Are there al qaeda in iraq

Al-Zarqawi had a long-standing connection with the senior Al-Qaida leadership, appeared to be well regarded by them and was a close associate of Usama bin Laden deceased. He arranged for his followers to be trained in Al-Qaida camps.

Since his designation by the Committee, Al-Zarqawi moved the center of his operations to Iraq and consolidated his group of operatives under JTJ. The group continues to attack Iraqi civilians, the Iraqi Security Forces, and Iraqi governmental institutions. It has claimed many terrorist attacks inside Iraq including the high-profile attacks in Baghdad in August, October and December , which, combined, killed over people.

ET on January 7, M ost historians of the Islamic State agree that the group emerged out of al-Qaeda in Iraq as a response to the U. They also agree that it was shaped primarily by a Jordanian jihadist and the eventual head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The Jordanian had a dark vision: He wished to fuel a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites and establish a caliphate. Although he was killed in , his vision was realized in —the year ISIS overran northern Iraq and eastern Syria. Narratives about the origins of Islamic State ideology often focus on the fact that Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden, both Sunni extremists, diverged on the idea of fighting Shiites and on questions of takfir , or excommunication. Based on this set of assumptions, many conclude that Zarqawi must have provided the intellectual framework for ISIS.

Recently, I came to question the conventional wisdom. Dissidents within ISIS recently spread the full document on social media, which is how I came across it. Abdullah has stated that the biography was based on 16 years of working closely with his father, a diary that Anbari kept, and firsthand accounts of Anbari from fellow ISIS members.

A nbari was born in northern Iraq in into a Turkified family of Arab and Armenian descent. The household was devout. Abdullah tells the story of when a young Anbari wanted to buy pigeons.

His father told him he had to ask the local imam if keeping pigeons was sound from an Islamic-law standpoint. In some Arab countries, testimony from pigeon keepers is inadmissible in court; Arabs associate them with dishonesty, as their profession is thought to involve stealing pigeons owned by others and then lying about it. Anbari studied Sharia after he completed elementary school, at an institute in the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar. He graduated from the University of Baghdad in with a degree in Islamic studies.

After graduation, he joined the Iraqi army, served for seven years, and fought in the Iran-Iraq war. One day, a rich citizen of the town invited ghajars —an ethnic group similar to the Roma—to pitch a tent and throw a party with music and dancing. Anbari was enraged by the news; the party seemed to him profoundly sacrilegious. Anbari considered killing the ghajars , but he had no gun. He then asked one of his students to bring him gasoline, with the idea that he would burn the ghajars alive inside their tent.

Ultimately, he simply delivered a sermon against the ghajars and the planned, profane celebration. Responsibility for staging it was claimed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian petty criminal drawn into jihadist circles in prison and to Iraq by the U.

The U. The connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq was not obvious and, as it turned out, largely non-existent, at least until the U. The particular conditions prevailing in Iraq due to the U. Zarqawi deemed the Shiites apostates, a radical notion not commonly held by Iraqi Sunnis at that time. Within a year, the insurgency that Crisis Group had seen coming was in full swing, aimed primarily at U.

By targeting Shiite clerics and houses of worship, as well as crowded marketplaces in predominantly Shiite neighbourhoods, this new al-Qaeda in Iraq AQI plunged the country into a vicious sectarian war. The fight might have taken place even without AQI, given the U.

But AQI was certainly the proverbial match that lit the oil-soaked tinder. As the sectarian war raged, Iraqi society transformed from diverse to deeply divided, a change first expressed in the way Iraqis defined themselves.

Apart from my visits to Iraq, I also attended a number of workshops with Iraqis in Amman, then my home base. Before , these Iraqis, mainly politicians, technocrats and civil society figures, would invariably self-identify as Iraqis; then suddenly they began, as if by invisible hand, referring to themselves and each other as Sunnis and Shiites.

They soon split from core al-Qaeda more definitively to set up the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria ISIS , capturing a good part of northern Syria, which they ruled with brutal hand before returning triumphantly to Iraq in May In short, the U. Welcomed by many for overthrowing a horrid dictator, U.

Even after the CPA dissolved, handing over the reins of power to an interim Iraqi government in , the U. Over time, Iraqi militants took control of AQI, giving it, and its successor ISIS, a predominantly Iraqi leadership possessing an Iraq-inflected ideology that was based partly in religion a very narrow, some would say twisted, interpretation of Sunni Islam and partly in Iraqi Arab chauvinism.

Virulent ideologies and violent actors are all around, but they need the right soil to blossom. Post-invasion Iraq provided it, as have many other war-torn countries and regions since then. Even if the U.