In Arab world, Zarqawi tactics bred disgust

AMMAN, Jordan -- Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's unyielding, lethal anti-Americanism initially won him accolades across the Arab world. But his terror campaign ultimately killed far more Islamic civilians than Americans, turning the wave of early support into a tide of revulsion among many Arab Muslims.

``How is this jihad, how is this holy war?" asked Bashar al-Akhras, 24, whose father was killed in the November 2005 suicide bombings of three Amman hotels, claimed by Zarqawi as retribution for Jordan's support of US policy in the region.

At one of the hotels shrapnel tore through the wedding party of Akhras's brother killing 17 of his relatives, including both the bride's parents. His extended family, Akhras said, consists of hard-working Palestinians who live across the Arab world and are bystanders in the war between Al Qaeda and the United States.

``If you are fighting foreigners, how come you kill 5,000 Iraqis or other innocent civilians and only a few Americans?" said Akhras, who said the beliefs of Osama bin Laden and his followers never appealed to him. ``They have a weird mentality. It is not our religion at all."

Arab analysts said that Zarqawi, who died in a US airstrike Wednesday, tapped into profound forces that will endure in the Arab world independent of his particular brand of terrorism: disgust with repressive regimes at home, rage against the United States, and ever-strengthening political Islam.

But Zarqawi , the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, pushed too far, they said, alienating many Arabs with his indiscriminate attacks on fellow Muslims, especially Shi'ites, and Iraqis who supported the US-backed government in Baghdad.

``If you look at the bottom line, the basic force supporting Zarqawi is anti-Americanism," said Labib Kamhawi, an independent Jordanian political analyst and businessman who travels widely throughout the Arab world. ``In an area like the Middle East where sentiments are high, people look at these issues with their emotions, not their brains."

In the Arab world, he said, a great number of people sympathized with Zarqawi's initial crusade, viewing it as part of a legitimate Iraqi resistance to the US-led invasion. Some said they supported Zarqawi for religious reasons, others out of tribal affinity, still others out of shared anti-Americanism.

An even larger group, Kamhawi said, shared many of Zarqawi's ideals, including his use of suicide bombings, but were put off by his most extreme tactics, including beheadings and bomb attacks directed at civilians in Iraq, Jordan, and other Arab countries.

``He appealed to the mainstream. I met a lot of Jordanians before the bombings of the hotels, and I say 90 percent of them sympathized with what he is doing to the Americans," he said.

Zarqawi's tactics widened a rift among those Arabs who always decry suicide bombings and other violent tactics, and those who support such tactics when directed against the United States or Israel. Many residents of his hometown Zarqa praised Zarqawi's campaign as a righteous holy war, after his death was announced Thursday. But against that zealous backdrop, the debate between those who condemned Zarqawi as a terrorist and those who embraced his vision of jihad was also on display.

``He wronged religion by what he did in Iraq. He made us hate everyone who grows a beard and follows religion because of what he did," Khalid al-Mohtaseb, 46, said as he stood in the family shop that makes military and police uniforms for Jordanian officers.

Zarqawi gave Jordan a bad name and spread a pernicious brand of terrorism that hurts all Muslims, Mohtaseb said.

But his friend Samir Abu Yusef, a 36-year-old clothing distributor waiting for a shipment of military uniforms for a parade in honor of King Abdullah, disagreed.

``What Zarqawi did in Jordan was 100 percent wrong, but what he did in Iraq where he was fighting the occupation forces was 100 percent right," Abu Yusef said.

Asked whether fighting the United States justified beheadings and suicide bombings, Abu Yusef shrugged: ``So long as the Iraqi people happily welcomed occupation forces, they'll have to suffer the consequences."

Such opinions are voiced in a context where many Arabs don't always distinguish between terrorism and guerrilla warfare.

In fact, Kamhawi said, Zarqawi's once broad popularity highlights what Kamhawi considers a reality about the Middle East: ``At the end of the day, what counts is the minority who have taken matters into their own hands."

As the deaths caused by Al Qaeda in Iraq rose, claiming the lives of maybe thousands of Shi'ite Muslim Iraqis and other Arabs since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, even some Islamist extremists turned away from Zarqawi, said Radwan Abdullah, a Jordanian political scientist who writes extensively about Arab politics.

``The extreme violence, in particular the beheadings and the bombings of the civilians, didn't play well," Abdullah said.

Many Islamists were in particular alarmed that Zarqawi's indiscriminate use of bombing would spark a civil war between Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims, Abdullah said, a conflagration that could destabilize the entire Muslim world and detract from the Islamist campaign against Western influence.

Akhras is still mourning his father but has resolutely focused on his studies, bent on finishing his college degree in finance and leaving Jordan as quickly as possible.

He said he feels out of place, as a secular Muslim who enjoys a Western lifestyle but respects Arab tradition. Why, he wonders, did so many fellow Arabs, from Gaza to the Gulf, extend sympathy to a terrorist organization that turns on its own people?

``Al Qaeda said, `We did it and we're sorry.' I blame them, I blame American policy in the region," Akhras said, talking about the bomb attacks in Amman that killed his father.

Iraq and the rest of the Arab world, he said, rather than the West, will continue to bear the brunt of extremist killings.

``I was really happy that Zarqawi died. They are killing innocent people," Akhras said, sitting next to a photograph of his father. ``But I feel it's not over. They have a mentality only to sabotage and destroy, in Amman, or Iraq, or tourism in Egypt, killing civilians. Maybe they are just crazy."