The photograph shows a young man sporting a red-and-white chequered head-dress, a wispy beard and a zealot's eyes. Majed Hamoud Mubarak al-Harithy, a 23-year-old student from the Saudi Arabian city of Mecca, was smuggled into Iraq from Syria sometime before August 2007. He was carrying a passport, 252 Saudi riyals (£35) and US$101, and was eager to become a “martyr”.
Al-Harithy has almost certainly achieved his goal by now. Al-Qaeda, the group he reported to, carried out more than 4,500 attacks against Iraqi civilians last year, killing 3,870 people and wounding nearly 18,000, according to figures just released by the US military in Baghdad. It also claimed that 90 per cent of al-Qaeda's suicide-bombers were foreigners like al-Harithy.
Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, a spokesman, said that the US military had gained a much better understanding of the terrorists it was fighting thanks to a treasure trove of biographical records that US troops discovered during a pre-dawn raid on some tents pitched near the town of Sinjar, on the Syrian border, last October.
Those records gave details of more than 600 foreign fighters who were smuggled into Iraq to join al-Qaeda in the 12 months leading up to August 2007. They included photographs of many of the men — gnarled and fresh-faced, scowling and smiling, bearded and clean-shaven — as well as ages, nationalities, home towns, relatives' telephone numbers, aliases and other details.
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