Abu Anas al-Shami

Abu Anas al-Shami (Arabic: أبو أنس الشامي) was known as Omar Yusef Juma'a (Arabic: عمر يوسف جمعة) prior to joining Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Jama'at al-Tawhid wal Jihad group in Iraq.

Originally from the Palestinian West Bank town of Tulkarm, Abu Anas moved with his family to Jordan, then Saudi Arabia, and later, Kuwait. He obtained an Islamic studies degree at Madinah University in Saudi Arabia. He then returned to Jordan to preach Salafiyah theology at an Amman mosque. In the mid-1990s he went to Bosnia-Herzegovina where he truly embraced radicalism. He then returned to Jordan to found a radical fundamentalist outreach center. 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 a fanatical interpretation of Islam.

In 2003, al-Shami joined Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Northeastern Iraq. He was appointed to the advisory council of al-Tawheed wal-Jihad and soon became Zarqawi's second in command.

Abu Anas al-Shami was killed in September 2004 (the exact date is disputed) in an American missile strike against his car, near Abu Ghraib. Al-Shami had been sent by Zarqawi to the Shiite Sadr City area of Baghdad to install an Al-Qaeda team to recruit former Mehdi Army militiamen looking for leadership following Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr’s defeat in Najaf.

A eulogy to him was written by al-Qaeda's top cleric, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, and still appears on the Tawhed website which is run by Maqdisi's organisation on behalf of al-Qaeda.