Employees Wanted: Must be foreigner (but not an infidel) for high-energy job with explosive future. No retirement benefits offered (or needed).
That might be the kind of ad Al Qaeda’s Iraqi bigwig Abu Musab al-Zarqawi might place — because he’s now reportedly facing an acute shortage of foreign suicide fighters (past employees have found they have to just kill themselves in that job).
His solution? Look into creating his own guerilla army, which means having a force that could be on The Terror Team a bit longer:
THE leader of al-Qa’ida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is trying to set up his own mini army and move away from individual suicide attacks to a more organised resistance movement:
Faced with a shortage of foreign fighters willing to undertake suicide missions, Zarqawi wants to turn his group into a more traditional force mounting co-ordinated guerilla raids on the US-led coalition forces.Al-Qa’ida is sending training and planning experts to help set up the guerilla force and infiltrate members into Iraq with the assistance of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the sources said.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, deputy leader of al-Qa’ida, claimed in a video posted on an Islamist website yesterday that 800 “martyrdom operations” in three years had “broken the back of America in Iraq”.
The change of strategy will make it easier for Zarqawi to link up with Iraqi insurgents and evade the special operations teams trying to track him down.
If this report is true, it would indicate that the reports several years ago about an almost infinite number of foreigners willing to pour into Iraq to fight in alliance with Al Qaeda haven’t been proven correct — that there are limits…even on the supply of foreigners willing to kill themselves to advance Al Qaeda’s cause.
UPDATE: Great minds think alike department. James Joyner has also picked up this story.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.