Does the Arabic at left mean anything to you? It could spell Tanzim Qaedat al-Jihad fi Balad al-Rafidin for all you know. Would that translate to “al-Qaeda in Iraq” if there was no such thing? AQI is a CIA coined term. Much as if the police searched your home, planted a stash, and labeled it “pot of your home.”
Al-Qaeda in Iraq is actually the dumbed down shorthand of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia for Americans who wouldn’t know what Mesopotamia would have had to do with September 11. The lands of Mesopotamia would really suggest a Greater Iraq, inclusive of regions of Syria, Turkey and Iran. In which case, Jihadists advocating for the ancient territorial legacy of Iraq would not likely be fighting in Iraq at all. AND ACTUALLY, fi Balad al-Rafidin translates to “the country of the Two Rivers.”
Whether QJBR is a CIA invention, like the Jordanian who-never-was al-Zarqawi, will be for historians to decipher. Probably it’s a little of both. Regardless, AQI ends with “in Iraq” –only in America, land of few maps and sub-average education. We can’t even be told that Mexico is actually called Los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, lest US Americans get confused.
What liberties can our think tanks and intelligence manipulators take with Kufic script! The phrase above could just as well mean “I will wipe World Jewry off the face of the Earth!” as “Springtime for Hitler and Germany.” Or it could have meant “erase the illegitimate borders imposed on trans-Arabia by the Western powers bent on imposing an Israeli colony, by ruse of religion, in mock restitution for the Holocaust, the pogroms and the Spanish Inquisition, to give them a beachhead for Middle East oil.”
If I were to have a guess at the Arabic characters above, it would be “Sin Salida.”