Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda’s top man in Iraq is writing that the coalition is "squeezing" the militants in Iraq.
"The space of movement is starting to get smaller," [the letter] said. "The grip is starting to be tightened on the holy warriors’ necks and, with the spread of soldiers and police, the future is becoming frightening."
If the militants fail to take over Iraq, "we will have to leave for another land to uphold the (Islamic) banner, or until God chooses us as martyrs," the statement says.
This letter, circulated by a number of Qaeda-led websites follows another letter written by al-Zarqawi earlier in the war when he argued that the militants were having trouble finding hiding places in Iraq and the coalition was continuing to keep them from achieving their goals. Al-Zarqawi knows that the single worst thing that could happen is for the Iraqis to achieve sovereignty — and he also knows that the US won’t budge no matter how bad the terrorism gets. The terrorists have lost Iraq. The Iraqi people hate them, they’ve killed more Iraqis than Americans, and they’re standing in their way.
For all the cries of "quagmire" and cries about how the US occupation of Iraq is creating more terrorists, etc, the terrorists themselves don’t see it that way. That is because the terrorists know far more about the Middle East than the writers of The New York Times. They know that that terrorism grows from autocracy and shrinks from freedom. Their biggest fear is that Western freedoms will gain a toehold in the Middle East, setting off the same kind of chain reaction that transformed Eastern Europe. They know that the situation in Iraq does not favor them, and that time is running out.
They’ll continue to try and do what they can to make the US shrink from the handover of sovereignty, and they will fail. The future of Iraq belongs to the Iraqi people, and the Iraqi people understand what tyranny is, and have no desire to return to it.
Make no mistake: we are winning this war.
UPDATE: LT Smash finds evidence that this is just a retranslation of the last Zarqawi memo from February… which seems quite plausible.
UPDATE: And now the AP retracts the story… score one for the blogosphere. The memo was probably authentic, but it was indeed the same memo as the previous one widely reported.
