Zarqawi purportedly orders more attacks

The attacks off the coast of Basra killed three Americans and shut down Iraq's biggest oil terminal for more than 24 hours. The Herald Sun, an Australian daily, reports that the website www.qal3ati.net published the claim, which was impossible to independently verify. According to CNN, the statement on the website drew parallels to the deadly 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, and also said that the oil terminal attacks were "meant to hit the economies of the nations of atheism, which came to raise the crusaders' flag in the Muslim land."

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Mr. Zarqawi has also been named by suspected Islamist militants as the one who ordered devastating chemical attacks in Jordan. Amman said the bomb and poison gas attacks against Jordan's secret service, its prime minister's office, and the US embassy would have decapitated the government and would have been worse than the September 11 attacks. The alleged plot was revealed earlier this month, and suspects reportedly confessed in a videotape broadcast Monday on Jordanian state television.

One of the alleged conspirators and the purported head of the Jordanian Al Qaeda cell, Azmi al-Jayousi, said he met Zarqawi in Iraq and was acting on his orders. "I have pledged loyalty to (Zarqawi) to fully be obedient and listen to him without discussion," Mr. Jayousi said. Jordanian officials say the attacks could have killed up to 80,000 people.

With a $10 million bounty on his head, Zarqawi is one of America's most wanted individuals. He has claimed responsibility for the August 19 bombing of UN headquarters in Baghdad that killed 23 civilians. The US accuses him of organizing many suicide bombings and other attacks in Iraq in the last year. Earlier this month, the CIA concluded that the voice on an audiotape urging insurgents in Iraq to fight US forces and Shiite "collaborators" was "probably" Zarqawi. Coalition officials said on April 13 that Zarqawi may be holed up in or near the volatile Iraqi city of Fallujah and that coalition forces there are engaged in a "robust hunt" for him.

The Christian Science Monitor reported in January about Zarqawi's growing influence on terror activities throughout the world. "Wherever European prosecutors turn these days, as they unravel suspected Islamic terrorist cells and track leads across the Continent, they keep coming across the fingerprints of one man: Abu Musab Zarqawi," the article begins. The report also mentions his ties to bombings in Turkey and Morocco.

Turkish police investigating last November's twin synagogue bombings in Istanbul arrested members of two Islamic groups they said had contacts with Zarqawi. Moroccan investigators concluded that Zarqawi organized and financed last June's quintuple bombing of Jewish and Israeli targets in Casablanca that killed 35 people. Italian and German police recently arrested three men on warrants charging them with helping would-be martyrs to travel from Europe to Iraq, at Zarqawi's behest.

US intelligence showed that Zarqawi had been given a safe haven in Iraq after having been wounded in fighting in Afghanistan. Before the US-led invasion of Iraq, US Secretary of State Colin Powell pointed to this as key evidence of Saddam Hussein's links to Al Qaeda.

Also...
• Oil-for-fraud ( The Economist)
• Saudi complaint at US media image ( BBC)
• Amid an unseen enemy, the welcome dog of war ( The Washington Post)
• Looking through keyholes ( The New York Times)
• Flap over new Iraq flag ( Associated Press)

• Feedback appreciated. E-mail Matthew Clark.