Daily Standard: Zarqawi and His Role Model

By Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

The death of terrorist kingpin Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a time to applaud the success of Coalition forces, but also to assess what could have been done better along the way. In today's Daily Standard, my colleague Richard Miniter and I argue that one shortcoming of U.S. intelligence was its failure to recognize the relationship between Zarqawi and his historical role model, Nur ad-Din Zanki. An excerpt:

HISTORY NEVER REPEATS ITSELF precisely, but it often rhymes. Coalition forces killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a safe house just outside Baghdad. More than 800 years earlier, the life of Zarqawi's role model, Nur ad-Din Zanki (1118-1174), came to an end in Damascus, another power center of the ancient Islamic world. The long overlooked connection between the two men should provide a note of instruction for the future in dealing with the Iraq insurgency.

Most tyrants and terrorists are inspired by a charismatic figure who triumphed in a heroic past. Hitler looked back to Napoleon and Frederick the Great. Lenin measured his achievements against the record of the Paris Commune of 1870.

Zarqawi's role model was twelfth century Arab fighting king Nur ad-Din Zanki. Zanki had two missions in life: to drive the Crusaders from Arab lands and to crush Shiite rulers. Few understood the importance that Zarqawi placed on him. In interviews with Iraq and Zarqawi specialists at the State Department, Defense Department and West Point's Combating Terrorism Center, we found no one who understood the importance that Zarqawi placed on Zanki.

A survey of the available literature on Zarqawi in English shows virtually no reference to Zarqawi's relationship to Zanki. In the Arab world, though, there has been a fair amount of discussion about the two men.

We recently acquired a new, never-before-translated Arabic-language book on Zarqawi, Al Qaeda's Second Generation, by Jordanian journalist Fouad Hussein, who has been linked to Hezbollah's al-Manar television network. An independent translation that we commissioned reveals that Zanki was in fact Zarqawi's ideological guiding star. Hussein's book reprints a long personal communication from Saif al-Adel, who heads the military wing of al Qaeda, about Zarqawi. Hussein and al-Adel put great emphasis on the fact that Zanki is Zarqawi's role model.

The bottom line is that the war against al-Qaeda in Iraq has not ended with Zarqawi's death. Hopefully, when a new leader is chosen for al-Qaeda's jihad in Iraq, American intelligence will examine his historical role models -- and use this knowledge to our advantage.

The complete article can be found here.

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