sometimes a weed gets out of hand.. but the branches or tentacles of all these groups seems intertwined..
what did Bush say,.. the fight was like wack-a-mole?
you hit them hard in one spot and they just pop up at another?
Zarqawi, a Jordanian who had been a convicted thief and sex criminal before turning to radical Islam, created his own group, drawing from his country and the region known in Arabic as al-Sham, or the Levant—that is, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. He called his force at that time the Army of the Sham.
The crippled condition of Al Qaeda’s core after 9/11 left the field free for Zarqawi to wage his own brand of jihad. Guided by certain Islamist thinkers who believed that attacking Shiites would draw Sunnis to their cause, Zarqawi concentrated his violence on native Iraqi Shiites, not the American military. He began his campaign in August, 2003, just five months after the American invasion, with a car-bomb attack on the Imam Ali Mosque, in Najaf. As many as a hundred and twenty-five Shiite Muslims were killed at Friday prayers, including Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, who might have provided moderate leadership to the country. Zarqawi also targeted Iraq’s professionals—the lawyers, teachers, doctors, and academics who together formed a fragile social matrix.
Zarqawi was killed by an American bomb, in 2006. American forces, along with a movement of Sunni tribes who rejected Al Qaeda, called the Awakening, bottled up his movement in Iraq.
but the revolution in Syria created a new opportunity.
what did Bush say,.. the fight was like wack-a-mole?
you hit them hard in one spot and they just pop up at another?