The legacy of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Jordan

The New York Times has a story about how the hometown of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who was killed last summer, has become a breeding ground for jihadists, eager to become suicide bombers in Iraq.

The Times profiles a man using the pseudonym of Abu Ibrahim, 24, and his five friends - all of whom left the Jordan town of Zarqa in the hopes of becoming "martyrs" for the cause of Allah in Iraq.

As the Times reports:

Interviews with Abu Ibrahim and relatives of the other men show that rather than
having been individually recruited by an organization like Mr. Zarqawi’s, they gradually radicalized one another, the more strident leading the way. Local imams led them further toward Iraq, citing verses from the Koran to justify killing civilians. The men watched videos depicting tortured and slain Muslims that are copied from Internet sites.

“The sheik, he was a hero,” Abu Ibrahim said of Mr. Zarqawi. But, he added, “I decided to go when my friends went.” For the final step, getting the phone number of a smuggler and address of a safe house in Iraq, the men used facilitators who act more like travel agents than militant leaders.

“Most of the young people here in Zarqa are very religious,” an Islamist community leader said. “And when they see the news and what is going on in the Islamic countries, they themselves feel that they have to go to fight jihad. Today, you don’t need anyone to tell the young men that they should go to jihad. They themselves want to be martyrs.”

Americans are not the prime targets, incidentally. Iraqi Shiites generate even more antipathy according to the Times' sources:

"They have traditions that are un-Islamic and they hate the Sunnis,” said Ahmad Khalil Abdelaziz Salah, an imam whose mosque in Zarqa was attended by some of
Zarqa’s bombers.

Asked to name his targets, Abu Ibrahim said: “First, the Shiites. Second, the Americans. Third, anywhere in the world where Islam is threatened."

When word reached Zarqa that one of the young men, a nineteen-year-old, became a suicide bomber, his brother sang praises at his crowded funeral. As the Times reports: “They are the best youths and good persons,” [his brother] said. “He was successful in life, but decided to fight the Americans in Iraq.”

Not all family members are thrilled about these youthful aspirations. As the Times writes:

The mother of another of the young men, a 20-year-old engineering student, still believes that her son went to Iraq looking for a job. At the family’s home recently, she sank to her knees, weeping and clutching his physics book.

...His family was large and poor, with 17 children. Going to college gave him a glimpse of opportunities, but he failed to win a scholarship to study medicine in England, the sister said.

“Rich people go to his university,” she said. “He wanted to be somebody and he couldn’t.”

At the same time, he adopted a strict adherence to Islam. “I noticed the change two years ago,” his sister said. “He stopped listening to music. He isolated himself from us. At family gatherings, he sat by himself, thinking.”

And not all imams, incidentally, push these young men to kill themselves in suicide bombings. Mr. Salah, the imam, characterized the moral dilemma for the Times: “If you do a suicide operation, the Muslims are mixed up with non-Muslims and maybe you kill Muslims,” the imam said, suggesting that Muslims can shed non-Muslim blood without compunction.

Zarqa wasn't always such a hotbed of radical Islam, as the Times reports. It was only after the Iraq war got going that the shift took place. As one young woman who only recently started wearing a face veil or niqab told the Times: “Religion was something we just got from our parents. But after the war started, we decided we have to show the world we are Muslims. I started wearing the niqab to show the world I am Muslim.”

It seems the elders are less than thrilled by the youthful intrepretation of piety. As Abu Ibrahim was quoted as saying: “[When] I started to tell [my parents] that God wants us to give up our lives for jihad. They didn’t like it. They told me, ‘You’re still too young, wait.’ You know how mothers and fathers are. They didn’t want to hear such things.”

Even now, after having gone to Iraq where instead of earning martydom by carrying out a suicide bombing, he was imprisoned, he told the Times that his parents are even more insistent that he give up this jihad business.

“Enough, Abu Ibrahim. You tried to go and God doesn’t want you to go. So sit down and get married,” he recalls them telling him. But as the Times goes on to report, Abu Ibrahim remains firm in his commitment: "If we don’t defend our religion who should do it? The old people or the children?”

As the Times goes on to report:

He spends his days now in Zarqa at work with his brothers, then evenings with friends who share his convictions. They visit Islamic Web sites, discuss the news from Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq.

“I still have the same aim, fulfilling the rules of God,” he said. “I wouldn’t do the same mistakes the next time and hope that God would open the way.”

How do these foreign fighters end up killing themselves in Iraq?

The Washington Post has a fascinating article today on how young Moroccans are being recruited to fight jihad in Iraq.

"The big state for al-Qaeda is Iraq," said Mohamed Darif, a political science professor and terrorism expert at Hassan II-Mohammedia University in Morocco. "Al-Qaeda has the same strategy as the United States: It wants to win in Iraq so it can transform the whole region. They are fixated on Iraq."

According to the Post's sources, Al Qaeda has focused its recruitment efforts in Morocco in a small village in a hill station in the Rif mountains called Tetouan. As the Post reports:

Designated "watchers" hang around radical mosques and other places to look for young men angry about the conflicts in places such as Iraq and the Palestinian territories. For months, the watchers try to whip up the potential volunteers' emotions further and convince them that they have a religious duty to intervene.

"The recruitment does not exclusively take place in the poorest parts of society, nor in the category of illiterates," said Benmoussa, the interior minister. Instead, he said, recruiters "target a category of people that is extremely sensitive to what they consider international injustice."

Candidates are subjected to psychological assessments from a distance to determine if they are really willing to die for the cause.

This is because these Moroccan recruits are primarily used to carry out suicide missions once they get to Iraq. As Nick Pratt, a retired Marine colonel and terrorism expert at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in Germany told the Post, "Suicide bombings are embraced by networks affiliated with al-Qaeda because they are more lethal and generate more publicity. He said a suicide attack, on average, causes six times as many deaths and 12 times as many injuries as a conventional attack, such as a roadside bomb explosion."

Moroccan authories believe that some 50 Moroccans have been lured to fight jihad in Iraq since 2003. According to the Post's sources, "the problem is worse in other Arab countries."