Al Qaeda in Iraq: Is the death of al-Zarqawi really good?

Dead terrorists don’t talk

To most people, the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a good thing. The means the US military employed, however, in terminating him should raise questions in everyone’s minds – especially since it appears that six other people, including a woman and child, were killed in the attack.

Although claiming to fight in the name of Islam, the self-described leader of “al-Qaida in Mesopotamia” wantonly killed hundreds of innocent Iraqis in contravention of Islam’s own laws of war, and justified his doing so. “The killing of infidels by any method including martyrdom (suicide) operations has been sanctified by many scholars, even if it means killing innocent Muslims,” said al-Zarqawi in a statement attributed to him in May 2005. “The shedding of Muslim blood… is allowed in order to avoid the greater evil of disrupting jihad.”

Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. Abu-Bakr, Islam’s first caliph, instructed his troops in the Islamic rules of war:

“Do not betray or be treacherous or vindictive. Do not mutilate. Do not kill the children, the aged or the women. Do not cut or burn palm trees or fruitful trees. Don�slay a sheep, a cow or camel except for your food. And you will come across people who confined themselves to worship in hermitages, leave them alone to what they devoted themselves for.”

For al-Zarqawi, such admonishments mattered very little. He was truly on a genocidal crusade against the very people he had come to free. “Al Qaeda organization in Iraq,” he stated last year, “has declared war against Shi’ites in all of Iraq.”

In the face of such tyranny, the United States as the occupying power in Iraq was certainly justified in hunting him down. However, having found al-Zarqawi’s hideout by tracking his “spiritual adviser,” was the US military justified in dropping two 500 pound bombs to kill him? If the military knew al-Zarqawi’s location and could surveil him from the air, why not try to capture him alive?

al-Zarqawi’s killing is evocative of the type of targeted assassination carried out by the Israeli government against Palestinians. The Jewish state has been roundly condemned by the international humanitarian organizations for such tactics.

As organizations such as Amnesty International have pointed out, extra-judicial executions, no matter how heinous the individual, are contrary to the rule of law.

The United Nations (UN) Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials state that:

“Law enforcement officials shall not use firearms against persons except in self-defense or defense of others against the imminent threat of death or serious injury, to prevent the perpetration of a particularly serious crime involving grave threat to life, to arrest a person presenting such a danger and resisting their authority, or to prevent his or her escape, and only when less extreme means are insufficient to achieve these objectives. In any event, intentional lethal use of firearms may only be made when strictly unavoidable in order to protect life.”

From the US military’s own description of the operation to kill Al-Zarqawi, less extreme means may have been sufficient to achieve the objective of capturing Zarqawi.

This is certainly not the first time an arm of the United States has engaged in extra-judicial killings. Last year Haitham al-Yemeni, an alleged al-Qaida under surveillance by CIA agents was killed, according to Amnesty. Intelligence agents are said to have feared that al-Yemeni would go into hiding and the decision to kill him was taken to avoid that possibility.

In an earlier case of what President Bush characterized as “sudden justice”, six men were killed in a car, blown up by missiles fired from a CIA-controlled Predator drone in November 2002. One of the people in the car was alleged to be a senior member of al-Qaida, Abu Ali al-Harithi.

By ending the lives of suspected terrorists in this fashion, the military seems to be writing off sources of potentially valuable intelligence. At the very least, such summary killings leave no room for mistakes.

British authorities learned this lesson the hard way when an innocent Brazilian day laborer, Jean Charles de Menezes, was shot and killed by London police because they mistakenly thought he was connected to the 7/7 train bombing. Mr. Menezes’ cousin complained to to the judicial inquest investigating the death that there was nothing to stop the government from “kill[ing] thousands of people” in the same way, based on the logic they used to gun down his relative.

Indeed in a “war on terror” that has no international boundaries, it’s not too incredible to believe that such “shoot first and ask questions later” tactics could not be used against future suspected homegrown terror cells in Lodi, California, New York City, or Toronto.

In fact, in London this week one such terrorism suspect was shot during the course of his arrest. He survived and will have his day in court. However, for a child and his/her mother in Iraq, being at the wrong place at the wrong time coupled with the decision to forego asking for al-Zarqawi’s surrender means they will never have the opportunity to protest their innocence.

The tragedy is that in a war that is meant to defend individual freedom and the rule of law from terrorism, the expediency and immediate results of extra-judicial killings makes it harder to distinguish exactly where the boundary between the lawful and unlawful lies.

Farhan Memon is an attorney and journalist based in New York City.