Omar Yusef Juma'a (1969-16 September 2004), also known as Abu Anas al-Shami, was a senior leader of the Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad militant group during the Iraq War.
Biography[]
Omar Yusef Juma'a was born in Kuwait to a Palestinian family originally from Yabroud, and, by the age of 15, he had memorized the entire Quran. He studied in Saudi Arabia before travelling to Bosnia and Herzegovina in the mid-1990s to teach Islam in towns and refugee camps, and he later returned to Jordan and became an imam in Sweileh. In the late 1990s, Jordanian authorities shut down his mosque for its extremist teachings. In 2003, he joined Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad militant group and became the group's spiritual advisor and second-in-command, directing many of its attacks against American and Iraqi forces during the Iraq War. He and his 300 Mujahideen claimed to have fought off 2,000 US soldiers at the First Battle of Fallujah in early 2004, and, in September 2004, Zarqawi sent al-Shami to Sadr City in Baghdad to lead the insurgency there. On 16 September 2004, however, as al-Shami was on his way to Baghdad, he was killed in a US missile strike on his car near Abu Ghraib.