Zarqawi's role in Iraq overstated, analysts say

Page 3 of 4 -- It is unclear whether Zarqawi's group is responsible for all the attacks to which it is linked, including the August 2003 suicide bombings at the United Nations, the Jordanian Embassy, and the Shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf.

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The American military contends it has uprooted the group's leadership structure, but its campaign does not seem to have stemmed the nationwide wave of suicide bombings and targeted killings of Iraqi police and soldiers.

Since Sept. 2, the US military in Baghdad has made at least 30 announcements about operations against the Zarqawi network. During that period, covering less than two months, the US military contends to have killed at least 100 members of the Zarqawi network in Fallujah while bombing 25 safe houses, four illegal checkpoints, a training camp, and five weapons depots. And the US military announced the capture of 11 militants linked to Zarqawi. There is a $25 million reward for his capture -- the same amount offered for Saddam Hussein last year.

Jordanians who knew Zarqawi in prison say they doubt Zarqawi and his group alone could be behind all the terror attacks.

Two Islamists who spent time in prison with Zarqawi in the 1990s, Yusuf Rababa, 35, and Khalid abu Doma, 36, said that Zarqawi's group was but one of many cells that attracted young men looking for the kind of jihad many Arabs experienced in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Since the US invasion, the men said, dozens of Jordanians have left for Iraq to fight American forces with Islamic extremist groups, most of them not Zarqawi's.

''What is happening in Iraq is like what is happening in Jenin [in the West Bank]," said abu Doma, who contended he renounced terrorism after serving six years in prison for building car bombs. ''We Arabs are of one language and one religion. The nationalist feeling moves us to fight."

The two men watched the beheading videos claimed by Zarqawi's group in Iraq, Tawhid and Jihad, and listened to the recorded statements attributed to him. They said they recognized him severing the head of American hostage Nicholas Berg, but in other cases are not certain it is Zarqawi.

They are convinced that the flowery language of communiqus attributed to Zarqawi, including the December letter outlining Tawhid and Jihad's plans to sow instability in Iraq -- and the recent oath of loyalty to bin Laden -- sound far too sophisticated to have been authored by Zarqawi, who is said to be an inarticulate high school dropout.

''He was clever but uneducated," said Abdullah abu Ramman, a Jordanian journalist who spent four months in prison with Zarqawi in 1996. Zarqawi had memorized the Koran in prison, he said, but always relied on more senior religious figures to provide guidance to his followers.   Continued...