

militants, but refused to release Ms. Rishawi until they received proof that the pilot was

alive.

On Tuesday, Jordanian officials said they learned that the pilot had actually been

killed on Jan. 3, suggesting that their caution had been justifiable. They did not, however,

explain where they got the information.

Even by Islamic State standards, the latest propaganda video was particularly

gruesome. The footage alternated images of the pilot while he was alive with segments

showing the rubble of destroyed buildings and the burned bodies of Syrians allegedly

killed in coalition airstrikes. Islamic State members took to Twitter to applaud the pilot’s

death, calling it an eye for an eye.

At the end of the 22-minute video, an Islamic State fighter set a powder fuse alight

as Lieutenant Kasasbeh watched, his clothes drenched in fuel. The flames raced into the

cage and engulfed him. The camera lingered, showing close-ups of his agony, before

concluding with pictures of what the Islamic State claimed were other Jordanian pilots

and an offer of a reward of 100 gold coins for whoever killed one of them. (American

officials said they were trying to authenticate the video.)

The Jordanian military responded swiftly. “The blood of our hero martyr, Moaz

Kasasbeh, will not go for nothing,” said Mamdouh al-Ameri, a spokesman for the

Jordanian military. “And the revenge will be equal to what happened to Jordan.”

Within hours, a convoy was seen leaving the women’s prison in Jordan, presumably

taking Ms. Rishawi to the men’s prison an hour outside Amman where executions are

carried out, normally by hanging.

Both prisoners had already been sentenced to death for terrorism offenses. Mr.

Karbouli was accused as one of the planners of the 2005 hotel bombings in Amman that

killed more than 57 people; Ms. Rishawi was the only one of four suicide bombers in that

attack whose explosive vest failed to detonate. Both were affiliated with Al Qaeda in Iraq,

which became the present-day Islamic State.

Jordan and the United Arab Emirates are among several Arab countries taking part

in American-led air raids against Islamic State positions in Syria. Two other Arab states,

plus Iraq, are members of the coalition in other capacities.

Lieutenant Kasasbeh was said to have been shot down in his F-16 fighter bomber on

Dec. 24 during an air operation against Islamic State positions not far from the militants’

stronghold of Raqqa in northern Syria.

He cut a dashing figure in uniform, with green eyes, black hair and a slim build, and

he had a significant social media following.

His capture transfixed the nation, which suddenly saw photos of the lieutenant being

dragged by militants out of a swamp where he had apparently crashed.

Weeks before the deadly attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in France

prompted refrains of “Je Suis Charlie,” Jordan’s Queen Rania started a campaign on

Instagram called “We Are All Moaz.”

Lieutenant Kasasbeh’s captivity at first aroused anti-coalition sentiment among

many in Jordan, but public opinion shifted dramatically as the Islamic State issued videos

showing what it said were the beheadings of two Japanese hostages, including the one the

militants had wanted to trade. By last week, critics of the coalition and the government

had come under fire for trying to turn the pilot’s plight to political advantage.

For someone in the elite forefront of Jordan’s air force — its 60 or more F-16s are

its most important aircraft — Lieutenant Kasasbeh did not show any early interest in the

military or in flying, his family said.

“It was just by happenstance,” his father, Safi Youssef Al-Kasasbeh, said Sunday.

During his last year in high school, his son, the fourth of eight children and the third son,

had been planning to go to medical school in Russia, as his mother had long encouraged.

But he saw a notice in a Jordanian newspaper inviting candidates to see if they qualified

for the air force, and, on a lark, Lieutenant Kasasbeh applied for what would be a

prestigious position.

To everyone’s surprise, he was chosen over hundreds of other applicants and went

straight to flight school instead of to college. He was commissioned as an air force officer

in 2009.

His eldest brother, Jawad Safi al-Kasasbeh, an engineer seven years older than

Moaz, took his captivity particularly hard. Twice, Jawad had saved his younger brother’s

life when he was a small child: once when Moaz accidentally started a fire, and another

time when he nearly stuck a nail in an electric socket.

“Now, when he really needs me, I can’t do anything,” Jawad said. “I was the one

who was supposed to support him, to be there for him.”

Jawad even helped introduce him to his future wife, Anwar, the sister of Jawad’s

best friend. The couple had moved into an apartment of their own, in the family’s

hometown, Al Karak, so Moaz could be close to his parents, instead of near the air base a

couple hours’ drive away. Moaz often visited his parents on days off, and the last time

Jawad saw him, five days before he was captured, he had been taking his father’s car to

Amman for repair.

Far from the speed-addict image of the fighter pilot, his family said, Moaz was

austere in his personal habits. His car was a nine-year-old Mitsubishi Lancer, and he

rarely wore jeans, preferring suits when he was not in uniform.

His brothers and his parents agreed that Lieutenant Kasasbeh had always been the

favored son, the one closest to the parents among the eight siblings. He usually got his

own way with his father, but not always.

Like Anwar, Jawad recalled how much his brother had wanted a pet rabbit and how

he had badgered their father, who said they had no place to put it. So Moaz built an

enclosure in the yard and asked again. When his father said they had no food for the

animal, Moaz gathered rabbit food and stocked the enclosure. Still no. So he got his baby

sister and put her there, saying, “See, she’s my rabbit now.”

Tears came to Jawad’s eyes as he recalled that story. Before she learned of her

husband’s death, Anwar, his wife, worried that he would be upset if he returned home to

learn that, distracted by concern over his plight, no one had taken care of the rabbits, and

they had escaped.

Rukmini Callimachi and Somini Sengupta contributed reporting from New York; Rana F.

Sweis from Amman, Jordan; and Karam Shoumali from Istanbul.

Editorial: Obama Seeks an ExpansiveWar Authorization to Combat ISISBy THE EDITORIAL BOARD

February 11, 2015

Nearly five months after launching a war against the Islamic State, in Iraq and Syria, the

Obama administration has gotten around to requesting formal authorization from

Congress to conduct that war.

While indefensibly late, the move is nonetheless welcome if it triggers the long-

needed substantive debate about the goals, scope and justification of a military

intervention that was launched with the claim of authority from laws passed more than a

decade ago to allow the use of force in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In seeking a three-year authorization, President Obama appears to be trying to avoid

leaving an open-ended mandate that his successor could interpret unjustifiably broadly,

much as his administration has. The request sets limits on the use of ground forces, which

is good news if Congress and the White House view that as explicitly ruling out another

protracted intervention.

The parameters of a proposed war authorization the White House sent to Congress

on Wednesday, however, are alarmingly broad. It does not limit the battlefield to Syria

and Iraq, the strongholds of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, which is

attempting to form a caliphate. It also seeks permission to attack “associated persons or

forces” of the brutal group, a term that appears to be excessively expansive and could

undermine Mr. Obama’s stated intent to limit the force authorization.

While a new Authorization for Use of Military Force, or A.U.M.F., would sunset the

2002 law Congress passed to pave the way for the invasion of Iraq, it would leave intact

the 2001 mandate for the war in Afghanistan. That is problematic, considering that the

Obama administration has relied on that law to start attacks that were well beyond the

scope of what lawmakers authorized at the time. In a letter to Congress delivered on

Wednesday, Mr. Obama reiterated his intent to “refine, and ultimately repeal” that statute,

which serves as a foundation for American military operations in Afghanistan. He should

go further and set a date for its expiration.

If the White House prevails, it would get virtually unrestricted power to engage in

attacks around the globe as long as it can justify a connection, however tenuous, to the

Islamic State.

While that type of sweeping mandate makes some Democrats uneasy, Mr. Obama is

likely to get backing from many Republicans. Certainly, there is cause to be alarmed by

the threat posed by the Islamic State. The savagery of the group, which has beheaded

journalists and aid workers, warrants a muscular response from the international

community. “If left unchecked, ISIL will pose a threat beyond the Middle East, including

to the United States homeland,” Mr. Obama wrote in the letter.

But as Congress tailors a new war authorization, lawmakers should reflect on the

missteps and unintended consequences of efforts over the past decade to fight Sunni

insurgent groups in the Middle East and Africa. While American bombs and firepower

have undoubtedly killed many terrorists, some of the tactics the government has used

have expanded the ranks of militant groups. A mandate for war that was intended to

punish the terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks was bloated to the point where it could be

used to justify anti-terrorist campaigns just about anywhere.

Striking the proper balance is more an art than a science. Washington is more likely

to get it right if it takes stock of the recent past and resists the temptation to keep the

country on an unrestricted war footing.

ISIS Onslaught Engulfs AssyrianChristians as Militants Destroy AncientArtBy ANNE BARNARD

February 26, 2015

ISTANBUL — The reports are like something out of a distant era of ancient conquests:

entire villages emptied, with hundreds taken prisoner, others kept as slaves; the

destruction of irreplaceable works of art; a tax on religious minorities, payable in gold.

A rampage reminiscent of Tamerlane or Genghis Khan, perhaps, but in reality,

according to reports by residents, activist groups and the assailants themselves, a

description of the modus operandi of the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate this week.

The militants have prosecuted a relentless campaign in Iraq and Syria against what have

historically been religiously and ethnically diverse areas with traces of civilizations dating

to ancient Mesopotamia.

The latest to face the militants’ onslaught are the Assyrian Christians of northeastern

Syria, one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, some speaking a modern version

of Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

Assyrian leaders have counted 287 people taken captive, including 30 children and

several dozen women, along with civilian men and fighters from Christian militias, said

Dawoud Dawoud, an Assyrian political activist who had just toured the area, in the

vicinity of the Syrian city of Qamishli. Thirty villages have been emptied, he said.

The Syriac Military Council, a local Assyrian militia, put the number of those taken

at 350.

Reached in Qamishli, Adul Ahad Nissan, 48, an accountant and music composer

who fled his village before the brunt of the fighting, said a close friend and his wife had

been captured.

“I used to call them every other day. Now their mobile is off,” he said. “I tried and

tried. It’s so painful not to see your friends again.”

Members of the Assyrian diaspora have called for international intervention, and on

Thursday, warplanes of the United States-led coalition struck targets in the area,

suggesting that the threat to a minority enclave had galvanized a reaction, as a similar

threat did in the Kurdish Syrian city of Kobani last year.

The assault on the Assyrian communities comes amid battles for a key crossroads in

the area. But to residents, it also seems to be part of the latest effort by the Islamic State

militants to eradicate or subordinate anyone and anything that does not comport with their

vision of Islamic rule — whether a minority sect that has survived centuries of

conquerors and massacres or, as the world was reminded on Thursday, the archaeological

traces of pre-Islamic antiquity.

An Islamic State video showed the militants smashing statues with sledgehammers

inside the Mosul Museum, in northern Iraq, that showcases recent archaeological finds

from the ancient Assyrian empire. The relics include items from the palace of King

Sennacherib, who in the Byron poem “came down like the wolf on the fold” to destroy

his enemies.

“A tragedy and catastrophic loss for Iraqi history and archaeology beyond

comprehension,” Amr al-Azm, a Syrian anthropologist and historian, called the

destruction on his Facebook page.

“These are some of the most wonderful examples of Assyrian art, and they’re part of

the great history of Iraq, and of Mesopotamia,” he said in an interview. “The whole world

has lost this.”

Islamic State militants seized the museum — which had not yet opened to the public

— when they took over Mosul in June and have repeatedly threatened to destroy its

collection.

In the video, put out by the Islamic State’s media office for Nineveh Province —

named for an ancient Assyrian city — a man explains, “The monuments that you can see

behind me are but statues and idols of people from previous centuries, which they used to

worship instead of God.”

A message flashing on the screen read: “Those statues and idols weren’t there at the

time of the Prophet nor his companions. They have been excavated by Satanists.”

The men, some bearded and in traditional Islamic dress, others clean-shaven in jeans

and T-shirts, were filmed toppling and destroying artifacts. One is using a power tool to

deface a winged lion much like a pair on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in

New York.

The Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has presented itself as a modern-day

equivalent of the conquering invaders of Sennacherib’s day, or as Islamic zealots

smashing relics out of religious conviction.

Yet in the past, the militants have veered between ideology and pragmatism in their

relationship to antiquity — destroying historic mosques, tombs and artifacts that they

consider forms of idolatry, but also selling more portable objects to fill their coffers.

The latest eye-catching destruction could have a more strategic aim, said Mr. Azm,

who closely follows the Syrian conflict and opposes both the Islamic State and the

government.

“It’s all a provocation,” he said, aimed at accelerating a planned effort, led by Iraqi

forces and backed by United States warplanes, to take back Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest

city.

“They want a fight with the West because that’s how they gain credibility and

recruits,” Mr. Azm said. “They want boots on the ground. They want another Falluja,” a

reference to the 2004 battle in which United States Marines, in the largest ground

engagement since Vietnam, took that Iraqi city from Qaeda-linked insurgents whose

organization would eventually give birth to the Islamic State.

The Islamic State has been all-inclusive in its violence against the modern diversity

of Iraq and Syria. It considers Shiite Muslims apostates, and has destroyed Shiite shrines

and massacred more than 1,000 Shiite Iraqi soldiers. It has demanded that Christians

living in its territories pay the jizya, a tax on religious minorities dating to early Islamic

rule.

Islamic State militants have also slaughtered fellow Sunni Muslims who reject their

rule, killing hundreds of members of the Shueitat tribe in eastern Syria in one clash alone.

They have also massacred and enslaved members of the Yazidi sect in Iraq.

The latest to face its wrath, the Assyrian Christians, consider themselves the

descendants of the ancient Assyrians and have survived often bloody Arab, Mongolian

and Ottoman conquests, living in modern times as a small minority community

periodically under threat. Thousands fled northern Iraq last year as Islamic State militants

swept into Nineveh Province.

Early in February, according to Assyrian groups inside and outside Syria, came a

declaration from the Islamic State that Christians in a string of villages along the Khabur

River in Syrian Hasaka Province would have to take down their crosses and pay the jizya,

traditionally paid in gold.

That prompted some to flee, and others to take a more active part in fighting ISIS

alongside Kurdish militias, helping take back some territory.

Islamic State militants hit back, hard, driving more than 1,000 Assyrian Christians

from their homes, some crossing the Khabur River, a tributary of the Euphrates, in small

boats by night.

Local Assyrian leaders are negotiating with the Islamic State through mediators,

said Mr. Dawoud, the deputy president of the Assyrian Democratic Organization. The

Assyrian International News Agency, a website sharing community news, said that Arab

tribal leaders were mediating talks to exchange the prisoners for captured Islamic State

fighters and that the Islamic State had agreed to free Christian civilians but not fighters.

Mr. Nissan, the accountant, described how he and others crammed into a truck,

paying exorbitant rates, to escape. Earlier, he said, Nusra Front fighters and other Syrian

insurgents had looted the village without harming anyone, but he feared ISIS more

because “they consider us infidels.”

“I made a vow, when I return I want to kiss the soil of my village and pray in the

church,” he said, adding that he had composed a song for the residents of Nineveh

Province when they were displaced a few months ago.

“I called it ‘Greetings from Khabur to Nineveh,’ ” he said. “Now we’re facing the

same scenario.”

Hwaida Saad and Maher Samaan contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, and

Karen Zraick from New York.

‘Jihadi John’ From ISIS ExecutionVideos Was Under Watch by BritishIntelligenceBy STEVEN ERLANGER

February 26, 2015

LONDON — Mohammed Emwazi was 6 when his parents moved to West London from

his birthplace in Kuwait, and he seems to have lived a normal life, studying hard and

graduating in computer sciences from the University of Westminster in 2009.

But he came to the attention of the British intelligence services in May that same

year, detained as he landed in Tanzania with two friends on what he described as a

celebratory safari. British officials thought he and his friends were headed to Somalia, to

fight with the Shabab terrorist group and allegedly tried to recruit him as an informant

before shipping him back home.

Mr. Emwazi was identified on Thursday as the masked Islamic State fighter called

“Jihadi John,” and his journey from computer student to a murderous spokesman for the

Islamic State is only beginning to come clear. How and when he was radicalized, and

whether the British intelligence services were at fault — either dealing with him too

harshly or not identifying him as a serious threat soon enough — are already the subjects

of hot debate.

The question for security services is the same all over the West, whether in Britain,

France or now in the United States, as some young Muslims are becoming radicalized or

seeking to join a jihad. Given important constitutional and legal protections, how do

counterterrorism and police officials draw the line when they find enough evidence to

suspect someone, but do not have enough to prosecute them, or even to keep them under

legal surveillance?

“Doing nothing is not practical or acceptable under today’s conditions,” said

Shashank Joshi, a senior research fellow at Royal United Services Institute, a British

research institution.

Mr. Emwazi was called Jihadi John by the foreign hostages he guarded, a number of

whom he apparently beheaded in widely circulated videos. He was first identified on

Thursday by the Washington Post website, and his name was confirmed by a senior

British security official. The official said that the British government had identified Mr.

Emwazi some time ago but had not disclosed his name for operational reasons. The

identification was also confirmed in Washington by a senior United States military

intelligence official.

Information about Mr. Emwazi is still vague, with Britain officially refusing to

confirm that he is indeed “Jihadi John” because of what are described as continuing

operations.

But Mr. Emwazi appears in 2011 court documents, obtained by the BBC, as a

member of a network of extremists who funneled funds, equipment and recruits “from the

United Kingdom to Somalia to undertake terrorism-related activity.”

Mr. Emwazi is alleged to be part of a group from West and North London,

sometimes known as the North London Boys, with links to the Shabab terrorist group

from Somalia, organized by an individual who had returned to London in February 2007

and whose name was redacted in court documents.

Another person associated with that group was Bilal al-Berjawi, who was born in

Lebanon but brought to West London as a baby. He fought in Somalia and rose through

the ranks of the Shabab and Al Qaeda in Africa before being killed in a drone strike in

January 2012, according to Raffaello Pantucci, also a fellow at the Royal United Services

Institute.

Mr. Berjawi traveled to Kenya in February 2009, telling his family he was heading

for a safari; he and a friend were detained in Nairobi and shipped back to London, but

made it to Somalia in October that year.

The neighborhood group “is a tight community and it’s very probable that they

knew each other and were part of the same crew,” Mr. Pantucci said.

So it is likely that Mr. Emwazi’s own safari a few months later in May, from Britain

to Germany to Tanzania, when he used the name Muhammad ibn Muazzam, set off

alarms with the British security services, and that he had started on the road to radicalism

even before his encounter with MI5 in 2009.

Asim Qureshi, research director at CAGE, a British advocacy organization opposed

to what it calls the “war on terror,” met with Mr. Emwazi in the fall of 2009. Mr. Emwazi

was very angry over his treatment at the hands of British security services, Mr. Qureshi

said, and the two stayed in contact for two years.

Mr. Qureshi said he was not 100 percent sure that Mr. Emwazi, whom he described

as “extremely kind, extremely humble and extremely soft-spoken,” was the masked

Islamic State terrorist.

But he nonetheless blamed Mr. Emwazi’s treatment for his radicalization, describing

harassment by police officers at airports, pressure on Kuwait to cancel a visa and on one

occasion, Mr. Emwazi’s being “roughed up” and “strangled by a police officer” before

being sent home.

“This is not somebody who ever said, ‘I hate the system, I reject the system,’ ” Mr.

Qureshi said. “It’s someone who said, ‘I don’t like the environment but I’ll work within

the system to effect change.’ ”

As ever, there are conflicting interpretations, with some seeing a young Muslim man

treated badly, put into a headlock, barred from traveling and induced to betray his friends,

and those who say that such treatment is not any excuse, or reason, for repeatedly cutting

off the heads of civilians taken hostage.

Further, there are others who are wondering how security services can identify

potential terrorists like Mr. Emwazi, but then fail to recognize what risk they pose.

The CAGE group, which embraces its notoriety, emphasized similar circumstances

in the case of Michael Adebolajo, who hacked to death a British soldier, Lee Rigby,

outside a London barracks in May 2013.

Mr. Adebolajo claimed that he had been detained in Kenya and tortured by British

officials who suspected that he was traveling to Somalia to join the Shabab, and that MI5

also tried to turn him into an informer.

Mr. Emwazi, returning from Tanzania, was detained again at an airport in the

Netherlands and questioned by Dutch and British security officials.

Mr. Emwazi later moved to Kuwait, his birthplace, working for a computer

company, and he returned to London at least twice, Mr. Qureshi said. British

counterterrorism officials detained Mr. Emwazi in June 2010, fingerprinting him and

searching his belongings. In July of that year, Mr. Qureshi said, Mr. Emwazi was not

allowed to return to Kuwait, which had apparently refused to renew his visa, and Mr.

Emwazi blamed the British government.

“I had a job waiting for me and marriage to get started,” he wrote in a 2010 email to

Mr. Qureshi. “But now I feel like a prisoner, only not in a cage, in London.”

In his statement, Mr. Qureshi said of Mr. Emwazi, “He desperately wanted to use

the system to change his situation, but the system ultimately rejected him.”

Mr. Qureshi said he last heard from Mr. Emwazi in January 2012. By 2013, he was

in Idlib, Syria, helping to guard Western hostages. In August 2014, he presided over the

first of the beheading videos of those hostages.

Even if Mr. Emwazi’s version of events, as passed on by Mr. Qureshi, is true, Mr.

Pantucci asked, “Is it justifiable to go and behead journalists and aid workers because you

have cops causing you trouble?”

Mr. Joshi said there were doubts about CAGE’s “crude and simplistic” narrative of

radicalization because of police mistreatment, saying that there was evidence of Mr.

Emwazi’s involvement with Somalia before he was ever detained, and long before the

Syrian civil war and the rise of the Islamic State.

J. M. Berger, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and co-author of a

new book on the history of ISIS, also said the narrative of police harassment, while it may

have contributed to his radicalization, did not explain it.

“Malcolm X and Martin Luther King got a lot more pressure from police, and

neither decided that decapitating people is the right response,” he said.

There were similar law enforcement issues in the case of three young men in

Brooklyn who became fascinated with the Islamic State. There are benefits to waiting and

watching rather than rushing to disrupt a plot the moment it is detected, said Diego G.

Rodriguez, chief of the F.B.I.’s New York division.

“We’re always trying to identify these folks, their hierarchy, their network,” he said.

Andrew M. Liepman, a former deputy director at the National Counterterrorism

Center who is now a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, said: “There are no

rules as to how long cases should cook, no recipe. Lots of factors must be weighed.”

Suspects in Western countries must break the law or have provided sufficient

evidence to be taken into custody, Mr. Liepman said, adding, “Both we and the British

have struggled with this.”

Reporting was contributed by Katrin Bennhold and Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura from

London; Eric Schmitt from Ndjamena, Chad; and Al Baker and Rukmini Callimachi from

New York.

Opinion: Solving Libya’s ISIS ProblemBy KARIM MEZRAN and MATTIA TOALDO

April 3, 2015

Last month’s terrorist attack on Tunisia’s national museum highlighted the threat posed

by the rise of the Islamic State in Libya. There is a sense of urgency in the West that

something must be done before violence by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and

ISIL, and its affiliates spreads even further and reaches Europe. Last week, the United

Nations Security Council voted to extend the fight against the Islamic State to Libya, but

it is unclear how this will be implemented.

Bernardino Leon, the United Nations special envoy for Libya, has been trying for

months to broker a deal between the major Libyan factions with two goals: a cease-fire

and a national unity government. This would bring together the internationally recognized

House of Representatives in the eastern city of Tobruk, which is dominated by anti-

Islamists, and Libya Dawn, a coalition of Islamists, militias from the western city of

Misrata and armed groups close to the Berber minority.

Talks are moving slowly and the fighting is escalating quickly. The Tobruk

government, with help from Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, is waging war in the

name of the fight against the Islamic State and Islamic terrorism in general. Libya Dawn’s

stated aim is to fight the return of elements of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s old regime.

The United Nations-sponsored talks won’t succeed as long as the fighting continues.

And there can’t be an effective dialogue as long as the warring factions remain happier

with the status quo.

The goals of ending Libya’s civil war and weakening the Islamic State are

interwoven. For all the announcements of a forthcoming “liberation” of Benghazi or

Tripoli, the armed groups headed by Gen. Khalifa Hifter that are loyal to the Tobruk

government have so far failed to make any significant military inroads.

Europe and America need a new strategy. They cannot achieve their goals in Libya

if they are in direct opposition to Egypt and the U.A.E., two important regional allies. But

acquiescing and allowing the Egyptians and Emiratis to take the lead will not produce a

quick fix. The solution is to combine politics and limited military force and to use formal

and informal agreements to pressure all sides to seek a political solution.

The heart of this new strategy would be to convince Libyan factions to fight the

Islamic State instead of each other.

This would address Egypt’s concerns about the rise of radicalism in Libya, while

also tackling two crucial threats to Europe: the rise of human smuggling through the

Mediterranean and the creation of yet another hub for radicalization of Western youth.

The United States and Europe should make clear that international military

assistance will be withheld, and the arms embargo will not be lifted, until all Libyan

factions demonstrate that they have united against Islamic State instead of bombing one

another’s cities and airports. This would be a significant departure from the usual pattern,

seen in both Iraq or Afghanistan, where international intervention led to thousands of

Western casualties before an eventual decision was made to shift the burden of fighting to

locals.

One may wonder why the warring factions should care about fighting the Islamic

State at all. They care because the Islamic State poses an existential threat to both sides:

Its fighters have attacked both the anti-Islamists loyal to Tobruk as well as the most

extremist Islamists within Libya Dawn, labeling them as “apostates.”

This existential threat is what has brought them together for talks in the past month.

In addition, the Security Council last week approved two resolutions that formally

extended the fight against the Islamic State from Syria and Iraq to Libya and referred

requests for further arm shipments to the Tobruk government to the United Nations’

sanctions committee.

The solution is to make external military and political support conditional on

fighting the Islamic State and forming a national unity government. The Tobruk

government and its allies have repeatedly asked for international support (either in the

form of a United Nations mandate or authorization for arms purchases) because, as things

stand, they don’t have a military edge. Their campaign has been stuck for months now on

all major fronts: Tripoli, Benghazi and the oil-producing region of the country.

A nonaggression pact between factions opposed to the Islamic State would provide

a more conducive environment for a political deal, after which a second phase of

international involvement could begin.

After a national unity deal is reached, and upon request of the new government, the

international community could then deploy a United Nations-mandated force in certain

parts of Libya. Terrorism and instability can be better fought with a national guard,

strengthened investigative capacities and a working judiciary. Building a national army

can wait. Libya doesn’t face foreign aggression and demilitarizing the country must take

priority.

If Europe and America do not change their approach soon, the West could

unwittingly end up siding with the Tobruk government in the Libyan civil war. Doing so

would lead to the usual vicious circle of Western intervention, radicalization and regional

destabilization. Such an outcome would pose an even greater long-term threat.

Karim Mezran is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. Mattia Toaldo is a policy fellow

at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

ISIS Video Appears to Show Executionsof Ethiopian Christians in LibyaBy DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

April 19, 2015

CAIRO — The Islamic State released a video on Sunday that appears to show fighters

from its branches in southern and eastern Libya executing dozens of Ethiopian Christians,

some by beheading and others by shooting.

Prefaced by extensive speeches and interviews that appear to take place in the

Islamic State’s strongholds in Syria and Iraq, the video of the killings, if confirmed,

would be the first evidence that the group’s leaders in those countries are coordinating

with fighters under the group’s banner in those parts of Libya, compounding fears of its

expansion across the Mediterranean.

The Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, released a video in February that

appeared to show masked fighters in its western Libyan branch, the so-called Tripolitania

Province of the Islamic State, beheading a group of Egyptian Christians who had been

abducted in the city of Surt. The group has now established control of Surt, and its

fighters there are sporadically battling militia troops from the nearby city of Misurata.

The video released on Sunday appears to show Islamic State fighters in what the

group calls its “Fezzan Province,” in the south, and its “Barqa Province,” in the east,

carrying out executions according to the group’s trademark rituals.

Militants in Egypt, Algeria, Afghanistan, Nigeria and elsewhere have pledged

loyalty to the Islamic State and its self-declared caliphate, but Libya is the first country

outside the group’s territory in Syria and Iraq where its core leadership has demonstrated

practical communication and collaboration with its far-flung “provinces.”

If more confirmation of its authenticity emerges, the video will upend both Western

and Libyan views of the Islamic State’s presence in the country. Fighters in the three

regions of Libya had previously claimed responsibility for various acts of violence carried

out in the Islamic State’s name, but most analysts presumed that most of those fighters, at

least the ones outside Surt, were operating independently and using the name to capitalize

on the group’s fearsome reputation.

Now fighters in all three provinces appear connected enough to the core group’s

leadership that they were able to coordinate separate, mass executions, film them and

send the video back to Syria or Iraq for production and release.

During the last five minutes of the half-hour video, the video cuts back and forth

between scenes in the southern desert and a beach along the coast, at one point displaying

both with a split screen. Both were filmed with the same sophisticated camera angles and

editing that have distinguished other Islamic State films from indigenous Libyan videos.

Masked fighters lead a row of bound captives dressed in black into the desert and

then shoot each of the prisoners in the back of the head. Another group of masked

fighters leads a row of prisoners in orange jumpsuits along a beach and then beheads each

of them with a long knife. The video shows fighters placing the severed heads on the

bodies lying on the sand as bloody surf washes over them.

“You will not have safety, even in your dreams, until you accept Islam,” declares a

masked figure, speaking English with an American accent and pointing a revolver at the

camera. “To the nation of the cross: We are back again.”

Of all the places the militants have used the group’s name, Libya may also be

uniquely vulnerable to penetration because of the collapse of any central authority since

the overthrow of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi four years ago.

Over the last nine months, its feuding militias and city-states have split into two

main warring factions — one controls the capital, Tripoli, and the other, including the

internationally recognized government, has fled to the eastern cities of Tobruk and

Bayda. Both factions have so far appeared more intent on fighting each other than uniting

to stop the Islamic State’s expansion.

In addition, Libyan banks and homes still hold significant wealth. Vast oil deposits

wait below ground, and the country’s long Mediterranean coast is a useful departure point

to destinations in Europe or around the region.

A spokesman for the Ethiopian government said Sunday that it could not confirm if

those killed in the video were its citizens, according to news reports. Many African

migrants come to oil-rich Libya seeking jobs or passage to Europe.

Some of the Egyptian Christians killed by the Islamic State in western Libya were

recognized in the earlier video by their families in Egypt as relatives who had been

abducted in Surt, helping confirm that video’s authenticity. Those killings prompted a

retaliatory air raid by Egypt on targets in Derna, Libya, an Islamist stronghold where the

Islamic State’s “Barqa Province” is believed to be based.

Both Libyan Islamic State videos were released by the Al Furqan media group,

which is controlled by the Islamic State’s leadership and often distributes its propaganda.

The video released Sunday begins with about 25 minutes of scenes that appeared to have

been filmed in Syria and Iraq. After reviewing the portrayal of Jesus in the Quran, a

narrator briefly walks through the history of the emergence of Catholicism, Eastern

Orthodoxy and Protestantism.

The video intersperses what appear to be scenes from a costume drama depicting

rows of medieval Muslim soldiers marching with spears, fighting with bows and arrows,

and assaulting a castle. Then it cuts briefly to images of the Islamic State’s leader, Abu

Bakr al-Baghdadi, climbing the steps to the minbar, or pulpit, of the Mosul mosque where

he proclaimed himself caliph.

A narrator, identified as Sheikh Abu Malik Anas al-Nashwan, says in formal Arabic

that the Islamic State requires Christians living under its dominion to convert to Islam or

pay jizya — the tax levied on non-Muslims living under Muslim rule in the Middle Ages.

He speaks against a backdrop of lush foliage that looks more like northern Syria than

anywhere in Libya, and the video shows a building and van used by the Islamic State to

handle such payments in a town in the Syrian province of Aleppo.

The narrator repeatedly uses a derogatory term for Christians that is something like

calling them Nazarenes. Yet much of the video is devoted to testimonials from people

speaking Arabic with Syrian or perhaps Iraqi accents who say they are Christians living

happily under the Islamic State in Aleppo, Raqqa and elsewhere. All say that they live

freely after paying the tax; it is impossible to know how much coercion they may have

felt at the time.

At one point, the video includes a scene of what appear to be two Islamic State

fighters lecturing a schoolroom full of adult Christians on the virtues of Islam. A rifle

leans against the wall behind them.

For those who refuse to convert or pay the tax, the narrator promises death and

destruction, and scenes of Islamic State fighters desecrating the churches of Mosul

illustrate the threat. “The Christians in Mosul have chosen their own destiny,” the narrator

warns.

The video then moves to what the narrator describes as areas of Libya under the

Islamic State’s rule. A short scene depicts what appear to be African migrants converting

to Islam and then being hugged by Islamic State fighters.

After that, the video cuts to the far longer processional scenes depicting rows of

African migrants escorted through the desert and along the beach. For those who refuse

Islam or jizya, the narrator says, “We owe nothing except the edge of the sword.”

Merna Thomas contributed reporting from Cairo.

Coalition Debates Expanding ISIS FightBy MICHAEL R. GORDON and ERIC SCHMITT

April 29, 2015

WASHINGTON — The Islamic State’s efforts to expand its reach beyond Iraq and Syria

have spurred a debate within the coalition that the United States has assembled to

confront the group about whether it needs to broaden its campaign.

The Islamic State has sent a small number of fighters to Libya to help organize

militants there, a new indication that the group is seeking to enlarge its self-declared

caliphate, American officials said on Wednesday.

The question of how the coalition should respond is emerging as a sensitive issue

for the Obama administration, which is struggling to win congressional support for a

measure authorizing the use of military force against the group.

Maintaining the unity of the more than 60-nation coalition against the Islamic State,

also known as ISIS or ISIL, may require the United States to agree to a broadening of the

campaign to include terrorist groups that have declared themselves to be “provinces” of

the Islamic State.

Egypt, for example, is worried about the Islamic State’s support for Ansar al-Sharia,

the Libyan terrorist group, and the financial support that the group has been providing to

Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, a terrorist group in the Sinai Peninsula. Italy, which is facing a

flood of desperate refugees from North Africa, has also been greatly concerned about

terrorist groups in Libya.

Foreign ministers from leading members of the coalition are expected to meet within

the next two months, and the spread of the Islamic State is expected to be one of the

major issues on their agenda.

The Obama administration has emphasized that the efforts against the Islamic State

are not purely military, but also involve cutting into its financing and slowing the flow of

foreign fighters to the group. Even so, some American lawmakers have expressed worries

that the fight may morph into a version of the Bush administration’s “global war on

terrorism,” which could compound the challenge of winning congressional support.

Intelligence officials estimate that the Islamic State’s fighters number 20,000 to

31,500 in Syria and Iraq. There are less formal pledges of support from “at least a couple

hundred extremists” in countries such as Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and

Yemen, according to American counterterrorism officials.

But not every terrorist group that claims to be fighting under the banner of the

Islamic State is necessarily working with the group, and it is not clear to what extent the

Islamic State exerts command over the groups it is supporting. The Islamic State began

attracting pledges of allegiance from groups and individual fighters after it declared the

formation of a caliphate, or religious state, in June 2014. Counterterrorism analysts say it

is using Al Qaeda’s franchise structure to expand its geographic reach, but without Al

Qaeda’s rigorous multiyear application process. This could allow its franchises to grow

faster, easier and farther.

It is not clear how the United States will deal with the Islamic State’s increasingly

global ambitions when the foreign ministers meet. The United States could declare some

foreign terrorist groups to be full-fledged affiliates of the Islamic State, or opt for

expressing a generalized concern about its increasing reach and the need to confront it.

Providing new details, American officials said that the Islamic State had sent a

senior Iraqi militant, among a dozen or so other fighters, to Libya to provide “technical”

support to Ansar al-Sharia, which has about 5,000 fighters.

In Egypt, the Sinai-based extremist group Ansar Beit al-Maqdis sent emissaries to

the Islamic State in Syria last year to seek financial support, weapons and tactical advice,

as well as the publicity and recruiting advantages that might come from declaring itself to

be the Sinai province of the Islamic State caliphate, according to Western officials briefed

on classified intelligence reports.

The group has received some financial backing from the Islamic State, though not as

much as it would have liked, American officials said.

The Islamic State has provided technical assistance to the Nigerian terrorist group

Boko Haram to help it create its video propaganda. While Boko Haram has declared itself

to be a province of the Islamic State’s caliphate, experts do not believe it is an integral

part of the organization.

In Afghanistan in February, an American drone strike killed a former Taliban

commander, Mullah Abdul Rauf Khadim, who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic

State and had recently begun recruiting fighters. But that pledge seemed to indicate less a

major expansion of the Islamic State than a deepening of internal divisions in the Taliban.

This month, Malaysian authorities announced that they had arrested a group of

militants who were suspected of planning an Islamic State attack. But American officials

say they may have been members of the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah who have

rebranded themselves.

Abu Sayyaf, the Philippine terrorist group, would like to be a formal part of the

Islamic State but has not been accepted.

Abu Sayyaf, an ISIS Leader, Killed bySpecial Forces, U.S. SaysBy HELENE COOPER and ERIC SCHMITT

May 16, 2015

WASHINGTON — American Special Operations forces mounted a rare raid into eastern

Syria early Saturday, killing a leader of the Islamic State and about a dozen militant

fighters, as well as capturing his wife and freeing an 18-year old Yazidi woman whom

Pentagon officials said had been held as a slave.

In the first successful raid by American ground troops since the military campaign

against the Islamic State began last year, two dozen Delta Force commandos entered

Syria aboard Black Hawk helicopters and V-22 Ospreys and killed the leader, Abu

Sayyaf. One American military official described him as the Islamic State’s “emir of oil

and gas.”

Even so, Abu Sayyaf is a midlevel leader in the organization — one terrorism

analyst compared him to Al Capone’s accountant — and likely is replaceable in fairly

short order. And the operation, while successful, comes as the Islamic State has been

advancing in the Iraqi city of Ramadi, demonstrating that the fight against the Sunni

militant group in both Iraq and Syria remains very fluid.

Yet the Pentagon’s description of a nighttime raid that found its intended target deep

inside Syria without any American troops being wounded or killed illustrates not only the

effectiveness of the Delta Force, but of improving American intelligence on shadowy

Islamic State leaders.

A Defense Department official said Islamic State fighters who defended their

building and Abu Sayyaf tried to use women and children as human shields, but that the

Delta Force commandos “used very precise fire” and “separated the women and

children.” The official said that the operation involved close “hand-to-hand fighting.”

(The accounts of the raid came from military and government officials and could not be

immediately verified through independent sources.)

The American forces eventually entered the building where they found Abu Sayyaf

and his wife, Umm Sayyaf, in a room together. His spouse was captured and later moved

to a military facility in Iraq, officials said.

The raid came after weeks of surveillance of Abu Sayyaf, using information gleaned

from a small but growing network of informants the C.I.A. and the Pentagon have

painstakingly developed in Syria, as well as satellite imagery, drone reconnaissance and

electronic eavesdropping, American officials said. The White House rejected initial

reports from the region that attributed the raid to the forces of President Bashar al-Assad

of Syria.

“The U.S. government did not coordinate with the Syrian regime, nor did we advise

them in advance of this operation,” said Bernadette Meehan, the National Security

Council spokeswoman. “We have warned the Assad regime not to interfere with our

ongoing efforts against ISIL inside of Syria,” she added, using another name for the

Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS.

In a statement early Saturday, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said the killing of

Abu Sayyaf dealt a “significant blow” to the group. The militant leader was said to be

involved in the Islamic State’s military operations and helped direct its “illicit oil, gas and

financial operations” that raised the funds necessary for the organization to operate.

Officials said the raid was approved by President Obama.

Defense Department officials said the Delta Force soldiers carrying out the raid

came under fire soon after they landed near a building used by Abu Sayyaf as his

residence, in Amr, about 20 miles southeast of Deir al Zour, near the oil facilities that he

oversaw for the Islamic State.

The commandos had left Iraq aboard the aircraft, and were soon on the ground in Al

Amr, a Defense Department official said. They came under fire, the official said, and

fired back, killing around a dozen Islamic State fighters.

“The objective was the building, a multistory building,” the official said. He spoke

on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

Abu Sayyaf “tried to engage” the commandos, the Defense Department official said,

and was shot and killed. The commandos took his wife and the Yazidi woman back to the

waiting American aircrafts, which, by then, had sustained a number of bullet holes from

the firefight with the Islamic State fighters.

Defense Department officials said only Islamic State fighters had been killed in the

mission, and that they had received no reports of civilian casualties. But officials

acknowledged they were still gathering information on the raid.

The commandos were back in Iraq with the two women around dawn local time,

officials said. They said the American forces were able to seize communications

equipment and other materials from the site, which may prove useful in intelligence

assessments.

The Yazidi woman, Mr. Carter said, will be reunited with her family as soon as

possible. It was unclear on Saturday what will be done with Umm Sayyaf, who,

according to Mr. Carter’s statement, is suspected of playing an important role in the

group’s activities and “may have been complicit in what appears to have been the

enslavement” of the Yazidi woman.

The Yazidis are a religious minority persecuted by the Islamic State.

The operation come just months after three unsuccessful raids by American

commandos in Syria and Yemen to free American hostages.

In the first one, in Syria last summer, two dozen Delta Force commandos raided an

oil refinery in the northern part of the country as part of the effort to free the American

journalist James Foley, but found after a firefight that there were no hostages to be saved.

Mr. Foley was later beheaded by the Islamic State.

In the second, on November 25, American Special Operations forces entered a cave

near Yemen’s border with Saudi Arabia in an effort to free the American photojournalist

Luke Somers. But he was not there; the forces freed eight other hostages and killed seven

militants.

A few days later, in December, American forces mounted another attempt to free

Mr. Somers, storming a village in southern Yemen, but that raid ended in tragedy with the

kidnappers killing Mr. Somers and a South African held with him.

Saturday’s raid into Syria represents an important threshold for the administration in

showing that it will continue to send American ground troops into conflicts outside major

war zones — as it has in Yemen, Somalia and Libya — to capture or kill suspected

terrorists.

Although Abu Sayyaf himself was not a well-known figure, he was important as

much for who and what he knew about the Islamic State’s hierarchy and operations, as

for his actual job.

“He managed the oil infrastructure and financial generation details for ISIL,” the

senior United States official said. “Given that job, he was pretty well connected.”

Bruce O. Reidel, a former C.I.A. analyst now at the Brookings Institution, said the

operation looked like “a collection mission, the goal to capture someone or two someones

who can explain how ISIS works.” With Abu Sayyaf now dead, he said, “perhaps the

wife can do that.”

But, he added: “To me, it demonstrates we still have large gaps in our understanding

of the enemy and how it is organized.”

Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.

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