Posted on 06/09/2006 8:28:59 PM PDT by tbird5
On a cold and blustery evening in December 1989, Huthaifa Azzam, the teenage son of the legendary Jordanian-Palestinian mujahideen leader Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, went to the airport in Peshawar, Pakistan, to welcome a group of young men. All were new recruits, largely from Jordan, and they had come to fight in a fratricidal civil war in neighboring Afghanistanan outgrowth of the CIA-financed jihad of the 1980s against the Soviet occupation there.
The men were scruffy, Huthaifa mused as he greeted them, and seemed hardly in battle-ready form. Some had just been released from prison; others were professors and sheikhs. None of them would prove worth rememberingexcept for a relatively short, squat man named Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalaylah.
He would later rename himself Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Once one of the most wanted men in the world, for whose arrest the United States offered a $25 million reward, al-Zarqawi was a notoriously enigmatic figurea man who was everywhere yet nowhere. I went to Jordan earlier this year, three months before he was killed by a U.S. airstrike in early June, to find out who he really was, and to try to understand the role he was playing in the anti-American insurgency in Iraq. I also hoped to get a sense of how his generationthe foreign fighters now waging jihad in Iraqcompare with the foreign fighters who twenty years ago waged jihad in Afghanistan.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Will Michael Moore make a movie about him?
I suspect his eternity will feel like an eternity.
His acts of escalating violence as a youth graduating to vicious murder later and his failure to stand out, combined with his seeking out of the most dangerous situations ("possessing no fear") are the hallmarks of a psychopath.
They don't experience fear or any highs or lows the way we do and the only way he could even come close was to murder people in a variety of savage ways.
Wasn't Zarqawi once in prison in Jordan for raping someone? Maybe he was a serial rapist/killer from way back and then he found in Jihad a "respectable" way to satisfy his sadistic urges.
To bad we can't hear the military directing this. That'd be lovely.
Yep...
All were new recruits, largely from Jordan, and they had come to fight in a fratricidal civil war in neighboring Afghanistanan outgrowth of the CIA-financed jihad of the 1980s against the Soviet occupation there.
As if our permission was required for Afghans to fight back, as if our permission was required for every wannabe non-Afghan freelancers or jihadists backed by Islamic countries to join in, as if we somehow were able to handpick all the combatants. The fighting against the Soviets was going to go on with or without us.
"Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, barely forty and barely literate.."
Barely literate? Zarqawi was a doctor; I didn't read the entire article. After that sentence, I figured this was typical Lefty dissembling.
The other theme is "US sources untrustworthy, while all terrorist relatives and anonymous Jordanian sources's stories are Gospel."
Have to wonder if the author's sources are imaginary friends or if they might actually be real and on the Oil-for-Food bribery list.
Article cotains some information you might be interested in bump
(Denny Crane: "Every one should carry a gun strapped to their waist. We need more - not less guns.")
This is wrong.
Praise be unto Allah for F-16s and their drivers, and unto Northrop Grumman, and 500lb bombs.
This article reads like an homage to Charles Manson.
This article reads like an homage to Charles Manson.
The author lifted the title from an old Time magazine cover story..and just changed the words from Robert "Yummy" Sandifer to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
For the record, an expert contradicts some of this author's views about Zark at the Weekly Stadard: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/307cfkcp.asp?pg=1
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He also was lying trapped in the rubble from the first bomb, probably hearing the second one coming.
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