Captors' goals were similar to al-Qaida's

Sunday, August 20, 2006 The two senior men had a three-phased, 20-year plan. By DAN MURPHY CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR Jill Carroll's senior captors shared much of the worldview and objectives of al-Qaida. Abu Ahmed, for example, described himself as a senior planner for the Mujahideen Shura Council in Iraq (MSC). He was a highly educated cleric. During Carroll's captivity, he told her that he had just finished an Arabic translation of a Henry Kissinger biography and was reading Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People," also in Arabic. Carroll came to know him while held in his book-filled house west of Fallujah. Abu Ahmed, a nom de guerre, had his own cell under Abu Nour aka Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi. Abu Ahmed and Abu Nour told Carroll of a 20-year plan that would extend far outside Iraq, broken into three phases. They said that the Americans would have to be driven from Iraq; then an emirate (similar to the United Arab Emirates) would be established in Iraq, but it would be governed under strict Islamic law; then they would destroy Israel and focus on a more global effort. Abu Nour expressed his hatred for Arab regimes, which many of the mujahideen see as the principal obstacles to bringing their strict interpretation of Islam to all Muslims. Last October, the U.S. military released a letter that it claimed was sent by al-Qaida's chief strategist, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in which he outlined al-Qaida's long-term goals. Though some commentators have alleged the letter could be part of a U.S. disinformation campaign, it tracks closely with the plan laid out by Carroll's captors. Laying out a similar plan In al-Zawahiri's letter, he sets out a four-step plan, its only real difference from Abu Ahmed's plan being the timing of the attack on Israel, and specifying that there would be attacks on the U.S. and Arab governments. al-Zawahiri wrote that it would be tactically best to topple Arab regimes before marching on the Jewish state. Evan Kohlmann, an expert on al-Qaida propaganda, says that the political statements of Carroll's captors are interesting because they indicate that some powerful Iraqi Sunni insurgent groups staunchly support al-Zarqawi's tactics of using suicide bombings, targeting Shiite civilians, and launching terror attacks beyond Iraq's borders. "It's not just al-Qaida and it's not just foreign fighters" who support terrorist attacks on civilians, said Kohlmann. "It's Iraqis, too, who are doing it, and that's a big problem." U.S. government officials frequently portray al-Qaida-style terrorist attacks as mostly a foreign import in Iraq, and a number of newspapers have reported that even Iraqi insurgents have turned on those who adopt such tactics. But Carroll's account and Kohlmann's own research have convinced him that many Iraqi insurgents are backing the most extreme tactics, and he sees little evidence that the operational freedom of such groups has been undermined by Sunni sheikhs such as Osama al-Jadaan, who claimed to have al-Qaida on the run in Anbar Province. In February, Jadaan publicly threatened Carroll's captors with death if she wasn't released unharmed. He was murdered in Baghdad in May. A few days later, the MSC claimed responsibility for his death.