Abu Anas al-Shami

Omar Yusef Juma'a (Arabic: عمر يوسف جمعة‎‎), known as Abu Anas al-Shami (Arabic: أبو أنس الشامي‎‎), was a senior leader in the Jama'at al-Tawhid wal Jihad militant group during the Iraq War.

History

Abu Anas Al Shami was a Palestinian cleric, teacher, writer, and jihadist born in Kuwait. Originally from the Palestinian West Bank town of Yabroud, Abu Anas obtained an Islamic studies degree at the Islamic University of Madinah in Saudi Arabia.

In the mid-1990s he went to Bosnia-Herzegovina to teach Islam in towns and refugee camps. He then returned to Jordan and became a preacher in the neighborhood of Sweileh.^[1] In the late 1990s, the Jordanian officials shut down an Islamic center that al-Shami had established in Amman on the grounds that it was promoting an extreme interpretation of Islam.

Iraq

In 2003, al-Shami joined al-Tawheed wal-Jihad leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in north-eastern Iraq. He was appointed to the advisory council of the group and soon became Zarqawi's second in command. He was both spiritual advisor to the group and directed many of its attacks and battles against American and Iraqi forces. In a letter he wrote that his 300 mujaheddin had fought-off over 2,000 U.S. Marines in the First Battle of Fallujah.^[2] According to Turki al-Binali, Abu Anas was the primary teacher of Abu Muhammad al-Adnani.

Death

Abu Anas al-Shami was killed by an American missilestrike against his car in September 2004^[3] (the exact date is disputed) near Abu Ghraib,^[4] when he had been sent by Zarqawi to the Sadr City area of Baghdad. A eulogy to him was written by Zarqawi's first spiritual mentor, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, and appeared on the Tawhed website which is run by Maqdisi's organisation on behalf of al-Qaeda.

References