My Share of the Task(271)

                time for a decision: My recollection of these meetings is aided by interviews with two task force members present.

                Jihad and Reform Front: The “JR Front Establishing Statement” was posted to an English-language Islamic Army in Iraq website on September 15, 2007, but was signed and dated May 2, 2007.

                to avoid killing innocents: One of the Front’s policies covered this issue: “Mujahedeen operations target the occupiers and their agents, and don’t target innocents whom one of Jihad goals is [sic] to support them and achieve a good life for them, and use kindness as the way that we treat Muslims.” “JR Front Establishing Statement,” Islamic Army in Iraq website, September 15, 2007.

                led by Abu Wail: “Jihad and Reform Front,” Jane’s Terrorism and Security Monitor, March 20, 2009.

                a faction came with him: Ibid. See also Evan F. Kohlmann, “State of the Sunni Insurgency in Iraq: August 2007,” NEFA Foundation, 15, 18–19.

                collaborating with the United States: “Jihad and Reform Front.” Jane’s.

                target the leaders: Stanford University, “Islamic Army in Iraq,” Mapping Militant Organizations, project website, 2012.

                clashed with AQI, petered out: Ibid.

                dissension within Ansar’s ranks: “Jihad and Reform Front,” Jane’s.

                Dadullah the Lame: Dadullah may have led one of the earliest meetings that set the still small Taliban resurgence movement into action in 2002. See Antonio Giustozzi, Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan (Columbia University Press, 2008), 11. In 2003, Mullah Omar dispatched Dadullah to lead recruitment in Baluchistan and Karachi, where he was rumored to be accompanied by Pakistani officials. Elizabeth Rubin, “In the Land of the Taliban,” New York Times Magazine, October 22, 2006.

                anti-Soviet resistance of the 1980s: According to a Taliban biography, he joined the anti-Soviet resistance in 1983. Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban-Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, 1970–2010 (Hurst and Co., 2012), 275.

                quit school to join: Ibid., 275–76.

                stepped on a mine: Omid Marzban, “Mullah Dadullah: The Military Mastermind of the Taliban Insurgency,” Jamestown Foundation, March 21, 2006.

                “preceded him to Paradise”: Abu Yahya al-Libi, quoted in “Islamist Website Monitor No. 110,” Middle East Media Research Institute, June 8, 2007.

                Mullah Omar retired him: Elizabeth Rubin notes, “His fighters slaughtered hundreds of Hazaras . . . in Bamiyan Province, an act so brutal it was even too much for Mullah Omar, who had him disarmed at the time” (“In the Land of the Taliban”).

                “I no longer need them”: Kate Clark, “The Layha: Calling the Taliban to Account,” Afghanistan Analysts Network, July 4, 2011, 3, note 7.

                United Front in the north: Linschoten, An Enemy We Created, 276.

                the atrocities he carried out: Carlotta Gall, “Northern Alliance Presses for Surrender of Taliban Commander and Troops,” New York Times, December 4, 2001.

                relied increasingly on suicide bombs: This point is made in Linschoten, An Enemy We Created, 279.

                bombs on the roads of Iraq: Sami Yousafzai, “Suicide Offensive,” Newsweek, April 15, 2007.

                there were 141: Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (Penguin, 2009), 366. Other accounts give slightly different numbers, but the magnitude of increase is the same. Linschoten, for example, reports 3 suicide bombs in 2004 and 123 in 2006. Linschoten, An Enemy We Created, 279.