Zarqawi's Destination: Which Country?

By the time most of you read this, I will be back in Washington DC. Blogging will continue on Winds of Change as my time allows, but all the same I just wanted to say that you guys are some of the most amazing people out there and it's been an honor to work on the blog with you.

According to media reports and claims on jihadi message boards known to be frequented by members and supporters of al-Qaeda, Abu Musab Zarqawi has suffered injuries and been moved out of Iraq to a neighboring state for medical treatment. The big question then becomes, which neighboring state might he be hiding in?

Just knowing what we do from court documents and media reports, it would seem that Zarqawi has at least some kind of relationship with hardliners in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards despite his sectarian views, with even Brigadier General Qassem Suleimani going as far as to state to his compatriots that Zarqawi's attacks on Iraqi Shi'ites were a necessary evil since they served the interests of Iran by evicting the US from the region. Zarqawi himself engaged (under very different premises) in this same kind of utilitarian justification for his actions in a recent audiotape, in which he argued that it was okay if he killed innocent Muslims because it was all in the service of the greater good.

All the same, Iran is not a likely destination for Zarqawi. As my colleagues Bill Roggio and Joe Katzman have explained at length, Operation Matador focused on the region around the city of Qaim, which is the main entry point for foreign jihadis from Iraq into Syria.

Tracking Zarqawi post-Fallujah is problematic at best, but near as I can tell his forces initially tried to set up a second Fallujah in Mosul and when that failed they more or less dispersed throughout the Sunni Triangle, only recently regrouping in and around the Syrian border. That makes Syria the most likely destination for Zarqawi, with Jordan being a distant second. The case for Syria as his refuge makes even more sense if he did indeed attend the al-Qaeda coffee hour there a few months back where it was decided that car bombs would be the order of the day.

Athena (whose blog you should be reading every day) makes a pretty convincing case that if Zarqawi is in Syria, Aleppo is his most likely location.

Some have suggested that these accounts of Zarqawi being wounded should be distrusted, but I am not so sure. While it is certainly true that these jihadi websites spew a great deal of propaganda and disinformation, they also tend to be reasonably accurate as to the deaths of jihadi leaders because they serve as a means of informing other members of the terror network of the often-immediate danger of their operational security that accompanies these killings. If Saad al-Faqih or the Islamic Observation Center (both based in London) come out and announce that Zarqawi is dead, I'd consider that pretty reasonable evidence to conclude that Z-Man is pushing up daisies.

As to the chain of succession, according to the Washington Post:

The insurgents' accounts suggested that steady U.S. and Iraqi military pressure was taking a toll on Zarqawi's group. In an interview Tuesday, the Zarqawi lieutenant, Abu Karrar, said his group was weighing both foreigners and Iraqis as possible successors to Zarqawi if he died.

Translated, there isn't a designated successor as yet so expect the Bad Guys to fight it out for awhile if Zarqawi does indeed perish.

This would be a very beneficial development, as in-fighting combined with a complete disregard for human life was one of the things that dealt a death blow to the Algerian GIA. The most likely contenders are Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi (a senior al-Qaeda leader who is reportedly Zarqawi's liaison to bin Laden), Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri (the former vice chairman of the Baathist Revolutionary Command Council who has since thrown in with Zarqawi) or one of his younger aides, and Abu Talha (a key leader in Ansar al-Islam operating out of northern Iraq).

A civil war among the insurgents, needless to say, would no doubt be very beneficial to the cause of both the coalition and the new Iraqi government.

If nothing else, it should cause a short-term drop in the number of attacks, as seems to be the rule every time the insurgents suffer a major loss.