The Iraqi Prisoner

Late last month, Iraqi officials announced that they had finally captured Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the shadowy supposed leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. But more than two weeks later, U.S. intelligence officials still can't say if the man being held in an Iraqi prison is Baghdadi—or even if "Baghdadi" is a real person, or a figure made up to throw Iraqi and U.S. forces off the trail.
 
Such confusion is hardly unusual when it comes to Baghdadi, who has been reported captured or killed several times over the past two years. The latest claim was delivered by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who told the BBC last week that Abu Omar had been arrested in late April after a two-month investigation by Iraqi security forces. The BBC said that the captured man had been identified as the leader of Al Qaeda's Iraqi franchise by people who had worked with him in the insurgency and who had attended his "inauguration" as leader of an umbrella group of jihadist factions. Maj. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, an Iraqi military spokesman, insists to NEWSWEEK that the government is indeed holding the Iraqi Al Qaeda chief: "All that I have to say is that the guy we arrested is Abu Omar al-Baghdadi." Asked about concerns that Baghdadi was a fictitious persona, the spokesman was adamant: "We found all the information we had about Abu Omar al-Baghdadi in this person."
 
Despite the latest Iraqi claims, U.S. officials say they aren't convinced the person captured by the Iraqis really is the elusive Abu Omar. One intelligence official, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, said: "We believe we know al-Bagdadi's identity, and it's not clear to us that he's the individual in custody." But another official said that the U.S. government's knowledge of Abu Omar's real identity is tentative at best and that no U.S. intelligence expert is positive who he really is. Maj. Gen. David Perkins, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said: "The detainee that the Iraqis are calling al-Baghdadi is in the custody of the Iraqi security forces and we have not had any access to him."

Jihadist Web sites proclaimed Abu Omar al-Baghdadi as the new leader of Al Qaeda shortly after the Jordanian-born founder of the Iraqi terrorist faction, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, was killed in an airstrike in June 2006. From the outset, there was speculation in intelligence circles that Abu Omar might be a nonexistent composite persona, designed to make it look like Al Qaeda in Iraq, which in Zarqawi's heyday was dominated by foreign jihadists, was finally headed by a native Iraqi. In 2007, the Iraqi government at one point claimed it had captured, and later claimed it had killed, Abu Omar. A few weeks later, however, a U.S. military spokesman announced at an official briefing that a captured Al Qaeda operative had told interrogators that Abu Omar al-Baghdadi was in fact a fictitious figurehead who had been played by an actor in videos posted on the Web.  Later still, according to the Long War Journal, a respected military blog, the U.S. military intercepted letters from Osama bin Laden's principal deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, suggesting that the Al Qaeda central leadership believes Abu Omar does really exist.
 
U.S. officials now debate among themselves whether the role—and nom de guerre—of Abu Omar might have later may have been assumed by a real Iraqi. But many in Washington believe that whoever the Iraqis recently captured, it wasn't him.

© 2009