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Zarqawi was granted permission to leave the country for good, headed again to Afghanistan and a future that surely—so the Jordanians thought—offered nothing more than futility and a dusty grave.
They let him go so they wouldn't have to deal with him, and he joined up with like-minded fanatics and then came back more dangerous than ever. Was this a common practice to let fanatics leave the country?
By dumping their problems on the rest of the world, do the Jordanians bear responsibility? And, what have they done to absolve themselves of this responsibility, and repair the damage that he has wrought?
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John Bravenec
Few beyond the intelligence service had heard of Zarqawi when Washington made him a terrorist superstar, declaring to the world in 2003 that this obscure Jordanian was the link between Iraq’s dictatorship and the plotters behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The claim was wrong,
Yeah, we still haven't taken care of our responsibility for George W. Bush...
In the immediate aftermath of the hotel bombings, Abu Haytham and other Mukhabarat officers had a simple goal: to eliminate the man who had ordered them. And when they succeeded, in 2006, by providing the United States with intelligence that helped it track Zarqawi to his hideout, the terrorist and his organization appeared finished.
This time, war-weary America would refuse to help until it was too late. There would be no serious effort to arm the moderate rebels who sought to deny ISIS its safe haven, and no air strikes to harry ISIS’s leadership and supply lines.
Two points.
First, who are these so called “moderate rebels”? If there were moderate rebels,Mae were clearly never able to find them. Less radicalized rebels, perhaps, but not moderate. The Syrians had pretty much destroyed any moderate opposition to Assad.
Second, has US intervention in the region ever worked out well? From the Shah, to Saddam, to Egypt, we have backed brutal, repressive regimes, that have choked off any moderate opposition, so that when they collapse, there is simply chaos. We cannot shape the world to create stable, western leaning democracies with the tools we have at our disposal.
al-Jafr,
Fun Fact: the al-Jafr is a holy book of Shia. Not sure how the prison got its name, other than being in a town with that name.
I point this out merely to demonstrate that I know something, although I can never remember which are the Shia and which are the Sunni, and I have no idea what the al-Jafr is, or whether it is even prefixed with "the". Truth is, I discovered this when I was looking it up, expecting it to be the villain from Disney's "Alladin."
Newly arriving prisoners were routinely beaten until they lost consciousness. Others were flogged with electric cables, burned with lit cigarettes, or hung upside down by means of a stick placed under the knees, a position the guards gleefully called “grilled chicken.
I don't want to justify the abuses, but if these were people so horrible and radicalized that the Jordanians were comfortable with this treatment, why the hell would they release them?
They took a bunch of angry, radicalized men, and turned them into angrier, more radicalized men with compelling stories to tell. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I am beginning to understand my father's fondness for General Pinochet. He was better at being a brutal dictator than the Kings of Jordan were.
Officials of the Public Security Directorate had grown worried about the behavior of a band of antigovernment zealots in the country’s central Swaqa Prison, and in 1998 they decided to isolate the group to prevent the contagion from spreading.
This seems reasonable. In the US, we use the state of Idaho for similar purposes, although most people self-imprison there.
The officials reopened one of al-Jafr’s dusty wings and dispatched an army of workers to sweep out corridors and prepare a large cell where all could be housed together.
No. No, no, no, no, no. You do not let the radicalized talk to each other, coordinate, and add their radicalization to each others'.
The inmates were too few to justify the hiring of a separate prison physician,
Why would you do this on the cheap? If you are repressively containing radical Jihadism, you don't want to skimp -- that can only come back to bite you on the ass.
It was an unwelcome assignment for Sabha, a tall twenty-four-year-old with boyish good looks,
But the 50 most dangerous men in Jordan probably enjoyed the eye candy.
There was one inmate—the sect’s apparent leader—whose seductive powers were extraordinary, he said. He was the one called Maqdisi, a religious scholar and preacher of considerable gifts, capable of infecting and twisting minds like a Muslim Rasputin.
Again, everyone involved is incompetent. If you have a charismatic leader of your radicalized prisoners, you are doing it wrong. Isolate him. Give him guards that don't even understand his language -- fine time to start an exchange program with prison guards from North Korea or something.
He was darker and shorter but powerfully built, with a thick neck and shoulders that might have belonged to a wrestler or gymnast.
Has the author ever seen a gymnast?
He turned to the doctor with the same reptilian stare, the look of a man who possessed, even in Jordan’s harshest prison, absolute control.
Ok, you need two isolation cells.
“What kind of person,” he wondered, “can command with only his eyes?
There are basically three ways to deal with violent radicals.
First, you can just kill them. This becomes a game of whack-a-mole.
Second, you can isolate them. The Jordanians here are doing a piss-poor job of that. If done well, it has all the finality of the first option, but without making anyone a martyr to their cause, and without all the weeping from their families. You could even subtly use them as hostages to ensure the good behavior of the people who love them.
Third, you can make them part of the system. Dealing with the hassles of organizing garbage pickup, fights with unions, and worrying about trucks at prayer time is going to sap the will of any radical.
But, dumping them together in one big open cell is a terrible idea.
One of the early attempts at a bombing had been a spectacular failure: A member of the group had volunteered to plant explosives inside a local adult cinema called the Salwa. After a few minutes in the theater, the would-be assailant had become so engrossed in the film that he forgot about his bomb. As he sat, glued to the screen, the device detonated under his feet. No patrons were hurt, but the bomber lost both his legs.
Behold, the power of porn!
But if prison was meant to break the jihadists and weaken their cause, the attempt was an utter failure. Confined mostly in the same communal cells, the men had been bound together by their privations and by the daily struggle to persevere as religious purists among drug dealers, thieves, and killers.
The other objects of Zarqawi’s exaggerated attentions were the sick and injured among his men.
Sabha was particularly struck by the tenderness Zarqawi displayed toward the most fragile of the inmates, the double-amputee named Eid Jahaline, the unlucky bomber who flubbed the attack on the pornographic cinema. Jahaline, who suffered from a psychological disorder in addition to his physical disfigurement, had always bunked with the other Islamist inmates in spite of extreme disabilities. Zarqawi appointed himself as the man’s personal valet, and assisted him with his bathing, changing, and feeding. Most days, he would simply scoop up the legless man in his arms and carry him to the toilet.
...more
There's more to this than simply helping the man.
Zarqawi clearly liked being in charge, and he gradually took on a still more dominant role, with his mentor’s blessing, leaving Maqdisi to oversee spiritual matters. For the first time, important people outside prison were beginning to hear his name.
See? This is exactly what you don't want to happen. No one outside the prison should know he exists. No one *inside* the prison should know he exists either.
Maqdisi had many admirers within the Islamist movement’s diaspora, from London to the Palestinian cities of the West Bank, and some of them were men with resources and extensive connections throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. Now they were learning through Maqdisi about his impressive assistant, an Afghan veteran of unusual courage and natural leadership ability.
Why is Maqdisi able to communicate with any of his followers? Pure fucking incompetence.
Sabha was happy to oblige, but it was complicated, he said. The test could not be performed in the prison—the risk of infection was too high to draw blood in al-Jafr’s filthy, rodent-infested cells
WTF? Either you want your prisoners living short miserable lives surrounded in filth, or you want to provide medical care. Don't do this shit halfway.
Also, how filthy could this place be? Were they spending their days waist deep in raw sewage or something? Wipe the wound with alcohol, and put a bandaid on it. Brush away the rodents from time to time.
Sabha’s face betrayed his horror at the story, but Zarqawi just shrugged, as though the act of hacking off an offending piece of flesh were as natural as squashing a cockroach.
These Bedouin raiders, who called themselves Ikhwan, or Brothers, had been armed and trained by Saudi Arabia’s first monarch, Ibn Saud, to help him defeat his political rivals. But the Ikhwan had ambitions beyond the Arabian Peninsula.
Thank God history never repeats itself.
Small bands of militants continued to control parts of the Saudi interior at least until the 1950s,
We've had some of this in Oregon lately. Y'all Qaeda.
The unwavering intolerance, the embrace of an extreme and pitilessly violent form of Islam as a kind of cleansing fire—these would find acceptance into the late twentieth century and beyond, from isolated villages in the peninsula’s interior to the oil-rich cities of the Gulf Coast, and from the rugged hills of eastern Afghanistan to the crowded cells of an infamous Jordanian prison.
They needed an Arab Donald Trump, to make the Middle East Great Again.
He relished moments when he could personally lead his special-forces teams into operations against terrorists and criminals, as he had famously done the previous year, when his commandos stormed a gangsters’ hideout in a street battle captured live on Jordanian TV.
I so wish George Herbert Walker Bush had pushed his sons to follow a similar path. "My fellow Americans, tonight my son will be leading an assault on a crack den in St. Louis. Let's join the assault in progress. God bless America."
They passed poorer suburbs and villages with their outdoor markets and small, neon-lit mosques.
Classy. Here in America only the largest mega churches have neon.
Russian president Boris Yeltsin, looking pale and disoriented, arrived with a phalanx of security guards but left minutes later, complaining of illness.
Perhaps the most anxious man in the room was Khaled Mashal, the leader of the militant Palestinian faction Hamas and a repeated target of Israeli assassination attempts. Two years earlier, agents from Israel’s Mossad spy service had jabbed Mashal with a poison needle on an Amman street a few miles from where he now stood. He survived only after a furious King Hussein prevailed on the Israelis to provide his doctors with an antidote.
Huh. I sort of thought that secret antidotes were a thing of fiction.
Later, his enemies would try ambushes, plane crashes, and even poisoned nasal drops, which Hussein discovered when he accidentally spilled the dispenser and watched in horror as the frothing liquid cut through the chrome on his bathroom fixtures.
As a young boy, Abdullah would squeal with delight whenever his father put him in his lap and took off for a spin through the desert in his roadster, the dust billowing behind them as the car blew down empty highways to strains of the cartoon theme song “Popeye the Sailor Man.
I will admit to having a particularly poor musical taste, preferring Deep Purple to the objectively better Led Zepplin, but even I would not listen to the theme song of "Popeye the Sailor Man" for fun.
The Islamists already commanded large numbers of supporters, and they were organized, motivated, and well funded. They could easily win a popular vote, putting the country’s future in the hands of a movement whose leaders included men with a radically different vision for Jordan from that professed by the Muslim brothers.
This is what local elections are for. Let them collect the garbage and see if that moderates them.
Zarqawi had traveled all the way to Amman, visited his mother in Zarqa for a few hours, then turned around and driven through the night in a friend’s car to arrive at al-Jafr before daybreak. Now here he was, back inside the hated prison, ministering to other inmates like a field commander checking the morale of his troops.
Just crack the door open, and gently shove him back in the cell. And then, forget about him.
Zarqawi, the war veteran and ex-convict, was going into business as an international honey merchant.
“You can’t just push him off on others,” Abu Haytham would explain to colleagues. “Sooner or later, a problem like that always comes back.
Finally, someone is thinking. This is why we don't just periodically round up everyone in Idaho and dump them over the Canadian border. We would like to be rid of them, but it would cause more problems in the long run. It's why we didn't let the South secede.
A wall of men fell on top of Zarqawi and struggled to pin him, while another in the raiding party snatched the weapon. It was then that one of the team’s members noticed an odd stirring behind a drapery. He lunged instinctively and tackled a second man, an Egyptian who, fortunately for the officers, had not been armed.
Who is this Egyptian who shared Zarqawi's bedroom? Was he a mysteriously unarmed guard, or something ... more?
His idea of a sexual conquest—according to security officials and to acquaintances who knew him at the time—was to force himself on younger men as a way to humiliate and assert his own dominance.
I'm not sure how I feel about this -- it's clearly hearsay and rumor, and just using the anti-gay bigotry of the Islamic world as a club to smack Zarqawi with, but on the other hand, he is a scumbag and deserves to be beaten with all the clubs available.
If the author feels compelled to report on unfounded rumors, rather than making Zarqawi a gay (or bisexual) rapist, and continuing the stereotype of gay men being predators, why not just make him a pedophile?
Dallah al-Khalayleh fretted over her troubled youngest son, but she never stopped believing in his basic goodness, or gave up her certitude that he would make something of himself.
Not something good, mind you, but something.
Zarqawi’s first assignment was to write articles for a jihadist magazine describing mujahideen exploits on the battlefield, a job that proved taxing for a young man of limited schooling.
Oy. Fundamentalist Jihadists really should put more thought into their Holy Warriors' skills and inclinations. This was not a learned man, who should be writing missives and campaign material, this was a brutal child-raping thug (see how easy it is to add that?) who just needs to be pointed towards people who need to be abused. Promise him his 72 virgins, and let him take care of the worst on the other side.
Among his first friends was Saleh al-Hami, a fellow journalist who had lost his leg to a land mine.
Does Zarqawi have a fetish for missing limbs? Recall Eid Jahaline, the prisoner missing his legs who Zarqawi would care for and help to the toilet and bath.
A ragtag army of Afghans and Islamist volunteers had humbled the Soviet superpower. How could such a thing be explained, except as an act of divine intervention?
Soviet hubris leaps to mind.
Now back in his hometown, Zarqawi had become his self-chosen nickname—“the Stranger.
He took his name, of course, after the alt-weekly in Seattle. He was very much inspired by Dan Savage's "Savage Love" column, which he read eagerly.
Dan Savage would later write about "gold-star pedophiles" who have an attraction, but don't act on it and keep themselves away from situations where they might be tempted (as so many well-meaning members of the clergy have been, to take an example).
Zarqawi was not even a bronze-star pedophile.
his brothers allowed their families to watch un-Islamic movies and comedies on their TVs.
Islamic comedies follow the tried and true trope of a n ugly woman borrowing the burka of an attractive woman, and the comedy of errors and misidentification this causes. Eventually, the enamored and ensnared man catches a glimpse of a thick ankle, but by then he has realized that a woman's true beauty is inside, just as Allah intended, and that a surely as the burka of cloth hides the flesh beneath, a burka of flesh hides that inner beauty.
It was an extension, of sorts, of the time-word adage: never judge a woman's ankle by the cloth of her veil.
wanted everything to be done quickly,” remembered Muhammad Abu al-Muntasir, a Jordanian Islamist who attended some of the meetings in 1993. “He wanted to achieve all of his ambitions in a matter of months, if not hours.
This description reminds me of corsun.
The plotters never had a chance. The Mukhabarat, with its vast network of informants, inevitably learned of the plan and moved quickly to squash it. Abu Haytham’s team launched their raids, ending with the dramatic arrest of Zarqawi in his bed on March 29.
Don't forget the man who was in his room. How old was that man? Was he younger? Much younger?
The spy agency was still pondering the question six months later, right up to the morning he turned up at the airport with his mother and a pair of coach-class tickets for Pakistan.
No one should have to fly coach.
When Zarqawi arrived, Abu Mutaz would grab a notebook and pack of Parliament cigarettes and make his way to the sparsely furnished office where informal interrogations took place.
My mother smoke Parliaments!
They picked up key details from one of the suspects, including the intended date of the attack—New Year’s Eve, 1999—and what the detainee said was the operation’s slogan: “The season is coming; bodies will pile up in sacks.
That is a crappy slogan -- too long, and sort of unwieldy, with the wrong level of vagueness and specificity. "The season is coming; bodies will pile up in sacks" reads like a poorly translated haiku.
My job needs a better slogan too. "Always be learning, always be teaching," or whatever it is is just forgettable.
A separate plot to attack the Los Angeles International Airport was foiled when U.S. customs agents arrested the would-be bomber as he attempted to cross the U.S.-Canadian border in a car packed with explosives.
I remember this! Just north of Seattle, and people were claiming he was coming to blow up the Space Needle.
No one respects the Space Needle enough to blow it up.
