The death of the al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq yesterday is an important military and symbolic event in that country's recent troubled history. He led the most ruthless opponents of the United States-led occupation forces and the country's new government. He has been responsible for thousands of Iraqi deaths and terrorist outrages in a gruesome sectarian campaign to stoke civil war and mock the occupation. Most Iraqis will be heartily relieved to know he has gone, even if they realise others will take his place and remain deeply unhappy about their country's political direction.
While Zarqawi's followers were originally from outside Iraq, in recent times they have become indigenous and all the more effective for being so. Nevertheless, they are considered to be an extremist minority in the insurgency and have recently become more and more unpopular because of their brutal tactics. Zarqawi became a convenient symbolic enemy for the Bush administration's "war on terrorism" as an international struggle. He responded in kind by clothing his victims in Guantanamo prison gear. Now that he is gone it will be less easy to stereotype these movements of militant opposition.
Nuri al-Maliki, Iraq's new prime minister, signalled a significant breakthrough in the formation of his government yesterday alongside the news of Zarqawi's death. He announced that Jawad al-Bolani, a Shia, has been appointed interior minister, the Sunni Lt General Abdel Qader Jassim is to take charge of defence, and a member of his Dawa party will take charge of national security. The deep factionalism that has so far prevented a unified administration emerging may at last be receding. But the huge issue of whether Iraq will be relatively centralised, as most Sunnis prefer, or federalised, as demanded by Kurds and southern Shias, still remains. And irrespective of al-Qaeda's efforts to provoke a civil war, the very fact of continuing occupation reproduces insurgency and rejectionism. Only a stable and more confident Iraqi government can break this vicious circle by demanding a phased withdrawal of foreign troops.
This chimes with growing disenchantment over Iraq policy in the US and Britain. Most voters believe the intervention was a great mistake and the occupation gravely mishandled and many call for immediate withdrawal. Wars are fought around symbolic as well as material issues, so it was not surprising to hear George Bush and Tony Blair claim the credit yesterday for Zarqawi's death in a US airstrike. Intelligence played a part in it too - pointing up its successive failures to prevent insurgent operations in which 1,600 Iraqis have died in the last month. US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday that since al-Qaeda is a network of networks it must be expected to regroup and mount revenge attacks. They and the other groups are reproduced by the conditions of occupation upon which they feed. Thus this is a tactical rather than a strategic victory.