So much for the theory that Saddam was "harbouring" zarkawi...
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was never as important a figure in the insurgency as was claimed, and the manner of his death proved it, says Patrick Cockburn Published: 11 June 2006
In the days before he was tracked down and killed by US laser-guided bombs, Iraq's most wanted man was living with almost no guards and only five companions, two of whom were women and one an eight-year-old girl, it emerged yesterday.
The US military displayed the few tattered possessions of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qa'ida in Iraq, and those who died with him in the rubble of an isolated house half hidden by date palms outside the village of Hibhib in Diyala province, north-east of Baghdad.
The ease with which Iraqi police and US special forces were able to reach the house after the bombing without encountering hostile fire showed that Zarqawi was never the powerful guerrilla chieftain and leader of the Iraqi resistance that Washington has claimed for more than three years.
By the time he died, Zarqawi's list of enemies included the US, the Iraqi government, many of the Sunni tribes and insurgent leaders. The biggest surprise surrounding his death last week was that it took so long to happen. And the manner in which he died confirms the belief that his military and political importance was always deliberately exaggerated by the US. He was a wholly obscure figure until he was denounced by then US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, before the US Security Council on 5 February 2003. Mr Powell identified Zarqawi as the link between al-Qa'ida and Saddam Hussein, though no evidence for this was ever produced.
Indeed, Iraqi police documents, discovered later, showed that Saddam Hussein's security forces, far from collaborating with Zarqawi, were trying to arrest him. Arriving in Iraq in 2002, he had taken refuge in the mountain hideout of an extreme Islamic group near Halabja in Kurdistan, in an area which the Iraqi government did not control. As for al-Qa'ida, in Afghanistan Zarqawi had led a small group hostile to it, and was never a close adherent of Osama bin Laden. For all his vaunted importance, US spokesmen admitted that Zarqawi's suicide bombers concentrated almost entirely on soft targets, and were responsible for very few of the 20,000 American casualties in Iraq.
It is not clear how far American or Iraqi government statements about how they located Zarqawi should be believed. It appears unlikely that he was meeting his lieutenants, as was first suggested, given that only two other men died with him.
There are already signs that in propaganda terms, the US military - as well as the media - is missing Zarqawi as a single demonic figure who could be presented as the leader of the resistance. The myth of Zarqawi was attractive to Washington because it showed that anti-occupation resistance was foreign-inspired and linked to al-Qa'ida.
In reality the insurgency was almost entirely home grown, reliant on near-total support from the five million-strong Sunni community. Its military effectiveness was far more dependent on former officers of the Iraqi army and security forces than on al-Qa'ida. They may also have helped to boost Zarqawi's fame, because it was convenient for them to blame their worst atrocities on him.
The killing of Zarqawi is a boost for the newly formed government of Nuri al-Maliki, but Iraqis did not fail to notice that when announcing it, he stood at the podium between Gen George Casey, the top US commander in Iraq, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador. "It showed the limits of Maliki's independence from the Americans," noted one Iraqi commentator. "It would have been better if they had let him make the announcement standing alone."
Such moments demonstrate the gulf that remains in the Americans' understanding of what motivates so many Iraqis to take up arms against them. It also helps to explain why Zarqawi's demise may make very little difference to the strength of the insurgency.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article756016.ece
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