Osama bin Laden does not want U.S. to leave Iraq

Among those quietly celebrating the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi last week, no doubt, were Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leaders of Al Qaeda, who have watched their nominal ally wreck the standing of their organization among Muslims around the world. After Zarqawi began his bloody operations in Iraq, in 2003, support for suicide bombings—the signature of Al Qaeda since the destruction of the American embassies in East Africa, in 1998—plummeted in Islamic countries. Muslims surveyed in the 2005 Pew Global Attitudes Project reported in substantial numbers that Islamic extremism was a threat to their own countries. Jordan, Zarqawi’s homeland, seemed to be the exception. Then Zarqawi sent suicide bombers to three hotels in downtown Amman, killing sixty people, including prominent Jordanians and Palestinians, many of whom were celebrating a wedding. The next day, tens of thousands of Jordanians poured into the streets to denounce Al Qaeda.

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Unlike Zarqawi, bin Laden and Zawahiri continued to focus their enmity on the West and on the autocratic rulers of their own countries. “They felt the need to fight on the fringes, in Chechnya, Bosnia, Pakistan, Sudan,” Nematt said shortly before Zarqawi was killed. “Once they won on the margins, they would march to the center. Zarqawi turned the tables on them. In bin Laden’s view, Zarqawi is leading the Sunnis in Iraq to hell, and he doesn’t know what to do. Bin Laden and Zawahiri feel that, if Zarqawi forces the Americans to abandon Iraq, the Shia will go into the Sunni triangle and start ethnic cleansing.”

Zarqawi’s obsession with the Shia led Zawahiri to write a letter to him last July. “Why were there attacks on ordinary Shia?” Zawahiri demanded. “Can the mujahideen kill all the Shia in Iraq? Has any Islamic state in history ever tried that?” He also said that the grotesque scenes of execution should stop. “We can kill the captives by bullet,” he counselled. But in the same note he meekly asked for a hundred thousand dollars for Al Qaeda. Money—especially from Saudi Arabia—that used to go to bin Laden was now going into Zarqawi’s treasury.

In recent months, the founders had begun to distance themselves from Zarqawi. Bin Laden’s latest communiqué, in April, urged Muslims to wage jihad in Darfur, Sudan, rather than in Iraq, saying that Western involvement in the Sudanese peace process was part of the “crusades against Islam.” Soon afterward, Zawahiri congratulated Zarqawi for overseeing more than eight hundred suicide operations, claiming, “This is what has broken the back of America in Iraq.” Last week, he offered similar encouragement; still, he directed his attention to Muslims elsewhere. A few days before Zarqawi was killed, Nematt told me, “He is on the edge of declaring total rebellion against bin Laden and Zawahiri. Zarqawi’s recruits are growing exponentially. This kid is eclipsing them.”