Posted on 06/26/2004 4:27:16 PM PDT by MadIvan
In a clandestine and dangerous meeting near Baghdad Hala Jaber was told the chilling story of a hostage’s death by one of the terror gang
IN A small, bare house to the west of Baghdad, a highly educated Arab fighter armed with an unusual combination of computer skills and European languages was packing spoils of war into cardboard boxes last week as his resistance cell prepared to take its battle into the Iraqi capital.
He removed aerial photographs from the walls, saying he had obtained them by hacking into a US military database in Iraq, and stacked laptops that had been brought to him from the vehicles of dead Americans to be checked for intelligence.
Then he flicked nonchalantly through the documents of Fabrizio Quattrocchi, a 36-year-old Italian hostage who was forced to kneel, handcuffed and blindfolded, in front of a grave before being shot in the forehead at point blank range.
“Would you like to know what happened to him?” the Sunni militant asked with a polite smile. “I filmed him as he was executed.”
The smile vanished as the fighter, who gave his name as Abu Yussuf, began his story of mayhem and murder with the latest twist, an act of treachery by a member of the group that killed Quattrocchi.
The “traitor” had vanished with $200,000 (about £110,000) he had made on the quiet by “selling” the body to the Italians, Abu Yussuf said. “He will be found and dealt with,” he added.
It was in a telephone call before dawn that I was summoned by Abu Yussuf. I knew little about him except that he was in a cell that had kidnapped Quattrocchi and three other Italian hostages in April.
The risks were obvious. Three foreigners have been beheaded by militants in recent weeks. I watched a video showing the decapitation of the first, the young American entrepreneur Nick Berg, and the images have haunted my dreams.
Kim Sun-Il, a South Korean translator, was also filmed begging pitifully for his life before he was murdered last week.
In between came the killing of Hussein Olayyan, who worked for a telecoms company. Like me, he was Lebanese, an Arab and a Muslim.
My origins were no guarantee of safety. Only my trust in an intermediary who promised that no harm would come to me while I was under his protection persuaded me to proceed.
Modestly dressed with a scarf over my head, I drove to the rendezvous, anxious that I did not know whether I was meeting a follower of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — the brutal leader of a group linked to Al-Qaeda — or a member of the Iraqi resistance.
It was a relief to discover that Abu Yussuf fell into the second category. When the intermediary had introduced us and niceties had been exchanged over several small cups of strong, sweet tea, the reason why the meeting had been granted became clear.
Abu Yussuf was willing to describe how Quattrocchi had been selected for execution from a group of four Italian security guards, how he had broken the news to the captive that he was about to die, how they had argued about whether his shooting would put pressure on the government of Silvio Berlusconi to withdraw troops from Iraq and how the condemned man had bravely demanded to have his blindfold removed at the end so that he could look his killer in the eye.
But first Abu Yussuf wanted to say why he was attacking coalition forces in Iraq, and to demonstrate the increasingly sophisticated skills being deployed by the resistance in the run-up to this week’s handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi government.
A university graduate aged 27 and fluent in French and Italian, he came to Iraq from another Arab country — he refused to say which — to fight. He arrived before the war and left after the fall of Baghdad, returning several months later to join the resistance.
Until September 11, he said, he had been a normal student who drank alcohol and enjoyed women. He had even made a little money from selling drugs. Then he heard an interview with Osama Bin Laden and joined the jihad.
He would not say whether he was a member of Al-Qaeda, but talked of cleansing the Middle East of “infidels” in terms reminiscent of Bin Laden’s rhetoric.
His parents opposed his involvement in jihad and he left for Iraq without telling them. When he arrived, he found that most resistance cells contained one or two foreign fighters — from countries as close as Syria and as far away as north Africa.
Each cell of 20-50 fighters was led by an “emir”, or top commander, and run by a “shura”, or council, of three senior men. Each planned its own operations and there was no overall leader to direct them.
Crouching on a mattress on the floor, Abu Yussuf explained with a smile that he was regarded as an expert with computers and was in high demand among various cells. The aerial photographs of Iraqi cities he had obtained had been widely circulated among insurgents to help them identify US positions and bases, he said.
Last April, after a US assault on Falluja prompted by the killing of four American contractors, Abu Yussuf’s cell took up positions nearby, targeting not only US military convoys, but European civilians as well.
Among their victims were two Germans, Tobias Ritrath, 25, and Thomas Haffenker, 38, who were shot while escorting diplomats from Jordan.
The Italian security guards were kidnapped in the same area and, because he spoke their language, Abu Yussuf was asked to help interrogate them.
“They said they worked for a company that provided security for individuals but from the papers we found on them and the information we collected from their laptops, we discovered that their work was more than simply bodyguard duty.”
He claimed to have confirmed that they had “trained and worked with Israelis”.
The hostages were neither handcuffed nor blindfolded and the door of their room was unlocked. “Given where they were being held, it would have been difficult for the Italians to find their way out if they were to escape. Our only concern was the Iraqi driver they had brought with them.” He was kept under close surveillance.
The hostages repeatedly asked whether they would be killed or freed. “Inshallah (If God wills it), you will return home to your families,” Abu Yussuf told them at one point.
One of the hostages, Salvatore Stefio, 34, replied: “No, not if God wills it. If you want it, then we will return home.”
Abu Yussuf said they had asked why he was fighting and where he would go next. “I would say that I was fighting God’s jihad and that if I should leave there’d be Chechnya or Palestine,” he said.
It was shortly afterwards that Abu Yussuf was ordered to take Quattrocchi to another location. He knew this could mean only one thing and suggested Quattrocchi be spared because he had spent more time than the others in Iraq and could have the most useful information.
His commander was adamant: he said Quattrocchi had worked in Bosnia and Nigeria, and that Muslims had suffered in both countries. “I sat him in the front seat of the car next to the driver and I sat behind him and pointed my AK-47 at his back,” Abu Yussuf said.
“I told him he could open his eyes and when he asked me whether he was being taken to be executed I said, ‘No, we are just changing places and then we will bring the others’.”
Quattrocchi’s instincts told him otherwise and he persisted in asking whether he was going to be killed. His captor finally confirmed his fate.
Abu Yussuf, a slender, lightly bearded young man, speaks softly for the most part but recounted all this with a chilling indifference, inserting occasional koranic verses into his story as if to justify his actions on religious grounds.
“But how did you feel, driving this man to his executioners?” I asked.
“He was going to hell to receive his worst fate,” Abu Yussuf replied in language taken from a part of the Koran that deals with the punishment of sinners.
The Italian asked how his execution would be announced. “I told him we’d ask the Italian government to withdraw troops from Iraq,” Abu Yussuf replied.
“I do not think this will happen,” Quattrocchi said. “We (hostages) mean nothing to our government on an issue such as this. We are not so valuable to them that they would withdraw our troops.”
Abu Yussuf conceded that one death might not be enough, but was convinced that killing two or three hostages would bring Berlusconi’s government to its knees.
He said Quattrocchi became scared when he was taken out of the car. “We blindfolded him and bound his hands together and led him a short distance where an earth grave had been dug out and prepared,” he said.
It was now that Quattrocchi made repeated pleas to have the blindfold lifted. “You who speak Italian, please grant me a last wish,” he shouted to Abu Yussuf. “Remove my blindfold and let me die the Italian way.”
Abu Yussuf conveyed this request to his comrades but it was denied. Moments later one of three fighters standing by the grave cried “Allahu akbar” (God is great) and killed Quattrocchi with a single bullet while Abu Yussuf recorded the spectacle with a video camera.
He knelt down in front of me to re-enact the scene, showing how Quattrocchi had tried to raise his hands to remove the blindfold just before he was shot. “We turned him over as I filmed and removed the blindfold to film where the bullet had gone in and where it came out at the back of his head.”
I asked how he could bear to watch a defenceless man being killed in this way. “I have never done this before,” he said. “But then I too started to call ‘Allahu akbar’ and my Islamic beliefs reminded me of my mission.”
Abu Yussuf looked up with another smile and said: “He was killed with his own pistol but by an Iraqi bullet.”
The body was placed in the grave and the video footage was dispatched to Al-Jazeera, the television news channel, but was never broadcast.
In a curious postscript, Abu Yussuf condemned the beheading of the Korean translator, saying Islam prohibited such acts against prisoners.
“The Korean was just a worker. They kidnapped him — fine — but they should not have killed him. The Italian was a security person who had committed acts against Muslims and who had links with Israelis. His case is different.”
The other Italian hostages — Stefio, Umberto Cupertino and Maurizio Agliana — were unaware of their friend’s murder and Abu Yussuf did not meet them until about a week later when they were moved in a small refrigerated truck to another location in Baghdad.
When they were handed over to a separate group at a mosque, all had been marked for execution on different dates, he said. In the event, the three were flown back to Rome on June 10 amid conflicting speculation about the circumstances of their release. Quattrocchi’s body was handed over to the Italian Red Cross in Baghdad.
Berlusconi had always ruled out negotiation with the kidnappers and a US video showed soldiers jumping from a helicopter to help the surviving hostages.
Abu Yussuf said the captors had been paid $4m (£2.2m) to let them live. Gino Strada, an Italian surgeon involved in attempts to broker their release, said he had been told by “sources in Iraq” that $9m (£4.9m) had changed hands.
Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italy’s military intelligence service, insisted no ransom had been paid, but admitted to a parliamentary committee that money had gone to “sources” with evidence that the hostages were alive.
As for what happens next, Abu Yussuf expected to be on the move today. Resistance commanders had ordered many fighters to transfer from the “Sunni triangle”, the hotbed of resistance west of Baghdad, into the capital during the handover of power.
Abu Yussuf showed me a device that he said had been taken from the Italians and allowed fighters to work out distances and angles so they could launch rockets with greater precision. A laptop opened to reveal the smiling faces of American soldiers, their arms around one another in the dining room of one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces.
The face that appeared in the most pictures was that of the soldier whose laptop this had been, Abu Yussuf said, and he was now dead. He vowed that there would be many more attacks after the handover.
Aerial photographs of Baghdad international airport flashed up on another screen and he talked of shooting down planes there.
I made a weak, nervous joke, asking whether he could ensure that there would be no such attack on the day of my flight out of the country.
“I cannot promise you this — the decision is not mine and I cannot tell my comrades not to attack if they are ready to do so,” he answered, utterly without humour. “Anyway, lives are in the hand of Allah and you should trust in Him.”
A "Thanks for all your FR posts !!" BTTT
Yeah, that was a sloppy analogy. You've *heard* a bit about Calvinism, but you don't know what it is. Be less cavalier about slamming beliefs you're not really familiar with....
You may be confusing the appreciation of God's grace and gratefulness that He's included us in His plans (Calvinism) with God does everything and we just sleep (hyperCalvinism). I don't understand why you and others like you enjoy attacking the grace of God and those who appreciate what the Lord has done for them. After all, we were "dead" in our sins, not "sick" in our sins.
I understand as a Presbyterian (probably not EPC), you're an Arminian. But no need to attack the grace of God in a thread about Islam.
Okay, now I'm confused. The link went to a page with some sound doctrine, but your illustration was pretty "off." Not sure I understand the point you were trying to make....
maJOR bump
You're right this is a must read.
BUMP!
Sorry, but I don't get the connection. This interview should show Bush supporters that he doesn't get the connection of terrorism, hatred of the West and for America in particular, and the attacks on the military in Iraq as fundamentally and necessarily intertwined with Islam, which Bush has staunchly defended.
The Bush administration's inability to grasp the roots of Islamic motivations/history of terrorism against us infidels has led to profound miscalculations and loss of American life. This should deeply trouble conservatives too. While Bush is right in his blunt declaration that we are in a struggle of good verses evil, until he grasps that the evil is Islam his strategy to defeat the evil will be ambivalent, at the very least.
Know your enemy ping.
He didn't learn anything from Pearl.
This is what we and other western countries are throwing our university doors open to. We educate them so they can turn that education against us.
Until September 11, he said, he had been a normal student who drank alcohol and enjoyed women. He had even made a little money from selling drugs.What a good little Muslim.
But, but the koran doesn't teach evil...
Hey, it worked pretty well in Spain.
Yep, that'll stop the kidnappings.
Michael Moore's heroes.
Judging from his name, Hala Jaber probably works for Al Jazzy, a subsidiary of AQ.
BTTT
It won't bother them. He was just a kufir, a tool of American interests, after all. < /sarcasm>
thanks. bookmarked.
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