Al-Zarqawi Rebuffed


The NYT reports that US suveillance of "chatter" among suspected terrorists suggests to them that al-Qaeda has decided not to get involved in Iraq, as Zarqawi had proposed.

al-Hayat profiled Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (i.e. Ahmad Fadl Nizal al-Khala'ilah) today. It says he is from al-Zarqa, a town near the capital of Amman. He is in his late 30s. He went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets in the mid-1980s (he must have been very young!). He took part in jihad against the Soviets. Afghan sources insisted to al-Hayat that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was seen at Tora Bora (November 2001) during the Afghanistan war, and was probably wounded. He escaped via Iran to Iraq and engaged in terrorist activities there. He visited Zarqa at the beginning of summer 2003.

Zarqawi is said to have been a prime organizer of an attack on the Jewish sites in Jerba, an island off Tunisia, in which Tunisian Jews and German tourists were hurt.