Free Republic

The insurgents allowed her to conduct occasional interviews about their organization in which she learned that they belonged to an insurgent council, including members of al Qaeda. "The main captor during all these interviews I would do was anxious to tell me about this. He told me his name was Abdullah Rashid," she said. "He said he had helped form this council … in Iraq that brought together some of the main Sunni insurgent groups, and he was the head of it. One of those groups in that council was al Qaeda and Zarqawi." She was held from Jan. 7...

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 Afghanistan—an 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...

JORDANIAN Mussab al-Zarqawi, the alleged leader of a network in Iraq believed responsible for several attacks there, threatened US-led forces in a recording broadcast Monday on an Islamist website. In the message said to have originated from inside Iraq, Zarqawi claimed that his "heroic Mujahedin have killed more than 200 soldiers from the coalition of the crusaders." Taking credit for several attacks, Zarqawi said "the most recent and not the last was against the Israeli Mossad in the Jabal Lubnan hotel." A strong car bomb explosion in front of that hotel on March 17 killed seven people and wounded a...

Fears grow that extremists are ready to cross another threshold of terror Evidence gathered in Iraq and Afghanistan lends credence to claims that radical Islamic groups are dabbling in lethal toxins BEIRUT: A few days ago, Japanese prosecutors demanded the death sentence for the guru of the Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme Truth) doomsday cult, Shoko Asahara, for masterminding the sarin gas attack on Tokyo’s subway system on March 20, 1995. Twelve people were killed and 2,500 sickened. A year earlier, sect activists had released sarin in a residential neighborhood in the Nagano Mountains, killing seven people. Those atrocities crossed a moral...