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After Zarqawi, No Clear Path In Weary Iraq
A U.S. soldier sets up a photograph of the slain Abu Musab al-Zarqawi at a Baghdad news conference. Reflections on the portrait and its frame, page C1.
(By Khalid Mohammed -- Associated Press)
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"But the key thing that we realize is he's not an Iraqi," Caldwell said. "You know, he's from a different country, he's come into Iraq and he's been out killing innocent Iraqi civilians. He's not the kind of person that the government of Iraq, the Iraqi people themselves nor the coalition forces care to have existing in this country."
But Masri has no public profile. Ordinary Iraqis and international experts said they knew little about the Egyptian put forward by the Americans as Zarqawi's heir apparent. And if U.S. commanders were quick to put a new foreign face on the insurgency, leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq were equally quick to insist that the new face was an Iraqi one.
A statement posted on Web sites and in mosques in the heavily insurgent western city of Ramadi declared that a Baghdad man -- Abdullah ibn Rasheed al-Baghdadi -- was the head of a recently formed umbrella group of Iraqi insurgent organizations that includes al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The statement was issued in the name of Abu Abdul Rahman al-Iraqi, the nom de guerre of an Iraqi identified as a former army general. Abdul Rahman is said to have been behind some of al-Qaeda in Iraq's comparatively rare military-style attacks, including a multi-pronged raid on Abu Ghraib prison last year.
"We are Jihadists in the cause of God, not of Abu Musab or any other," the statement declared.
"We pledge to Sheik Osama bin Laden, our emir, that he shall see from the Qaeda organization during the coming days longer breath, more strength and further scourging of Americans," the statement said. "There is between us and them a lengthy war, and those who have blasphemed shall see who prevails. God is the victor."
Abdul Rahman has been cited as Zarqawi's deputy and possible successor since last year.
Zarqawi himself is considered to have fallen out of favor with al-Qaeda as a whole during that time, allegedly because of his slowness to declare fealty to bin Laden and because al-Qaeda leaders saw that the beheadings and wholesale slaughter of civilians by Zarqawi's group revolted supporters instead of rallying them.
"The man was a burden on al-Qaeda," said Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper and a noted Palestinian observer of international militant groups.
"I believe personally that President Bush unintentionally gave al-Qaeda a huge reward in getting rid of Zarqawi," Atwan said by telephone from London. "He was an unmanageable bully who forced himself as a leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq."
Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's founding leaders, are likely to try to put in place a leader "they have more operational control of" and who will take fewer personal risks, according to a longtime participant in the U.S. military hunt for Zarqawi.
"To them, this day serves two purposes," the participant said. "They've got their martyr, and they can put one of their guys in who they've been grooming, who is not running around playing master and commander on the battlefield but is going with the party line, and that is the danger."
