Hamid Dawud Mohamed Khalil al Zawi, most commonly known as Abu Abdullah al-Rashid al-Baghdadi, and also known as Abu Hamza al-Baghdadi and Abu Omar al-Qurashi al-Baghdadi, was presented as the leader of the Mujahideen Shura Council (also translated as “Council of Freedom Fighters”, “Consultative Council of Mujahedeen”, and “Council of Holy Warriors”), an umbrella organization composed of eight groups that oppose the United States’ military presence in Iraq, and its successor organisation, the Islamic State of Iraq – ISIS.
A man believed to be Abu Omar al-Baghdadi
The Interior Ministry of Iraq claimed that al-Baghdadi was captured in Baghdad on 9 March 2007, but it was later said that the person in question was not al-Baghdadi. On 3 May 2007, the Iraqi Interior Ministry said that al-Baghdadi was killed by American and Iraqi forces north of Baghdad. However, in July 2007, the U.S. military reported that al-Baghdadi never actually existed. The detainee identified as Khaled al-Mashhadani, a self-proclaimed intermediary to Osama bin Laden, claimed that al-Baghdadi was a fictional character created to give an Iraqi face to a foreign-run terror group, and that statements attributed to al-Baghdadi were actually read by an Iraqi actor.
Brigadier General Kevin Bergner
According to Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi never existed and was actually a fictional character whose audio-taped declarations were provided by an elderly actor named Abu Adullah al-Naima as a form of psychological warfare as reported in the New York Times. Brigadier General Kevin Bergner currently serves with the National Security Council staff as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Iraq. Prior to this assignment, he served as the Deputy Commanding General for Multi-National Forces in Mosul, Iraq. He also served as the Director for Political-Military Affairs (Middle East) on the The Joint Staff in the Department of Defense.
Below we reproduce in full the article published in The New York Times dated July 18, 2007.
Leader of Al Qaeda group in Iraq was fictional, U.S. military says
By Michael R. Gordon
Published: Wednesday, July 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/18/world/africa/18iht-iraq.4.6718200.html
BAGHDAD — For more than a year, the leader of one the most notorious insurgent groups in Iraq was said to be a mysterious Iraqi named Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi.
As the titular head of the Islamic State in Iraq, an organization publicly backed by Al Qaeda, Baghdadi issued a steady stream of incendiary pronouncements. Despite claims by Iraqi officials that he had been killed in May, Baghdadi appeared to have persevered unscathed.
On Wednesday, a senior American military spokesman provided a new explanation for Baghdadi’s ability to escape attack: He never existed.
Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, the chief American military spokesman, said the elusive Baghdadi was actually a fictional character whose audio-taped declarations were provided by an elderly actor named Abu Adullah al-Naima.
The ruse, Bergner said, was devised by Abu Ayub al-Masri, the Egyptian-born leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who was trying to mask the dominant role that foreigners play in that insurgent organization.
The ploy was to invent Baghdadi, a figure whose very name establishes his Iraqi pedigree, install him as the head of a front organization called the Islamic State of Iraq and then arrange for Masri to swear allegiance to him. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, sought to reinforce the deception by referring to Baghdadi in his video and Internet statements.
The evidence for the American assertions, Bergner announced at a news briefing, was provided by an Iraqi insurgent: Khalid Abdul Fatah Daud Mahmud al-Mashadani, who was said to have been captured by American forces in Mosul on July 4.
According to Bergner, Mashadani is the most senior Iraqi operative in Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. He got his start in the Ansar al-Sunna insurgent group before joining Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia more than two years ago, and became the group’s “media emir” for all of Iraq. Bergner said that Mashadani was also an intermediary between Masri in Iraq and bin Laden and Zawahiri, whom the Americans assert support and guide their Iraqi affiliate.
“Mashadani confirms that al-Masri and the foreign leaders with whom he surrounds himself, not Iraqis, made the operational decisions” for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, Bergner said.
The struggle between the American military and Qaeda affiliate in Iraq is political as well as military. And one purpose of the briefing Wednesday seemed to be to rattle the 90 percent of the group’s adherents who are believed to be Iraqi by suggesting that they are doing the bidding of foreigners.
An important element of the American strategy is to drive a wedge between Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, other insurgent groups and the Sunni population.
Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, for its part, has engaged in its own form of psychological warfare. The Islamic State of Iraq recently issued two videos that were said to show an attack in Diyala Province on an American Bradley vehicle with a roadside bomb, as well as an assault on an Iraqi military checkpoint.
The recent American operation to clear western Baquba, the provincial capital of Diyala, of Qaeda fighters was dubbed Arrowhead Ripper. In a statement, the Islamic State of Iraq claimed that “the arrows have been returned to the enemy like boomerangs,” according to Site Institute, which monitors international terrorist groups.
Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official and a Middle East expert, said that experts had long wondered whether Baghdadi actually existed. “There has been a question mark about this,” he said.
Nonetheless, Riedel suggested that the disclosures made Wednesday might not be the final word on Baghdadi and the leaders of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Even Mashadani’s assertions, Riedel said, might be a cover story to protect a leader who does in fact exist.
“First, they say we have killed him,” Riedel said, referring to the statements by some Iraqi government officials. “Then we heard him after his death and now they are saying he never existed. That suggests that our intelligence on Al Qaeda in Iraq is not what we want it to be.”
American military spokesmen insist they have gotten to the truth on Baghdadi. Mashadani, they say, provided his account because he resented the role of foreign leaders in Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. They say he has not repudiated the organization.
While the American military says that senior Qaeda leaders in Pakistan provide guidance, general direction and support for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, they did not provide any examples of a specific raid or operation that was ordered by Pakistan-based leaders of Al Qaeda.
An unclassified National Intelligence Estimate on terrorist threats to the United States homeland, which was made public in Washington on Tuesday, suggested that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia draws support from Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan but also has some autonomy. It described Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as “an affiliate.”
“We assess that Al Qaeda will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of Al Qaeda in Iraq, its most visible and capable affiliate and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the homeland.”
In the latest violence in Iraq, a series of roadside bombs exploded early Wednesday in separate areas of east Baghdad, killing 11 people and wounding more than a dozen, the police said, according to The Associated Press. The U.S. military reported that three more American soldiers had died in action in the Iraqi capital.
End of article.
However the question that arises is if the leader of ISIS was a fiction created by US Military where does the group takes it orders from ?
We answer this question in our recent report Paris Attack Part 1 Day Of The Jackals. Below is an excerpt from the same.
Where Jihadis are Manufactured
In late 1995, the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria, known as the GIA, operating from its London headquarters, ordered a terror war against France. The Nov. 6, 1995 London Daily Telegraph reported the French government’s protest in an article entitled “Britain Harbours Paris Bomber.” On Nov. 3, 1995, the French daily Le Figaro wrote, under the headline “The Providential Fog of London,” of the GIA’s bombing spree: “The trail of Boualem Bensaid, GIA leader in Paris, leads to Great Britain. The British capital has served as logistical and financial base for the terrorists.”
The next day, France’s Le Parisien reported that the author of the GIA terror attack in side France was former Afghan mujahideen leader Abou Farres, who was given a residence visa in London, despite the fact that he was already wanted in connection with the bombing of the Algiers Airport. Farres’s London-based organization, according to Le Parisien, recruits Islamic youth from the poor suburbs of Paris, and sends them to Afghanistan, where they are trained as terrorists.
There are mosques in London, including the Finsbury Park Mosque, where the recruiters of those two Kouachi brothers, were based, and were, for decades, protected by the British Intelligence. One of the leaders of that mosque, Abu Hamza, was, recently, in the last several years, extradited to the United States and was put on trial for his role in certain terrorist activities and terrorist recruitment, and his principal defense in court in the United States, is that, while he was there as a recruiter for al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups, he was also secretly working for British MI5, the equivalent of their FBI. And there’s reason to believe that there’s a significant credibility to those claims.
Furthermore, even the recent so called ISIS uprising in Iraq was also carefully orchestrated by British Secret Service. For months it was in the news that 400 Britons had joined the jihadis in Syria. Foreign Secretary William Hague himself said so. However, the number of these British jihadis is much larger and it has been revealed that some of them were trained to be Sunni jihadists by a jihad-seeking Saudi mullah in a British mosque under the watchful eyes of the MI6.
Londonistan is a pejorative sobriquet in use by parts of the media referring to the British capital of London and the British Government’s tolerance of the presence of various Islamic groups in London and other major cities of Britain as long as they carry out their controversial agendas, ideologies or terror campaigns outside Britain
Recently an operation by German Customs official revealed that the British Queen financed Osama Bin Laden. German officials in an operation raided two containers passing through Hamburg Port and seized 14,000 documents establishing that Osama bin Laden was funded by UK Queen’s bank Coutts, which is part of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Report prepared by the Terrorism & Security Studies Department of GreatGameIndia
