Terror Suspect's Ambitions Worry U.S. Officials

Intelligence officials say Zarqawi is considered dangerous in part because he has a history of violent action, and not just in Iraq.

A 37-year-old Sunni who trained in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, Zarqawi established his own extremist group -- called al Tawhid -- several years ago in Jordan.

There his group attempted at the turn of the millennium to carry out terrorist bombings against hotels used by Jewish and American tourists. In 2002, he is believed to have arranged for the murder of Laurence Foley, a U.S. Agency for International Development official, for which he was convicted in Jordan in absentia. He was first publicly mentioned in October 2002 by President Bush as a terrorist associated with al Qaeda who was receiving medical treatment in Baghdad.

Zarqawi also has been tied by U.S. intelligence to Ansar al-Islam, the terrorist group that before the war was based in the Kurdish area of Iraq. He has been linked more recently to Jordanian members of al Tawhid who are on trial in Germany for plotting attacks against Jews in that country.

U.S. intelligence officials believe Zarqawi's vision for the jihadist movement differs somewhat from that of bin Laden. Bin Laden has remained focused on waging attacks in the United States, as well as against Americans and Europeans in the Middle East.

Zarqawi, U.S. officials said, sees Israel and Jews as main targets. His wider goal is to resurrect fundamentalist Islamic rule throughout the Middle East, officials said.

His main goals "include getting the U.S. out of the Arab heartland, promoting Sunni [against Shiite] predominance within the Islamic community" and targeting "Israel as the basis for evil," said a senior intelligence official.

In the letter that was seized, Zarqawi called Iraq "a political mosaic, an ethnic mixture," where for centuries "only a strong central authority and an overpowering ruler have been able to lead."

The Shiite majority, led by their religious leaders, "have befriended and supported the Americans" and therefore are "the proximate, dangerous enemy of the Sunnis." He continued: "As far as the Shia, we will undertake suicide operations and use car bombs to harm them."

Zarqawi also wrote that he has prepared publicity material "so that we can come out into the open . . . and become an arena of jihad in which the pen and the sword complement each other." Meanwhile, he wrote, he is working in the Sunni areas, "racing against time to create companies of mujahidin."

The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad has displayed the Zarqawi letter on its Web site and released excerpts in Arabic in Iraqi newspapers. CPA officials stress Zarqawi's plan to create turmoil by attacking the Shiite majority and his words that "with the deployment of [Iraqi] soldiers and police, the future has become frightening."

Yesterday, CPA spokesman Dan Senor reiterated the U.S. view that Zarqawi's letter shows he and other terrorists are threatened by the prospect of democratic rule in Iraq and the end of the U.S. occupation June 30.

As L. Paul Bremer, the CPA administrator, told reporters last month, "Zarqawi and all the others know they are falling behind in a race against time, a race against Iraqi self-government, when he says, 'Democracy is coming and there will be no excuse thereafter for the attacks.' "

Juan R.I. Cole, a Arab specialist at the University of Michigan, had a different view of the letter's meaning and did not see it as an expression of desperation. He said in an interview that the "democracy is coming" phrase was not stated as Zarqawi's sentiment, "but what he imagines the Shiites will be suckered into thinking by those wily Americans, who will still actually be running things" after the U.S. occupation ends. Cole said the U.S. government translation missed the nuance of the Arabic text and the rhetorical device of the writer temporarily adopting the voice of the Shiites.

Cole also said the seized Zarqawi letter indicates that he has not been in close touch with bin Laden and al Qaeda in recent years and in fact is "a rival to the bin Laden group." Although Zarqawi went through the al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan in the 1980s, he does not come across in the document as subservient to bin Laden, Cole said.

The Jordanian, he said, "is now in the position of being a small corporation looking to an older, larger corporation with a joint project in mind." But, Cole added, the letter makes it clear that Zarqawi is not calling off his Iraq operation if he does not get al Qaeda support.