Jordanian Sting Operation-Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
Breaking News-Mossad-Israeli Intelligence Exposed
June 9, 2006
Exclusive: Israeli Intelligence-Mossad-Report
Intelligence and Betrayal
A Jordanian Sting Operation Yielded the Vital Lead of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
The final breakthrough in the long pursuit of the most blood-stained terrorist of them all, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, came about in the third week of May in Jordan.
There, Jordanian special forces nabbed one of the lowlifes he employed to attack and rob the convoys plying Baghdad's main supply route across the Jordanian-Iraqi border and murdering their Iraqi or Jordanian drivers.
Foreigners riding along were taken hostage.
Ziyad Halaf al Karbouli, also known as Abu Hufeiza, was the leader of the al Qaeda squad plaguing these convoys.
Reveals he was the al Qaeda operative picked up not by chance, but in consequence of a well-laid Jordanian sting operation.
It was set up and executed by King Abdullah's old unit, The Riders of Justice of Jordan's 71st Commando Brigade and on his orders.
Jordanian intelligence had a score to settle with Zarqawi's highway robber.
Last September, he kidnapped a Palestinian called Khaled Da Siko, who was an important Jordanian undercover agent, assigned with penetrating Zarqawi's following.
The abduction took place in Ruthba in western Iraq.
When Abu Hufeiza asked Zarqawi what to do with his captive, he was told to execute him forthwith, which he did.
From that moment, Jordanian intelligence never let up on their efforts to lay hands on the kidnapper to exact revenge. The Riders of Justice infiltrated western Iraq at the beginning of 2006 and scoured al Qaim, Ruthba, Falujja and Ramadi for the wanted man.
At some point, they realized that even if they overpowered his bodyguards and killed him, they would never make it back to Jordan past Zarqawi's killers.
In early April therefore, a decision was taken in Amman to lure Abu Hufeiza into braving Zarqawi's prohibition and venturing into Jordan.
Double agents held out an offer of a base for al Qaeda in the kingdom, plus information on ways to lay hands on the hundreds of millions of dollars flowing through the funding channel between Jordan and Iraq.
Abu Hufeiza swallowed the bait. He was so dazzled that he pictured himself handing the rich booty over to Abu Zarqawi and being promoted to his Number Two in al Qaeda's Iraq hierarchy by his grateful master.
Zarqawi's henchman sings The moment he set foot on Jordanian soil with his bodyguards, all got up as Iraqi businessmen on a shopping trip, the trap snapped shut they were surrounded by the Riders of Justice and taken to the capital for questioning counter-terror sources report that Abu Hufeiza held nothing back from his Jordanian interrogators.
He was the source of the first real lead to Zarqawi's location to reach the US command and intelligence service in Iraq. Abu Hufeiza also gave away certain members of the Butcher of Baghdad's command group.
Here is a summary of the data the Jordanians extracted from him.
The name of al Qaeda chief's chief of operations, Yassin Harabi an Iraqi Sunni codenamed Abu Obeida.
Then going down the chain of command Yunas Ramlawi, a Palestinian from the West Bank town of Ramallah, and Muhammad Majid, a Saudi Arabian known as Abu Hamza.
He gave the Jordanians descriptions of these senior terror operatives which were good enough for identikit portraits and betrayed their hideouts, how they stayed in touch with Zarqawi and their movements.
He also parted with a detailed list of many junior commanders.
This data haul Jordanian intelligence whipped across to Washington where analysts went to work on it and rushed their findings to American headquarters in Baghdad.
All of a sudden, the US military in Baghdad had an intelligence bonanza instead of chance identities of the odd Zarqawi adherent which was all they had to work with before.
From Abu Hufeiza Jordanian intelligence had extracted the first clue to the location of the safe house near Baquba, where Zarqawi was actually in conference with his senior commanders.
The next link in the chain came from a senior Zarqawi commander in Iraq, who fell into American hands and was persuaded to part with the final steps to the targeted address.
Jordan and the captured terrorist were not the only source of the leads that brought US 500-pound bombs down on Zarqawi's final location, intelligence sources add that the US command was surprised by the fountain of data that gushed in the two weeks leading up to the air strike from Iraqi Sunni insurgents thought to be al Qaeda's close collaborators.
At first, the American officers treated the offerings as disinformation designed to trip them up.
But when US commander General George W. Casey and American ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad ordered it examined, the information proved solid.
All that needed to be done was to cross-reference the intelligence data incoming from Jordan, the al Qaeda prisoner and the Iraqi Sunnis and bull's eye, Zarqawi's location was pinpointed.
But questions remained: What caused the Sunni informers to turn on Zarqawi and give him away to his American hunters?
Did the betrayal come from inside al Qaeda?
Some answers to these questions appear in the next article in this issue.
Did Zarqawi Overreach Himself?
Bin Laden Names a New Global Operations Chief over His Head
Just two weeks before the US flattened Abu Musab al Zarqawi's hideout north of Baquba Wednesday night, June 7, Osama bin Laden named Abdulhadi al-Iraqi commander of worldwide operations effectively Zarqawi's new superior, disclosing this development, reports Abdulhadi is his code name. His real name is not known. All we have discovered is that the new man is in his forties and his wife is a constant companion in his travels.
The appointment underlines three significant points:
1. Bin Laden's choice of an Iraqi for the high post is a pointer to the overwhelming importance he attaches to the three-year old Iraq warfront, before and after Zarqawi's exit, for the future of his organization.
2. After operating for some years as an independent terrorist contractor, Zarqawi placed himself in 2004 under Osama bin Laden's direct command.
Having to defer to a bin Laden lieutenant must have been a galling comedown for him.
3. But this would fit in with another disclosure by counter-terror sources, Zarqawi, who had been claiming an inordinate amount of publicity, had fallen out with Wariya Arbili, commander of al Qaeda's second largest affiliate in Iraq, Ansar al-Sunna.
Arbili's nom de guerre is Abdallah a-Shefi. Bin Laden may have resorted to the classic method of settling a quarrel between two victorious generals by setting a third over both their heads.
Wariya Arbili, whose name is fairly unknown in the West outside military and intelligence circles directly involved in Iraq, was becoming a formidable rival; his war gains challenged those of Zarqawi. His Ansar al Sunna had seized control of large tracts of Iraq including sectors of Baghdad and the western al Anbar province, as well as footholds in Mosul, Tal Afar further north, and the Salah-e-din province in central Baghdad with the major Sunni towns like Tikrit.
Ansar al Sunna also boasts a strong presence in the Kurdish oil town of Kirkuk.
This fiercely radical Islamist group evolved from the northern Iraqi Ansar al-Islam as a home-grown jihadist group whose membership is a mix of Arabs, Kurds and Turkemen.
In the 1980s, hundreds of these Iraqi extremists joined up with al Qaeda to fight the Russians in Afghanistan, returning home to challenge the Saddam Hussein regime.
When US-led forces invaded Iraq in 2003 and toppled Saddam, they turned their bombs and guns against the foreign invaders. Of late, under their leader Arbili, Ansar al Sunna had begun bringing al Qaeda important assets.
First al Qaeda incursions into Kurdistan and Iran
A. The organization has expanded its penetration of the Sunni Kurdish community to the point that Kurdish leaders, for the first time since the war erupted, fear al Qaeda as a tangible threat to their domination of Kurdistan.
B. Using Sunni Kurdish recruits, Arbili is vigorously recruiting Sunni Iranians to his organization.
Tribute to Ansar al Sunna is contained in many of al Qaeda's recent electronic messages and circulars in such phrases as: "Sunna currently has many followers among Iranian Sunnis and is mainly based in central and northern parts of the country."
The inroads the organization has made on Iraq's Kurdish community surface in Afghanistan where Kurds are fighting NATO troops alongside the Taliban.
A prominent Kurdish commander from Iraq, Ayoub al-Kurdi, was identified among the dead in a battle near Kabul in late May.
Zarqawi looked askance at Arbili's successes and tried to undermine him by drawing Ansar al Sunna adherents into his camp. In the last two weeks of his life, he had a major success:
"Column 2", a large Kurdish Sunni group, crossed over to his force. Arbili fought back by encroaching on Zarqawi turf and stealing away two of his affiliates, Brigades of the 20th Revolt and the Army of Islam.
Osama bin Laden was not pleased with the skirmishing between his two top commanders for supremacy in Iraq, which he regards as al Qaeda's primary warfront.
Their feud posed three big problems for their leader.
1. Bin Laden saw he could not afford to let Zarqawi undermine Arbili because al Qaeda's gains in Iran and Kurdistan would be jeopardized, his scale of priorities, the penetration of Iran and Kurdistan ranks higher than the Zarqawi-instigated civil war against Iraq's Shiite community.
2. Bin Laden disapproved of many of Zarqawi's aspirations and methods, he felt that using the Iraqi platform for leaps into Middle East positions in places like Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Sinai and the Palestinians, meant stretching al Qaeda's resources too thin.
Such practices as the decapitation of hostages and massacres of innocents gave rise to undesirable theological disputes in the jihadi movement. Bin Laden was prepared to back Zarqawi, but only as long as the war in Iraq went in al Qaeda's favor.
3. Zarqawi's drive to whittle down Ansar al Sunna's strength was seen as a threat to hijack the Iraq arena as his own and usurp bin Laden's authority. Ansar al Suna's motives for betrayal This power struggle is believed by to have been the motive for Arbili's aides to intimate to certain Sunni Iraqis close to Ansar al Sunna that leaks to the Americans on Zarqawi's movements would not be taken amiss.
President George W. Bush, in his first remarks on Zarqawi's death, Thursday, June 8, referred to a tip from "Iraqi sources" as having led to the pinpointing of the second or third most wanted terrorist in the world.
It was no accident that Thursday afternoon, 1700 Iraq time, all Iraqi Sunni insurgent and guerrilla groups, including those tied to al Qaeda, simultaneously released a very detailed manifesto nullifying one by one the edicts issued by Zarqawi without naming him. They did away with such injunctions as the all-war on Iraqi Shiites and the indiscriminate massacres of civilians.
This document took time to prepare. It therefore attests to a degree of foreknowledge in Sunni radical circles that Zarqawi was finished.
The appointment of Abdulhadi sheds important light on some of the conventions that have grown up among Western intelligence pundits and terror researchers about al Qaeda's mode of operation and evolution, al Qaeda experts have never subscribed to the theory that Osama bin Laden has been reduced to a figurehead by young Turks and that the organization has become an ideological umbrella for autonomous franchises.
His timing and sureness of purpose in the appointment of the Iraqi operations chief, known also as Abdallah a-Shefi, indicate not just that he is in full command of all al Qaeda's warfronts and networks, but that he is fully apprised week by week of their activities and that his decisions are guided as much now as ever before by an acute sense of strategy.
It is also becoming apparent that the second generation of commanders bred in Afghanist an in the eighties is only now taking up positions in the organization's command hierarchy.
The new appointment serves to confirm the waning influence of the Egyptian Jihad Islami leader Ayman Zuwahiri in operational decision-making.
Our experts see him as relegated to the role of ideological analyst who offers theological advice in taped sermons to anyone who wants to listen.
Active field commanders are not thought to be in his audience.
Zarqawi's Last Major Hit
The US Military Loses its Sunni Linchpin in Iraq
The loss of Osama bin Laden's "emir" in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, may change some modes of al Qaeda violence but is unlikely to turn the tide of terror in Iraq.
But before he was dispatched in a targeted US assassination fed by Jordanian intelligence and Iraqi leaks, Zarqawi performed his last brutality and struck the US military a resounding blow.
Iraq was reeling this week from the rising tempo of terrorist attacks and a death toll mounting to 100 a day.
Baghdad hospitals reported receiving 1,400 bodies in May, many of them victims of the Sunni-Shiite sectarian war whose flames Zarqawi was fanning ruthlessly. There was a sense in Iraq and the Middle East at large that the crisis was careening out of control up to the point of no return.
His death Wednesday, June 7, provided a welcome moment of release from the stark reality. But it did not come soon enough, exclusive sources now disclose that Sunday, May 28, a killer squad sent by al Qaeda's Iraq chief murdered Osama Sheik al-Jadan, chieftain of the Karabila Sunni tribal federation.
The hit was carried out in Baghdad's high-end Mansour district near the Green Zone, fortified seat of Iraq's government, the American embassy and the US high command.
Our sources report that the US had been building up the Sunni sheikh for six months as its great white hope for reining in the insurgency and spearheading the operation to contain al Qaeda's push out of the western provinces to seize more territory.
Al Jadan was granted millions of US dollars and equipped with a steady supply of weapons and ammunition in order to array his tribal fighting men along a line running from Ramadi northwest of Baghdad up to Ruthba in the West that would hold back al Qaeda and its allies from marching on the Baghdad conurbation and the south.
The information gathered by his tribal spies on al Qaeda's movements was supplemented by US intelligence.
Their ambushes exacted heavy terrorist casualties.
The Americans prized the tribal chief all the more as a political leader as his collaboration with US forces deepened. US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad saw al Jadan as the key that would open the door for America and the Iraqi government to do business with the Sunni community.
His assassination by Zarqawi's killers brought home to Washington how far they had come to rely on the tribal chief.
The shock was comparable to the stunning effect of an earlier loss, the assassination of the young Shiite cleric Abdul Majid al-Khoei weeks into the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.
The son of the revered Iraqi cleric Imam al-Khoei, he was brought back from exile in London, armed with a US military-CIA trained militia and all ready to be set up as a prestigious, pro-American head of the Shiite community after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Another assassination derailed another American plan.
But Tehran sent the radical Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr back from Iran to assassinate Khoei before he found his bearings.
The US-trained militia broke up and Washington was forced to ditch its plan.
The death of al-Jadan, our Iraqi sources report, likewise scuttled the security setup which American forces had toiled for more than a year to put in place in central and western Iraq in the hope of arresting the advance of Zarqawi's forces and allied groups, like Ansar al Sunna.
Karabila tribesmen lost the urge to fight Zarqawi and withdrew from the field, followed by more Sunni tribes who had sided with the Americans.
The next to withdraw were the Sunni tribal and clan chiefs and informers, who served US forces as their support and information structure. They began refusing payment, meaning they had quit service with the US army.
At this point, US military commander in Iraq Gen. George W. Casey, rushed 1,500 troops of the 2nd Brigade of the US 1st Armored Division from Kuwait to the Anbar province.
They were needed urgently to hold the territory together, take over the key positions deserted by the Karabila tribes and rescue American-Sunni ties from collapse.
Casey also pulled six Iraqi brigades out of Baghdad and its outlying towns and deployed them with the US increment in the west. Their exit gave rise to the appalling surge in violent atrocities in and around Baghdad as terrorists and groups bent on inflaming sectarian warfare took advantage of the vacuum.
Casey will no doubt try and capitalize on the shock effect of Zarqawi's violent passing to recoup US ties with the Sunni tribes and stabilize the western front.
He needs to make haste, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's Iraqi sources say, because moderate Sunni factions and politicians have lost heart from the assassination of the Karabila chieftain and complain that Sunnis in Baghdad and other places are suffering ethnic cleansing as part of the communal war.
In the final days of Zarqawi's life, he began to see more active support for his campaign of terror from previously uncommitted Sunnis than ever before.
Zarqawi Dies as His Terror Campaign Prospers. Al Qaeda Is Driving Forward on Seven Fronts.
An intelligence snapshot of al Qaeda's situation in 2006 reflects momentum on seven of its eleven active fronts. The fundamentalists are stalled or in retreat on only three sectors.
al Qaeda experts do not expect the death Wednesday, June 7, of Abu Musab al Zarqawi in a safe house north of Baquba, Iraq, to halt the momentum of these campaigns of terror, although they might take a different direction.
Zarqawi was the most extreme and bloodthirsty of any al Qaeda commander in all its thirteen years. This does not mean that al Qaeda, without the Butcher of Baghdad, will be averse to repeating attacks on the 9/11 scale, or flinch from the use of chemical, biological or radioactive weapons.
But there will be less slaughter of hostages according to the ancient Muslim rites of beheading and the cutting of throats and less interest in inflaming sectarian and civil war at the cost of tens of thousands of innocent deaths.
Al Qaeda now appears to be intent mostly on territorial expansion and diverting its terrorist weapons to achieving strategic objectives, such as crippling national economies and destabilizing the West. Our al Qaeda experts examine four cases that expose the unsuspected dimensions of al Qaeda's current offensive: