Thursday, April 22, 2010

The Mysterious al Baghdadi

Last week the US government said that the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, had been killed in a joint US-Iraqi raid. Which is interesting, because the Iraqi government has reported killing or capturing him half a dozen times before, and the US government has at times said that al Baghdadi does not even exist:
It was a bit different this time, in that U.S. officials confirmed the death reports, as they hadn’t before. But the better question might be how many times al-Baghdadi has been born. The Times noted that al-Baghdadi was “once said to be fictional”—and the ones doing the saying were not conspiracy theorists but American officials (there is a difference). There was speculation that al-Baghdadi was a name picked up and passed around by several different people, like Green Lantern. Back on July 19, 2007, the Times wrote that Brigadier General Kevin Bergner said that al-Baghdadi was a “ruse,” a fake Iraqi everyman invented by foreign Al Qaeda fighters to “mask the outsiders’ dominant role.” The one who dreamed him up, according to Bergner, was al-Masri—the other man killed Sunday.
As the NY Times once put it

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