Doubt over Zarqawi’s role as ringleader
by Adrian Blomfield
American intelligence obtained through bribery may have seriously overstated the insurgency role of the most wanted fugitive in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
US agents in Baghdad and Fallujah have revealed a series of botched and often tawdry dealings with unreliable sources who, in the words of one, “told us what we wanted to hear”.
“We were basically paying up to $US10,000 ($A13,700) a time to opportunists, criminals and chancers who passed off fiction and supposition about Zarqawi as cast-iron fact, making him out as the linchpin of just about every attack in Iraq,” one agent said.
“Back home this stuff was gratefully received and formed the basis of policy decisions. We needed a villain, someone identifiable for the public to latch on to, and we got one.”
Officials in Washington have linked Zarqawi to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, casting the Jordanian extremist as leader of the insurgency, mastermind of suicide bombings and the man behind the abduction of foreign hostages.
But some critics of the war say the Bush Administration has deliberately skewed the level of Zarqawi’s involvement in an attempt to portray the insurgency as a war waged by foreign Islamic terrorists.