Deep in the heart of
terror (Courier-Mail)
Saturday, July 10, 2004
A Brisbane journalist has penetrated Iraq's
network of insurgents, writes foreign editor David
Costello
MICHAEL Ware has watched Arab extremists argue over
whether he should be executed during terrifying
encounters with insurgents in Iraq.
A former journalist with The Courier-Mail, Ware has
reported for Time magazine on the ruthless men in the
country's lawless Sunni triangle north of Baghdad.
He has rubbed shoulders with fighters from the Tawhid
Al-Jihad faction led by new Al-Qaeda kingpin Abu
Mussab al-Zarqawi. Such men behead hostages, and
Zarqawi is believed to have wielded the knife that
decapitated American Nicholas Berg in May.
Ware says these hardliners could turn on him in an
instant, and this week told The Courier-Mail of one
harrowing close call.
"In the past I have been in a room with people, a
commander and his fighters who I know, and a stranger
has walked in and in Arabic sought permission to
execute me," he said.
"He then argued the toss and was told by the
commander 'he is my guest', therefore I had the cloak
of security. And this fellow reluctantly, in great
protest, finally accepted that."
Ware says the Arab code of protecting invited guests
gives him some security on assignments.
"With Iraqis, if they invite me, by and large I am
fairly secure," he says.
"I mightn't be comfortable but I have a personal
guarantee bound by age-old honour codes that I will
be returned safely."
Ware, 35, worked at The Courier-Mail from 1995 to
2000.
His major stories included uncovering child abuse at
the John Oxley Youth Detention Centre and the Neerkol
orphanage at Rockhampton.
Ware was educated at Brisbane Grammar School and the
University of Queensland from which he graduated with
an arts/law degree.
He says the insurgents, who include Ba'athists,
former members of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard
and Feyadeen militia, nationalists and foreign
terrorists, are using Time to get their message out.
Ware last month became the first Westerner to get one
of Iraq's notorious hostage tapes, material that has
until now only surfaced on Arab networks such as
satellite TV station Al-Jazeera.
This message showed militants threatening to behead a
Pakistani hostage, who was eventually freed.
Since then, Ware says, the insurgents, including
members of Tawhid al-Jihad, have granted him a level
of access that is "quite frightening".
He has received footage of terrorists preparing for
and carrying out suicide bombings.
This week he received a Mujahideen video of militants
involved in the killing of four US contractors in
Fallujah in March.
The insurgents, says Ware, go to great lengths to
ensure that coalition forces cannot follow him back
to their lairs.
"I am blindfolded. I am transferred through many
vehicles. Often it is done at night. We always take
circuitous routes," he says. "I am always left in a
state of confusion.
"I may recognise a room in a house that I have seen
but I cannot tell you where that house is or where
the weapons cache is or where the rockets they have
shown me are."
The terrorists have clear motives for getting their
message out, says Ware, and scaring Westerners away
is only one part of it.
"It is also aimed at our public -- this is what you
are sending our boys to fight," he says.
"It plays to a Muslim market -- in terms of
recruitment, fundraising and incitement. There is
also a political level where this stamps Zarqawi as
the new star of the global jihad (holy war)."
Being the go-between in this sort of exchange is
mind-warping, and Ware worries he has become too
close to terror.
But he says he applies the same sort of "journalistic
filters" he used when embedded with US special
forces.
"This stuff is being generated with or without me.
The attacks occur with or without me," he says. "I
have been put in a position where I can access it
first and I am able to make analysis of it."
That analysis is startling, as it reveals that some
of the hard men from Saddam's secular gangster
regime, the types who in past years Ware says would
be "drinking and whoring", now say they are "fighting
for Allah".
Their goal now, Ware wrote in Time last week, is to
transform Iraq into "a training ground for young
jihadists, who will form the next wave of recruits
for Al-Qaeda and like-minded groups".
Ware says he has laid down ground rules for his
contacts with these men. And he is emphatic that he
will never again be a middleman in a hostage drama.
When he received the tape of the Pakistani hostage,
he says, he became a participant, a situation he
resented.
His response was to send "repeated requests and
pleadings" for the man's release through the channels
from which he received the tape.
"I suspect they were to no avail. His release was
secured by other channels," Ware says. "I refused to
be made a participant. I made it clear through that
channel and all other channels into the resistance
that any future hostage tapes I will return
unopened."