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I mean do we care which flavor of terrorist they are ?

I don't see that it does. It's a mind set we are fighting.
Something you(and others might be interested in reading

Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology

By Lee Harris

Know your enemy” is a well-known maxim, but one that is difficult to observe in practice. Nor is the reason for this hard to fathom: If you are my enemy, it is unlikely that I will go very much out of my way to learn to see things from your point of view. And if this is true even in those cases where the conflict is between groups that share a common culture, how much more true will it be when there is a profound cultural and psychological chasm between the antagonists?

Yet, paradoxically, this failure to understand the enemy can arise not only from a lack of sympathy with his position, but also from a kind of misplaced sympathy: When confronted by a culturally exotic enemy, our first instinct is to understand such conduct in terms that are familiar to us — terms that make sense to us in light of our own fund of experience. We assume that if our enemy is doing x, it must be for reasons that are comprehensible in terms of our universe....

http://www.policyreview.org/AUG02/harris.html

In a certain sense it doesn't matter. A terrorist stopped or killed is a terrorist out of business.

But finding the links, finding the connections, identifying the players is part of what this war is about. We're not fighting the Nazis here. The enemy has no home territory (at least not much of one in the traditional sense) wears no uniforms, and has no clear command and control. Before we take them out we've got to find them.

I didn't post this because I thought it surprising that there is a link to al-Qaeda. I assumed that when first hearing the story. The hope here is that these guys will talk, and reveal a bit more of the connections, maybe leading to other take downs. Getting al-Zarqawi and those close to him wouldn't be the end of it, but it would go a long way in hampering them.

I've not yet read the link from Valin (thanks for linking), but commenting a bit about the identity of al-Qaeda, I hope that most people are beginning to get the idea that AQ is not a tightly controlled, hierachical, positively definable organization in itself. They don't carry membership cards and members don't learn the secret hand shake after getting inducted. The corporate or business franchise model comes closer to reality, I think. Going a bit further, I could imagine that it extends to a certain mind-set that results in certain affiliations.

Just about all of us on this forum have some flavor of conservative mind-set. Many of us are active posters. Many more lurkers. A good percentage of us are registered Republicans. Some may be party volunteers. A few may actually be elected to some office at some level of government. Some may be followers of Pat Buchanan, and won't usually vote for a Republican. The point here is that the mind-set results in affiliations that are somewhat predictable, but are not homogenous. I don't want to carry the analogy too far, but if someone found out I'm an active poster here, they would have a good idea of my mind set, and a good idea that I may also be affiliated with the Republican party.