Portrait of a video-crazed executioner

ANY day now a new batch of DVDs will appear on the stalls of Baghdad’s thieves’ market courtesy of Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, one of the world’s most ruthless terrorists.

They will show Eugene Armstrong, the American contractor seized in Baghdad last week with another American and the Briton Kenneth Bigley, having his head severed from his body in 35 agonising seconds by al-Zarqawi and his hooded henchmen.

There is by now a well-established market for these “snuff movies” released by the “media section” of al-Zarqawi’s Tawhid wal Jihad group (Unity and Holy War), al-Zarqawi having personally performed or supervised the execution of at least five foreigners deemed to have been collaborating with US forces.

The DVDs cost less than a dollar and are sellouts as soon as they hit Baghdad’s streets. One vendor said that when a new film arrives on the stalls he can sell about 65 a day, better even than his more discreet selection of pornography. They are bought mostly for their shock value, but in the process they spread al-Zarqawi’s insidious propaganda through the volatile slums of Iraq.

Though clumsy by Western standards, they show a chillingly professional fusion of video technology and Islamic rhetoric and imagery, deploying graphics, revolving logos, fadeouts, Koranic chants and soundtracks. Each execution is preceded by the group’s symbol — a Kalashnikov, a flag and an arm emerging from the open pages of the Koran — to the accompaniment of a battle hymn in Arabic. The introduction is soon followed by the reading of a statement by a hooded figure flanked on either side by armed guards, usually dressed in black. Behind them, pinned to the wall, is the group’s distinctive flag: a black banner emblazoned with a large yellow circle and the group’s name. In front of the execution squad is a bound and blindfolded figure.

Some, like a Bulgarian worker and a South Korean translator, plead for their lives in broken English. Others sit passively, their heads bowed forward as they await their death. The lucky ones, such as Murat Yuce, a Turkish driver, are shot in the head with a pistol. His crime was to have driven supplies to a US Army base, but at least his punishment was swift. The unlucky ones, such as the Americans Nick Berg and Mr Armstrong, are rolled over on the floor while al-Zarqawi personally cuts their heads off.

The films are designed to inflame Arabic and Islamic emotions. The victims appear in the orange jumpsuit worn by detainees at the American Guantanamo Bay prison camp and Abu Ghraib. In the background flash by scenes of damaged mosques and injured children. In one, al-Zarqawi uses footage from a US aircraft in which a bomb falls in the middle of a crowded street, as a brash American voice crows: “Oh, dude!” The DVDs are repulsive but they are clever and they help to explain al-Zarqawi’s astonishing rise since his youth in the slums of the Jordanian industrial city of Zarqa, where he was regularly picked up for offences such as drunkenness and drug abuse.

Today his reign of terror in Iraq has made much of the country ungovernable, challenged the might of the US military and put the war against terrorism squarely at the forefront of the debate taking place among world leaders at the United Nations in New York this week.

His tactics have been copied by other insurgents — one group recently shot dead 11 Nepalese civilian contractors and beheaded the 12th; last week the decapitated and bloated bodies of three Kurds, who had done nothing more than belong to a pro-US party, were found dumped by the side of a road north of Baghdad. And they have forced presidents and prime ministers such as Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and Silvio Berlusconi to engage in frantic manoeuvring to save their captured citizens.

The US Government has posted a $25 million (£14 million) reward for al-Zarqawi’s capture and his notoriety has reached almost mythical proportions in Iraq, where he has co-opted the anti-American resistance campaign and has already taken the first steps towards creating his goal of a fanatical Islamic state that would make the former Taleban regime in Afghanistan look positively liberal.

He is already credited with establishing a mini-Islamic state in the rebel stronghold of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, where his Mujahidin volunteers from across the Arab world operate in relative freedom after forcing out US troops in April.

Although his group is fundamentally opposed to the country’s Shia Muslim majority and other non-Sunni Arab sects, he has nevertheless succeeded in co-opting the resistance movement, which began as a nationalist struggle.

“This is jihad (holy war), so we cannot prevent any Muslim or Arab coming here to fight,” Abdullah al-Salafi, a local resistance fighter, said. “Our goal is to create in the rest of Iraq what we have achieved in Fallujah.”

Large sections of the city have been abandoned by the civilian population, allowing al-Zarqawi’s men to establish safe houses and plan future kidnappings, suicide car bombings and assassinations. For days last week his followers even seized control of Haifa Street, one of Baghdad’s main arteries, where the group’s distinctive black flag was draped on apartment balconies, street lamps and, briefly, on a destroyed US armoured vehicle.

So how did al-Zarqawi emerge from obscurity to become in the space of only a few years one of the most feared individuals on the planet, whose operations have eclipsed even Osama bin Laden and whose actions could yet decide the outcome of the US presidential elections? Certainly the wanted posters plastered all over US military bases offer few clues. The fugitive, shown in a variety of disguises, has large brown eyes and a sympathetic face. In one, where he is wearing glasses, he even manages to look respectable.

In his home town, his family were answering no questions yesterday. When The Times approached the shabby, two-storey home where Um Musab, his wife, lives with the couple’s four children she slammed the white iron door shut, saying she had nothing to say.

At the small, nearby flat of Saleh Ilhami, al-Zarqawi’s brother-in-law, the terrorist’s sister said that the family stopped giving interviews months ago. “No one here is talking to the press. Leave us in peace,” she said.

But old friends and acquaintances in the town are incredulous that the boy born Ahmad Khalayleh in 1966 can possibly be the same man responsible for leading such a violent and successful global terrorist group.

Al-Zarqawi was raised in a branch of the powerful Bani Hassan tribe and is remembered as a simple troublemaker who got mixed up with the wrong people. Many of his neighbours recalled him as a tattooed, under-educated thug, once jailed for drug abuse and sexual assault in Jordan, who was an embarrassment to his long-suffering father, a retired army officer.

Like many aimless youths in the Arab world in the 1980s, he was drawn to the cause of the Mujahidin in Afghanistan, then fighting the Soviet occupation. He arrived in 1989, too late to fight, so instead became a journalist working for an Islamic magazine. He returned home, three years later, a committed Islamic warrior in search of a cause.

Jordanian authorities were already on the lookout for Afghan veterans seeking to bring the battle home. AlZarqawi was arrested for concealing weapons and belonging to Bayaat al-Imam, an Islamist group accused of planning the violent overthrow of the regime and replacing it with an Islamic caliphate.

He was sentenced to 15 years’ hard labour. It was during his imprisonment in Swaqa jail that he was transformed from foot soldier to leader under the direction of Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a Palestinian militant. Former inmates recall how al-Zarqawi became the de facto prison leader, studying the Koran and using violence when necessary to punish fellow inmates.

In a move that the Jordanians later had cause to regret, the prisoner was freed under an amnesty in 1999. He was then accused of plotting to kill American and Israeli tourists, but fled to Pakistan before he could be caught. He quickly moved to Afghanistan where, with the likely consent of bin Laden, he set up a training camp in the western city of Herat.

In the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the US invasion of Afghanistan, he disappeared and re-emerged in northern Iraq, where he joined forces with Ansar al-Islam, an al-Qaeda affiliate, hiding out in the mountains of Kurdistan.

His first victim was Laurence Foley, a US diplomat killed in Amman in 2002. But al-Zarqawi’s emergence as a real terrorist leader would come only later, in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, where he launched a terror campaign that has killed hundreds of people.

Among his first victims were the staff of the United Nations in Baghdad, whose offices were hit by two devastating suicide bombs last August. Since then he has killed Shia Muslims during their annual pilgrimage, slaughtered foreign kidnap victims and assassinated the president of the former governing council. In February the Americans claimed to have intercepted a long rambling letter sent by al-Zarqawi to bin Laden asking for help in fomenting a civil war.

Whether or not the Saudi fugitive responded is not clear, but al-Zarqawi has done a good job by himself. Few figures in Iraq dare to contradict him.

When Harith al-Dhari, a prominent Sunni Muslim cleric, condemned the practice of beheading hostages, al-Zarqawi branded the cleric a coward “who accepted humiliation” and accused him of “extending his hands to the enemy”.

Iyad Allawi, the Iraqi Prime Minister, last week told police recruits that he was sure al-Zarqawi would be brought to justice. “This will never be the Iraq of terrorists and saboteurs,” he said.

“We will destroy those who are targeting innocent people. Most of them are outsiders. One of them, God damn his father, is the one called Zarqawi. We don’t know where he came from to threaten Iraqis and target them for unknown reasons.”

But the Iraqi leader’s confidence has yet to be vindicated. Al-Zarqawi probably has freer movement around the country than Dr Allawi. His terrorist campaign may be barbaric, but it is infectious. His small band of fighters are better motivated and trained than the Iraqi security forces.

Even in the rundown neighbourhood of Hay Masoum, where al-Zarqawi grew up and his first wife and four children still live, some people are proud of Zarqa’s most infamous son.

A bearded man emerged from noon prayers yesterday praising the latest beheading of a foreign hostage at the hands of his former neighbour.

“God willing, Abu Musab will emerge victorious in his fight against the American and Zionist infidels who are wreaking havoc in Iraq,” said Yousef Khilleh, 30, a stonemason, clad in a knee-length white robe, the dressing code of purist Salafi Muslims.

“What Abu Musab and his Tawhid wal-Jihad group are doing in Iraq is halal (sanctioned by Islam), because Iraq is in a state of war and jihad (against the invaders) is allowed,” he said before disappearing down a dusty alley.

OK...I have a question for all you internet gurus out there:

How is it that these guys can publish these videos on the web? What country is hosting these sites and why can't we...with all our intel and means...track these guys down...or at least hack these web sites and figure out who is hosting them...paying the bills...and take them out?

I don't understand how these videos make it on the net and we can't stop them...or trace them back to their sources and make those people PAY for putting this act of terrorism on the net. They have to be hosted somewhere. They have to take that video...convert it to a .wav/.mpeg...etc...and then publish it. Seems that we should be able to get those people who publish it on their sites...and "ENCOURAGE" them to tell us who gave them the video.

Can somebody help a brother out? If we can do this...the next question is why aren't we. Sorry...just frustrated because I feel we are fighting this war a little too politically...and not the way we should (and before you accuse me of being anti-Bush...or anti-war...let me say I am a 17 year vet and was deployed for OIF...and was there on A day).

Again...somebody tell me why we can't track these guys down easier. I want them erradicated.

"...Yousef Khilleh, 30, a stonemason, clad in a knee-length white robe..."

Stonemason? Yeah, my great-grandfather, bless his soul, wanted me to follow his trade -- wooden-shoe carving.

Backwards, barbaric thugs.

We're gonna' get them. They're gonna' suffer hard sooner or later.

MADIVAN:

I've asked myself the same question... child porn rings are taken down with relative regularity, yet we can't track these videos through the sites on which they are posted? There must be a logical answer to this... probably the fact that the site on which the videos are hosted are not in the continental U.S. of A.

Good...so its not just me asking. I am sure those sites aren't in the US...but if any country that supports terrorism is our enemy...per the Bush doctrine (which is an EXCELLENT doctrine, BTW)...then they should be forced to oblige. I'm sure we have enough hackers working for the CIA to track these guys and take down their sites...with or without the assistance of the countries that host them. Heck...I would tell the world that country "X" is hosting these web sites and we will no longer do biz with them...OR ANYONE who does biz with them as long as these sites/people are allowed to exist. Period.

This crap will go on as long as we try to fight politically correct wars. If you're gonna turn a country around, you kick that country's ass to the point that its PEOPLE know not to mess with you again. The notion that the Iraqi people love us for liberating them is nonsense. By and large, they hate our guts. They have no fear of us because they know we'll only go after the worst of the bad guys. Thus the "insurgents" will never be stopped, because at best the population condones them and their tactics; at worst, the population supports, applauds, and aids these animals.

Welcome To Hell

(Trace Adkins/Bobby Terry)

Come on in son have a seat
Don't mind the screams, don't mind the heat
It's been like this round here for a long,long time
We haven't had the chance to meet
But I've heard about you on TV
And I think we're gonna get along just fine
I can't help but notice
You look somewhat surprised
Did ya think son after what you've done
The Lord would let you slide

Welcome to Hell your new home
You did the crime now you'll do the time
Right where you belong
Welcome to Hell end of the line
Your final sin got you in
And now your soul is mine
Welcome to Hell

I hope for your sake you're the kind
That can stand to burn 'til the end of time
'Cause that's exactly what you're gonna do
There's some lots left on the lake of fire
Where we send your kind to retire
And I picked out a nice little hot spot just for you
I've got one last thing to tell ya
And let me make this clear
I don't know what you've been told
But there ain't no virgins here

Welcome to Hell your new home
You did the crime now you'll do the time
Right where you belong
Welcome to Hell end of the line
Your final sin got you in
And now your soul is mine
Welcome to Hell

Your final sin got you in
And now your ass is mine

Welcome to Hell
Welcome to Hell,boy
You're gonna love it

[I'm not a country music fan but I love these lyrics]

"In his home town, his family were answering no questions yesterday. When The Times approached the shabby, two-storey home where Um Musab, his wife, lives with the couple’s four children she slammed the white iron door shut, saying she had nothing to say.

At the small, nearby flat of Saleh Ilhami, al-Zarqawi’s brother-in-law, the terrorist’s sister said that the family stopped giving interviews months ago. “No one here is talking to the press. Leave us in peace,” she said."

Wow, we are so nice and compassionate. We know where Zarqawi's wife, children and sister live, and we don't do anything to them? Unfortunately, compassion doesn't win wars.

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