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> latimes.com
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> Confessions of a Saudi Militant in Iraq
> In a series aired by the Iraqi government, the youth tells of his quest
> for jihad that led him there and the suicide attack he survived.
> By Patrick J. McDonnell
> Times Staff Writer
>
> February 19, 2005
>
> BAGHDAD - "Please, please," the young Saudi appeals in a whisper,
> "don't turn me over to the Americans."
>
> His face is charred and blistered. His head and arms are enveloped in
> gauze.
>
> Each word seems to beget pain. His haunted eyes dart about, his only
> noticeable movements.
>
> He is here to repent, under the stern guidance of an Iraqi intelligence
> agent. The setting is an anonymous office in the heavily barricaded
> Iraqi Interior Ministry.
>
> So what does he think now of "Sheik" Osama bin Laden, the interrogator
> asks?
>
> "He kills Muslims," the Saudi murmurs, his lips barely moving.
>
> And Abu Musab Zarqawi?
>
> "If they are all like this," he says of the Jordanian militant, "I want
> to take revenge on all of them."
>
> So proceeds the extraordinary televised confession of Ahmed Abdullah
> Abdul-Rahman Alshai, a 20-year-old high school dropout from Saudi
> Arabia and one of many young volunteers from across the Arab world who
> have come to Iraq to wage jihad, or holy war.
>
> Some fight alongside Iraqi insurgents in Ramadi, Fallouja and Mosul,
> ambushing U.S. patrols, setting off roadside bombs and targeting Iraqi
> forces working with the Americans.
>
> But the most committed are reserved for suicide missions, a crucial
> weapon in the insurgents' arsenal.
>
> The bombers are recruited in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia and in some
> cases, the back streets of Muslim immigrant enclaves in Paris and other
> European cities. They are typically blown to bits.
>
> Sometimes, their voices and grainy images emerge posthumously, boasting
> of their coming attacks on videotaped proclamations that are hawked on
> black-market CDs. Each proclaims a desire to become a shaheed, or
> martyr.
>
> But Alshai, though gravely injured, survived the thunderous Christmas
> Eve explosion he set off in Baghdad's upscale Mansour district. His
> rigged gas tanker erupted into a massive fireball at the concrete
> barriers of a fortified compound housing three embassies, lighting up
> the night sky. It was a substantial blast even by the standards of this
> violence-plagued capital.
>
> A dozen people lost their lives that night, including a family of seven
> Iraqis in one house and a Sudanese guard posted outside the Libyan
> Embassy down the street. The target may have been the nearby Jordanian
> Embassy, but it escaped serious damage.
>
> Nor were any U.S. troops in the vicinity, though the oft-stated goal of
> jihadis like Alshai is to kill Americans.
>
> He is not the first would-be suicide bomber to be captured and
> debriefed, but seldom has so much detail been made public. The Saudi is
> among several insurgents whose interrogations are being aired on Iraqi
> television.
>
> They make similar assertions: They were misled and manipulated and
> regret their homicidal actions.
>
> Alshai contends that he didn't know the tanker was going to blow up -
> an unlikely story considering that he came to Iraq to fight a jihad
> against the U.S. and, authorities say, was trained here to drive the
> difficult-to-handle tanker truck.
>
> Indeed, it is easy to question the sincerity of the confessions and
> remorse expressed in the government propaganda videos, which began
> airing on state and private TV outlets in the weeks before the national
> election on Jan. 30.
>
> It's clear that many captured insurgents have told investigators what
> they want to hear, and they may have been coached or coerced.
>
> At the same time, authorities say the information gleaned from
> interrogations has been helpful in breaking up insurgent cells.
>
> In the case of Alshai, officials say, the debriefing helped lead to the
> arrest of several top aides of Zarqawi, whom Bin Laden recently
> designated as his "emir" or commander in Iraq.
>
> Alshai also said police in the former rebel stronghold of Fallouja
> detained Zarqawi, Iraq's most wanted man, for seven hours at some point
> before the U.S. assault in November. But Zarqawi was released, whether
> through police complicity or incompetence remains unclear.
>
> Alshai's confession traces his journey along the jihadi trail: from his
> hometown of Buraydah, known even within Saudi Arabia for its
> ultra-conservative style of Islam; to his arrival in Iraq through the
> porous Syrian border with the help of a smuggler; to his placement in a
> cell in the insurgent stronghold of Ramadi and finally to the truck
> explosion in Baghdad.
>
> "He pleaded with me not to hand him over to the Americans," said Brig.
> Gen. Hussein Ali Kamal, the deputy interior minister, who conducted the
> interrogation.
>
> As a former Kurdish security official, Kamal has questioned dozens of
> militants.
>
> "I told him to tell me everything and I will not hand you over," Kamal
> said in an interview in the seventh-floor office where he had
> questioned Alshai. Blood stains were evident in the carpet.
>
> During the session, Kamal said, Alshai provided his telephone number in
> Saudi Arabia and the Iraqi interrogator called the father, who was
> astonished to hear that his son was alive.
>
> Earlier, the father had received an anonymous phone call informing him
> that his son had become a shaheed in Iraq. A letter written in his
> son's hand would arrive shortly, the caller told him, Saudi media
> reported.
>
> The father, a Saudi government employee, had begun receiving
> condolences in the Arab tradition. He later recognized his heavily
> bandaged son when Al Arabiya, an Arabic-language satellite channel, ran
> a clip of the interrogation video.
>
> Alshai, like other militants, appears to have been an aimless,
> disenchanted young man from a middle-class family who drifted to
> religious extremism.
>
> It is a common profile among the current generation of holy warriors,
> including some of the 15 Saudis who participated in the Sept. 11
> attacks on the United States.
>
> Alshai's father told a Saudi newspaper that his son was very calm and
> quiet in his early years; he blamed clerics for brainwashing his son.
>
> During his interrogation, Alshai said he flew to Damascus at the end of
> Ramadan, in late October, and crossed the border into Iraq using his
> own passport with the help of a smuggler.
>
> Once there, he said, he was met by men who identified themselves as
> operatives of Jamaat al Tawhid wal Jihad, as Zarqawi's faction was
> formerly known. The group now goes by the more ornate name of Al Qaeda
> Organization in the Land of the Two Rivers, a reference to Iraq, where
> the Tigris and Euphrates converge.
>
> The group is part of an extensive network of religious extremists and
> loyalists of toppled President Saddam Hussein, among others, who have
> capitalized on the fervor and idealism of young volunteers, authorities
> say.
>
> Alshai said he underwent a month of training and indoctrination in
> Sunni-dominated western Iraq with other jihadis, who included Iraqis,
> Tunisians, Libyans, Yemenis, Syrians and a Macedonian.
>
> "They come to Iraq to fight and die," said Corentin Fleury, a young
> French photographer who spent time with insurgents in Fallouja before
> the U.S. invasion in November. "They wanted to die. Most of them didn't
> know how to fight."
>
> U.S. commanders say no more than 1,000 foreign fighters are in Iraq, a
> tenth or less of the entire insurgent force. They play a key role,
> providing most of the manpower for the suicide attacks, though U.S.
> commanders acknowledge that accelerating religious militancy in Iraq
> has produced a crop of home-grown suicide bombers.
>
> Alshai said he arrived in Iraq with $1,800 in his pocket. But his
> superiors relieved him of his cash and informed him he would be given
> $100 whenever he asked.
>
> He said he was eventually transferred to an insurgent cell in the
> southern Baghdad neighborhood of Doura, a rebel stronghold known for
> its smokestacks and power station, a frequent target of saboteurs. He
> was trained to handle a tanker truck.
>
> On the night of the explosion, he said, he was instructed to drive the
> gas tanker to the Mansour district and approach a set of the ubiquitous
> concrete barriers dotting the city.
>
> "They told me to stop there and to wait for the people who will take
> the tanker from me," Alshai told his interrogator. "I stopped and it
> exploded with me."
>
> Alshai was thrown from the cab and was rushed to the hospital with
> others wounded in the attack. Many, like him, had burns on much of
> their bodies.
>
> He was registered under a false name that appeared to be Iraqi and his
> role in the attack was not immediately clear. However, Iraqi
> authorities learned that someone, presumably one of his confederates,
> had offered a guard at the hospital $50,000 to remove him from the
> facility. Iraqi intelligence officers swooped in and spirited Alshai
> away. He was soon in Kamal's office, telling his tale of jihad from
> behind a mask of gauze.
>
> On the streets of Mansour, shards of the tanker truck remain scattered
> in a vacant lot, not far from the shattered residence of laborer Muhsin
> Sharrad, his wife, Latifa Abdul-Ridha, and their five children. In the
> blast, their brick and cement home collapsed on top of them. A black
> banner out front pays homage to the seven Iraqi "martyrs" who perished
> in Alshai's attack on America.
>
> "This is not jihad," said Ayub Ahmad Ibrahim, a 40-year-old Sudanese
> guard at the nearby Libyan Embassy whose countryman and friend, Essa
> bil-Naga Ahmad, also an embassy guard, was fatally injured in the
> blast. Ibrahim showed a visitor snapshots of Ahmad, who was struck by
> flaming shrapnel from the truck. He died after four days in a hospital.
>
> "This was a cowardly act," Ibrahim said. "Look what he has done. He
> killed innocent people. No American soldier was killed. Only poor
> Iraqis and guards. This is not jihad."
>
> Today, Alshai's worst fears are realized: He is alive, and sits in Abu
> Ghraib, the notorious U.S. lockup west of Baghdad. He is one of more
> than 8,000 U.S. prisoners in Iraq dubbed security risks in a war that
> U.S. officials once dismissed as being waged by no more than 5,000
> "dead-enders."
>
> A top U.S. diplomat here conceded this month that the insurgency was
> likely to drag on for years.
>
> Alshai received medical treatment and is recuperating from his
> injuries.
>
> He won't be getting out anytime soon.
>
> *
>
> Times staff writers Alissa J. Rubin in Baghdad, Megan K. Stack in
> Cairo, and special correspondents Said Rifai, Caesar Ahmed and Saif
> Rasheed in Baghdad contributed to this report.
>
> LA TIMES
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