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Backgrounder: Profile: Al-Qaeda in Iraq (a.k.a. al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia)

Council on Foreign Relations

Author: Greg Bruno, Staff Writer
November 15, 2007

The Bush administration has singled out al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) as a central threat to its efforts to pacify and stabilize Iraq. White House officials and many experts have consistently linked the militant group with the most high-profile terrorist strikes and suicide bombings in Iraq. In an April 2007 speech, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, called AQI “probably public enemy No. 1” for U.S. forces. In the first seven months of 2007, President Bush highlighted the importance of defeating AQI more than forty times during public speeches. After years of near-constant attention from Washington, the group’s ability to carry out attacks in Iraq appears to have been diminished in 2007, experts say. But AQI is not the only purveyor of violence in Iraq. By the end of 2007, AQI was one among dozens of groups contributing to Iraq’s violence, prompting some to criticize the Bush administration for over-emphasizing the group’s role.

Origins

Al-Qaeda in Iraq, also known as al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, is a Sunni Muslim extremist group that seeks to sow civil unrest in Iraq, with the aim of establishing a caliphate—a single, transnational Islamic state. Established by the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an Arab of Jordanian descent, AQI rose to prominence after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. After being released from a Jordanian prison in 1999, Zarqawi reportedly commanded volunteers in Afghanistan before fleeing to northern Iraq in 2001. There he joined with Ansar al-Islam (Partisans of Islam), where he led Ansar’s Arab contingent. Many analysts say it’s this group, and not al-Qaeda, that was the precursor of AQI, though U.S. officials dispute this.

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Copyright 2007 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.