Saddam : His Rise and Fall by Con Coughlin Read Free Book Online Page B

traditions Westernized.
    The continuing political uncertainty in post-Saddam Iraq undoubtedly played into the hands of those both inside and outside Iraq who were determined that the coalition’s attempts to rebuild the country, both politically and economically, ended in failure. There was no letup in the daily, morale-sapping guerrilla attacks on coalition troops, particularly American forces, which were carried out by a combination of disaffected Baathists and foreign recruits who had made their way to Iraq after the war for the chance to carry out attacks against Western targets. Coalition forces detained fighters who had come from as far afield as Somalia and Yemen, and there were significant numbers of fighters who made their way to Iraq from Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran. So long as there was no recognized Iraqi government either to rally support among the people or to impose its will upon them, the foreign fighters were able to operate at will, carrying out a number of deadly attacks that were designed to make it impossible for the coalition to run the country by fostering civil strife. During a one-week period in February 2004 more than 100 Iraqis, most of whom were employed by the coalition, were killed by a series of car bombs, the purpose of these attacks being to deter Iraqis from cooperating with the occupation forces. In March, as the country prepared to celebrate the first anniversary of Saddam’s overthrow, more than 200 Shiite worshipers were killed by a series of bombs detonated at mosques in Baghdad, Karbala, and Quetta as they celebrated the Shiite feast of Ashura.
    Many of these indiscriminate attacks were blamed on Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization. During the buildup to the war in Iraq, the Bush administration had argued persistently that military action against Saddam was justified because of Baghdad’s links with al-Qaeda. In his victory speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, President Bush had directly linked the war in Iraq to the September 11 attacks and stated that in defeating Saddam, the United States had defeated “an ally of bin Laden.” Undisputed evidence that Saddam had cooperated actively with al-Qaeda, however, remained elusive. Documents found in looted Iraqi ministries suggested that al-Qaeda operatives had been trying to arrange a meeting betweenSaddam and bin Laden in the late 1990s, but there was no confirmation that the meeting had actually taken place.
    If doubts existed about the extent of al-Qaeda’s involvement in Iraq before the war, there could be none once Saddam had been overthrown. Coalition military commanders soon identified one of bin Laden’s leading lieutenants, a one-legged Jordanian-Palestinian militant called Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as the driving force behind many of the attacks being carried out in Iraq after Saddam’s capture. Prior to the war the Bush administration had alluded to Zarqawi’s presence in Iraq as evidence of Saddam’s involvement with al-Qaeda. At that time Zarqawi was reported to be acting as an intermediary between Baghdad and a group of al-Qaeda fighters that had taken refuge in a northern enclave of Iraq near the Kurdish village of Halabja after fleeing from Afghanistan. There was some dispute as to whether Saddam’s regime had any meaningful contact with the al-Qaeda fighters, but both Israeli and Jordanian intelligence claimed that Zarqawi was actively cooperating with Saddam. During the war U.S. forces made a point of destroying the al-Qaeda camp near Halabja, but Zarqawi remained at large, and by early 2004 he was identified as the prime culprit behind the deadly bombing campaign being waged against coalition targets, and U.S. forces offered a $10 million reward for his capture. In May 2004 Zarqawi gained international notoriety when he was held responsible for the murder of Nick Berg, an American contractor who was kidnapped in Iraq by a group of Islamic extremists. Zarqawi