How Jordanians hunted down their hated son
When US bombers finally caught up with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to end the life of one of the world’s most savage terrorists, they were acting on a remarkable chain of intelligence.
It started in a dusty border post in the rock-strewn desert between Iraq and Jordan. A quiet operation that received no attention. A frontier guard arrested by the Jordanian police. Not even worth a news brief in a local newspaper.
But Mohammed al-Karbouli was not just a frontier guard.
Karbouli, arrested on 22 May, disappeared, hidden in one of the scores of secret prisons and intelligence installations that the Jordanians run in their arid hinterland. If Karbouli’s actual detention went unnoticed, the consequences of his arrest would not. Teams of US special forces, CIA, Jordanian secret services and Iraqi intelligence have spent three years hunting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was blamed for beheading hostages – including the Briton, Kenneth Bigley – and killing hundreds of people in suicide bombings. This was the breakthrough they had needed.
There had been ‘breakthroughs’ before – almost as many as there have been ‘turning points’ in Iraq since 2003. But this was different. Karbouli had been arrested as part of a major investigation by Jordanian secret services into suicide bombings at hotels. He was thought to have assisted the bombers to enter Jordan from Iraq; he was also thought to have been a key figure in the transfer of weapons, money and material to insurgents in Iraq from Jordan. Most importantly, Karbouli talked.
His information was transmitted to the Americans and the intelligence stations that the Jordanians have, secretly and recently, been allowed to set up in Iraq itself. The Jordanians have made a huge effort of late to recruit agents and sympathisers among the powerful al-Dulaimi clan, in and around Falluja and Ramadi. The clan has become alienated from hardline Islamic militants such as Jordanian-born Zarqawi – even killing some ‘mujahideen’ whom they felt were targetting Iraqis too enthusiastically or encroaching on their own tribal power.
guardian.co.uk
Zarqawi Betrayed by Qaeda Insider
BAGHDAD Muhammad Ismael, a 40- year-Iraqi taxi driver, was standing outside his home in the tiny village of Hibhib on Wednesday evening when something unusual caught his eye.
Three GMC trucks, each with blackened windows, rumbled past his home and toward the little house in a nearby grove of date palms that for more than three years had stood abandoned.
“It was something very strange,” Ismael said in a telephone interview a day later. “That house is always empty.”
Meanwhile, in Baghdad, U.S. military commanders believed they had at last cornered Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist whose murderous onslaught against Iraqi civilians and U.S. troops made him the most wanted man in all of Iraq.
For the first time, the U.S. officials said they had a source deep inside his terrorist group. Zarqawi, the source told them, was in the little house in the palm grove.
U.S. jets were in the sky above.
In recent weeks, U.S. officials said, they had begun following a man who they believed could lead them directly to Zarqawi: his “spiritual adviser,” a man named Sheikh Abd al-Rahman. A member of Zarqawi’s network, captured by the Americans, had told them that the sheik was Zarqawi’s most trusted adviser.
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