Militant leader killed in US air strike, say clerics

The spiritual leader of the terror group believed to have killed two American hostages in Iraq this week and responsible for a string of other deadly attacks has been killed in a US air strike, his family and Islamic clerics said yesterday.

The death of Sheikh Abu Anas al-Shami, who has in previous preachings on the internet condoned the kidnapping and killing of hostages, is a blow to Iraq’s most active militant group, Tawhid and Jihad, led by Jordanian-born militant Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, experts say.

But they added that such groups managed to survive, with other militants filling in.

Al-Shami, a Palestinian who holds Jordanian citizenship, was killed when a missile hit the car he was travelling in on Friday in the west Baghdad suburb of Abu Ghraib, said the clerics, who have close ties to the family.

Al-Shami’s father, Youssef Jumah, said he learned of the death on Monday from his eldest son Jumah, who lives in the United Arab Emirates. He declined to say how his son was informed.

The pan-Arab satellite television Al-Jazeera reported al-Shami’s death earlier this week, quoting unidentified relatives.

A Jordanian security official said he could not confirm the death.

Also known as Omar Youssef Jumah, al-Shami was a top aide to al-Zarqawi, who is thought to be a close confidant of al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

The Tawhid and Jihad is blamed for some of the biggest attacks in Iraq, such as the bombing of the United Nations headquarters last year, and the beheadings of foreign hostages.

Al-Zarqawi is believed to have personally decapitated American hostage Eugene Armstrong on Monday.

Postings on the internet yesterday claimed his group also decapitated another American hostage, Jack Hensley, whose body was identified yesterday.

Al-Shami was believed to be the voice on several audio tapes that Tawhid and Jihad released via the internet. In some of his preachings that were carried on the internet, he condoned the kidnapping and killing of hostages as a religious duty.

In one tape in August, a speaker identified as al-Shami said the militants planned to kill Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi, soldiers and police officers.

“We will not allow you to destroy our hopes in this blessed holy war, and we will not let you steal our bright tomorrow, which is now appearing on the horizon,” the speaker said on the tape.

Ghazi Rababaa, a terrorism expert at the University of Jordan, said that while the killing dealt a blow to Tawhid and Jihad it was “unlikely to lead to the disintegration of the group or the cessation of its activities”.

“Such groups are not affected by the disappearance of this or that person because there’s always a second and a third in line to carry out the same task,” he said.

“The important thing is the continued existence of the group’s ideology and its goals.”

At the family home in Amman’s middle-class district of al-Zuhoor, a predominantly Palestinian neighbourhood of the Jordanian capital, al-Shami’s father was busy erecting a tent for a wake last night.

He said his son was buried in Fallujah, the city west of Baghdad that is known as a hotbed of anti-American militants.

“I can’t describe my feelings. I’m neither sad nor happy about his death,” Youssef, 64, told The Associated Press.

“The last I saw of him was a year ago, when he told me he was going to Saudi Arabia,” said the retired contractor.

Two weeks later al-Shami sent him a message saying he was in Iraq.

Inside the family home, al-Shami’s 56-year-old mother, Dalal Jumah, said her son “always yearned for martyrdom and he got what he wished for”.

Al-Shami was born in Kuwait to a middle-class Palestinian family of seven children. The family had Jordanian citizenship, like many Palestinians or descendants who fled their homes since the 1948 creation of the state of Israel.

The clerics close to the family recalled al-Shami as a calm, flexible person of moderate ideology.

They were surprised to hear he had joined Tawhid and Jihad. They said al-Shami was a leading member of a small Salafiyah movement in Jordan.

The movement advocates the peaceful introduction of strict Islamic law, such as veils for women and gender segregation.

Al-Shami’s father said his son was a “devout Muslim” since childhood. “He always prayed and feared God,” he said. He said he was not aware that his son had any links with al-Zarqawi or al Qaida.

Youssef Jumah said al-Shami studied Islamic theology in the holy city of Medina, Saudi Arabia, between 1988 and 1991. He preached Salafiyah theology at an Amman mosque, the clerics said.

In the late 1990s, the government closed down an Islamic centre that al-Shami had established in Amman on grounds that it was propagating a fanatical interpretation of Islam, according to the clerics.

Youssef Jumah said his son married a Palestinian woman from the Gaza Strip when he returned to Saudi Arabia in 1993. They had three children: Maymouna, 12, Anas, 10, and Malek, five.

The children and their mother lived in Egypt, he added.