A FALLING OUT AMONG THIEVES:

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi:
The mysterious man behind the beheadings. (Eric Umansky, June 29, 2004, Slate)

[Abu Musab al-Zarqawi], who has been blamed for the recent beheadings of foreigners in Iraq, remains something of a mystery. The U.S. government's wanted poster lists his height and weight as "unknown," and the military recently concluded that despite reports to the contrary, he may still have both his legs. Zarqawi isn't even his given name. He was born Ahmed al-Khalayleh, to a poor Palestinian family outside Amman, Jordan, in 1966.

But officials are growing certain of this much: that Zarqawi is his own man, with his own group, distinct from Osama Bin Laden. "I don't know if I should say this or not, but I—I suppose I can—it appears that Zarqawi may very well not have sworn allegiance" to Bin Laden, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said last week. "Maybe, because he disagrees with him on something, maybe because he wants to be 'The Man' himself, and maybe for a reason that's not known to me."

The distance between Zarqawi and Bin Laden, it turns out, has been suspected for a while. They have had contacts and fought together in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s. But after the war, Zarqawi dedicated himself to overthrowing Jordan's King Hussein, while Bin Laden eyed bigger targets. Following a stint of several years in a Jordanian jail for plotting against the regime, Zarqawi returned to Afghanistan, where he built training camps and established his group, al-Tawhid. He retained his focus on Jordan, with the added goal, as one trainee put it, "to kill Jews everywhere." Zarqawi's camps were hundreds of miles from Bin Laden's, and the two reportedly competed for funds and recruits. One of Zarqawi's fighters, a Jordanian named Shadi Abdallah, told German investigators, "He is against al-Qaida."

The Israelis and Jordanians supposedly have such fabulous intelligence services, couldn't they help find the guy? At any rate, after the Court's absurd enemy combatants rulings, we should certainly hand him over to Jordan when we catch him.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 1, 2004 8:39 PM