Greetings, from me, Al-Zarqawi!Follow

Even Us Terrorist Types Gotta Do the Daily Grind
by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi
Senior VP, Al-Qaeda In Iraq

How's it hangin, homos? Same ol', same ol' here in the Big Sandbox. Not much new since my last letter; Team Satan keeps dropping the hammer, we keep mopping up the jihadi juice. Despite the occasional market-bombing morale booster, the situation has been going downhill for a while now. So I guess you could say that everybody was pretty jazzed last week when big bossman Zawahiri sent out a memo announcing casual Fridays and a special "R&R event."

Well yeah, okay, normally the Zarkman is cool with a little downtime. Chance to catch up on the email and paperwork and all that, especially since Ive got like three months of travel expenses that Fatima (wife #3, the fat one) has been all over my a$$ to file. Anyway, I'm in the middle of Xeroxing some ammonia nitrate receipts Friday morning, thinking about what I needed to pack for the weekend family trip to Damascus, when I get another memo:

From: A. al-Zawahiri
To: All Associates
Subject: Mandatory Weekend Retreat

Oh goat ****ing terrific. I popped my head up over my cubicle to see if Khalid had read it yet, and he just sorta looks up at me and rolls his one good eye.

Anyway, I call the wives on my cell and tell them to cancel the room reservations, and you can just imagine how big that shiite went over. "You know the kids were really looking forward to the rides at Assadland," "it'd be nice if you could occassionally be home to read them a bedtime surah," "you know that roof is not going to thatch itself," blah blah ****ing blah. Then the wives start in on that suspicious "if we didn' know better, we'd think you were seeing another harem" crap, like I got enough energy to go fornicating after a week of occupier missile strikes and filling out the Q1 school bomb progress reports.

But hey, Zarkman's a team player. So I'm out on the curb with everybody else late Friday, piling into the courtesy van headed to the Ramadi Inn conference center, and guess what? I have to sit next to that new French intern Ali the entire trip. Holy frickin' Prophet, what a weasely little brown-noser. "Oh Monsieur Zarqawi, it is the great pleasure to be working for the jihad with you!" while I'm just trying to get some peace and quiet and work on my Times crossword. I swear I'd can that little suckup tomorrow if the martyr recruiting market wasn’t so damn tight. About an hour into the trip we took a few rounds from the Iraqi collaborators, which thankfully shut him up, but then I had to deal with his poopstank the rest of the way.

Saturday morning after continental breakfast we gathered in the Fallujah Room for the opening session which got started late because, as usual, nobody can remember to bring the freaking network cord for the projector. Then Zawahiri stands up and flashes the opening slide: "Restoring the Caliphate: A TQM Roadmap For Strategic Empowerment."

Oh, man, I think. This ought to be good for some laughs. His big intro?

"Brothers, at the end of the day, to break through the strategic gap, we have to level-set all associates to tee-up a flat, service-focused organizational paradigm with benchmarks for long range results."

At that point I basically knew where the whole ****ing weekend was going. So then he trots out his precious freaking 'Five Point Roadmap.' Get a load of this shiite, which I cut and pasted from his actual PowerPoint:

1. Develop Skill-Set Synergies For Expelling Crusaders From Mesopotamia
2. Achieve Buy-In For Scalable "Bleeding Edge" Regional Amirate Platform
3. Implement Adaptive "Win-Win" Map To Break Down Intra-Regional Jihad Silos
4. Champion Mission-Critical Processes For Dis-Implementing Zionist Pigs
5. Pareto-ize Alpha Office for Stakeholder-Focused Global Sharia Capabilities

Then, I swear to Allah, 58 drilldown slides of this crap. Lucky I was at the back of the room with Minesweeper on my laptop, otherwise I would have volunteered for my own martyrdom operation just to end the misery. Finally, at around 11:30, Fearless Leader opens the floor for questions.

Yeah, I got a question, I thought. How many consultants did you hire to put together this box-and-arrow cluster****? But, since it was close to lunch, I kept my mouth shut. Then Achmed the Saudi raises his hand. Now, you have to understand, Achmed is pretty much the team wiseass, so half the room was smiling and the other half was cringing when he stood up. "Imam," he says, "let's go back to phase number one on your waterfall chart. Ummmm, how does this expel-the-crusaders thing happen again?"

So Zawahiri just sorta stands there, mute for a minute, and says, "well, er, the vision statement is really very simple. We build mindshare with the masses with six-sigma beheading QC processes, and then the kaffirs will run away like in Vietnam. We just need to be ready for it, like the Vietnamese."

Achmed just stands there and looks at him, completely deadpan.

"No seriously, this is exactly what happens with best-of-breed insurgencies, like Vietnam," says Zawahiri. "It's in all the books." So then, Achmed does this sarcastic confused look, and starts scratching his temple with his left stump. Man, it's a good thing they broke for lunch, because I thought I was going to ****ing crack up.

After lunch, the next round of stupidity: another one of those retarded "team building" activities. These consultants divided us into color-coded teams, and gave us big bags of styrofoam cups and tongue depressors. The idea was that we were supposed to compete to build the highest cup tower. What the **** this had to do with restoring the caliphate, I had no idea, but during the debrief the consultant finally said it was "an exercise to help you discover cooperation strategies." Oh brilliant. Maybe you could have told me that before I decapitated those three idiots on the Blue Team.

Anyway, after tea break we shuffled back to the conference room for Session 3 ("Caliphate? Let's Motivate!") and I swear, that stuff was so bad it made me wish I was back in the morning session. First up was this middle aged infidel chick Cindy, who droned about how she came to support the jihad after we killed her crusader kid. I mean, this is supposed to be inspirational? We finally get one kaffir mom on our side, and she turns out to be a lunatic hippie egomaniac who won't shut up, and with a voice like nails on a chalkboard. Oh, help me, Mohammhed!

I guess the high point of the day is when the PR department showed some of our network media coverage from Satanland. That was hella cool, but then they had to follow it with fan mail from the some of the infidel websites, which was a complete buzz kill. Come on, man. Hitler had his Mussolini. The 'Cong had their Khmer Rouge. Us? We get Michael Moore and a clown car of dipsticks from Kos and DU.

Nobody really said anything, but at this point I think everybody was kind of depressed. If anything, the mood got even worse at the "Reward and Recognition Dinner" that night. Due to budget cuts, they didn't even have gift cards this year – just some cheesy "I (Heart) Jihad" coffee cups and Successories posters. The after-dinner speaker? Good ol' blowhard George Galloway, like always. I'd been through that movie before, so I sneaked out and went back to my hotel room. I thought about ordering some **** on SpectraVision, but that stuff ends up on your credit card and I'm already in the doghouse with Fatima and the other wives as it is.

Sorry to be such a downer again. You know it's funny, but when I signed on with Al Qaeda I was as gung ho as any teenager at the Finsbury Park mosque. I was completely dazzled by Zawahiri's bullsheet about "Global Caliphate Platforms" and "paradise option programs." But I'm telling you, when you're out there in the field dealing with Team Satan, you become a cynic real fast. Just between you and me, I'm beginning to hate this job and hate my boss, and I would be updating my resume if it wasn't for the benefits plan.

Anyway, gotta go man, Khalid says the crusader are headed this way again. Don't let your meat loaf, and let me pass on a little insider tip on JihadCo: sell short.

Al Z.






Totem

Edited, Sat Oct 15 18:22:02 2005 by Totem

Masterful, my brother. Masterful.