January 05, 2005

MSNBC - Report: Mess-hall suicide bomber was Saudi

The suicide bomber who killed 22 people when he blew himself up in a U.S. mess hall in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul was a Saudi medical student, an Arab newspaper reported Monday.

The Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat identified him as 20-year-old Ahmed Said Ahmed al-Ghamdi, citing unnamed friends of the man’s father. The friends said members of an Iraqi resistance group contacted al-Ghamdi’s father to tell him his son was the suicide bomber who carried out the Dec. 21 attack, the deadliest on an American installation in Iraq.
[...]
The paper did not name the Iraqi resistance group. But Ansar al-Sunnah, a radical Islamic Iraqi group that has been active in northern Iraq, claimed responsibility for the mess hall attack. In a videotape posted on the Web, Ansar al-Sunnah identified the suicide bomber as Abu Omar al-Musali — an apparent nom de guerre meaning Abu Omar of Mosul.
[...]
Ansar al-Sunnah shares the anti-Western, Quranic rhetoric of Islamic extremist groups like al-Qaida, but has confined its fight to Iraq and has not actively recruited foreign fighters. The group, though, has declared that it worked with an al-Qaida-linked group in Iraq in at least one operation in November.
[I don't think MSNBC is being very truthful here:
there's lots to link Ansar al-Sunnah and their leader Zaqarwi with OBL and Al Queda, but NBC doesn't ever want to go there, so they don't.--Jen]
[...]
It said the father said he learned Dec. 16 that his son had withdrawn all the money left in a Sudanese bank account for him and later received a phone call from his son telling him that he was in Iraq to fight the Americans.

The al-Ghamdis are a large Saudi clan, three members of which were among the Sept. 11 hijackers.

This little story tells us quite a lot:
*The guy wasn't a poor, starving camel herder but a med student with money.
*He wasn't a native Iraqi or a Sunni Baathist "Freedom Fighter."
*His family boasts 3 of the 9/11 hijackers already.
Can anyone still doubt that Iraq is where we need to be fighting the war on terror?