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Zarqawi’s “mufti” arrested in Diyala: official

 Zarqawi’s “mufti” arrested in Diyala: official

Late al-Qaeda in Iraq commander Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (right)

Late al-Qaeda in Iraq commander Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (right)
Late al-Qaeda in Iraq commander Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (right)
(IraqiNews.com) Diyala – A senior advisor who was close to late al-Qaeda in Iraq’s leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was arrested in Diyala on Tuesday, local officials reported.

“An intelligence team, in a special operation, has successfully arrested a well-known leader at al-Qaeda who worked as part of the so-called ‘jurisprudence counseling’ body,” said Sadeq al-Husseini, head of the security committee at Diyala council. He said that the arrested militant, whose name he did not mention, was so close to Zarqawi that he was killed “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s mufti”.

“Zarqawi’s mufti had disappeared since 2009 but reappeared in 2014 in Diyala. He became an Islamic State leader but fled shortly after outside the province upon its liberation from the group’s control,” said Husseini. “An intelligence team tracking his movements arrested him at a checkpoint near al-Azim (64 kilometers north of Baqubah) trying to re-enter Diyala.”

According to Husseiny, a majority of well-known, fugitive al-Qaeda leaders are now working within ISIS, having shared the same extremist thought.

Zarqawi, a former al-Qaeda training camp commander in Afghanistan, became the extremist group’s commander in Iraq, claiming responsibility for a string of deadly attacks during the US war in Iraq. He was killed in 2006 by a US airstrike in Diyala’s Hibhib region.

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