Another Terrorist Tidbit.
This story is likely to make the blogospheric rounds in the next couple of days:
Iraq’s resistance has replaced Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as political head of the rebels, confining him to a military role, the son of Osama bin Laden’s mentor told AFP Sunday in Jordan.
“The Iraqi resistance’s high command asked Zarqawi to give up his political role and replaced him with an Iraqi, because of several mistakes he made,” said Hudayf Azzam, who claims close contacts with the rebels.
“Zarqawi’s role has been limited to military action,” said Azzam, whose late father Abdallah Azzam was the mentor of bin Laden, the Al-Qaeda boss.
“Zarqawi bowed to the orders two weeks ago and was replaced by Iraqi national Abdullah bin Rashed al-Baghdadi,” Azzam said.
That’s certainly a sign that we’ve been doing good things in Iraq. What I want to look at, though, is something that shows up deeper in the story.
He [Azzam] said Zarqawi “made many political mistakes”, including “the creation of an independent organisation, Al-Qaeda in Iraq”.
An “independent organisation”? Does this not at least imply that Zarqawi’s group was not independent before he made it so during the last four years?
A statement like this, made by someone like Azzam who is in a position to know these things pretty well, seems pretty darned important to me. It says, at least by implication, that Zarqawi’s group was part of Al Qaeda before he made it independent and since it existed inside Iraq and was actively funded and supplied by Saddam Hussein, it is yet another sign that Hussein and Al Qaeda enjoyed more than just a handshake relationship.
At the very least this story shows us that there is a worldwide terrorist network that’s not simply “Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden” that can exercise its will in the hottest of terrorism hot spots. Surely that ought to be the target of our anti-terrorism efforts instead of the Democrats’ “invade Pakistan and get bin Laden, somehow” plan they unveiled earlier in the week.
In either case (or both cases), every day we take the fight to the terrorists, we learn a lottle bit more about how they operate, the folks they cozy up to, and who really calls the shots. We should all be flexible enough in our thinking to take these new pieces of information, fit them into what we already know, and act accordingly. The only other option is the ones taken by the minority party these days: keep a deathgrip on September 10th and act like the world is in suspended animation. Well, except for the Chimpy McBushHitlerEvilCheneyDevilRove machine, which chugs on apace, powered by the blood of servicemen and babies, and of course sweet, sweet crude oil.
(h/t: “>All Things Conservative)
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Category: Fighting the Islamists
