Six months before the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June, a senior al-Qaeda figure warned him in a letter that he risked removal as al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq if he continued to alienate Sunni tribal and religious leaders and rival insurgent groups.
The author of the Dec. 11 letter, who said he was writing from al-Qaeda headquarters in the Waziristan region of Pakistan, was a member of Osama bin Laden's high command who signed himself "Atiyah." The military's Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, which last week released a 15-page English translation of the Arabic document made public in Iraq, said his real identity was "unknown."
But counterterrorism officials said they believe he is Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a 37-year-old Libyan who joined bin Laden in Afghanistan as a teenager during the 1980s. He has since gained considerable stature in al-Qaeda as an explosives expert and Islamic scholar. After becoming acquainted with Zarqawi in the western Afghan city of Herat in the late 1990s, he became al-Qaeda's main interlocutor with the fiery Jordanian.
Atiyah's name does not appear on any published U.S. government list of known or suspected terrorists. But his biography, as described by counterterrorism officials who agreed to discuss him on the condition that they not be named, offers a rare glimpse into the cadre of loyal senior aides who escaped with bin Laden into the mountainous Afghan-Pakistani border region in the fall of 2001.
The letter, the first document to emerge from what the military described as a "treasure trove" of information uncovered from Iraqi safe houses at the time of Zarqawi's death, provides new details of a debilitated al-Qaeda leadership-in-hiding, locating it in Waziristan.
"I am with them," Atiyah writes Zarqawi of the high command, "and they have some comments about some of your circumstances."
Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, said on a visit to the United States last week that he believes bin Laden and his top lieutenants are on the Afghan side of the border. U.S. military and intelligence officials have long believed that the al-Qaeda leadership is hiding in one of the tribal provinces on the Pakistan side of the border, and Atiyah's letter, if accurate, would confirm their location at the time it was written.
Atiyah bemoans the difficulty of direct communications between Waziristan and Iraq and suggests that it is easier for Zarqawi to send a trusted representative to Pakistan than the other way around. The "brothers," he writes, "wish that they had a way to talk to you and advise you, and to guide and instruct you; however, they too are occupied with vicious enemies here.
"They are also weak," he continued, "and we ask God that He strengthen them and mend their fractures. They have many of their own problems, but they are people of reason, experience and sound, beneficial knowledge. . . . This letter represents the majority of, and a synopsis of, what the brothers want to say to you."
Deemed authentic by military and counterterrorism officials, Atiyah's letter also adds context to events in al-Qaeda's often rocky relationship with its Iraqi subsidiary, shedding new light on the depth of the organization's concern over Zarqawi and the limits of its control over him.
‘Perilous and ruinous’
An earlier letter to Zarqawi, written in July 2005 by bin Laden deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, made some of the same points in more formal and less pointed words. But it appeared to have little effect. In September 2005, Zarqawi released an audiotape accusing Sunni leaders and Shiites of cooperating with U.S. forces and promising their certain death.
Atiyah's letter begins with warm personal words for Zarqawi. "I am setting this out as an introduction," he says, because the rest of his letter "will be primarily about the negatives and cautioning against things that are perilous and ruinous."
Zarqawi had been placed in a position of high responsibility, Atiyah continues, but needed to expand his circle of advisers in Iraq and listen more to those with a better sense of al-Qaeda's wider political objectives. If his words led Zarqawi to wonder if he were being asked to step down, Atiyah writes, the response would be "not necessarily." But, he continues, "it is a possibility if you find at some point someone who is better and more suitable than you." Sharia law, he reminds, requires that "proper fitness be ordained."
Atiyah orders him not to make "any decision on a comprehensive issue" without consulting bin Laden, Zawahiri and the other "brothers." Zarqawi should improve his relationship with other Sunni insurgent groups in Iraq and be more judicious in using the al-Qaeda name in his operations.
Atiyah refers to a bombing in Jordan ordered by Zarqawi as the kind of operation that requires consultation. He urges the utmost caution "against attempting to kill any religious scholar or tribal leader who is obeyed, and of good repute in Iraq from among the Sunnis, no matter what." After they have succeeded in driving out U.S. forces and dismantling the Iraqi government, he writes, "then we can behave differently."
"Know that we, like all mujahiddin, are still weak. . . . We have not yet reached a level of stability. We have no alternative but to not squander any element of the foundations of strength or any helper or supporter."
Atiyah's December missive seemed to produce at least temporary results. In January, Zarqawi's organization, al-Qaeda in Iraq, announced it was melding operations with other Sunni insurgent groups under a new umbrella organization called the Mujaheddin Shura Council. But any hopes of appealing to Shiites -- seen by al-Qaeda as an interim necessity that would be abandoned once U.S. forces were ejected -- was eliminated when Zarqawi-affiliated forces blew up an important Shiite shrine, the golden-domed al-Askari mosque in Samarra, in February. A number of Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq's Anbar province have also been killed this year under the Shura Council banner.
Since Zarqawi's death in a U.S. air raid near the Iraqi city of Baqouba in June, the new leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, has appeared more in tune with al-Qaeda's wishes and has reached out to Sunni tribal and religious leaders. Competing for their support with the U.S.-backed Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, al-Muhajer on Thursday issued a public appeal for their forgiveness and pledged to respect their scholarship and status.
Atiyah is no longer in Waziristan, according to U.S. officials who declined to speculate on his current whereabouts. But they said he was not in U.S. custody and expressed certainty that he is still alive. Asked what priority they attach to his capture, one official said: "He is an important figure. . . . The world would be a much safer place with him off the streets."
The official said that Atiyah is one of a number of senior al-Qaeda figures whose names have not been made public. "We knew about him," he said. "There are a lot of key al-Qaeda people that might not be on lists for the general public or the press." Rita Katz, whose Washington-based SITE Institute monitors extremist Web sites, said she believes that Atiyah is a "top al-Qaeda strategist" who frequently appears on a password-protected site under the name of Louis Atiyah Allah. "He's the one the jihadists go to when they have a question. He tells them what to do, what fatwahs to provide. He communicates with the jihadi online community."
The counterterrorism official declined to say whether the government believes Louis Atiyah and Atiyah Abd al-Rahman were the same person.
Atiyah's journey from Libya to a prominent position in the al-Qaeda hierarchy began like that of many young Muslims who traveled to Afghanistan to join the Afghan mujahedeen fighting a Soviet military occupation in the 1980s. Many were recruited and organized there by bin Laden, a charismatic Saudi who had joined the mujaheddin cause. U.S. officials said Atiyah was principally based around the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad.
Visit to Algeria
In the early 1990s, after a brief return to Saudi Arabia, bin Laden transferred his operations to Sudan. The 1991 U.S. action against Iraq had given him a new cause, and his al-Qaeda organization, formed of the foreign recruits he had organized in Afghanistan, declared war against the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf.
As bin Laden organized in Sudan, Atiyah went to Algeria, where he is believed to have fought with the Armed Islamic Group (known as GIA, its French initials).
When the Taliban took power in Kabul in 1996, bin Laden returned to Afghanistan, where Atiyah joined him in establishing terrorist training camps. After his release from a Jordanian prison, Zarqawi arrived in Afghanistan in 1999. Although he had only a tenuous relationship with al-Qaeda, Zarqawi took bin Laden's money to set up his own training camp near Herat to prepare to overthrow the Jordanian government in Amman.
It was in Herat, U.S. officials believe, that a relationship was established between Zarqawi and Atiyah.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Zarqawi traveled to Iran and then to northern Iraq. After U.S. forces invaded Iraq in March 2003, he leveraged his al-Qaeda connections to gain legitimacy and adherents to an anti-U.S. insurgency. In October 2004, he changed the name of his burgeoning organization to al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Atiyah's liaison role was "more a function of his long-term ties to al-Qaeda and his relationship with the al-Qaeda central leadership and their interest in seeing him assume this role as opposed to a close relationship with Zarqawi," a counterterrorism official said.
