A TERRORIST mastermind has united insurgent groups in Baghdad to target the Iraqi Shia Muslim community with the aim of bringing civil war to Iraq, The Times has learnt.

According to US military intelligence sources, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the man responsible for the bloodiest acts of terror in Iraq over the past two years, now commands thousands of fighters from various rival groups and is set to order further waves of bombings.

Yesterday the self-styled “emir” of Iraq was blamed for a dozen co-ordinated bombings in Baghdad that killed 152 people, the single worst death toll in the city since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Most of the dead were poor Shia labourers killed by a huge car bomb in a busy square.

“The al-Qaeda organisation in Mesopotamia is declaring all-out war on the Rafidha [a pejorative term for Shias], wherever they are in Iraq,” said the 38-year-old in an audio message released on an Islamic website. He urged Sunni Muslims to “wake up from your slumber” and joint the fight.

Last night the threat was being taken seriously by US and Iraqi officials, who have offered a $25 million reward for his capture. “We have got reason to believe that al-Zarqawi has now been given tactical command in the city over groups that have had to merge under him for the sake of survival,” an American intelligence officer in Baghdad told The Times yesterday.

An intelligence summary, citing the conglomeration of insurgent groups under the al-Qaeda banner to be the result of rebel turf wars, money, weaponry and fear, concluded that of the estimated 16,000 Sunni Muslim insurgents, 6,700 were hardcore Islamic fundamentalists who were now supplemented by a possible further 4,000 members after an amalgamation with Jaysh Muhammad, previously an insurgent group loyal to the former Baathist regime.

Al-Zarqawi’s rise to supremacy will cast a long shadow in the run up to the October 15 referendum on Iraq’s new constitution and general elections due in December.

His organisation is believed already to have gained domination of smaller resistance groups in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province in western Iraq and a centre of gravity for the Sunni insurgency. An Iraqi resistance insider there last week told The Times that al-Zarqawi’s men had already caused thousands of Shia to flee the city over the past six weeks.

“His men announced through leaflets that all Shia should leave Ramadi or face ‘the iron fist’,” the Ramadi resident said. “At first local Sunnis didn’t want anything to do with it. But they know how powerful Zarqawi’s group is, that it doesn’t hesitate to kill and is not afraid to die.”

“They control Ramadi now. They have the best weapons and the most money, and more and more men. They walk openly on the streets when the Americans aren’t around. So the Shias left, by their thousands.”

The man, himself a supporter of the insurgency, claimed that public executions of coalition informers were a regular occurrence, and happened during daylight in the street. Such is the breakdown of any official authority in Ramadi that it was impossible to stop.

Coalition intelligence sources said that a culmination of signal, image and human intelligence had alerted the coalition to a huge al-Qaeda attack planned for Baghdad in August, which had been aborted at the last minute.

They said the yesterday’s attack was likely a rescheduling of the original operation, and broadcast for propaganda purposes as retaliation for recent government successes in Tal Afar, northern Iraq.

In Tal Afar itself yesterday, where some 10,000 US and Iraqi troops have been engaged in a massive offensive to recapture the ethnically divided town from Sunni insurgents, commanders spoke of the “horrible” abuses they had uncovered. The details were prophetic reminder of what al-Qaeda’s supremacy may bode.

“The enemy here did just the most horrible things you can imagine, in one case murdering a child, placing a booby trap within the child’s body and waiting for the parent to come recover the body of their child and exploding it to kill the parents,” said Colonel H R McMaster, a senior American commander in the town.

Yesterday commanders said they were in full control of the town after the insurgents melted away, but their victory appears quickly overshadowed by al-Zarqawi’s subsequent gore-splattered stamp acoss the very centre of Baghdad.

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