Mohamed Moumou

Who was Mohamed Moumou?

Mohamed Moumou was a Moroccan-born Swedish national who was the No. 2 leader of al-Qaida in Iraq and the senior leader in Northern Iraq. He died in a building in Mosul during a shootout with American troops.

Born in Fez, Morocco, he was one of the founders of the militant Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group. Moumou immigrated to Sweden in the mid-1980s and gained Swedish citizenship in the mid-1990s.

In March 2004, Moumou was arrested in Copenhagen, Denmark, at the Moroccan authorities request for his alleged role in the 2003 Casablanca bombings. He was released by the Danish authorities after a month and sent back to Sweden.

While in Sweden, he was the "uncontested leader of an extremist group centered around the Brandbergen Mosque" in the Stockholm suburb of Haninge, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. Säpo, the Swedish intelligence agency, had been keeping an eye on him since the mid-1990s, suspecting him of leading an Islamist network that supported terrorism abroad. He was believed to be recruiting Jihadists to fight in Iraq from his base in Sweden. The Swedes also suspected that he had taken part in terrorist attacks and fought in Afghanistan in the 1990s. In May 2006, he left for Iraq and never returned. In December 2006, he was placed on the EU and UN terrorist lists.