IRAQ & The Neo-Salafi - The Challenges Of Terrorism - Part 5B - Iraq Challenge.

In Saudi Arabia, where Wahhabism is the sect of the state, radical militants bent on undermining the royal regime are called neo-Wahhabis. In Iraq, neo-Wahhabi militants are the most deadly enemy of the US-led forces as well as the Shi'ite Arab majority. The militants are part of what experts in Islamic terrorism call neo-Salafism, the most fanatic strain of Sunnism. Their main strength is suicide bombing - a serious challenge to the US project for Iraq for and the rest of the Greater Middle East (GME).

Part of the challenge is Syria, a Baathist-ruled neighbouring country through whose territory neo-Salafi volunteers transit into Iraq. But intensive US pressures in the past several months have resulted in the isolation and weakening of the Baathist regime in Damascus. Now this regime appears to be on the verge of major change or even collapse (see news14cSyriaOct3-05).

The most dangerous among neo-Salafi groups in Iraq is al-Qaeda Organisation for Jihad (holy war) in Mesopotamia, led by Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi. US-led Iraqi forces on Sept. 27 dealt a heavy blow to this group as they announced the killing of its second-in-command, Zarqawi's deputy, Shaikh Abdullah Najm Abdullah Muhammad al-Juwairi - known as Abu 'Azzam - who was "the emir of Baghdad" and previously was "emir of Anbar" province. He was personally responsible for the killing of more than 1,200 people.

A US-Iraqi force shot and killed Abu 'Azzam after he resisted at a multi-storey Baghdad building in the morning of Sept. 25. The US described him as the "second most wanted al-Qaeda terrorist" after Zarqawi. He was responsible for the wave of suicide car bombings after the formation of an elected government in late April. He orchestrated the upsurge of violence in and around Baghdad which killed hundreds of Shi'ite civilians and policemen. He funded wider insurgent operations. The raid was based on intelligence and information from a close associate of Abu 'Azzam. In 2004 he led western Iraq's Anbar, the heartland of the insurgency, and was at Falluja where US troops tried to stamp out the network's leadership. The insurgency continued despite his elimination. In Ba'qouba, north-east of Baghdad, a suicide bomber on Sept. 27 detonated himself in a crowd of police recruits, killing 10 and wounding more than 20. But in the northern city of Mosul police captured another Zarqawi aide, Abdul Rahman Hasan Shahin.

Security adviser Muaffaq al-Rubai'e on Sept. 27 said US-led forces were getting close to capturing or killing Zarqawi, a Palestinian-born Jordanian terrorist with a US bounty of $25m on him. A ruthless man who has personally decapitated many of al-Qaeda's hostages, Zarqawi has declared an all-out war against Iraq's Shi'ite Arabs (see Iraq survey in rim3bbIraqWarSep26-05). On Sept. 29, for the first time, a neo-Salafi female detonated herself as a bomber, killing ordinary people in Tal A'far near the Syrian border.

Over 63 people were killed on Sept. 29 in three al-Qaeda car bomb attacks in Balad. The bombs went off successively within less than an hour at dusk near a busy market in a mostly Shi'ite area, in a street with a bank and next to a police station in a town about 90 km north of Baghdad. Last week five Shi'ite teachers in a school south of Baghdad were dragged away by gunmen and shot dead. In August, more than 160 part-time labourers living in the Shi'ite Baghdad district of Kathemiya were killed in a suicide bomb blast, the deadliest attack since the war began. Balad, site of a big US air base, is near the Shi'ite town of Dujail, the focus of a trial of Ba'thist dictator Saddam Hussein. Saddam is accused of ordering the killing of around 150 Shi'ite men in Dujail after a failed assassination attempt on his life in 1982. The trial is due to begin on Oct. 19, four days after a referendum on a draft constitution which many in Saddam's formerly dominant Sunni minority have condemned as hiving off too great powers from Baghdad to the Kurdish north and potentially to majority Shi'ite Arabs in southern Iraq.