Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn

Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn (Organization of Jihad's Base in Mesopotamia)
Participant in the Iraq War
One of the flags used by AQI in their video releases. Variants used white text for the circle and the shahada.
Active	17 October 2004[1]-October 2006 / April 2013
Ideology	Sunni Islam[2]
Leaders	Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (KIA) Abu Ayyub al-Masri (KIA)
Headquarters	Fallujah
Area of operations	Iraq
Part of	Al-Qaeda
Originated as	Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad Ansar al-Islam (associate)
Became	Mujahideen Shura Council Islamic State of Iraq
Opponents	Multinational force in Iraq  Iraq (Iraqi security forces, Kurdish and Shia militias)  Jordan  United Nations
Battles and wars	Iraqi insurgency (2003–06) Civil war in Iraq (2006–07)

Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, (TQJBR),^[3] ("Organization of Jihad's Base in Mesopotamia", Arabic: تنظيم قاعدة الجهاد في بلاد الرافدين‎), also referred to as Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) or Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, was an Iraqi Sunni Islamic Jihadist organization^[2] affiliated with al-Qaeda. It was a major combatant actor in the Iraqi insurgency and played a central role in the establishment of the Mujahideen Shura Council in Iraq and the Islamic State of Iraq.^[4]

Origins

The group was founded by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 1999 under the name Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (Arabic: جماعة التوحيد والجهاد, "Group of Monotheism and Jihad").

The group is believed to have started bomb attacks in Iraq as of August 2003, five months after the coalition invasion and occupation of Iraq, targeting UN representatives, Iraqi Shiite institutions, the Jordanian embassy, provisional Iraqi government institutions.

After pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network in October 2004, its official name became Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn.^[1][5][6][7]

Leadership

On 7 June 2006, the leader of AQI, al-Zarqawi, and his spiritual adviser Sheik Abd-Al-Rahman, were both killed by a U.S. airstrike with two 500 lb (230 kg) bombs on a safe house near Baqubah. The group's leadership was then assumed by the Egyptian militant Abu Ayyub al-Masri, also known as Abu Hamza al-Muhajir.^[8]

Purpose

In a letter to al-Zarqawi in July 2005, Al-Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri outlined a four-stage plan beginning with taking control of Iraq. Step 1: expulsion of US forces from Iraq. Step 2: establishing in Iraq an Islamic authority—a caliphate. Step 3: "the jihad wave" should be extended to "the secular countries neighbouring Iraq". Step 4: "the clash with Israel".^[9][10]

Violent activities

US Navy Seabees during the Second Battle of Fallujah (November 2004)

2004

End of October 2004, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group Tanzim (Al-Qaeda in Iraq, AQI) kidnapped Japanese citizen Shosei Koda. In a video posted on a website and shown on Arabic TV station Al-Jazeera, AQI gave Japan 48 hours to withdraw its troops from Iraq, lest Koda's fate would be "the same as that of his predecessors, Berg and Bigley and other infidels".^[11] While Japan refused to comply with this demand, Koda was beheaded, and his dismembered body found on 30 October.

The car bomb attacks on 19 December 2004 in the Shiite holy cities Najaf and nearby Karbala, killing 60 people, were claimed by Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn ('al-Qaeda in Iraq').^[12]

2005

In 2005 (according to internal AQI documents seized in 2008), al Qaeda started killing Iraqi tribesmen and nationalist insurgents wherever they began to rally against it.^[13]

Following deadly attacks in 2005 are claimed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his followers or AQI:

• 30 January: AQI launched attacks on voters during the Iraqi legislative election in January.^[9] In 100 armed attacks, 44 people were killed, not meaning all those attacks came from AQI. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said: We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy (…)”.
• 28 February: in the southern city of Hillah, a car bomb strikes a crowd of police and Iraqi National Guard recruits. 125 people are killed.^[12]
• 2 April: the group launched a combined suicide and conventional attack on the Abu Ghraib prison in April.^[9]
• 7 May: in Baghdad, two explosives-laden cars plow into an American security company convoy. 22 people are killed, including two Americans.^[12]
• 6 July: AQI claimed responsibility for the kidnapping and execution of Egypt's ambassador to Iraq, Ihab el-Sherif.^[14][15] In a message posted on Internet, Zarqawi said: "The Islamic court of the al-Qaeda Organization in the Land of Two Rivers has decided to refer the ambassador of the state of Egypt, an ally of the Jews and the Christians, to the mujahideens so that they can execute him."^[16]
• 15–17 July: a three-day series of suicide attacks, including the Musayyib marketplace bombing, left 150 people dead and 260 wounded. AQI claimed that the bombings were part of a campaign to take control of Baghdad.^[17]
• 19 August: In the Jordanian city of Aqaba, a rocket attack kills a Jordanian soldier.^[12]
• 14 September: ‘Al-Qaida in Iraq’ (=Tanzim) claimed responsibility for a single-day series of more than a dozen bombings in Baghdad, which killed about 160 people, most of whom were unemployed Shia workers,^[18][19] and its leader Al-Zarqawi on Internet declared “all-out war” on Shiites, Iraqi troops and the Iraqi government.^[18]
• Friday 16 September: a suicide bomb attack outside a Shiite mosque 200 km north of Baghdad killed 13 worshippers.^[19]
• 24 October: AQI made coordinated suicide attacks outside the Sheraton Ishtar and Palestine Hotel in Baghdad in October.^[9]
• 9 November: in the Jordanian capital Amman, three bomb attacks against hotels killed 60 people.^[12]
• 18 November: Tanzim claimed responsibility for a series of Shia mosque bombings in the city of Khanaqin, which killed at least 74 people.^[19]

2006

• The 5 January bombings on Shi'ite civilians in Karbala and Ramadi, near a religious shrine and a police recruiting centre, were blamed by some residents on al Qaeda in Iraq.^[20]
  

  The Al-Askari Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam, after the first attack by Al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2006
• The 22 February 2006 al-Askari Mosque bombing was blamed by a U.S. intelligence officer^[21] in March 2007 and by ‘Iraqi officials’^[22] in May 2007, on Tanzim (or ‘AQI’).
• On 3 June 2006, AQI abducted and killed four Russian diplomats in Iraq.
• 16 June 2006, a U.S. checkpoint near Baghdad was attacked, one U.S. soldier killed and two abducted. Those abducted, Thomas Lowell Tucker and Kristian Menchaca, were found on 19 June, brutally killed and tortured. The next day, Mujahedeen Shura Council of Iraq (MSC)—an organization including Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn—claimed to have “slaughtered” the two Americans. Three weeks later, MSC issued a video showing the mutilated corpses of Tucker and Menchada, purportedly as revenge for the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl, in March 2006, by U.S. soldiers of the same brigade.

Autumn 2006, AQI took over Baqubah, the capital of Diyala Governorate, and before March 2007, AQI or its umbrella organization ‘Islamic State of Iraq’ (ISI) claimed Baqubah as its capital.^[23]

• The US suggested that ‘al Qaeda’ was involved in the wave of chlorine bombings in Iraq, October 2006–June 2007, which affected hundreds of people, albeit with few fatalities.^[24]

Further violent activities in Iraq after 13 October 2006 blamed on ‘al Qaeda (in Iraq)’ are listed in article Islamic State of Iraq (ISI).

War Sunnis against Shias

September 2005, after a U.S.-Iraqi offensive on the town of Tal Afar, al-Zarqawi declared "all-out war" on Shia Muslims in Iraq.^[25]

Conflicts between Al Qaeda in Iraq and other Sunni Iraqi groups

In September–October 2005, there were signs of a split between homegrown Iraqi Sunni Arab rebel groups who wanted Sunni influence in national politics restored,^[26] and therefore supported a “no” vote in the 15 October 2005 referendum on a constitution,^[27] and ‘Al Qaeda in Iraq’ led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi which strove for a theocratic state and threatened to kill those who engaged in the national political process with Shiites and Kurds,^[26] including those who would take part in that referendum.^[27]

Since mid-2006, AQI was being pushed out of their old strongholds in the rural Anbar Province, from Fallujah to Qaim, by tribal leaders in open war. That campaign was being facilitated and stimulated by the Iraqi government paying cash gifts and alleged salaries to tribal sheikhs of up to $5,000 a month.^[28]

In September 2006, 30 tribes in Anbar Province formed the “Anbar Awakening”, an alliance to fight AQI militants.^[29] Around September 2006, a new grouping called the “Anbar Rescue”—it is not certain that this group is the same as the “Anbar Awakening”—also claimed to represent a number of Anbar tribes and sub-clans and intended to clear Anbar Province from AQI.^[28] End September–begin October 2006, that Anbar Rescue or other ‘fiercely independent Iraqi tribes’ fought three days with AQI and pushed it out of some strongholds in Anbar.^[28]

January 2006: Tanzim (AQI) creates Mujahideen Shura Council

Shosei Koda before his beheading

In January 2006, Tanzim's ('AQI') efforts to recruit Iraqi Sunni nationalist and secular groups were undermined by its violent tactics against civilians and by its fundamentalist doctrine. It then created an umbrella organization called the Mujahideen Shura Council (MSC), in an attempt to unify Sunni insurgents in Iraq.^[21]

Strength AQI in 2004-2006

A secret U.S. Marine Corps intelligence report of August 2006 wrote that Iraq’s Sunni minority had been increasingly abandoned by their religious and political leaders who had fled or been assassinated, was “embroiled in a daily fight for survival”, feared “pogroms” by the Shiite majority, and was increasingly dependent on Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) as its only hope against growing Iranian dominance across Baghdad. In western Iraq, like Al Anbar Governorate, AQI was now entrenched, autonomous and financially independent, and therefore the death of AQI leader Al-Zarqawi (see section Leadership) in June 2006 had little impact on structure or capabilities of AQI. Illicit oil trading provided millions of dollars to AQI, and their popularity was rising in western Iraq.^[30]

Western media suggest, that also Muslim warriors from foreign countries had started to flock to AQI, in the aftermath of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.^[31]

In Al Anbar Governorate, home to 1.25 million Iraqis many of whom in violence-ridden towns like Fallujah, Haditha, Hit, Qaim and Ramadi, most government institutions had disintegrated in August 2006, and AQI was the dominant power in al-Anbar, the U.S. Marine Corps intelligence report said.^[30] In 2006, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research estimated that Al-Qaeda in Iraq's core membership was "more than 1,000".^[32]

October 2006: Tanzim (AQI) creates Islamic State of Iraq

On 13 October 2006, the MSC declared the establishment of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), comprising Iraq's six mostly Sunni Arab governorates: Baghdad, Anbar, Diyala, Kirkuk, Salah al-Din, Ninawa, and "other parts of the governorate of Babel", with Abu Omar al-Baghdadi being announced as the self-proclaimed state's Emir.^[4] A Mujahideen Shura Council leader said: "God willing we will set the law of Sharia here and we will fight the Americans"; the Council urged on Sunni Muslim tribal leaders to join their separate Islamic state "to protect our religion and our people, to prevent strife and so that the blood and sacrifices of your martyrs are not lost".^[33]

In reality, the group was not known to control any territory in Iraq yet.^[34] Following the announcement, scores of gunmen took part in military parades in Ramadi and other Anbar towns to celebrate.^[33][34]

In November, a statement was issued by Abu Ayyub al-Masri, leader of Mujahideen Shura Council (MSC), announcing the disbanding of the MSC, in favor of the ISI. After this statement, there were a few more claims of responsibility issued under the name of the Mujahideen Shura Council, but these eventually ceased and were totally replaced by claims from the Islamic State of Iraq.

In April 2007, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, who had been the leader of the MSC, was given the title of Minister of War within the ISI's ten-member cabinet.^[35]

Car bombings were a common form of attack in Iraq during the Coalition occupation

According to report by US intelligence agencies in May 2007, ISI (Islamic State of Iraq) planned to seize power in the central and western areas of the country and turn it into a Sunni Islamic state.^[36]

In June 2007, the uncompromising brand of extreme fundamentalist Islam of Tanzim ('AQI'), or Mujahideen Shura Council (MSC), or Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), seemed, again, to be alienating more nationalist Iraqi strands of insurgency, like former Baathists, or Sunnis with a grudge against the US-led coalition and the new Iraqi government.^[37]

U.S. fighting Tanzim (Al-Qaeda in Iraq)

In November 2004, al-Zarqawi's network was the main target of the US Operation Phantom Fury in Fallujah, but its leadership managed to escape the American siege and subsequent storming of the city.

On 7 June 2006, the leader of AQI, al-Zarqawi, and his spiritual adviser Sheik Abd-Al-Rahman, were both killed by a U.S. airstrike with two 500 lb (230 kg) bombs on a safe house near Baqubah. The group's leadership was then assumed by the Egyptian militant Abu Ayyub al-Masri, also known as Abu Hamza al-Muhajir.^[8]

Criticisms from al-Zawahiri

U.S. intelligence in October 2005 published a letter purportedly from Ayman al-Zawahiri questioning Tanzim’s (AQI's) tactic of indiscriminately attacking Shias in Iraq.^[38]

In a video that appeared in December 2007, Ayman al-Zawahiri defended the AQI, but distanced himself from the crimes against civilians committed by "hypocrites and traitors" that he said existed among its ranks.^[39]

Operations outside Iraq and other activities

On 3 December 2004 AQI attempted unsuccessfully to blow up an Iraqi–Jordanian border crossing. In 2006 a Jordanian court sentenced al-Zarqawi and two of his associates to death in absentia for their involvement in the plot.^[40] AQI increased its presence outside Iraq by claiming credit to have carried out three attacks in 2005. In the most deadly of these attacks, suicide bombs killed 60 people in Amman, Jordan on 9 November 2005.^[41] They claimed responsibility for the rocket attacks which narrowly missed the American naval ships USS Kearsarge and USS Ashland in Jordan, and also targeted the city of Eilat in Israel, and for the firing of several rockets into Israel from Lebanon in December 2005.^[9] The affiliated groups were linked to regional attacks outside Iraq which were consistent with their stated plan, one example being the 2005 Sharm al-Sheikh bombings in Egypt, which killed 88 people, many of them foreign tourists.

The Lebanese-Palestinian militant group Fatah al-Islam, which was defeated by Lebanese government forces during the 2007 Lebanon conflict, was linked to AQI and led by al-Zarqawi's former companion who had fought alongside him in Iraq.^[42] The group may have been linked to the little-known group called "Tawhid and Jihad in Syria",^[43] and may have influenced the Palestinian militant group in Gaza called Jahafil Al-Tawhid Wal-Jihad fi Filastin.^[44]

See also

• Islamic terrorism
• List of bombings during the Iraq War

References

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31. Het Nieuwsblad edition Oostende-Westhoek (Belgian newspaper), 26 March 2016.
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39. "British 'fleeing' claims al-Qaeda". Adnkronos. 17 December 2007. Retrieved 20 April 2012.
40. Aloul, Sahar (19 December 2005). "Zarqawi handed second death penalty in Jordan". The Inquirer. Agence France-Presse. Archived from the original on 29 October 2007.
41. "Al Qaeda claims responsibility for Amman blasts". The New York Times. 10 November 2005.
42. "Fatah Islam: Obscure group emerges as Lebanon's newest security threat". International Herald Tribune. Associated Press. 20 May 2007. Archived from the original on 25 May 2007.
43. "Al-Qaida inspired militant group calls on Syrians to kill country's president". International Herald Tribune. Associated Press. 28 May 2007. Archived from the original on June 1, 2007. Retrieved 6 August 2007.
44. New Gaza Organization Vows Loyalty to Al-Qaeda, MEMRI 10-11-2008