Austin Bay Blog

Iraq the Model writes:

Iraq’s national security advisor Muwaffak al-Rubaie says Iraqi security forces arrested Abu Qudama al-Tunisi in a raid in the suburb of al-Dhuloiya north of Baghdad. 15 other foreign terrorists were killed in the raid according to al-Rubaie.

The terrorist of Tunisian origin confessed that he was responsible for the attack that destroyed the Askari Shrine in Samarra back in February 22 of this year.

This is great news. Since the death of Zarqawi Iraqi and coalition forces have been “rolling up” Al Qaeda cells and hardline insrugent cells. Iraq the Model says Iraqi forces are still looking for al-Tunisi’s cell leader– a man named “Haitham al-Badri who is believed to be the field commander under whom Abu Qudama was operating…”

al-Badri was once connected to Saddam’s regime and “later became one of the leaders of Ansar al-Sunna and later al-Qaeda organization in Iraq.” That’s interesting. A Saddam operative conveniently migrates to Ansar al-Sunna (an Islamist group that operated against the Kurds) and ends up with Al Qaeda. This character needs to be arrested and his odyssey from secular Baathist to Al Qaeda cell leader explored. Counter-terror experts know the intel agencies of rogue nations and transnational terrorists ”connect in the sewer” (along with drug dealers, arms traders,  organized criminals, smugglers of various stripes,etc). These kinds of gray-area, individual connections are hard to trace– but they occur. Stay tuned.

The entire report also contains a description of how the Samaraa mosque attack was planned and conducted.

UPDATE: The AP story with this infromation just broke. The AP identifies the arrested individual as “Yousri Fakher Mohammed Ali, a Tunisian also known as Abu Qudama.” Compare the AP report to Iraq the Model’s.