Questions linger over Zarqawi's death

US officials are saying the alleged leader of Al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, died shortly after the US military obliterated his hideout northwest of Baghdad on June 7 with two 500-pound bombs. The bombs tore a huge crater in the date palm forest where the house was nestled outside the town of Baquba. The military also said Zarqawi's spiritual adviser, Sheik Abdul-Rahman, was killed instantly in the bombing. The military has revised several details of the bombing and its aftermath. After first reporting that Zarqawi was dead when US troops arrived, US officials now say that he died at the site in the presence of US troops. US officials also changed their story about the dead at the house besides Zarqawi. First official reports included the death of a child along with two women and other men. Then that was changed to definitely no child present. On June 10, US Military spokesman Army Maj. Gen. William Caldwell recanted his correction, saying that one of the six people who died was in fact a girl around five or six years old. Statements by two witnesses further conflicted with the shifting US accounts. An Iraqi police lieutenant who said he was among the first people at the scene said that after Iraqi police had carried Zarqawi to an ambulance on a stretcher, US troops took him off the stretcher and placed him on the ground. One of the soldiers tried to question Zarqawi and repeatedly stepped on his chest, causing blood to flow from his mouth and nose, said the lieutenant, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Another witness, Mohammed Ahmed, who said he lived near the Zarqawi hideout, said that he had also witnessed US soldiers beating Zarqawi. Ahmed claimed that residents put the man in the ambulance before US forces arrived. "He was still alive. We put him in the ambulance, but when the Americans arrived they took him out of the ambulance, they beat him on his stomach and wrapped his head with his [robe]. Then they stomped on his stomach and his chest until he died and blood came out of his nose," Ahmed said. Ahmed also said that he and others at the bombing site were detained and interrogated for several hours by US forces. Seeking to dispel some of the allegations, Maj. Gen. Caldwell said an autopsy performed on June 10 proved the Jordanian-born militant died of "massive internal injuries" that were consistent with the blast. The cause of death was listed as "primary blast injury of the lung," with blast waves from the two bombs causing bruising and bleeding of the organs. US commanders initially had said Zarqawi died in the airstrike but later said he survived and died 52 minutes after the bombing. "There is no intention on anybody's behalf to engage in deception, manipulation or evasion," Caldwell said. "The scientific facts provide irrefutable evidence regarding the deaths of terrorists (sic) [and] will serve to counter speculation, misinformation and propaganda," the general said. Caldwell's recounting of the aftermath of the airstrike could not be independently verified. "Our soldiers who came on the scene found him being put in an ambulance by Iraqi police. They took him off, rendered first aid, and he expired," said Gen. George Casey, the top US commander in Iraq. "And so he died while American soldiers were attempting to save his life. And so the idea that there were people there beating him is just ludicrous." The bombs that supposedly killed Zarqawi at 6:15pm pulverized the brick house where he spent his final minutes, vaporizing walls and the foundation, hurling concrete blocks 90 yards, and leaving a crater 40 feet wide and deep. Trees around the blast site were ripped from their roots. The next morning, the scene was a bit tidier. The once-gaping crater had been mostly bulldozed and filled in. In one corner of the wreckage lay a leaflet from Council of Holy Warriors, the militant organization that Al-Qaida in Iraq claimed to have joined in Zarqawi's final months. There was a can of Diet Pepsi, unopened at its top but the rest of it shredded by the blast. What the bombs did not destroy, US bulldozers did. US troops demolished anything left of the structure. The troops said they nevertheless uncovered a pair of AK-47 assault rifles, ammunition and grenades, as well as information on computer hard drives and memory sticks that led them to conduct 56 subsequent raids around Iraq. Still, given the extraordinary destruction evident at the house, a number of questions lingered, including how anyone could have survived such an attack, let alone for nearly an hour, as US and Iraqi officials say Zarqawi did. It seemed puzzling, too, surveying the destruction, how Zarqawi's head and upper body, shown on television screens across the world, could have remained largely intact. That an unmolested weapons and intelligence cache survived also appeared strange. Caldwell said experts told him it is not unheard of for people to survive a blast of that magnitude. "There are cases when people, in fact, can survive even an attack like that on a building structure. Obviously, the other five in the building did not, but he did for some reason," he said. Zarqawi was not meeting his lieutenants, as was first suggested. The US military said intelligence specialists had been following Rahman's movements for weeks. US commanders said that when it became clear that Rahman was meeting Zarqawi, they ordered the pilot of an F-16 fighter jet that was on a routine mission in the area to drop the bombs on the house. In the days before he was tracked down and killed, Iraq's most wanted man was living with almost no guards and only five companions. The ease with which Iraqi police and US Special Forces were able to reach the house after the bombing without encountering hostile fire showed that Zarqawi was never the powerful guerrilla chieftain and leader of the Iraqi resistance that Washington has claimed for more than three years. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was a little-known Jordanian petty criminal before he became the Islamic fundamentalist fanatic denounced by the United States as an insurgent leader of great importance. Zarqawi's rise was attributable to the US in two ways. He was a wholly obscure figure until he was denounced by then US Secretary of State Colin Powell before the UN Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003 as the link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. There was no evidence for this connection and Zarqawi did not at that time belong to al-Qaida. Indeed, Iraqi police documents, discovered later, showed that Saddam Hussein's security forces, far from collaborating with Zarqawi, were trying to arrest him. Arriving in Iraq in 2002, he had taken refuge in the mountain hideout of an Islamic extremist group near Halabja in Kurdistan, in an area which the Iraqi government did not control. As for al-Qaida, in Afghanistan Zarqawi had led a small group hostile to it, and was never a close adherent of Osama bin Laden. But Powell's denunciation made Zarqawi a symbol of resistance to the US. It also fit Washington's political agenda that attacking Iraq was part of the international "war on terror." The next critical moment in Zarqawi's career was the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003. Previously, US military and civilian spokesmen blamed everything on the former Iraqi leader. No sooner was Saddam captured than US spokesmen began to mention Zarqawi's name in every sentence. The US denunciations, and videos supposedly showing Zarqawi beheading Western hostages, combined to spread his fame. Several public statements about Zarqawi–that he had a leg amputated in Baghdad and hosted a meeting of terrorist chieftains in Syria–turned out to be inaccurate. It then emerged in April that the US emphasis on Zarqawi as the prime leader of the Iraqi resistance was part of a carefully calculated propaganda program. The US campaign was partly geared towards the US public, aiming to establish that the invasion of Iraq was a reasonable response to the Sept. 11 attacks. This meant it was necessary to show that al-Qaida was strong in Iraq and play down the fact that this had happened only after the invasion. According to internal military documents published by the Washington Post and officials interviewed by the newspaper, the US military conducted a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials say has overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. For the past two years, US military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "US Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign. The campaign included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, internet postings and at least one leak to a US journalist. Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, KS, last summer, "Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will–made him more important than he really is, in some ways." The military's propaganda program apparently spilled over into the US media. One briefing slide about US "strategic communications" in Iraq, prepared for Gen. Casey, describes the "home audience" as one of six major targets. Other sections of the briefings indicate that there were direct military efforts to use the US media to affect views of the war. One slide in the same briefing noted that a "selective leak" about Zarqawi was made to New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins. The resulting article, about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the Times front page on Feb. 9, 2004. The Zarqawi campaign is discussed in several of the internal military documents. "Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response," one US military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed "Media operations" and "PSYOP," the US military term for propaganda work, as the main methods to use. One internal briefing document quotes Brigadier General Kimmitt, then-chief US military spokesman, as saying: "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date." Kimmitt is now the senior planner on the staff of the Central Command that directs operations in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. In 2003 and 2004, he coordinated public affairs, information operations and psychological operations in Iraq. "There was clearly an information campaign to raise the public awareness of who Zarqawi was, primarily for the Iraqi audience but also with the international audience," Kimmitt said. "Through aggressive Strategic Communications, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi now represents: Terrorism in Iraq/Foreign Fighters in Iraq/Suffering of Iraqi People [Infrastructure Attacks]/Denial of Iraqi Aspirations," the same briefing asserts. Although US military officials admitted that few insurgents were non-Iraqi, Zarqawi's Jordanian origins were useful in suggesting that the resistance against the occupation was being orchestrated outside of Iraq. In reality the insurgency is almost entirely homegrown, reliant on near-total support from the five million-strong Sunni community. Its military effectiveness is far more dependent on former officers of the Iraqi army and security forces than on al-Qaida. Iraq remains a nation beset by deeply rooted problems that threaten to push it deeper into chaos. There are few expectations that Zarqawi's death will change that. Both President Bush and Gen. Casey were careful when announcing Zarqawi's death not to suggest that it was a turning point. "We can expect the terrorists and insurgents to carry on without him," Bush said. "We can expect the sectarian violence to continue." Supposedly, Al-Qaida in Iraq quickly named Zarqawi's successor and said he would stick to the slain leader's path–attacks on Shiites as well as on US and Iraqi forces. The new leader, identified by the nom de guerre Abu Hamza al-Muhajer in a statement posted on the web, appeared to be a foreign Arab, like his predecessor. But otherwise he is an unknown. The authenticity of the statement could not be independently confirmed. It was posted on an Islamic militant web forum where al-Qaida in Iraq supposedly posts messages. Nevertheless, Bush claimed Zarqawi's death to be "a severe blow to al-Qaida." But a half-dozen officials, who have decades of experience tracking and analyzing Islamic militants, offered a more cautious view. "To me it's not a severe blow. It's a dent," said Dennis Pluchinsky, a former State Department terrorism analyst. "It will probably have a minimal impact on the insurgency in Iraq and minimal impact on the global jihad movement, which is now self-sustaining." Michael Scheuer, the first chief of the CIA's Osama bin Laden tracking unit, said Zarqawi's death is likely to have little impact on the largely sectarian bloodletting in Iraq and "as the dust settles, it may be a negative" because bin Laden may actually welcome Zarqawi's death. Zarqawi never had more than an uneasy alliance of convenience with bin Laden's al-Qaida network, the current and former officials said. In fact, Zarqawi and bin Laden, who came from vastly different backgrounds, disliked each other. Al-Qaida leaders were alarmed by reports of Zarqawi's rampage of beheadings and car bombings and his targeting of Shiite Muslims in an effort to instigate a Shiite-Sunni war. Zarqawi rejected an admonition from bin Laden's deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, to stop targeting Shiites, who are the majority of Iraq's 26 million people. "He was an embarrassment to the resistance," said Iraqi commentator Ghassan al-Attiyah. "They never liked him taking all the limelight and the Americans exaggerated his role."