al Qaeda in Iraq

al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI, aka al Qaeda in Mesopotamia; al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers) is an Iraqi Sunni insurgent group led by foreign leaders with anti-Shiite beliefs, extreme tactics, and connections to al Qaeda's transnational terrorist network. It was formed in October 2004 by Abu Musab al Zarqawi, a radical Jordanian Islamist who had operated a guerrilla training camp in Herat, Afghanistan, before the demise of the Taliban regime in 2001. AQI, also referred to as al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers, became notorious for beheadings of hostages and was responsible for the vast majority of mass-casualty suicide bombings in Iraq. It targeted coalition forces, Iraq's government and security services, Shiite militias and civilians, and Sunnis that turned against it.

AQI was created after the United States and its allies invaded Iraq to topple the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. Initially, AQI consisted of foreign fighters from neighboring states, but it also attracted volunteers from as far away as North Africa and Europe. Many of these foreign volunteers ended up carrying out suicide attacks on behalf of AQI. By 2006, however, AQI transformed itself into a primarily Iraqi organization with foreign leaders at the helm. It received the political support of al Qaeda's original leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri, but operated independently of their command and control structure.

AQI's immediate objectives are to drive foreign forces out of Iraq, topple the democratic regime in that country, and establish an Islamic state based on Sunni hegemony over the majority Shiite nation. Its ultimate aims are to create a base for radical Sunni jihadists in the Middle East, from which they could topple neighboring secular regimes, and form a pan-Islamic union akin to the caliphates that reigned over the region for many centuries prior to the advent of the modern nation state. AQI uses a variety of tactics to achieve its aims, including beheading its hostages, summarily executing captured Iraqi police and soldiers, detonating improvised explosive devices (IEDs) against coalition forces, and deploying male and female suicide bombers to kill scores of civilians and destroy the institutions of the new Iraqi order.

AQI's extremism stems from its fundamentalist religious ideology and strategic objectives. It harbors an extremist Salafist worldview that depicts Shiites as heretics because of their rejection of Sunni orthodoxy. This ideology has been used to justify mass-casualty bombings against Shiite religious processions, leaders, and shrines. In February 2006, AQI was a major catalyst in a sectarian civil war between Shiites and Sunnis after it destroyed the golden dome of the Askariya Shrine in Samarra, one of Iraq's four major Shiite shrines. The Samarra bombing was not the first catastrophic strike against the symbols of Shiism in Iraq, nor would it be the last. On August 29, 2003, a group known as Tawhid and Jihad (the precursor to AQI) detonated a car bomb outside the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf, killing the Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al Hakim, along with several dozen worshippers. Seven months later, on March 2, 2004, insurgents set off several explosions in Baghdad and Karbala during the Shiite Ashura processions, killing 181 people.

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