Follow The Hawala Trail

How could Abu Musaub Al Zarqawi’s head – bloated alright -- be found in one piece amid the rubble left by two 500-lb bombs? His remains, we were told, were identified by sight and by finger-prints. So the tip of at least one of his fingers was intact.
Who’s going to pocket the $25 million bounty on the self-proclaimed leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq? More importantly, who turned him in?
Whoever had the most to lose from al-Zarqawi alive. Iraqis, Americans, Muslims from other countries were victims of the Jordanian terrorist who shot to prominence with the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003. That attack, which claimed the top UN official responsible for Iraq and dozens others, marked the onset of the insurgency.
Zarqawi’s death was undoubtedly a huge psychological victory over the insurgents. But, as President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and top Iraqi officials insisted, Zarqawi’s death does not diminish the threat he posed alive.
A lanky bearded fellow huddled somewhere along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border was troubled by Zarqawi’s transformation from a small-time radical into one of the world’s most feared men.
Here was a fighter who was always at the front – actually multiple fronts -- not sermonizing from some cave or crevasse once in a while. Equally at ease with IEDs and the Internet, Zarqawi was constantly seeking to innovate. He had acquired such mythical standing among his adversaries that his clumsiness with that rifle didn’t detract from his legend.
Clearly, Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri were more than troubled by Zarqawi rise. They feared him as a potential rival with multitudes of radicals behind him ready to kill or die for the cause. The Al Qaeda top brass just couldn’t find a good reason to discredit Zarqawi. True, the way he fanned Shia-Sunni violence spilled too much Muslim blood in a war that was officially against the infidels. Before Bin Laden could condemn Zarqawi’s methods, he recognized how powerfully they worked. After all, killing yourself and your co-religionists for the larger good was sanctioned under jihad.
Iraqi and American military officials have said the plan to kill Zarqawi was the culmination of weeks of sifting through tips and tracking down credible leaders. It generally takes bin Laden several weeks to deliver his tapes to Al Jazeera. Maybe the Al Qaeda leader used a similar channel of couriers to order his lieutenants to liquidate Zarqawi.
While we’re at it, maybe that last tape from bin Laden contained a coded message to loyalists to lead the American and Iraqi forces to Zarqawi and then commiserate in his “martyrdom”. It won’t hurt to start following the hawala trail for signs of some of that $25 million.