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Black Flags - Joby Warrick
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Also by Joby Warrick
The Triple Agent:
The al-Qaeda Mole Who Infiltrated the CIA
Copyright © 2015 by Joby Warrick
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of
Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random
House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered
trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Cover design by Emily Mahon
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Warrick, Joby.
Black flags : the rise of ISIS / Joby Warrick.—First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-385-53821-3 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-385-53822-0 (eBook)
- IS (Organization) 2. Terrorism—Iraq. 3. Terrorism—Middle East. 4. Terrorism—
Religious aspects—Islam. 5. Islamic fundamentalism. 6. Middle East—Politics and
government—21st century. I. Title.
HV6433.I722I8593 2015
956.9104′2—dc23
2015020949
eBook ISBN 9780385538220
v4.1
a
To Maryanne
With love and gratitude
I bring the men who desire death as ardently as you desire
life.
—Khalid ibn a-Walid (seventh-century Islamic warrior,
companion of Muhammad)
CONTENTS
Cover
Also by Joby Warrick
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
List of Principal Characters
Map of Key Locations
Prologue
BOOK I: THE RISE OF ZARQAWI
- “What kind of person can command with only his eyes?”
- “Here was a real leader”
- “A problem like that always comes back”
- “The time for training is over”
- “I did it for al-Qaeda and for Zarqawi”
- “This war is going to happen”
- “Now his fame would extend throughout the Arab world”
BOOK II: IRAQ
- “No longer a victory”
- “So you guys think this is an insurgency?”
- “Revolting is exactly what we want”
- “It would surpass anything al-Qaeda did”
- “The sheikh of the slaughterers”
- “It’s hopeless there”
- “Are you going to get him?”
- “This is our 9/11”
- “Your end is close”
BOOK III: ISIS- “The people want to topple the regime!”
- “Where is this Islamic State of Iraq that you’re talking about?”
- “This is the state for which Zarqawi paved the way”
- “The mood music started to change”
- “There was no more hope after that”
- “This is a tribal revolution”
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
A Note About the Author
Illustrations
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The names of several current and former Jordanian intelligence
officers interviewed for this book have been altered by mutual
agreement due to concerns about threats to their safety. They are
referred to in these pages by their informal Arab kunya titles, rather
than by traditional family names.
LIST OF PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
Zarqawi and His Generation
Abu Muhmmad al-Maqdisi (given name Aasim Muhammad Tahir al-
Barqawi), Jordanian-Palestinian cleric and author, former cellmate
and mentor to Zarqawi
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (given name Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh),
Jordanian terrorist, founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq
Abu al-Ghadiya, Syrian dentist, senior Zarqawi associate, and supply
master
Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of al-Qaeda’s “core” branch, former deputy
to Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Laden, founder of al-Qaeda
The Islamic State of Iraq and Its Successors
Abu Omar al-Baghdadi (given name Hamid Dawud Mohamed Khalil
al-Zawi), former member of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist Party and
leader of the Islamic State of Iraq from 2006 to 2010
Abu Ayyub al-Masri (given name Abu Hamza al-Muhajir), Egyptian
explosives expert and Zarqawi associate who became the number two
commander of the Islamic State of Iraq in 2006; killed in an air
strike in 2010
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (given name Ibrahim Awad al-Badri), Islamic
cleric and ISI spiritual adviser who rose to leadership in 2010;
declared himself “caliph” of the Islamic State of Iraq in 2014
Abu Wahib (given name Shaker Wahib al-Dulaimi), brutal, media-
obsessed ISIS commander in Anbar Province notorious for killing
Shiite truck drivers and other civilians
Haji Bakr (given name Samir al-Khlifawi), deputy to Abu Bakr al-
Baghdadi and leader of ISIS’s military council; killed in 2014
In Jordan
King Abdullah II, fourth sovereign of the Hashemite Kingdom of
Jordan
Abu Haytham, senior counterterrorism official, General Intelligence
Directorate (GID), Jordan
Abu Mutaz, GID case officer and later manager; expert in “flipping”
Islamists into informants
Ali Bourzak, GID official and legendary interrogator known as the “Red
Devil”
aurence Foley, midlevel official at the U.S. Embassy in Amman,
Jordan
alem Ben Suweid, Zarqawi disciple who plotted Foley’s assassination
Azmi al-Jayousi, Palestinian-Jordanian, trained at Zarqawi’s camp in
Herat, Afghanistan; plotted to explode chemical “dirty” bomb in
Amman
ajida al-Rishawi, would-be suicide bomber in 2005 terrorist attack on
hotels in Amman, Jordan
In Iraq
addam Hussein, president of Iraq, 1979 to 2003
harles “Sam” Faddis, CIA operative inside Iraq prior to 2003
invasion; urged preemptive strike on Zarqawi’s camp
Nada Bakos, CIA officer and chief “targeter” responsible for tracking
Zarqawi
aydan al-Jibiri, Sunni tribal leader from Ramadi, Iraq
General Stanley McChrystal, head of Joint Special Forces Command
that led the hunt for Zarqawi in Iraq
aid al-Karbouly, Iraqi customs officer in the pay of al-Qaeda in Iraq
Nouri al-Maliki, Shiite prime minister of Iraq from 2006 to 2014
In Syria
ashir al-Assad, president of Syria
Robert Ford, U.S. ambassador to Syria, 2010 to 2014
Mouaz Moustafa, director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a
nonprofit that offered a window into deteriorating conditions in
Syria
Abu Mohammad al-Julani, leader of Jabhat al-Nusra (“al-Nusra
Front”), the Syrian branch established by the Islamic State of Iraq in
late 2011
Kofi Annan, U.N. secretary-general, 1997 to 2006, who sought to
broker Syrian peace accord
In Washington
Dick Cheney, U.S. vice president, sought the CIA’s support in
connecting al-Qaeda to Iraqi regime
Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, 2009 to 2013
Michael V. Hayden, NSA director and director of National Intelligence
during anti-Zarqawi campaign; CIA director, 2006 to 2009
rederic C. Hof, special State Department adviser on the Middle East
and Syria, 2009 to 2012
en. John McCain, chairman, Senate Armed Services Committee
eon Panetta, CIA director, 2009 to 2011; defense secretary, 2011 to
2013
Robert Richer, the CIA’s former station chief in Jordan, later chief of
the agency’s Near East Division and deputy director of operations
George Tenet, CIA director, 1996 to 2004
Detail left
Detail right
PROLOGUE
Amman, Jordan, February 3, 2015
Just after nightfall, a warrant arrived at the city’s main women’s
prison for the execution of Sajida al-Rishawi. The instructions had
come from King Abdullah II himself, then in Washington on a state
visit, and were transmitted from his private plane to the royal court
in Jordan’s capital. A clerk relayed the message to the Interior
Ministry and then to the prisons department, where it caused a stir.
State executions are complicated affairs requiring many steps, yet
the king’s wishes were explicit: the woman would face the gallows
before the sun rose the next day.
The chief warden quickly made the trek to the cell where Rishawi
had maintained a kind of self-imposed solitary confinement for close
to a decade. The prisoner, forty-five now and no longer thin, spent
most of her days watching television or reading a paperback Koran,
seeing no one, and keeping whatever thoughts she had under the
greasy, prison-issued hijab she always wore. She was not a stupid
woman, yet she seemed perpetually disconnected from whatever was
going on around her. “When will I be going home?” she asked her
government-appointed lawyer during rare meetings in the months
after she was sentenced to death. Eventually, even those visits
stopped.
Now, when the warden sat her down to explain that she would die
in the morning, Rashida nodded her assent but said nothing. If she
cried or prayed or cursed, no one in the prison heard a word of it.
That she could face death was not a surprise to anyone. In 2006, a
judge sentenced Rishawi to hang for her part in Jordan’s worst-ever
terrorist attack: three simultaneous hotel bombings that killed sixty
people, most of them guests at a wedding party. She was the suicide
bomber who lived, an odd, heavy-browed woman made to pose
awkwardly before TV cameras showing off the vest that had failed to
explode. At one time, everyone in Amman knew her story, how this
thirty-five-year-old unmarried Iraqi had agreed to wed a stranger so
they could become a man-and-wife suicide team; how she panicked
and ran; how she had wandered around the city’s northern suburbs
in a taxi, lost, stopping passersby for directions, still wearing streaks
of blood on her clothes and shoes.
But nearly ten years had passed. The hotels had been rebuilt and
renamed, and Rishawi had vanished inside Jordan’s labyrinthine
penal system. Within the Juwaida Women’s Prison, she wore a kind
of faded notoriety, like a valuable museum piece that no one looks at
anymore. Some of the older hands in the state security service called
her “Zarqawi’s woman,” a mocking reference to the infamous
Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who ordered the hotel
bombings. The younger ones barely remembered her at all.
Then, in the span of a month, everything changed. Zarqawi’s
followers, it turned out, had not forgotten Rishawi. The terrorists
had rebranded themselves over the years and were now known in
Jordan by the Arabic acronym Daesh—in English, ISIS. And in
January 2015, ISIS asked to have Rishawi back.
The demand for her release came in the middle of Jordan’s worst
domestic crisis in years. A Jordanian air-force jet had crashed in
Syria, and its young pilot had been captured alive by ISIS fighters.
The group had broadcast photos of the frightened, nearly naked pilot
being paraded around by grinning jihadists, some of them reaching
out to embrace this great gift that Allah had dropped from the sky.
From the palace to the security agencies, the king and his advisers
steeled themselves for even more awful news. Either the pilot would
be publicly butchered by ISIS, they feared, or the terrorists would
demand a terrible price for his ransom.
True to form, ISIS announced its decision in macabre fashion. Less
than a week after the crash, the captured pilot’s family received a call
at home, from the pilot’s own cell phone. On the other end, a
stranger, speaking in Iraqi-accented Arabic, issued the group’s
singular demand.
We want our sister Sajida, the caller said.
The same demand was repeated, along with several new ones, in a
constantly shifting and mostly one-sided negotiation. All the
requests were routed to the headquarters of the Mukhabarat,
Jordan’s intelligence service, and all eventually landed on the desk of
the imposing forty-seven-year-old brigadier who ran the
department’s counterterrorism unit. Even in an agency notorious for
its toughness, Abu Haytham stood apart, a man with a burly street
fighter’s physique and the personality of an anvil. He had battled
ISIS in its many incarnations for years, and he had famously broken
some of the group’s top operatives in interrogation. Zarqawi himself
had taken several turns in Abu Haytham’s holding cell, and so had
Sajida al-Rishawi, the woman ISIS was now seeking to free.
Outside of Jordan, the demand made little sense. Rishawi had no
value as a fighter or a leader, or even as a symbol. She was known to
have participated in exactly one terrorist attack, and she had botched
it. Hardly “Zarqawi’s woman,” she had never even met the man who
ordered the strike. If ISIS hadn’t mentioned her name, she would
likely have lived her remaining years quietly in prison, her execution
indefinitely deferred for lack of any particular reason to carry it out.
But Abu Haytham understood. By invoking Rishawi’s name, the
terrorists were reaching back to the group’s beginnings, back to a
time before there was an ISIS, or a civil war in Syria; before the
meltdown in Iraq that gave rise to the movement; even before the
world had heard of a terrorist called Zarqawi. The Mukhabarat’s men
had tried to keep this terrorist group from gaining a foothold. They
had failed—sometimes through their own mistakes, more often
because of the miscalculations of others. Now, Zarqawi’s jihadist
movement had become a self-declared state, with territorial claims
on two of Jordan’s borders. And Rishawi, the failed bomber, was one
of many old scores that ISIS was ready to settle.
In summoning this forgotten ghost, ISIS was evoking one of the
most horrifying nights in the country’s history, a moment seared into
the memories of men of Abu Haytham’s generation, the former
intelligence captains, investigators, and deputies who had since risen
to lead the Mukhabarat. Once, Zarqawi had managed to strike
directly at Jordan’s heart, and now, with the country’s pilot in their
hands, ISIS was about to do it again.
—
Abu Haytham had been present that night. He could remember every
detail of the crime for which Rishawi had been convicted and
sentenced to hang. He could remember how the night had felt, the
smell of blood and smoke, and the wailing of the injured.
Mostly he remembered the two girls.
They were cousins, ages nine and fourteen, and he knew their
names: Lina and Riham. Local girls from Amman, out for a wedding
party. They were both dressed in white, with small faces that were
lovely and pale and perfectly serene. “Just like angels,” he had
thought.
They still wore the nearly identical lacy dresses their parents had
bought for the party, and stylish shoes for dancing. Almost
miraculously, from the neck up neither had suffered a scratch. When
Abu Haytham first saw them, lying side by side on a board in those
chaotic first moments at the hospital, he had wondered if they were
sleeping. Injured, perhaps, but sedated and sleeping. Please, let them
be sleeping, he had prayed.
But then he saw the terrible holes the shrapnel had made.
The girls would have been standing when it happened, as everyone
was, whooping and clapping as the bride and groom prepared to
make their entrance in the ballroom at Amman’s Radisson Hotel,
which was lit up like a desert carnival on a cool mid-November
evening. The newlyweds’ fathers, all big grins and rented tuxedos,
had taken their places on the podium, and the Arabic band’s bleating
woodwinds and throbbing drums had risen to a roar so loud that the
hotel clerks in the lobby had to shout to be heard. The party was just
reaching its gloriously noisy, sweaty, exuberant peak. No one
appeared to have noticed two figures in dark coats who shuffled
awkwardly near the doorway and then squeezed between the rows of
cheering wedding guests toward the front of the ballroom.
There was a blinding flash, and then a sensation of everything
falling—the ceiling, the walls, the floor. The shock wave knocked
guests out of their beds on the hotel’s upper floors and blew out thick
plate-glass doors in the lobby. A thunderclap, then silence. Then
screams.
Only one of the bombs had gone off, but it cut through the
ballroom like a swarm of flying razors. Hundreds of steel ball
bearings, carefully and densely packed around the bomb’s core,
sliced through wedding decorations, food trays, and upholstery. They
splintered wooden tables and shattered marble tiles. They tore
through evening gowns and fancy clutches, through suit jackets and
crisp shirts, and through white, frilly dresses of the kind young girls
wear to formal parties.
Abu Haytham, then a captain, was winding down another in a
string of long shifts on that Wednesday in early November 2005. It
was just before 9:00 p.m. when the first call came in, about an
explosion of some kind at the Grand Hyatt across town. The early
speculation was that a gas canister was to blame, but then came word
of a second blast at the Days Inn Hotel, and then a third—reportedly
far worse than the others—at the Radisson. Abu Haytham knew the
place well. It was an Amman landmark, glitzy by Jordanian
standards, perched on a hill and easily visible from most of the town,
including from his own office building, nearly two miles away.
He raced to the hotel and pushed his way inside, past the rescue
workers, the wailing survivors, and the recovered corpses that had
been hauled out on luggage carts and deposited on the driveway. In
the ballroom, through a haze of smoke and emergency lights, he
could see more bodies. Some were sprawled haphazardly, as though
flung by a giant. Others were missing limbs. On the smashed podium
lay two crumpled forms in tuxedos. The fathers of both the bride and
the groom had been near the bomber and died instantly.
Abu Haytham assembled teams that worked the three blast sites
through the night, gathering whatever remnants they could find of
the explosive devices, along with chunks of flesh that constituted the
remains of three bombers. Only later, at the hospital, standing over a
wooden slab in a makeshift morgue, was he overwhelmed by the
horror of the evening: The broken bodies. The scores of wounded.
The smell of blood and smoke. The girls, Lina and Riham, lying still
in their torn white dresses. Abu Haytham, a doting father, had girls
the same age.
“How,” he said aloud, “does someone with a human heart do a
thing like this?”
Just two days later came the news that one of the attackers—a
woman—had survived and fled. A day after that, Sajida al-Rishawi
sat in a chair in front of him.
She would surely know something, tied as she was to such an
obviously important and well-planned mission. Where would the
terrorists strike next? What plans were unfolding, perhaps at this
very hour?
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” the woman would occasionally
manage, in a soft mumble. She repeated the line slowly, as though
drugged.
Abu Haytham pleaded with her. He threatened. He appealed to her
conscience, to religion, to Allah. Hours passed—crucial hours, he
feared.
“How brainwashed you are!” he shouted at one point. “Why do you
protect the people who put you up to this?”
The woman would never offer a useful syllable, then or in the
months to come, after she was convicted and sentenced to die. Yet,
already, Abu Haytham knew who was behind the act. All the
Mukhabarat’s men knew, even before the culprit boasted of his
responsibility in an audio recording made in his own voice. The
signatures were all there: The coordinated blasts, all within ten
minutes; the deployment of human bombers, each skillfully fitted
with a device consisting of military-grade RDX explosive and enough
loose metal to ensure maximum carnage. Most telling of all was the
choice of targets—ordinary hotels where, on any given evening,
Amman’s middle class would pack a rented ballroom in their finest
apparel to celebrate a union or mark a milestone. No intelligence
operative or general was likely to pass through the lobby of the
Radisson at 9:00 p.m. on a weekday night. But scores of Jordanians
would be there, clinging to the rituals of normal life in a country
bordering a war zone.
Such hallmarks, like the voice on the audio recording,
unmistakably belonged to Zarqawi, a man the Mukhabarat knew
exceptionally well. He was, at the time of the bombing, the head of a
particularly vicious terrorist network called al-Qaeda in Iraq. But the
Jordanians had known him back in the days when he was Ahmad the
hoodlum, a high school dropout with a reputation as a heavy drinker
and a brawler. They had watched him wander off to Afghanistan in
the late 1980s to fight the communists, then return as a battle-
hardened religious fanatic. After a first try at terrorism, he had
vanished into one of Jordan’s darkest prisons. This time he emerged
as a battle-hardened religious fanatic who also happened to excel as
a leader of men.
Abu Haytham had been among those who tried to alter Zarqawi’s
path after prison. He had been the last intelligence officer to meet
with him in 1999, before Zarqawi was granted permission to leave
the country for good, headed again to Afghanistan and a future that
surely—so the Jordanians thought—offered nothing more than
futility and a dusty grave.
Then, in the most improbable of events, America intervened. Few
beyond the intelligence service had heard of Zarqawi when
Washington made him a terrorist superstar, declaring to the world in
2003 that this obscure Jordanian was the link between Iraq’s
dictatorship and the plotters behind the September 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks. The claim was wrong, yet, weeks later, when U.S.
troops invaded Iraq, the newly famous and well-funded terrorist
gained a battleground and a cause and soon thousands of followers.
Over three tumultuous years, he intentionally pushed Iraq to the
brink of sectarian war by unleashing wave after wave of savage
attacks on Shiite civilians in their mosques, bazaars, and schools. He
horrified millions with a new form of highly intimate terrorism: the
beheading of individual hostages, captured on video and sent around
the world, using the Internet’s new power to broadcast directly into
people’s homes. Along the way, he lashed out violently at his native
Jordan and helped transform America’s lightning victory in Iraq into
the costliest U.S. military campaign since Vietnam.
Yet his most significant accomplishment was not apparent until
years later. Though some would cast his movement as an al-Qaeda
offshoot, Zarqawi was no one’s acolyte. His brand of jihadism was
utterly, brutally original. Osama bin Laden had sought to liberate
Muslim nations gradually from corrupting Western influences so
they could someday unify as a single Islamic theocracy, or caliphate.
Zarqawi, by contrast, insisted that he would create his caliphate
immediately—right now. He would seek to usher in God’s kingdom
on Earth through acts of unthinkable savagery, believing, correctly,
that theatrical displays of extreme violence would attract the most
hardened jihadists to his cause and frighten everyone else into
submission. His strategy shook the region as al-Qaeda never had.
But Zarqawi’s excesses also deepened his adversaries’ resolve. In
the immediate aftermath of the hotel bombings, Abu Haytham and
other Mukhabarat officers had a simple goal: to eliminate the man
who had ordered them. And when they succeeded, in 2006, by
providing the United States with intelligence that helped it track
Zarqawi to his hideout, the terrorist and his organization appeared
finished. Instead, his followers merely retreated, quietly gaining
strength in Syria’s lawless provinces until they burst into view in
2013, not as a terrorist group, but as an army.
This time, war-weary America would refuse to help until it was too
late. There would be no serious effort to arm the moderate rebels
who sought to deny ISIS its safe haven, and no air strikes to harry
ISIS’s leadership and supply lines. Twice in a decade, a jihadist wave
had threatened to engulf the region. Twice, it seemed to the
Jordanians, the American response had been to cut a fresh hole in
the lifeboat.
Zarqawi’s successors called themselves by different names before
settling on ISIS—or simply the Islamic State. But they continued to
refer to Zarqawi as the “mujahid sheikh,” acknowledging the founder
who had the audacity to believe he could redraw the maps of the
Middle East. And, like Zarqawi, they believed their conquests would
not end there.
In the prophetic passages of the Muslim holy texts known as the
Hadith, Zarqawi saw his fate foretold. He and his men were the
black-clad soldiers of whom the ancient scholars had written: “The
black flags will come from the East, led by mighty men, with long
hair and beards, their surnames taken from their home towns.”
These conquerors would not merely reclaim the ancient Muslim
lands. They also would be the instigators of the final cataclysmic
struggle ending in the destruction of the West’s great armies, in
northern Syria.
“The spark has been lit here in Iraq,” Zarqawi preached, “and its
heat will continue to intensify until it burns the Crusader armies in
Dabiq.”
The Mukhabarat’s men had heard enough of such talk from
Zarqawi back when he was their prisoner. Now the brazen claims
were coming from his offspring. Thirty thousand strong, they were
waiting just across the border, calling for their sister Sajida.
—
The charade of a prisoner swap ended abruptly on February 3, 2015,
the day after Jordan’s king arrived in Washingon for the official visit.
For Abdullah II, it was the latest in a series of exhausting journeys in
which he repeated the same appeal for help. His tiny country was
struggling with two burdens imposed from abroad: a human tide of
refugees from Syria—some six hundred thousand so far—and the
cost of participating in the allied Western-Arab military campaign
against ISIS. The trip was not going particularly well. Members of
Congress offered sympathy but not much more; White House
officials recited the usual pledges to bolster Jordan’s defenses and
struggling economy, but the kind of assistance Abdullah most
desperately needed was nowhere in the offing.
The king’s disappointment had long since hardened into
resentment. During previous visits, President Obama had declined
Jordan’s requests for laser-guided munitions and other advanced
hardware that could take out ISIS’s trucks and tanks. On this trip,
there was no firm commitment even for a meeting between the two
leaders.
Abdullah was in the Capitol, making a pitch to Senator John
McCain, the Republican senator and chairman of the Senate Armed
Services Committee, when one of the king’s aides interrupted him.
The monarch stepped into the corridor and, on the small screen of a
smartphone, watched ISIS deliver its final statement on the proposed
prisoner swap. As video cameras rolled, masked jihadists marched
the young Jordanian pilot into a small metal cage that had been
doused with fuel. Then they lit a fire and filmed as the airman was
burned alive.
By the time Abdullah returned to the meeting, McCain’s aides had
seen the video as well. The monarch kept his composure, but McCain
could see he was badly shaken.
“Can we do anything more for you?” McCain asked.
“I’m not getting support from your side!” Abdullah finally said.
“I’m still getting only gravity bombs, and we’re not even getting
resupplied with those. Meanwhile, we’re flying two hundred percent
more missions than all the other coalition members combined, apart
from the United States.”
The king continued with his scheduled meetings, but he had
already made up his mind to return home. He was making
arrangements when the White House phoned to offer fifteen minutes
with the president. Abdullah accepted.
Inside the Oval Office, Obama offered condolences to the pilot’s
family and thanked the king for Jordan’s contributions to the
military campaign against ISIS. The administration was doing all it
could to be supportive, the president assured the monarch.
“No, sir, you are not,” Abdullah said, firmly. He rattled off a list of
weapons and supplies he needed.
“I’ve got three days’ worth of bombs left,” he said, according to an
official present during the exchange. “When I get home I’m going to
war, and I’m going to use every bomb I’ve got until they’re gone.”
There was one other item of business to attend to before his
return. From the airport, Abdullah called his aides in Amman to start
the process of carrying out a pair of executions. On Jordan’s death
row, there were two inmates who had been convicted of committing
murderous acts on orders from Zarqawi. One was an Iraqi man who
had been a midlevel operative in Zarqawi’s Iraqi insurgency. The
other was Sajida al-Rishawi. Both should be put to death without
further delay.
The king foresaw that Western governments would protest the
executions as acts of vengeance, even though both inmates had been
convicted and sentenced long ago as part of normal court
proceedings. But he would not be deterred. As far as he was
concerned, the appointment with the hangman had already been
delayed too long, he told aides.
“I don’t want to hear a word from anyone,” Abdullah said.
The king was still airborne at 2:00 a.m. Amman time, when the
guards arrived to collect Sajida al-Rishawi from her cell. She had
declined the customary final meal and ritual bath with which devout
Muslims cleanse the physical body in preparation for the afterlife.
She donned the red uniform worn exclusively by condemned
prisoners on the day of execution, along with the usual hijab for
covering her head and face.
She was escorted outside the prison to a waiting van with a
military escort for the drive to Swaqa, Jordan’s largest prison, on a
desert hill about sixty miles south of the capital. The vehicles arrived
just before 4:00 a.m., as a full moon, visible through a light haze, was
dipping toward the southwestern horizon.
Her last earthly view, before she was blindfolded, was of a small
execution chamber with white walls and a row of tiny windows, and a
few tired faces looking up from the witness gallery just below her. An
imam prayed as a noose with a heavy metal clasp was secured, and a
judge asked if Rishawi cared to convey any last wishes or a final will.
She gave no reply.
She likewise made no audible sound as the gallows’ trap opened
and she plunged hard into the darkness. It was 5:05 a.m., nearly
ninety minutes before sunrise, when the prison doctor checked for a
pulse.
“Zarqawi’s woman” was dead, her execution the closing scene in
the worst act of terrorism in Jordan’s history. But Zarqawi’s children
were pursuing the founder’s far grander ambitions: the end of
Jordan and its king, the erasing of international boundaries, and the
destruction of the modern states of the Middle East. Then, with black
flags raised above Muslim capitals from the Levant to the Persian
Gulf, they could begin the great apocalyptic showdown with the
West.
BOOK I
THE RISE OF ZARQAWI
1
“What kind of person can command with only his
eyes?”
The most notorious of Jordan’s prisons is the old fortress of al-Jafr,
known for decades as the place where troublesome men went to be
forgotten. It lies outside a Bedouin village of the same name, on a
road that marks the outer boundary of human habitation in the
country’s fierce southeastern desert. Beyond the prison, the terrain
flattens into a basin of baked mud that stretches to the horizon
without a hill or rock or stubble of grass. The ancient sea that once
stood here evaporated eons ago, leaving an emptiness like a missing
limb, a void so unnatural that it stirs feelings of dread among the few
travelers who pause for a look. “There’s a terrible loneliness,” wrote
filmmaker David Lean, who shot parts of Lawrence of Arabia on the
same mudflats in 1962 and pronounced the place “more deserted
than any desert I’ve ever seen.” His picture editor, Howard Kent,
would describe al-Jafr as, simply, “a warning of what hell is like.”
It was at this spot that British military overseers chose to build an
imposing prison with limestone walls and high watchtowers for
detainees regarded as too dangerous for ordinary jails. And it was
here, years later, that the Jordanians began the practice of
quarantining Palestinian militants and other radicals viewed as
threats to the state. Hundreds of men, many of them held without
formal charge, languished in stifling, vermin-infested cells where
they endured temperature extremes, rancid food, and a catalogue of
abuses later documented by United Nations investigators. Newly
arriving prisoners were routinely beaten until they lost
consciousness. Others were flogged with electric cables, burned with
lit cigarettes, or hung upside down by means of a stick placed under
the knees, a position the guards gleefully called “grilled chicken.”
Over time, the monarchy grew weary of the costs of running a prison
so isolated from the country’s population and so damaging to its
reputation. In 1979, the last of its inmates were transferred to other
jails, and al-Jafr was abandoned to the scorpions and its own ghosts.
Years passed, and then, in a sudden shift, the old prison was
resurrected. Officials of the Public Security Directorate had grown
worried about the behavior of a band of antigovernment zealots in
the country’s central Swaqa Prison, and in 1998 they decided to
isolate the group to prevent the contagion from spreading. The
officials reopened one of al-Jafr’s dusty wings and dispatched an
army of workers to sweep out corridors and prepare a large cell
where all could be housed together. Twenty-five bunk beds were
assembled and stacked in cramped rows, and a new door of latticed
steel was bolted across the cell’s entrance, the room’s only opening
other than air slits cut into walls at knee level. When the grounds
were ready, the department appointed a warden and hired the usual
complement of guards, laundrymen, and cooks. The inmates were
too few to justify the hiring of a separate prison physician, and so it
was that Basel al-Sabha, a recent medical-school graduate assigned
by the Health Department to the local village, was pressed into
service as the doctor of record for fifty of the most dangerous men in
Jordan.
It was an unwelcome assignment for Sabha, a tall twenty-four-
year-old with boyish good looks, and he complained bitterly about
the posting. Prisons in Jordan were vile places, and this one
exceeded all others, at least by reputation. Sabha’s anxiety deepened
on his very first day, as the warden, a middle-aged colonel named
Ibrahim, sat him down to review a list of safety precautions. When
dealing with inmates such as these, the warden cautioned, it was
essential to stay on the other side of the bars at all times, even during
medical examinations. And Sabha shouldn’t be lulled into thinking
that a metal door was protection enough, he warned.
“These people are very dangerous,” Ibrahim said. “Even if they’re
not physically dangerous, they have a way of affecting you. Even I
have to be careful that they don’t affect me.”
The warden went on to describe the peculiarities of the new
arrivals, from their strange dress—most insisted on wearing an
Afghanstyle tunic over their jailhouse uniforms, because tight-fitting
prison trousers were regarded as too revealing—to their ability to
make converts out of hardened criminals and even prison employees.
At Swaqa, so many guards had fallen under their spell that prison
officials were forced to limit shifts to ninety minutes in any sector
where the inmates might be encountered.
As the tour was ending, the warden repeated his warning about the
prisoners. There was one inmate—the sect’s apparent leader—whose
seductive powers were extraordinary, he said. He was the one called
Maqdisi, a religious scholar and preacher of considerable gifts,
capable of infecting and twisting minds like a Muslim Rasputin.
“He is very smart, a walking library of Islamic knowledge,”
Ibrahim said. “You will know when you see him. A handsome guy,
tall and slim, with light-brown hair and blue eyes. Don’t be fooled.”
Moments later, Basel al-Sabha was being escorted by guards into
the prison’s interior, past the watchtowers and armed guards, to the
wing where the prisoners were kept. It was well past dark, and a dim
light shone feebly through the bars of the doorway as the doctor
approached. Drawing closer, he could make out the rows of bunks,
followed by a jarring first glimpse of the prisoners themselves.
Forty-eight inmates sat upright on their bunks or prayer rugs,
facing the doorway with rapt attention, like military conscripts
awaiting inspection. Each wore the same peculiar uniform, a loose-
fitting tunic worn over the standard blue prison shirt and trousers,
just as the warden had said. All eyes appeared fixed on a figure near
the doorway, and Sabha inched forward to see who it was.
At the front of the cell were two men. The first was tall and slender
with scholarly glasses and a tangle of light-brown hair protruding
from his prayer cap. Sabha guessed that this was the one the warden
had called Maqdisi, the cell block’s charismatic leader. Yet it was the
second man who appeared to command the room’s attention. He was
darker and shorter but powerfully built, with a thick neck and
shoulders that might have belonged to a wrestler or gymnast. Sabha,
now only feet away, noticed an unusual scar on the man’s right arm:
a jagged gash across a patch of ink-stained skin the color of an old
bruise. Around the wound the flesh showed the pulls and folds of
amateur suturing.
The owner of the scar studied the rows of bunks for a long
moment, then turned to lock his gaze on the visitor. The face was
unremarkable, fleshy, with full lips framed by a thin beard. But the
eyes were unforgettable. Deep-set and nearly black in the low prison
light, they conveyed a cold intelligence, alert and probing, but lacking
any trace of emotion. Neither welcoming nor hostile, his look was
that of a snake studying the fat young mouse that had just dropped
into his cage.
At last the warden spoke. He mumbled words of introduction for
the new doctor, and then declared the start of clinic hours. All
prisoners with medical complaints can step forward to be
examined, he said.
Sabha edged closer to the door to await the inevitable rush. He had
prepared for the moment and had brought along a supply of pills and
salves to treat the rashes, minor wounds, allergies, and gastric
ailments common to men living in close confinement. But, to his
surprise, no one stirred. The inmates sat motionless, waiting for a
sign from the scarred man, who at last turned his gaze on an inmate
seated on a bed near the front of the cell. When he gave a slight nod,
the seated prisoner stood and walked to the doorway without a
sound. He nodded a second time, and a third, and, one by one,
inmates took their place in line in front of the doctor.
Five men, and only five, were summoned, and still the man with
the scar had not uttered a word. He turned to the doctor with the
same reptilian stare, the look of a man who possessed, even in
Jordan’s harshest prison, absolute control.
Sabha felt an uneasiness, like a tremor welling up from somewhere
deep in the foundation of the old fortress. “What kind of person,” he
wondered, “can command with only his eyes?”
—
Over the following days, the doctor scoured files for insights into his
new patients and why prison officials had come to fear them. The
group’s core, he learned, consisted of about two dozen men who had
been members of radical Islamic sects that sprang up in Jordan in
the early 1990s. With the exception of the leader, Abu Muhammad
al-Maqdisi—a firebrand preacher known for penning screeds against
Arab leaders—their individual histories were unimpressive. Some
had been street thugs who had gotten religion and found acceptance
and purpose among the zealots. Others had been part of the Arab
volunteer army that had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan in
the 1980s. Back home in safe, stable Jordan, these men had been
drawn to organizations that offered a way to relive the glories of the
Afghan campaign through perpetual holy war against the enemies of
Islam.
Their efforts at jihad in Jordan had been anything but glorious.
The leaders of Maqdisi’s small band had been arrested before they
could carry out their first operation, a planned attack on an Israeli
border post. The other groups’ targets had consisted of small-time
symbols of Western corruption, from liquor stores to video shops
and pornographic movie houses. One of the early attempts at a
bombing had been a spectacular failure: A member of the group had
volunteered to plant explosives inside a local adult cinema called the
Salwa. After a few minutes in the theater, the would-be assailant had
become so engrossed in the film that he forgot about his bomb. As he
sat, glued to the screen, the device detonated under his feet. No
patrons were hurt, but the bomber lost both his legs. Six years later,
the double-amputee was among Sabha’s charges at al-Jafr Prison.
The doctor had noticed him on his first visit, propped up on his
bunk, his pant legs neatly pinned at the knee.
By now, nearly all the men had been locked up for four years or
more. But if prison was meant to break the jihadists and weaken
their cause, the attempt was an utter failure. Confined mostly in the
same communal cells, the men had been bound together by their
privations and by the daily struggle to persevere as religious purists
among drug dealers, thieves, and killers. They shared a common
creed, an austere brand of Islam invented by Maqdisi and inculcated
during endless weeks of confinement. They also possessed an
uncommon discipline. The group behaved as a military unit, with
clear chains of authority and unquestioned obedience to Maqdisi’s
handpicked enforcer, the scarred, thick-chested man who had made
such an impression during Sabha’s first visit to the prison. Maqdisi
told the men what to think, but his number two controlled everything
else: how the men spoke and dressed, which books they read and
which television shows they watched, whether they accepted or
resisted prison dictates, when and how they fought. The man’s given
name was Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh, but he preferred to be called
“al-Gharib,” or “the Stranger,” a handle he had picked up during his
days as a fighter in the Afghan civil war. Some, however, were
already calling him “the one from Zarqa,” the tough industrial town
in northern Jordan where he grew up. The phrase in Arabic is “al-
Zarqawi.”
Sabha was able to observe both leaders up close. The Maqdisi he
saw was mild and agreeable, more amiable professor than beguiling
mystic. At just shy of forty, he had the weary air of an intellectual
who felt he deserved better company than the few dozen backward
men who shared his cell. He freely dispensed religious advice and the
occasional fatwa, or religious ruling, but he preferred spending his
time in solitary pursuits, writing essays and reading the Koran. On
the printed page, Maqdisi was fearless: he gained renown throughout
the Muslim world for inflammatory books with titles such as
Democracy Is a Religion, in which he denounced secular Arab
regimes as anti-Islamic and called for their destruction. His work
eventually gained such resonance among Islamists that a Pentagon-
commissioned study in 2006 would call him the most important new
thinker in the jihadi intellectual universe.
Previous Islamist ideologues also had criticized leaders of the Arab
world as corrupt and unfaithful to the religion. The same themes
appeared in the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the influential Egyptian
author whose works inspired the founders of al-Qaeda. But in
Maqdisi’s view, each Muslim bore a personal obligation to act when
confronted with evidence of official heresy. It wasn’t enough for the
faithful simply to denounce corrupt rulers. They were compelled by
Allah to slaughter them.
“His radical conclusion was that the leaders were infidels, and
Muslims should kill them,” said Hasan Abu Hanieh, a Jordanian
writer and intellectual who was friendly with Maqdisi during the
years when his ideas were beginning to congeal. “The ‘killing’ was the
turning point. It was a message that resonated with Muslims who felt
that the regimes were stupid and had allowed foreigners to occupy
Arab lands. For these people, Maqdisi was not only validating their
views but telling them they were obliged to do something about it.”
Oddly enough, the man who called so bluntly for confronting
Islam’s enemies tended to shy away from conflict. As Sabha
observed, whenever interrogators and agents of the intelligence
services visited the prison, he would greet them politely and ask
about their families, to the dismay of other inmates who had suffered
at the hands of the same men. He would patiently explain to guards
and prison officers why they and their government were heretics,
buttressing his arguments with quotes from the Koran. But he would
often retreat when challenged, allowing that less severe
interpretations of scripture could also be valid.
“You can be a member of Parliament and still be a good Muslim,”
he told Sabha one day, offering a nuance that seemed to contradict
his central thesis about the evils of nontheocratic governance. “If
someone is elected because he wants to serve the people, that’s being
a good Muslim. But if he believes in democracy—if he believes in
rules made by men—he is an infidel.”
Maqdisi seemed fond of the young physician, who, though secular,
was the only other person at al-Jafr with an advanced degree. Their
relationship took a turn one day when the youngest of Maqdisi’s
wives fell ill during a visit to the desert prison. The woman suffered
from unusual menstrual bleeding, and Sabha arranged to see her at
his private clinic in the village. The gesture might have risked offense
—many ultra-conservative Muslim men refuse to allow their wives to
be seen by male doctors—but Maqdisi seemed genuinely grateful.
After that day, the physician’s visits to the cell block were greeted
with wide grins.
But politeness and intellect are poor instruments for commanding
men in such a hard place as al-Jafr. Maqdisi needed an enforcer. In
Zarqawi, he had found the perfect helper: a man with the distinction
of being at once slavishly devoted and utterly ruthless. “He is very
tough,” Maqdisi would say admiringly, referring to his number two,
“and he is a Jordanian’s Jordanian—a man of the tribe.”
Their personalities could hardly have been more different. Zarqawi
had no capacity for warmth or nuance. The man with the scar did not
smile. He did not return greetings from prison employees, or engage
in their small talk. When he spoke at all, it was with the street slang
of a high-school dropout who had grown up as a brawler and petty
criminal in one of Zarqa’s toughest neighborhoods. His gruffness and
refusal to conform to convention had marked him as a troublemaker
since boyhood. They also helped burnish the legend that was already
beginning to cement around Zarqawi in his thirty-third year.
Whereas Maqdisi preferred the ethereal world of books and ideas,
Zarqawi was purely a physical being, with a compact, muscular
frame that he chiseled through weight lifting, using buckets of stones
as barbells. The whispered stories of his criminal past—the stabbings
and beatings, the pimping and drug dealing—made him seem
dangerous and unpredictable, a man of action, capable of anything.
He had fought bravely, even recklessly, in Afghanistan, and his
reputation for impulsive violence had followed him into prison. He
habitually defied authorities in the first of the jails where he and the
others were confined, and he brutalized and humiliated inmates who
crossed him, sometimes with fists or crude weapons and sometimes,
it was widely said, sexually. Once, in a rage, he had grabbed a prison
guard by his uniform collar and suspended him from a coat hook.
Another time, he instigated a violent protest by inmates armed with
crude clubs and swords fashioned from bed frames. “We have come
to die!” the prisoners had screamed, and some surely would have,
except for the timely intervention of a warden who acceded to many
of the jihadists’ demands.
Under Maqdisi’s tutelage, Zarqawi’s attacks subsided, but the
violent energy simply shifted form. Zarqawi began memorizing the
Koran, spending hour after hour reading, or staring blankly with the
open volume in his lap. His diffuse rage took on a focus: a fierce,
single-minded hatred for perceived enemies of Allah. The list started
with Jordan’s monarch, King Hussein, whom Zarqawi saw as the
illegitimate leader of an artificial country, responsible for the
unspeakable crime of making peace with Israel. It also included
servants of the regime: the guards, the soldiers, the politicians, the
bureaucrats, and countless others who profited from the current
system. Even prison inmates he denounced as kafirs, or disbelievers.
To Muslims the term is no mere epithet; if used in a fatwa, it implies
that the person has lost the protection of Islamic law and can be
killed with impunity. Within the prison, the guards began referring
to Zarqawi and his closest followers as al-takfiris—“the
excommunicators.”
At the same time, Zarqawi began taking a stronger hand as a
leader and an enforcer among the Islamist prisoners. He demanded
the absolute obedience of the men, and he berated them whenever
they skipped prayers or watched television news shows anchored by
women who were not veiled. Despite his harsh manner, he won
admirers because of his fearless defiance of prison authority. When
official visitors came to al-Jafr, Zarqawi would often ignore them and
refuse even to acknowledge their greetings. And he would order his
men to do the same.
One day, after Jordan agreed to open its prisons to inspections
from human-rights groups, a senior Interior Ministry official arrived
at al-Jafr to check on conditions and implore the inmates not to say
anything negative to the foreigners. The Islamists refused to answer
his questions or even look at him.
The exasperated official first scolded the men, then tried to cajole
them into cooperating with suggestions that their sentences could be
reduced.
“God willing, King Hussein will pardon you!” he said.
Zarqawi stood suddenly and jabbed a finger just inches from the
bureaucrat’s nose.
“This master is not our master!” he snarled. “Ours is Allah
almighty.”
The visitor snapped. “I swear to God, you will not leave!” he
shouted. “You will stay in this prison!”
“By Allah,” Zarqawi replied coldly, “we will come out. Forcibly, if
God wills.”
—
There was another side to Zarqawi. Sabha would catch occasional
glimpses of it during his prison visits. It was jarringly incongruous
with Zarqawi’s usual behavior, as though he suffered from a split
personality.
Everyone at al-Jafr knew how Zarqawi worshipped his mother,
how he became like a little boy whenever she visited. He would
prepare for days, scrubbing his clothes in the sink and tidying up his
corner of the cell. Some inmates knew about his love letters to her,
and to his sisters. Scarcely a word was mentioned about Zarqawi’s
wife, Intisar, or their two young children. But to his mother and
sisters he wrote gushing notes adorned with poems and hand-drawn
flowers in the margins.
“Oh, sister, how much you have suffered on account of my
imprisonment for the sake of my religion,” he wrote to Umm
Qadama in one carefully scrawled note with alternating blue and red
ink. He closed with a poem:
I wrote you a letter, O my sister,
Which I made of my soul’s desire.
The first thing I write is the fire of my heart,
And the second is my love and longing.
The other objects of Zarqawi’s exaggerated attentions were the sick
and injured among his men. When any of the Islamists fell ill, he put
himself in the role of heroic caregiver, giving up his own blankets
and rations to ensure their comfort. He hovered over Sabha and a
second doctor who joined the prison staff, hectoring them whenever
he felt his men were being shortchanged.
“Where’s the medicine you promised for this one?” he would
demand, according to Sabha’s recollection. Once, when one of the
inmates left al-Jafr for a few days of hospital therapy, he fretted like
a nervous parent, nagging Sabha for news about the man’s condition.
Sabha was particularly struck by the tenderness Zarqawi displayed
toward the most fragile of the inmates, the double-amputee named
Eid Jahaline, the unlucky bomber who flubbed the attack on the
pornographic cinema. Jahaline, who suffered from a psychological
disorder in addition to his physical disfigurement, had always
bunked with the other Islamist inmates in spite of extreme
disabilities. Zarqawi appointed himself as the man’s personal valet,
and assisted him with his bathing, changing, and feeding. Most days,
he would simply scoop up the legless man in his arms and carry him
to the toilet. Sabha suspected that the daily ritual had as much to do
with Zarqawi’s peculiar sense of propriety as with genuine
compassion for his comrade. Under the Islamists’ strict moral code,
exposing the man’s naked body to others would constitute both a
humiliation and a sin.
One evening, while Sabha was visiting the cell, Jahaline suffered
one of his occasional meltdowns, a screaming fit that usually
required treatment with antipsychotic drugs. Sabha grabbed a
syringe and was preparing to administer the shot when Zarqawi
stepped forward to block him. Without a word, Zarqawi took a
blanket from one of the beds and draped it over Jahaline’s lower
body. He held the blanket in place with one hand, and with the other
he tugged at the elastic waistband of the disabled man’s trousers,
exposing a narrow crescent of skin. Then he motioned to the doctor.
“Just make sure it’s in the right spot,” he commanded.
Sabha felt for Jahaline’s pelvic bone through his clothes and,
satisfied, pushed the needle into the pale flesh.
When it was done and Jahaline was resting quietly, Sabha looked
up to find Zarqawi watching him with a look of satisfaction. There
was something different in the reptilian eyes, a quality that the
doctor had not noticed before. He thought it might have been the
stirrings of a smile.
—
The arrival of winter in 1998 brought freezing temperatures and
scores of newcomers, as prison officials sought to relieve
overcrowding elsewhere in the system. The Islamists remained
cloistered together, as always, but now subtle cracks were beginning
to show. Some of the jihadists were openly suggesting that Zarqawi
should be the leader, replacing Maqdisi, whose professorial
demeanor had begun to grate on some members of the group.
Zarqawi made no move against his mentor, but the feelings of
many inmates were quite clear. Maqdisi’s nuanced theological
arguments were lost on the high-school dropouts and petty criminals
who made up much of the group. These men preferred someone with
tough-guy credentials, like Zarqawi, a brawler who talked plainly and
refused to compromise. As he himself admitted, Maqdisi was no
warrior. Even while living in Arab training camps in Afghanistan, he
had given up on learning how to use a gun.
“He was not a fighter who lived between the bullets, the missiles
and the tanks, even for a day!” one of the Afghan veterans later
explained.
Zarqawi clearly liked being in charge, and he gradually took on a
still more dominant role, with his mentor’s blessing, leaving Maqdisi
to oversee spiritual matters. For the first time, important people
outside prison were beginning to hear his name. Maqdisi had many
admirers within the Islamist movement’s diaspora, from London to
the Palestinian cities of the West Bank, and some of them were men
with resources and extensive connections throughout the Middle
East, North Africa, and Europe. Now they were learning through
Maqdisi about his impressive assistant, an Afghan veteran of unusual
courage and natural leadership ability.
Sabha, meanwhile, found himself working more frequently with
Zarqawi, and their interactions became increasingly cordial, if not
exactly warm.
One evening, as Sabha was making his rounds, Zarqawi pulled the
doctor aside to make a request. It was the first time the man had
asked for anything on his own behalf.
“I think I have high blood sugar,” he began. “My mother has
diabetes, so maybe it’s in the family. Can you check?”
Sabha was happy to oblige, but it was complicated, he said. The
test could not be performed in the prison—the risk of infection was
too high to draw blood in al-Jafr’s filthy, rodent-infested cells—so
Zarqawi would have to be brought to the doctor’s private clinic in the
village.
There was another complication: obtaining the official approvals
needed to allow such a dangerous inmate to leave al-Jafr. As
expected, the warden protested vigorously. What if it was a ruse to
help Zarqawi escape? What if his allies were waiting in ambush in
the town? But eventually Ibrahim relented, and arrangements were
made for the armed escort that would deliver the prisoner to the
village clinic and back again.
On the day of the test, Sabha decided to wait at the village clinic for
his patient to show up. It was well after dark when a convoy of ten
vehicles arrived, with a complement of dozens of guards armed with
assault rifles. It was the biggest military escort Sabha had ever seen,
and he wondered at first if someone from the royal court had decided
to call on the village. Instead, a solitary prisoner stumbled out of one
of the vans and then disappeared again inside a moving cocoon of
armed men.
Zarqawi was led into the doctor’s office in his prison garb, still
wearing his handcuffs.
“Please take those off,” Sabha ordered, gesturing to the metal
bracelets.
“Sir, the man is dangerous,” one of the escorts protested.
“You have fifty soldiers watching his every move,” the doctor
replied. “I insist that the cuffs be taken off.”
Having succeeded in freeing Zarqawi’s arms, Sabha proceeded
with his examination. He began to roll up one of the prisoner’s
shirtsleeves to draw a blood sample, but was stopped again, this time
by Zarqawi.
“I’m sorry,” the inmate apologized. Zarqawi lowered the sleeve
back to its position before the doctor had touched it. Then he rolled it
back up again, without help. Sabha had tripped on another of
Zarqawi’s indecipherable codes on the touching of naked flesh.
As the blood was being drawn, Sabha worked up the courage to
ask, finally, about the nature of the mysterious scar on Zarqawi’s
arm.
“It was a tattoo. An anchor,” he replied.
“What happened?”
Zarqawi began to recount how he had gotten the tattoo at age
sixteen, at a time when, as he put it, “I wasn’t very Islamic-minded.”
After he joined the jihadist movement, his tattoo became an
embarrassment. He tried scrubbing it off in various ways, including
with bleach. The skin turned an angry red, but the tattoo would not
budge.
Finally, he turned to one of his Zarqa relatives, who was visiting
the prison with a razor hidden in his clothes. As Zarqawi sat, the
kinsman cut two elliptical lines around the tattoo. He then sliced
away the upper layers of skin. When the tattoo was mostly gone, he
closed the wound with crude stitches.
Sabha’s face betrayed his horror at the story, but Zarqawi just
shrugged, as though the act of hacking off an offending piece of flesh
were as natural as squashing a cockroach. Islam—his brand of Islam
—required it. This was an indisputable fact. The rest was a simple act
of will.
“Tattoos,” he explained impassively, “are haram. Forbidden.”
Sabha finished his exam, and Zarqawi, who showed no signs of
physical disease, returned to prison with his escorts. The doctor
remained behind to ponder, in his small clinic by the road on the
edge of a dead lake, dwarfed by the vastly larger Arabian desert just
beyond it.
Seventy years earlier, an Islamic army had traversed the same
road, riding north on horses and camels with the intention of wiping
out the country known as Jordan in the name of Allah. These
Bedouin raiders, who called themselves Ikhwan, or Brothers, had
been armed and trained by Saudi Arabia’s first monarch, Ibn Saud,
to help him defeat his political rivals. But the Ikhwan had ambitions
beyond the Arabian Peninsula. Bloodthirsty fanatics who regarded
all Western inventions and practices as works of the devil, they saw
themselves as divinely appointed to purify the region by slaughtering
all who allied with foreigners or deviated from their narrow vision of
Islam. From the harsh wastelands of the interior, they thundered
into the newly formed countries of Jordan and Iraq in the early
1920s with the intention of toppling governments and creating a
unified Islamic theocracy, or caliphate, spanning all of the Middle
East. They hacked and slashed their way through entire villages that
stood in their path, slitting the throats of every male survivor, to
ensure that all traces of Western modernity were wiped out.
Despite vain attempts by the Saudi monarch to control them, an
Ikhwan army of about fifteen hundred advanced to within ten miles
of Amman, the Jordanian capital, before finally being stopped.
British warplanes spotted the approaching column and cut them
down with machine guns until all but about a hundred of the raiders
were dead.
Small bands of militants continued to control parts of the Saudi
interior at least until the 1950s, menacing and sometimes killing
outsiders who wandered near their villages. Eventually they
vanished, yet the fierce hatreds that animated the Ikhwan never went
away. The unwavering intolerance, the embrace of an extreme and
pitilessly violent form of Islam as a kind of cleansing fire—these
would find acceptance into the late twentieth century and beyond,
from isolated villages in the peninsula’s interior to the oil-rich cities
of the Gulf Coast, and from the rugged hills of eastern Afghanistan to
the crowded cells of an infamous Jordanian prison.
At al-Jafr, the contagion was contained within thick prison walls,
at least for a time. Under the sentence handed down by the judge in
Amman, Zarqawi’s confinement was to continue for another ten
years, until 2009, when the muscular and vital young man would be
entering middle age. Yet, as Sabha well knew, prison terms in Jordan
were rarely what they seemed on paper. A sentence could be
drastically shortened because of a change in government, or a
perceived need to curry favor with a religious party or tribe. If that
happened, Zarqawi could find himself, and perhaps his army of
followers, suddenly free.
2
“Here was a real leader”
Two weeks before King Hussein’s death—in the calm before the
deathbed farewells, the legions of mourners, and the lines of world
leaders paying tribute to Jordan’s greatest and longest-serving
statesman—the monarch called his oldest son, Abdullah, to the
palace to share a decision that would transform the young man’s life
and alter his country’s destiny.
The king had just returned from a six-month hospital stay in the
United States to treat an aggressive form of lymphoma, but the
cancer had returned with a fury, and the doctors were warning that
his time was short. On January 22, 1999, he phoned Abdullah, then a
thirty-six-year-old army commander at the pinnacle of his military
career, and asked him to come at once.
“I want to see you,” he said.
Abdullah bin Hussein got into his car and drove up the steep road
to the palace at Hummar, with its stunning hilltop vistas of the
capital city. Inside, he found the king in the dining room, looking
alarmingly frail. At sixty-three, he was bone-thin, and his skin was
sallow from jaundice. The gray hair and beard that in earlier years
had given him a vague resemblance to the actor Sean Connery had
long since fallen away, from extensive chemotherapy.
The king excused his aides and shut the door. He then turned to
Abdullah, pale fingers grasping his son’s hands.
“I want to make you crown prince,” he said.
The words were all but incomprehensible. For more than three
decades, the title had belonged to Prince Hassan, the king’s worldly
and accomplished younger brother who had become heir apparent to
the throne when Abdullah was still a toddler. The king’s athletic and
boyish-looking oldest son had spent his adult years driving tanks and
helicopters and jumping from airplanes. He had shown little interest
in politics or palace intrigues, preferring the military’s cleaner lines
of command. Now his father was seeking to propel him into a job
whose perils included, among innumerable others, the near certainty
of a clash with family members who had been waiting for years for a
chance to run the country.
“What about my uncle?” Abdullah asked at last, according to his
recollection of the meeting years afterward.
But the king had made up his mind. Days later, he would
announce his decision publicly in the form of an open letter to
Hassan, officially demoting him and hinting vaguely of his
disappointment with greedy “climbers” in the royal family who he
said were “meddling” and “disloyal.” After his death, he said, the
crown would pass from father to son—in this case, to a son who,
among the monarch’s brothers, nephews, and eleven children, was
distinguished by his lack of ambition to be king.
Abdullah had been born a crown prince. Under Jordan’s
constitution as well as a centuries-old Hashemite dynastic tradition,
the title automatically belonged to the oldest male child. But in the
turbulent 1960s, with war clouds looming and the monarchy under
constant threat of assassination or palace coup, Hussein made his
brother the heir apparent, to ensure stability in the case of his death.
Removed from the line of succession, Abdullah spent much of his
youth and early adulthood outside Jordan. He attended American
and British prep schools and universities, which gave him a worldly
education but relatively little insight into the inner workings of his
own country.
Back home, he had immersed himself in the culture of Jordan’s
lower and middle classes as a career soldier, sharing the same
squalid barracks and dust-coated field rations as the other
commissioned officers. He climbed the ranks to major general, but
he retained his young man’s passion for fast cars and motorcycles.
He relished moments when he could personally lead his special-
forces teams into operations against terrorists and criminals, as he
had famously done the previous year, when his commandos stormed
a gangsters’ hideout in a street battle captured live on Jordanian TV.
But now the young commander sat in the dining room of the
Hummar Palace, overwhelmed. With a single sentence, his father
had upended his world and the stable, if privileged, life he had built
for himself, his wife, and their two children.
The king also had acknowledged something he had never said
aloud: the fact of his impending death.
“A cold sensation crept into my stomach,” Abdullah would recall.
“I think that was the first instant I felt truly alone.”
He left the palace and returned home to find his wife, Rania,
sitting on the floor of their living room with family photos spread out
around her. Her eyes filled when he shared the news, as the
magnitude of the changes awaiting both of them began to sink in.
“We would soon be thrust into the spotlight in a way that neither
of us could have imagined,” he later wrote in his memoir. “And there
were a lot of wolves out there, waiting for us to stumble.”
Those worries were soon shoved aside by more immediate crises.
King Hussein had decided to try one more round of cancer
treatment, which meant leaving Jordan for another bone-marrow
transplant in the United States. Abdullah would effectively serve as
regent during his absence, a role that would force him to plunge
headlong into a sea of political and foreign-policy challenges, despite
his limited experience. Though he did not yet know it, the list of
urgent tasks would soon include preparations for a state funeral and
his formal coronation as king.
On January 29, Abdullah drove his father to the airport to begin
his journey to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. The king sat in the front
passenger seat, looking quietly out the window as the car wound
through Amman’s affluent western district, with its high-rise hotels
and office towers, and then onto the airport highway. They passed
poorer suburbs and villages with their outdoor markets and small,
neon-lit mosques. Then they were speeding through open country,
past craggy hills and rock-strewn fields where sheep and Bedouin
tents compete for space with satellite dishes and Toyota pickup
trucks. Abdullah reached over to rest a hand on top of one of his
father’s, then kept it there as they rode in silence.
The farewells were going fine until they reached the airplane, when
Abdullah, convinced he was seeing his father for the last time, briefly
lost the steely composure he had vowed to maintain. Choking back
tears, he helped his father onto the plane and then stood with him for
a moment in the aisle to say goodbye. The king looked at his son
directly but was clearly struggling with his emotions as well,
Abdullah later recalled. Instead of a hug or parting instruction, he
simply nodded, then turned to walk down the aisle alone.
Minutes later, the crown prince was on his way back to Amman
and the duties awaiting him at the palace. He would never again see
his father conscious. The king returned to the country he had ruled
for nearly half a century, but this time there were no cameras on
hand as the dying man was wheeled from the plane to a waiting
ambulance and onward to Amman’s King Hussein Medical Center,
where thousands of ordinary Jordanians stood vigil in a cold rain,
refusing to leave until the moment, shortly before noon on February
7, 1999, when television stations throughout the country abruptly
went dark.
Abdullah sat by the hospital bed during the final hours, feeling
even more alone for his inability to comfort his father, or to ask for a
single word of advice on governing a country that seemed perpetually
in crisis, beset by enemies within and without.
—
Not since the founding of the country had Jordanians seen an event
as grand as the funeral of King Hussein bin Talal. Never had there
been such crowds, as ordinary Jordanians—an estimated eight
hundred thousand of them, or nearly a quarter of the country’s
population—clogged the sidewalks and spilled out of windows and
rooftops along the route through which the flag-draped coffin would
pass. They stood for hours, bundled up against a damp chill, to honor
the only ruler most had ever known: the smiling monarch with the
common touch who had led the country through wars and civil strife
and then, in his later years, on a historic path to peace. Men and
women openly wept, and some wailed and slapped themselves in a
traditional Arabic show of mourning. Others ran alongside the
funeral cortege and even lunged into its path in a frenzy of grief.
Nearly as impressive was the gathering of foreign dignitaries at
Amman’s Raghadan Palace. Less than twenty-four hours after the
king’s death, premiers and potentates from seventy-five countries
had passed through the palace’s arched limestone entrance to attend
what commentators were already calling “the funeral of the twentieth
century.” Four U.S. presidents were among the visitors, including the
White House’s current occupant, Bill Clinton, who paused before
boarding Air Force One to praise Hussein as a “magnificent man”
whose nobility came “not from his title, but from his character.”
Britain’s Prince Charles and prime minister Tony Blair rushed to
Amman to attend, as did UN secretary-general Kofi Annan and the
heads of state of Japan, France, Germany, and the other major
European powers. Russian president Boris Yeltsin, looking pale and
disoriented, arrived with a phalanx of security guards but left
minutes later, complaining of illness.
The Middle Eastern guests invited the most stares. The contingent
included a surprise visitor, Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, for years
a bitter foe of Hussein, having fought his neighbor across their
common border and tried repeatedly to undermine his government.
Now the aging autocrat mingled with other emirs and strongmen
who at various times had battled the Jordanians, or the Syrians, or
each other. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wearing a
traditional Hebrew prayer cap over his graying locks, occupied a
corner of the domed reception hall with an entourage that included
generals, bodyguards, and a bearded rabbi. The Palestine Liberation
Organization’s Yasser Arafat, his five-foot-two frame dwarfed by an
oversized military coat, made small talk with Egypt’s president Hosni
Mubarak. Perhaps the most anxious man in the room was Khaled
Mashal, the leader of the militant Palestinian faction Hamas and a
repeated target of Israeli assassination attempts. Two years earlier,
agents from Israel’s Mossad spy service had jabbed Mashal with a
poison needle on an Amman street a few miles from where he now
stood. He survived only after a furious King Hussein prevailed on the
Israelis to provide his doctors with an antidote.
Greeting them all, looking slightly uncomfortable in his black suit
and red-checkered keffiyeh, was the man whom visitors now
addressed as King Abdullah II. The new monarch stood near the
coffin in a royal receiving line of siblings and uncles, shaking hands
with presidents and ministers who were mostly strangers to him. He
was not yet officially king—the formal swearing in would take place
before Parliament later in the day—but he had gone on Jordanian
television moments after Hussein’s death to signal the change to the
nation. When he appeared on camera, reading from a paper script
with his father beaming from a portrait over his shoulder, it was the
first time most Jordanians had heard his voice.
“This was God’s judgment and God’s will,” he had said.
Now he was taking his place at the head of the line of mourners,
walking behind his father’s coffin to the royal burial plot, flanked by
his uncles and brothers and trailed by the late king’s favorite white
stallion, Amr, bearing an empty saddle. At the graveside, next to
markers for the first two kings of Jordan, Hussein’s body was
removed from the casket and lowered into the ground, covered only
by a simple white shroud.
Then all that remained was the formality of the swearing-in
ceremony before the combined houses of Parliament. After
administering the constitutional oath, the Senate president
introduced the country’s new sovereign.
“May God protect His Majesty King Abdullah and give him
success,” he said.
It was official, and yet not quite real. As the new king was leaving
the ceremony, he was caught off guard when an aide called out,
“Your Majesty, this way.”
“Out of habit, I looked around for my father,” he recalled later.
But the title now was his, and so was the country. Abdullah now
owned the sagging economy, the fractious politics, the sectarian
tensions, the regional disputes.
At one stroke, he had also inherited legions of enemies. Some were
close to home, and covetous of his job. Others were foreign powers
who saw an independent Jordan as an obstacle to their own designs
for the region. Still others were religious extremists opposed to the
very idea of a secular, pro-Western state called Jordan. In the early
months of 1999, as the newest heir to the Hashemite throne settled
tentatively into his perch, all were watching closely to see if he would
fall.
—
To serve as ruler of a Middle Eastern country is to give up any
expectation of dying of old age. It’s especially true in Jordan, where
the extraordinary perils of the job seem to generate a kingly appetite
for dangerous hobbies.
Hussein survived at least eighteen assassination attempts in his
lifetime. He was just fifteen on the summer day in 1951 when his
grandfather—Jordan’s first king, Abdullah I—was shot to death by a
Palestinian gunman as the two royals were visiting Jerusalem’s al-
Aqsa Mosque. The young prince gave chase, narrowly escaping death
himself when the assassin turned and fired a bullet that deflected off
a medal on his uniform, according to the palace’s version of events.
Later, his enemies would try ambushes, plane crashes, and even
poisoned nasal drops, which Hussein discovered when he
accidentally spilled the dispenser and watched in horror as the
frothing liquid cut through the chrome on his bathroom fixtures. The
king dodged death so many times that he took on an aura of
invincibility. Jordanians would often say that Hussein possessed
baraka—Allah’s favor. The prospect that one of his sons could be
equally blessed seemed unlikely.
Hussein refused to be deterred by the attacks. If anything, they
increased his appetite for risky pastimes: racing cars and flying
helicopters and fighter jets. Once, famously, while entertaining
Henry Kissinger, he had taken the former U.S. secretary of state and
his wife on a gut-churning chopper tour of the country, zipping
across Jordan’s rolling terrain as the helicopter’s skids shaved the
tops off palm trees. Kissinger would later recall that his wife tried
politely to ask the king to climb to a safer altitude.
“I didn’t know helicopters could fly so low,” she said.
“Oh! They can fly lower!” the king replied. Then he dropped below
treetop level and skimmed along the ground. “That really aged me
rapidly,” Kissinger said.
In choosing Abdullah as his successor, Hussein picked a leader
who resembled him at least in that respect. In contrast to the
cerebral and cautious Prince Hassan, the king’s brother, Abdullah
shared his father’s informal bearing and devotion to high-
testosterone pursuits. As a young boy, Abdullah would squeal with
delight whenever his father put him in his lap and took off for a spin
through the desert in his roadster, the dust billowing behind them as
the car blew down empty highways to strains of the cartoon theme
song “Popeye the Sailor Man.” His adrenaline addiction spurred a
lifelong interest in motorcycles, race cars, airplanes, and free-fall
skydiving.
Abdullah excelled at wrestling, track, and schoolboy pranks at his
American prep school, and as a military cadet at Britain’s prestigious
Sandhurst academy, he turned down an infantry officer’s
commission for the speed and firepower of battle tanks. He liked
driving the Fox, a nimble, tanklike armored vehicle with a thirty-
millimeter cannon, and wheels instead of tracks. Once, he led a
column of Foxes on an expedition along the M4 motorway west of
London, squeezing every ounce of horsepower from the boxy vehicles
until they were flying past the civilian traffic. After a few minutes at
full throttle, he peered out of the turret to see a police cruiser racing
alongside of him, lights flashing. The officer motioned the column to
stop and then approached Abdullah in the lead vehicle, shaking his
head.
“I have no idea how I’m going to write this up,” the officer said.
The cadets were eventually released with a warning.
The prince’s reputation for daredevilry nearly scuttled his
courtship with his future queen, Rania al-Yassin, even before it
officially started. The stylishly beautiful Rania was a twenty-two-
year-old marketing employee for Apple Inc. when the two met at a
dinner party. Abdullah was instantly smitten, but Rania shunned his
advances. Abdullah was then a thirty-year-old armored-battalion
commander with perpetually sunburned skin and a bad-boy
reputation, and Rania, the daughter of middle-class Palestinian
parents, had no interest in being his latest conquest, Abdullah would
acknowledge in his memoir years later.
“I’ve heard things about you,” Rania had said.
“I’m no angel,” Abdullah admitted. “But at least half the things you
hear are just idle gossip.”
The two finally agreed to date. Six months later, having mustered
the courage to pop the question, he drove Rania to one of his favorite
spots in Jordan: the summit of a small mountain that had been the
setting for daring hill-climb car races for both Abdullah and his
father. “I had hoped for a more romantic proposal,” he acknowledged
afterward. But this time, Rania did not push him away. They were
married on June 10, 1993, just ten months after they were
introduced.
Yet, in the weeks after he became King Abdullah II, all traces of the
brash battalion commander and adrenaline junkie faded from view.
The man who had plunged from airplanes hundreds of times moved
quickly to eliminate risks, at least those that threatened his survival
as monarch. He set out to repair his tattered relations with members
of the royal family, offering the position of crown prince to his
younger brother Hashem, son of Hussein’s popular fourth wife, the
American-born Queen Noor. But he fired or demoted top officials of
the security services whom he suspected of having close ties to his
uncle, his stepmother, or other royals. He then decreed that his own,
decidedly nonroyal wife would become queen. After that, Queen
Noor left Jordan for good.
Other risks beckoned from beyond the border, so the new king
launched a diplomatic offensive aimed at mitigating the biggest ones.
He traveled to Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf emirates to patch a
nearly decade-old rift over Jordan’s policy of neutrality during the
first Iraq war. He invited Israel’s prime minister, the notoriously
pugnacious Netanyahu, to Amman for a get-acquainted luncheon.
He even tried to improve ties with Syria, reaching out first to
President Hafez al-Assad and then, after the autocrat’s death,
befriending his son, Bashar al-Assad, another Western-educated
thirty-something who had been a surprise choice to succeed his
father.
Then, finally, it was time to make peace with the Islamists. Or, at
least, with some of them.
Jordan’s kings have long sought to preserve stability in the country
through an uneasy alliance with the country’s religious
fundamentalists, allowing them a voice in Parliament and moving
cautiously with reforms to avoid causing offense in what remained a
deeply conservative tribal society. King Hussein relied on the Muslim
imams in the 1960s and 1970s to help him beat back threats from
Marxists and Pan-Arab nationalists. Many of these same clerics were
furious when Hussein made peace with Israel in 1994, yet the king
managed to maintain cordial ties with the country’s most prominent
Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, which he repeatedly
praised as “the backbone of the country.”
The new king would try a similar approach. A few weeks after
taking office, Abdullah invited the leadership of the Muslim
Brotherhood to an informal meeting at his hilltop residence. The
clerics arrived at the palace, a gaggle of flapping robes and wagging
beards, bearing a list of complaints about mistreatment of prominent
Muslim activists. They groused about media censorship and the
country’s arcane election laws, which they said were tilted to prevent
the group’s political candidates from winning seats in Parliament.
Abdullah listened politely, and then, as the meeting wound down, he
offered his visitors an unexpected gift: the government would
immediately free sixteen Muslim Brotherhood activists who had
been jailed following a street protest. The visitors seemed charmed,
telling journalists afterward that the new king was a friend to the
Islamists.
“Your Majesty, we are with you, as one team, one body that trusts
you,” the Brotherhood’s leader told Abdullah.
If only it were that simple. Despite the occasional rhetorical barb
hurled at the monarchy, the Muslim Brotherhood was effectively part
of the Jordanian establishment. Other Islamists would not be swayed
by the release of a handful of detainees, or by vague promises to
broaden electoral choices. The Muslims wanted a say in running the
country, even if they were divided about where they would take it.
Abdullah was willing to yield, to a point. The young king had
already spoken in interviews about his intention to see Jordan
become a true constitutional monarchy, headed nominally by a king
but governed by a prime minister chosen by the people’s
representatives in Parliament. But Abdullah’s advisers insisted that
reforms should come slowly. In a country with few democratic
traditions, attempting too much change too quickly could backfire,
they argued. The Islamists already commanded large numbers of
supporters, and they were organized, motivated, and well funded.
They could easily win a popular vote, putting the country’s future in
the hands of a movement whose leaders included men with a
radically different vision for Jordan from that professed by the
Muslim brothers.
The turbaned men seated around Abdullah’s table could be
reasoned with. But there were others in Jordan and the region who
held no regard for reason, in the Western sense. They could only be
fought.
—
Jordan already bore deep scars from previous struggles with Islamic
extremists, dating back to its earliest days as a monarchy. Some saw
the very existence of the state as anathema, an attempt by colonial
powers to keep Muslims divided and weak. As they saw it, Jordan’s
royal family, the Hashemites—rulers of the holy city of Mecca for
nine hundred years—had played a role in the betrayal.
It is true that no country called Jordan existed—and, likewise, no
group of people called Jordanians—until the early twentieth century.
For a thousand years, the arid lands east of the Jordan River were
part of Islamic empires, or caliphates, that at times extended from
North Africa to the Balkans and encompassed all of the Arabian
Peninsula and the Levant. The first caliphs, who were viewed as
successors to the Prophet Muhammad, ruled from Damascus and
Baghdad. They were supplanted in time by the Ottoman Turks, who
expanded the Islamic Empire and established an Ottoman Caliphate
under the supervision of powerful sultans in Istanbul. The Turkish
conquerors permitted limited self-rule in Mecca, allowing the
Hashemites to retain control of the city’s holy sites in a tradition
dating back to the tenth century. Then, early in the twentieth
century, came a Hashemite whose ambition and audacity would alter
the family’s destiny and redraw the boundaries of the Middle East.
Sharif Hussein bin Ali, the seventy-eighth emir of Mecca and the
great-grandfather of Jordan’s King Hussein, came to power as the
Ottomans were lurching toward collapse. After the Turks sided with
Germany at the outset of World War I, Sharif Hussein began secret
negotiations with Britain with the aim of instigating a rebellion
seeking Arab independence. In 1916, he agreed to help Britain and
the Allied powers drive against the Turks in exchange for a promise
of future British recognition of the new Arab-Islamic nation. Four of
the sharif’s sons—Ali, Faisal, Abdullah, and Zeid—would lead Arab
armies in what became known as the Great Arab Revolt, at times
fighting at the side of the British Army officer T. E. Lawrence, later
immortalized by historians and filmmakers as Lawrence of Arabia.
The Arabs were victorious, but Britain’s promises to Sharif
Hussein expired even before the conflict ended. Britain and France
preemptively divvied up the captured Ottoman lands into British and
French protectorates under the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of
1916. After the war, the maps were redrawn to create entirely new
states, including the kingdoms of Iraq and Syria and, on the narrow
strip of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, a
Jewish homeland that would later become Israel.
On the eastern side of the river, home to Bedouin tribes and vast
deserts, the British carved out an enclave for Sharif Hussein’s third
son, Abdullah I. The British had taken a small step toward honoring
their promises to the ruler of Mecca, but their creation—initially
called the Emirate of Transjordan, and later the Hashemite Kingdom
of Jordan—seemed a few ingredients shy of a real country. No
historical precedent existed for such a country, nor was there
anything resembling a national identity among the scattering of
tribes who lived in the region. The new state lacked significant
reserves of oil or gas, or minerals for mining, or water for agriculture.
Even its emir, Abdullah, had been imported from abroad. Many
political observers at the time assumed that Transjordan would
quickly collapse as an autonomous state, to be absorbed by one of its
larger neighbors.
The first serious threat came from the Ikhwan hordes who invaded
the country in the 1920s and were finally dispatched by Saudi
intervention. Then, in the late 1960s, it was Palestinian guerrillas
who threatened Jordan’s sovereignty. A patchwork of militant
groups, drawn from the four hundred thousand Palestinian
immigrants and refugees massed in Jordan after three decades of
wars, staged attacks on Jordanian troops and tried repeatedly to
assassinate King Hussein. The monarch launched an offensive that
became known as Black September, killing thousands of Palestinian
militants and driving many more into Syria or Lebanon. Heavy
clashes spilled into the largely Palestinian town of Zarqa, where the
man who would become known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was then a
boy of four years.
In the 1980s, it was regional unrest that threatened to spill across
Jordan’s relatively peaceful borders. Thousands of Palestinian youths
clashed with Israeli troops in the first intifada, or uprising, while
young Jordanian men volunteered by the hundreds to fight the
Soviets in Afghanistan. Some returned to their villages and refugee
camps with military skills and new ideas. A few, like Zarqawi, formed
into groups and began looking for ways to continue the struggle
against perceived enemies of Islam.
And yet radicals such as these were few in number, and
notoriously disorganized. Like other Arab rulers, Jordan’s monarchs
sought to contain the threat by fostering powerful and ruthless
intelligence networks to keep the extremists in check. At the same
time, they would co-opt relatively moderate Islamists by granting
them positions of privilege and offering limited political freedoms.
Abdullah, like his father, supported the Muslim Brotherhood’s role
as a moderate opposition force in Jordan. And, like his forebears, he
would look for ways to bolster the informal alliance, by granting
occasional favors and concessions that would benefit the group’s
leadership politically and ensure loyalty to the crown.
Just such an opportunity arose in March 1999, as the country
marked the end of the official forty-day mourning period for King
Hussein’s death. In a tradition dating back to Jordan’s founding, new
kings are expected to declare a general amnesty in the country’s
prisons, granting royal pardons to inmates convicted of nonviolent
offenses or political crimes. It was a way to clean the slate and score
points with important constituencies, from the Islamists to powerful
East Bank tribes. To ensure the maximum political return, members
of Parliament were given the task of nominating release-worthy
prisoners and drafting the amnesty’s legal particulars. Their list
quickly grew to five hundred names, then a thousand, then two
thousand. And still lawmakers pushed for more.
A debate over the names spilled into the open. Whereas the new
law excluded anyone convicted of a violent crime or terrorism, some
lawmakers wanted to free dozens of detainees convicted of draft
dodging or of conspiring in attacks against Israelis. Others pushed
for pardons for the so-called Arab Afghans, veterans of holy war
against the Soviets in Afghanistan who had formed Islamist cells
after returning home.
“Jordan is on the threshold of a new phase of its history, which
means that the government should turn a new page, especially with
political detainees,” Saleh Armouti, president of Jordan’s Bar
Association, told the Jordan Times as negotiations dragged on. But
some of the country’s law-enforcement chiefs saw a disaster in the
making.
“Most of them will be repeat offenders and we will see their faces
again and again,” a police official complained to the same
newspaper. “Most of them are thugs who will harm people when they
are free.”
In the end, the list, now with more than twenty-five hundred
names, was endorsed by Parliament and sent to the palace for the
final approval. The king, then just six weeks into his new job and still
picking his way through a three-dimensional minefield of legislative,
tribal, and royal politics, faced a choice of either adopting the list or
sending it back for weeks of additional debate.
He signed it.
Many months would pass before Abdullah learned that list had
included certain Arab Afghans from the al-Jafr Prison whose
Ikhwan-like zeal for purifying the Islamic faith should have
disqualified them instantly. But by that time, the obscure jihadist
named Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh had become the terrorist Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi. And there was nothing a king of Jordan could do
but berate his aides in an exasperated but utterly futile pique.
“Why,” he demanded, “didn’t someone check?”
—
On the evening of March 29, 1999, a caravan of prison vehicles
arrived at al-Jafr to haul away the first of the Islamist prisoners
granted freedom under the royal amnesty. Under the law, the state is
obliged to deliver inmates to the town where they were first arrested,
so Zarqawi and his mentor, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, took seats
on the van bound for Amman. They carried their few belongings, and
freshly stamped release papers that reinstated their rights as free
citizens, able to work, visit, associate, and travel just as any other
Jordanian citizen. The Amman van’s driver waited until dark, then
eased the vehicle through the main gate, past the guards and
machine-gun nests, past the drooping, parched palm trees planted
along the driveway, and finally onto the rough asphalt of the highway
leading to the capital. For the first time in five years, they were free
men.
But not entirely free. Both men had wives and children they barely
knew, families that had scraped by during their confinement,
surviving on handouts from relatives. Both were subject to continued
scrutiny and even harassment from the country’s secret police. And
both were bound to the Islamist brotherhood they had forged
together in prison, though to differing degrees.
Maqdisi’s detachment from the other inmates had deepened
during the months in al-Jafr. As the day of his release approached,
he talked about returning to his family and his writing; about
expanding his audience throughout the Muslim world while taking
care to avoid the kind of offense that could land him back in prison.
Zarqawi, on the other hand, was torn between two families: the
one in Zarqa and the one he had gained in jail. His al-Jafr brothers
were a cadre of men devoted to him personally and willing to follow
him anywhere. With the amnesty, the survival of this family was
suddenly in doubt.
Sabha, the prison doctor, was away on the evening when Zarqawi
and the others departed for Amman. The release of so many
prisoners under the amnesty meant a much lighter workload, and the
prison staff was abuzz with rumors that the entire facility would soon
be shut down for good. The morning after the release, Sabha arrived
for his shift early and stopped by the warden’s office for coffee and
the latest news. Colonel Ibrahim greeted him with a strange look.
“Our friend has come back,” he said.
The warden led the doctor through the courtyard toward the
Islamists’ cell, which now held only a handful of inmates who had
committed violent offenses and were ineligible for the pardon. As
they approached, Sabha could see a bearded man standing at the
doorway, talking to the prisoners through the bars. It was Zarqawi.
“He has been here since five-thirty this morning,” the warden said.
Zarqawi had traveled all the way to Amman, visited his mother in
Zarqa for a few hours, then turned around and driven through the
night in a friend’s car to arrive at al-Jafr before daybreak. Now here
he was, back inside the hated prison, ministering to other inmates
like a field commander checking the morale of his troops.
Sabha watched for a moment in disbelief.
“Here,” he said afterward, “was a real leader.
“I knew at that moment that I would be hearing about him,” he
said. “This man was going to end up either famous, or dead.”
3
“A problem like that always comes back”
Six months after regaining his freedom, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
strode into the departures lounge of Amman’s Queen Alia
International Airport with a plan to escape Jordan for good. He
carried a freshly minted Jordanian passport, No. Z393834, along
with a Pakistani visa stamp and a serviceable cover story: Zarqawi,
the war veteran and ex-convict, was going into business as an
international honey merchant.
He had thought to bring along his mother, the fifty-year-old Dallah
al-Khalayleh, a useful prop for someone trying to pass as a simple
businessman looking for partners for his apiarist venture. Notably
absent were his wife and his three children. Zarqawi’s true
destination was no place for a young family; besides, he already had
plans for picking up a second wife once he had settled.
But he hadn’t anticipated the reception the Mukhabarat had
prepared for him.
As he approached the gate, several large men in dark suits grabbed
Zarqawi by the shoulder and quickly hustled him into a side room,
leaving his exasperated mother spluttering in the corridor. Minutes
later, he was sitting in the spy agency’s headquarters, visibly
struggling to contain his rage.
“I didn’t do anything!” he protested. “Why did you stop me?”
The man who sat opposite Zarqawi had by now interrogated the
jihadist so many times he could practically deliver his lines for him.
Abu Haytham, the intelligence-service captain then in his fifteenth
year in the Mukhabarat’s counterterrorism division, had followed
Zarqawi’s preparations for weeks and arranged for the predeparture
“chat.” He had never been impressed with Zarqawi, regarding him as
another Islamist hothead, louder and more aggressive than most, but
lacking in the kinds of intellectual or organizational talents that
might make him exceptionally dangerous. But now Zarqawi was
leaving Jordan through an obviously concocted scheme. What
exactly was he up to?
Zarqawi had been right about one thing: he had committed no
criminal offense, at least nothing of a magnitude that would warrant
a dramatic scene in front of his mother and the scores of airport
passengers. But the Mukhabarat wasn’t about to let him slink away
easily. His prison stint had only hardened his views and expanded
his network of possible co-conspirators. And now he had a plane
ticket to Peshawar, Pakistan, gateway to the Hindu Kush Mountains
and, just beyond them, Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden was in
Afghanistan. The Saudi terrorist had blown up two U.S. embassies in
Africa in 1998 and declared war on the United States.
The captain had yet to divine Zarqawi’s true plans, but he was
certain they had nothing to do with raising honeybees in Pakistan’s
northwestern mountains. If Zarqawi were to link up with terrorists, it
could come back to haunt Jordan.
“You can’t just push him off on others,” Abu Haytham would
explain to colleagues. “Sooner or later, a problem like that always
comes back.”
Legally, Abu Haytham could detain Zarqawi for three days while
the Mukhabarat’s agents searched his belongings and quizzed his
relatives and associates. In reality, the spy service could hold him as
long as it wanted to. Zarqawi, still straining to keep his anger in
check as he waited in the spy agency’s interrogation cell, knew this as
well as anyone. But Abu Haytham reminded him anyway.
“As the security service,” he said, “it is our duty to know what
you’re doing.”
—
Zarqawi had not always been so pliant. Abu Haytham’s first
encounter with the man then known as Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh
was an adrenaline-infused struggle, and very nearly proved fatal.
On March 29, 1994, Abu Haytham was part of a team of fourteen
heavily armed officers who raided an apartment where Zarqawi was
staying. At the time, the intelligence service was rolling up a cell of
Afghan war veterans connected to what appeared to be a serious
terrorist plot. Members of the cell—all with ties to a radical preacher,
Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi—had acquired land mines and antitank
rockets and were preparing to attack Israeli soldiers at one of the
border crossings with Jordan. A known leader of the cell was
Zarqawi, then a twenty-seven-year-old Afghan war veteran who
worked as a video-store clerk and spent his free time meeting
secretly with small groups of Islamic radicals. As other cell members
disappeared into the Mukhabarat’s prison, Zarqawi had moved from
his house to the apartment to make arrangements to flee Jordan. He
was finalizing his escape plan just as Abu Haytham and the other
officers gathered in an alley behind the building to prepare for the
assault.
The agents had watched the apartment throughout the day to see
when Zarqawi would come home, and then waited for hours after the
lights went out. At 1:00 a.m., using a key secured from the landlord,
they quietly slid back the deadbolt and began creeping up the stairs.
They found Zarqawi alone in a back room, dead-asleep.
The men had reached the foot of the bed when Zarqawi jerked
awake. He swore at the strangers and thrust a hand behind his
pillow, as if to grab something.
“Gun!” one of the officers shouted.
A wall of men fell on top of Zarqawi and struggled to pin him,
while another in the raiding party snatched the weapon. It was then
that one of the team’s members noticed an odd stirring behind a
drapery. He lunged instinctively and tackled a second man, an
Egyptian who, fortunately for the officers, had not been armed.
“We didn’t know there was another person in the house,” Abu
Haytham explained afterward. “We found him only because the
curtain was moving and there was no window behind it.”
The agents tossed the pistol—an M15 automatic, with three loaded
clips—into their van along with the cursing suspects. Zarqawi—still
“ready to kill,” as one of them later described him—sat glowering at
the agents from the backseat, with his tangle of matted hair and torn
nightshirt, tattoos poking out below the sleeve.
“He was angry, just screaming curses: ‘You are kafirs. You are
infidels,” the officer recalled.
Then it was back to the Mukhabarat’s fortresslike headquarters for
the interrogation. Among those looking in on the suspects was Samih
Battikhi, the agency’s worldly, silver-maned deputy chief. He
watched as his men, working in a small, glaringly lit cell, tried in
turns to wear the suspect down. Zarqawi was having none of it, he
recalled.
“He just spouted ideology. His head was full of it,” Battikhi said.
Battikhi, who would soon be named director of the spy agency, had
been watching with growing unease the stream of Jordanian
nationals returning home after fighting under the mujahideen army’s
Islamist banner in Afghanistan. At first, he recalled, the Jordanians
who volunteered for duty in Afghanistan “were the good guys,
fighting the communists,” in ideological lockstep with the country’s
most important allies, including the Americans, the British, and the
Saudis. Now they were returning home as combat veterans with
radically different views, and even different ways of speaking and
dressing. Zarqawi looked and sounded like the others, but with an
aggressiveness that reminded Battikhi of a caged animal. It was
widely known that Zarqawi had been a vicious brawler and petty
criminal as a youth. Battikhi now wondered if the two parts of his
personality had fused together—the gangster and the religious
fanatic.
“He didn’t fit the profile,” Battikhi said. “Here’s a guy who had
been a thug and a drunk. His family had gotten worried and tried to
steer him toward religious groups to straighten him out. But then it
was like he went too straight. So now you’ve got the worst of both
worlds.”
—
In fact, the Mukhabarat knew a lot about Zarqawi, even in those
early days before prison. Between his thick police file and the spy
agency’s legions of informants, the officers were quickly able to fill in
the remaining blanks.
Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh, as the records showed, had been
troubled since childhood, taking the hard path from vandalism to
drugs and alcohol to more serious crimes. He was born October 30,
1966, to parents of working-class Jordanian stock: a civil-servant
father who worked for Zarqa’s municipal government, and a devoutly
religious mother who doted on the young boy above his seven sisters
and two brothers. The family lived in a modest two-story house
perched on a hill above a large cemetery where Zarqa’s working class
buries its dead. The graveyard is a shambles, a few thousand
crumbling, hand-lettered tombstones strewn across a sloping lot
overrun with weeds and feral cats; it is also the closest thing in the
neighborhood to a public park. The boy who would become Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi spent countless hours playing in the cemetery as a
child; later, when he was a teen, the graves became the backdrop for
his first forays into delinquency and crime.
The Khalaylehs came from a large and respectable East Bank tribe,
the Bani Hassans, a biographical fact that normally carried certain
advantages for a young man looking to make connections and find
work in a patriarchal society like Jordan. But Zarqawi had blown one
opportunity after another. He dropped out of high school, despite
above-average grades and test scores showing an aptitude for art. He
skated through two years of compulsory military service, but then got
himself fired from a city job his father had arranged for him. His
criminal career began at age twelve—he had cut a neighborhood boy
in a street fight—and progressed to pimping, drug dealing, and
assault. By his late teens, he had acquired tattoos and a reputation as
a heavy drinker and street tough who took pleasure in brutalizing his
victims and opponents with fist or blade. His idea of a sexual
conquest—according to security officials and to acquaintances who
knew him at the time—was to force himself on younger men as a way
to humiliate and assert his own dominance.
He was twenty-one when he married his cousin, Intisar, who
quickly bore him a daughter. But Zarqawi’s great love remained his
mother. Dallah al-Khalayleh fretted over her troubled youngest son,
but she never stopped believing in his basic goodness, or gave up her
certitude that he would make something of himself. She also
understood her son’s intellectual limitations. Years later, when
journalists would show up at her house to ask about Zarqawi’s
reported accomplishments as a terrorist commander and bomb
maker, she would seem genuinely amused.
“He wasn’t that smart,” she told an American reporter. She
allowed that her boy was “committed to Islam,” but explained his
decision to join a jihadist movement as the only option available to a
young man who couldn’t find a real job at home.
“My son is a good man, an ordinary man, a victim of injustice,” she
said.
It was his mother who nudged Zarqawi into joining the Islamists.
She signed him up for religion classes at the local al-Husayn Ben Ali
Mosque, hoping he would find better role models among the imams
and pious youth, with their theological debates and fundraising
drives to benefit Muslim holy warriors in Afghanistan. To everyone’s
surprise, Zarqawi plunged into Islam with all the passion he had
once reserved for his criminal pursuits. He swore off drinking and
became a regular at Koran discussions and Friday prayers. He
devoured propaganda videos and audiocassettes on the sectarian
wars being fought in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya. And when
the prayer leader at the local mosque asked for volunteers to fight
against the communist oppressors of Afghanistan’s Muslims,
Zarqawi’s hand shot up.
He arrived at the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier in the spring of
1989, weeks after the last Soviet troops withdrew, but just in time to
join the Islamist assault on the pro-Moscow Afghan government that
was left to fend for itself after the Russians pulled out. One of the
Afghan veterans who greeted him at the airport would later
remember a wiry young man who seemed eager but also oddly self-
conscious. He said little, explaining at one point that he was
embarrassed to speak, fearing he would betray his inadequate
schooling and thin grasp of the Koran. Although it was already hot,
he insisted on wearing long sleeves to cover up his tattoos.
“We all knew who he was: he had been this notorious tough guy in
Zarqa,” said Hudhaifa Azzam, a fellow Afghan-fighter and son of the
influential Palestinian cleric Abdullah Azzam, regarded by many as
the father of the global jihad movement. “Now he had found religion,
and he was very much ashamed of his tattoos. You could see him
covering up his hands self-consciously.”
Zarqawi’s first assignment was to write articles for a jihadist
magazine describing mujahideen exploits on the battlefield, a job
that proved taxing for a young man of limited schooling. Among his
first friends was Saleh al-Hami, a fellow journalist who had lost his
leg to a land mine. Zarqawi spent long hours at the man’s bedside as
he recovered, becoming so impressed with his devotion that he
arranged to have one of his own sisters flown to Pakistan to marry
the man. His new brother-in-law would later move to Jordan to
become Zarqawi’s admiring biographer. Al-Hami remembered the
young Zarqawi as highly emotional, and quick to cry whenever he
read the Koran. Most of the Arab fighters tried to avoid such open
displays, but not the Jordanian.
“Zarqawi was crying whenever he said prayers aloud, even when
leading the prayers,” al-Hami wrote.
During breaks in training, Zarqawi wandered around the Pakistani
city of Peshawar, sometimes visiting a local mosque that had become
a favorite for Arab fighters. Years later, the mosque’s imam still
vividly remembered the earnest young Jordanian who seemed
preoccupied with past sins. One day, after the cleric mentioned his
plans to travel to Mecca, Islam’s holiest city, Zarqawi approached
him with a request.
“If you are to go on pilgrimage,” the youth said, “on your way
there, pray to God that he may forgive Abu Musab.”
Zarqawi’s first taste of actual combat came in 1991, when
mujahideen rebels launched an offensive against government-held
towns in Afghanistan’s eastern provinces of Paktia and Khost.
Zarqawi fought with enthusiasm, and quickly gained a reputation for
bravery bordering on foolhardiness, comrades remembered. Once,
according to Azzam, he single-handedly held off a column of a dozen
or more Afghan government troops during fighting in the eastern
city of Gardez, allowing time for others in his unit to escape.
“He was so brave, I used to say he had a dead heart,” Azzam said.
As Azzam recalled it, Zarqawi’s heroics appeared to go beyond mere
risk taking. He seemed at times to be trying to purge himself of
something.
“I was struck by the way his past seemed to affect him, as he
always struggled with a sense of guilt,” Azzam said. “I think that is
why he was so brave. He would say, ‘Because of the things I did in my
past, nothing could bring Allah to forgive me unless I become a
shahid’—a martyr.”
Zarqawi would never be a martyr, but in the mountains of eastern
Afghanistan he earned his credentials as a mujahid—a holy warrior.
By the time he left Afghanistan in 1993, he was a combat veteran
with a few years of battlefield experience. He had been steeped in the
doctrine of militant Islam, learning at the feet of radical Afghan and
Arab clerics who would later ally themselves with the Taliban or with
Osama bin Laden. He had gained formal military training at a camp
operated by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the Afghan rebel commander who
would also mentor Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of
the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.
Like the other Afghan fighters, he had also drunk from the heady
cocktail of battlefield camaraderie and the rebels’ own improbable
success. A ragtag army of Afghans and Islamist volunteers had
humbled the Soviet superpower. How could such a thing be
explained, except as an act of divine intervention?
“God granted the Muslim mujahidin in Afghanistan victory against
the infidels,” declared Sayf al-Adel, a deputy to Osama bin Laden, in
a written account of the war. It was an opinion widely held among
the veterans, and Zarqawi was utterly convinced of its truth.
—
In 1993, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and hundreds of other Jordanian
veterans returned home to a country they barely recognized. But it
wasn’t only Jordan that had changed. In four years, while Amman
and the other big towns had grown larger and more modern, Zarqawi
and his comrades had traveled backward in time by journeying to
Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, a place that by almost every
measure lagged centuries behind the rest of the world.
Now back in his hometown, Zarqawi had become his self-chosen
nickname—“the Stranger.” Even a trip to the local market was a
reminder of the gulf between moderate, easygoing Jordan and the
strict Islamic discipline Zarqawi had witnessed in Afghanistan. He
complained to friends about immodestly dressed Jordanian women
and the mixing of unmarried couples at cafés and cinemas. He griped
about the liquor stores and pornography vendors, which, years
earlier, he himself had patronized. Even his own family disappointed
him: his mother and sisters refused to wear the burka-style veil
commonly worn by Afghan women, and his brothers allowed their
families to watch un-Islamic movies and comedies on their TVs. The
news shows that Zarqawi occasionally watched were even more
upsetting, bringing reports of progress by both the Palestinians and
the Jordanian monarchy in negotiating treaties with Israel. The very
idea of peace with the Jewish state was anathema to many Islamists.
Some formerly steadfast supporters of King Hussein never forgave
the monarch for this act.
Zarqawi would take a stab at a normal life, spending his days
renting out Hollywood movies and Islamist propaganda tapes at the
video store. But, inevitably, he was drawn toward the one thing that
had given him a purpose. He read books about early Islamic heroes,
and became particularly fascinated with Nur ad-Din Zengi, a
warrior-prince who ruled from Damascus in the twelfth century. Nur
ad-Din had famously destroyed a European Crusader army and
sought to unify a patchwork of Muslim kingdoms under a single
sultanate extending from southern Turkey to the Nile River. After his
soldiers killed the French-born prince of Antioch, Nur ad-Din
arranged for the sovereign’s head to be placed in a silver box and
sent to the caliph in Baghdad as a gift.
Years later, Zarqawi came to view himself as a modern incarnation
of Nur ad-Din and would seek to emulate his military strategy. But
for now, Zarqawi was prepared to start small. He tracked down an
old acquaintance from Afghanistan, the preacher and scholar named
Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, showing up at his house in Amman to
say he wanted to “work on behalf of religion in Jordan,” as Maqdisi
later recalled. The two began a years-long partnership that began
with Koranic study groups for other Afghan veterans and progressed
to the organizing of small cells for more ambitious endeavors.
“We printed out some of my books and disseminated them among
the people,” Maqdisi would write later about his early days with
Zarqawi. “Young men rallied around our call and circulated our
books and messages.”
Similar groups, also led by disaffected ex-mujahideen fighters,
were forming simultaneously across Jordan, and some had carried
out minor attacks against liquor stores and other symbols of Western
vice. Soon Zarqawi, too, was pushing to do something more dramatic
than photocopying religious tracts. He suggested ways to disrupt
upcoming parliamentary elections in Jordan, talking excitedly about
possible targets until others in the group became nervous.
“He wanted everything to be done quickly,” remembered
Muhammad Abu al-Muntasir, a Jordanian Islamist who attended
some of the meetings in 1993. “He wanted to achieve all of his
ambitions in a matter of months, if not hours.” Because of hastiness,
Zarqawi made decisions “unilaterally at the wrong time and place,”
he said.
“More tragically,” al-Muntasir added, “the majority of brothers
used to agree with him.”
By early 1994, the group had a name: Bay’at al-Imam, or literally,
the Oath of Allegiance to the Prayer Leader. They also had a small
stock of weapons from an unlikely source. Maqdisi, who had lived in
Kuwait at the time of the 1990 invasion by Saddam Hussein’s army,
had acquired a few mines, grenades, and artillery rockets left behind
after the Iraqis’ retreat in 1991, and hid them in his household
furniture when he moved to Jordan after the war. The spark that
finally propelled the group into action came on February 25, 1994,
when a Jewish extremist opened fire on praying Muslims in a
religious shrine in the West Bank town of Hebron, killing twenty-
nine men and boys and wounding scores of others. Incensed by the
murders, the group decided, with Maqdisi’s reluctant support, to use
their weapons in a coordinated attack on an Israeli outpost along the
border. The plan called for striking the guard station with back-to-
back suicide bombs followed by small-arms fire.
The plotters never had a chance. The Mukhabarat, with its vast
network of informants, inevitably learned of the plan and moved
quickly to squash it. Abu Haytham’s team launched their raids,
ending with the dramatic arrest of Zarqawi in his bed on March 29.
He and twelve other members of the cell eventually signed
confessions admitting to possessing illegal weapons and plotting an
act of terrorism.
Maqdisi tried to turn the group’s trial into a showcase for his
radical views, at one point shouting at the military judge, “You are
guilty!” The defendants yelled and banged the bars of the prisoners’
box as they were being sentenced, while Maqdisi called out a
warning:
“Your penalties only strengthen our faith in our religion!”
Perhaps it was so. But with Maqdisi and Zarqawi both drawing
prison terms of fifteen years, the greater likelihood was that the men
and their movement had been silenced for good. And if Jordan’s
prisons couldn’t control them, the Mukhabarat had a variety of
alternate methods that could deliver the same result, as Abu
Haytham was fond of reminding Western visitors.
“The agency is not averse to using pressure,” he would say, “if it’s
the only way to stop a bad thing from happening.”
—
The truth was, the leaders of the Mukhabarat weren’t entirely sure
what to do with Zarqawi when he emerged unexpectedly from prison
in the spring of 1999. The spy agency was still pondering the
question six months later, right up to the morning he turned up at
the airport with his mother and a pair of coach-class tickets for
Pakistan.
As Zarqawi stewed in a holding cell during his three days of
confinement, the Mukhabarat’s men made a careful inventory of his
belongings, looking for clues about his destination and how long he
intended to stay. They found a handwritten letter in one of the bags,
and pored over every line for possible coded messages, eventually
concluding that it was a harmless greeting from one of Zarqawi’s
friends to a mutual acquaintance in Pakistan.
Abu Haytham tried quizzing Zarqawi directly, asking the same
questions different ways. The detainee freely admitted that he hoped
eventually to settle in Pakistan, once his honey business was doing
well enough to support his family.
“I can’t live here in this country,” he told the captain. “I want to
start a new life.”
Zarqawi’s discomfort was hardly surprising. For one thing, he
missed prison. Harsh though it was, al-Jafr had given Zarqawi an
identity and a community. Life on the outside just left him feeling
anxious and disoriented, he told family members.
But it was the Mukhabarat that accounted for most of his stress.
Deeply unhappy with the Islamists’ early release, the service’s
counterterrorism chiefs endeavored to keep Zarqawi and his
brethren in a state of perpetual agitation.
Abu Haytham and his colleagues were masters of the art. Indeed,
getting into the heads of suspected terrorists and troublemakers was
one of the many things Jordan’s intelligence agency did exceptionally
well. The service had always been relatively small, and it traditionally
depended on the United States and other allies for surveillance
technology and operating cash. But few in the world could rival its
capabilities in developing informants, running spy operations, or
penetrating hostile networks. In earlier times, its interrogation
methods included physical cruelties so extreme that some
Jordanians referred to the Mukhabarat’s imposing prison as “the
fingernail factory.” But in later years, the service’s directors adopted
subtler techniques that achieved the same result.
To keep Zarqawi off balance, the Mukhabarat employed a strategy
of regular harassing visits its men called “annoyances.” A pair of
officers would turn up at the Khalayleh house at odd hours, even late
at night, and ask Zarqawi to take a ride with them. Invariably, they
would end up at headquarters for “chats” that often went on for
hours. A key part of the ritual would be a recitation of things the
agency’s informants had overheard Zarqawi say or do, just to remind
their guest of how closely he was being watched.
Though Zarqawi clearly resented the visits, he had no choice but to
submit. During one routine “annoyance” in late summer, the sight of
the spy agency’s black car sent him into a rage, as one of the officers
later recalled.
“Oh, look who’s here again—it’s the Mukhabarat,” Zarqawi
boomed, with sarcasm that could be heard down the block. His
mother, her plump face crimson against her dark head scarf, met the
visitors at the door with a string of epithets, denouncing the
intelligence service, the government, and even her troublemaker son.
“I curse the day he was born!” she said.
At headquarters, officers took turns with Zarqawi in a kind of tag
team of interrogators and techniques. Abu Haytham sometimes
alternated with his boss, Ali Bourzak, the head of the
counterterrorism section and one of the most feared men in the
Mukhabarat. Bourzak’s harsh manner and thin fringe of red hair
earned him the nickname Red Devil among the spy agency’s frequent
visitors. Zarqawi loathed him. Years later, long after leaving Jordan
for good, he twice sent operatives to Amman with explicit
instructions to assassinate the Red Devil. Both attempts failed.
A third officer who took a particular interest in the case was a
young counterterrorism specialist nearly the same age as Zarqawi.
Abu Mutaz was part of a new generation of Mukhabarat officers:
college-educated and traveled, with special training in intelligence
analysis at institutions in Britain and the United States. But he was
also a son of one of Jordan’s desert tribes, steeped in the same
culture as many of the jihadists and criminals he worked with. His
close-cropped hair, jagged teeth, and leather coats gave him a
streetwise look, but his warm brown eyes and easy laugh made him
instantly likable, even among the Islamists.
When Zarqawi arrived, Abu Mutaz would grab a notebook and
pack of Parliament cigarettes and make his way to the sparsely
furnished office where informal interrogations took place. Zarqawi
would sit opposite him across a small table, without handcuffs or
restraints, maintaining his usual look of icy indifference. Abu Mutaz
thought he seemed a bit shabby, with his loose Afghan clothes and
patchy beard that he never groomed. His fingernails were unfailingly
untrimmed and dirty, giving him the look of a rough field hand.
Abu Mutaz would offer sugary herbal tea and sweets, which were
usually accepted, but not coffee or cigarettes. Zarqawi disliked coffee
and, as a strict Islamist, he viewed smoking as a Western vice. Abu
Mutaz would light up anyway.
“So, Ahmad,” Abu Mutaz would begin, using Zarqawi’s given
name, “talk to me about your plans.”
Abu Mutaz became adept at pushing Zarqawi’s emotional buttons
as a way of drawing him out. He found that he usually could provoke
a reaction by bringing up religion or family, particularly Zarqawi’s
tribal roots. Tribal identity is a matter of profound importance
among Jordan’s East Bank communities, and Zarqawi’s Bani Hassan
lineage tied him to one of the biggest and most important tribes in
the region, dating back to the time of Muhammad and beyond. A
person’s tribal affiliation defined his standing in society and
incorporated elements of patriotism, filial duty, and family pride.
Abu Mutaz would drop into the conversation that he had spoken to
tribal elders about Zarqawi, and they were concerned about him. The
defiance would briefly disappear from Zarqawi’s expression, but he
said nothing.
“The thing that you were doing,” Abu Mutaz would say, “is
something that could destroy your tribe. It could destroy the
country.”
When the subject turned to religion, Zarqawi became animated.
He seemed to enjoy showing off his knowledge of the Koran and the
Hadith, the collection of apocryphal sayings of Muhammad and his
companions, extensively mined by jihadists to justify their beliefs.
Abu Mutaz, accustomed to parrying with Islamists, quizzed him on
his views about violence. Didn’t Islam prohibit the taking of innocent
life?
Apostates are not innocent, Zarqawi would argue. “It is not just
halal”—permitted—Zarqawi said flatly. “We are commanded to kill
the kafir.”
Eventually, Zarqawi would weary of the conversation and shut
down. “You didn’t like me when I was a delinquent,” he mumbled to
Abu Mutaz one day. “Now I’m religious and you still don’t like me.”
As disturbing as his words were, Zarqawi was only mouthing
standard jihadist rhetoric. Senior Mukhabarat officials regarded his
partner, Maqdisi, as a truly dangerous thinker and proselytizer, and
they would find reasons to keep him behind bars for most of the next
fifteen years. Zarqawi clearly wasn’t in Maqdisi’s league, but what,
exactly, was he? The agency’s experts were perplexed.
Though Zarqawi talked like a religious radical, the agency’s
intensive surveillance showed that his behavior was filled with
contradictions and carried echoes of his prereligious past. He would
disappear for hours to the home of a Zarqa woman who was not his
wife, and then he would head directly to an Islamist gathering or to
the local mosque for evening prayers. Abu Mutaz observed that
Zarqawi would habitually lie about the most insignificant things, and
he would stick to the false story even after being confronted with
contrary evidence. His behavior was so baffling that Mukhabarat
officials hired private psychiatrists to review his files and make an
assessment. Though inconclusive, their review suggested that
Zarqawi could suffer from a kind of multiple-personality disorder,
one in which the subject’s deep insecurities and shattering guilt
battled with an outsized ego convinced of its own greatness.
“He had a hero complex and a guilt complex,” Abu Mutaz said. “He
wanted to be a hero and saw himself as a hero, even when he was a
thug. But it was the guilt that made him so extreme.”
Some of his Islamist friends also noticed his increasingly strange
demeanor. One recalled that Zarqawi would sometimes sit for hours
in a favorite falafel shop in Zarqa in his Afghan garb without
speaking to anyone. “He struck me as being like a Sufi, or a mystic,”
the friend said. “He would sit there, looking calm, pious. Slightly
sad.” At other times, he seemed nearly manic, prattling on about his
ambitions to revive his old Islamist cell, either in Jordan or abroad.
“He visited me at home and asked me to open a new chapter with
him, work together, and perhaps travel to Afghanistan,” recalled al-
Muntasir, the Amman Islamist who had been arrested and
imprisoned with Zarqawi in 1994. “I welcomed him as a guest, but I
refused to work with him again in any way in view of his narcissism,
not to mention other traits.”
But such talk did not constitute a crime. Abu Haytham
acknowledged as much to Zarqawi on the last of his three days in
Mukhabarat custody after the scene at the airport. The captain was
questioning Zarqawi, for what would turn out to be the last time,
when his subject began to complain bitterly about his limbolike
existence at the agency’s headquarters.
“Take me to court if you have something on me!” Zarqawi pleaded.
“If I had something on you, I would take you to court!” Abu
Haytham acknowledged.
It was a rare moment of mutual candor. The captain explained
again the necessity of keeping men such as Zarqawi on a tight leash.
“It’s nothing personal,” he said.
“You have to understand how we look at you,” he said. “You’re an
extremist.”
“You have to understand how I look at you,” Zarqawi retorted.
“You are all infidels.”
The next day, Zarqawi and his mother returned to the airport for a
Pakistan-bound flight. There would be no interference this time, but
the Mukhabarat would still be watching.
4
“The time for training is over”
On November 30, 1999, Jordanian investigators were running a
wiretap on a twice-jailed Islamist militant when an ominous phrase
turned up in one of the daily transcripts. The suspicious call came
from a phone in Afghanistan, and the speaker appeared to be giving
a kind of coded instruction.
“The time for training is over,” the Afghan caller had said,
speaking in Levantine-accented Arabic.
Though the words were maddeningly vague, Mukhabarat leaders
decided to move quickly to head off whatever it was the Islamists
were planning. It was soon clear that they had stumbled upon
something huge. Within a few days, the Jordanians had arrested
sixteen people, including the recipient of the call, Khadar Abu
Hoshar, a Palestinian and veteran of the Afghan war with ties to
several extremist groups. They seized bomb-making manuals and
hundreds of pounds of chemicals hidden in a secret underground
passage. They picked up key details from one of the suspects,
including the intended date of the attack—New Year’s Eve, 1999—
and what the detainee said was the operation’s slogan: “The season is
coming; bodies will pile up in sacks.”
A few days later, the agency’s deputy director invited the CIA’s
Amman station chief, Robert Richer, to dinner. Sa’ad Kheir seemed
unusually anxious and waited until he had consumed several drinks
before blurting out the news.
“Rob, I have to tell you something, but you can’t tell my boss,” the
Mukhabarat’s number two commander said. “We just picked up
some people who are planning major attacks against a number of
targets in Jordan.”
Kheir described how the Jordanians had stumbled on the plot and
what was known so far about the intended targets. Topping the list
was the Radisson Hotel, the Amman landmark that on any New
Year’s Eve was certain to be packed with Americans and other
Westerners as well as hundreds of Jordanians. He said top
Mukhabarat officials had decided against sharing details with U.S.
counterparts until they were certain they had all the plotters in
custody.
Richer cut him off.
“Sa’ad, I have to use this information,” he told the Jordanian
deputy. “I’ve got to see your boss and get this released.”
Richer, a former marine on his second tour as the CIA’s spy chief
in Jordan, well knew the Mukhabarat’s complex internal politics. But
this time American lives were potentially at stake. The next morning
he walked into the office of Samih Battikhi, now the Mukhabarat’s
director, to say that the CIA had learned independently of a plot to
strike Jordan on the eve of the millennium. Battikhi, surprised, had
little choice but to tell the Americans everything he knew.
Over the next two weeks, American counterterrorism teams would
arrive to assist the Jordanians in reconstructing what became known
to history as the Millennium Plot, following a trail of clues spread
across at least six countries. Organized by an al-Qaeda associate in
eastern Afghanistan, the Jordanian portion of the plan called for a
wave of bombings and small-arms attacks targeting not only
Amman’s Radisson, but also an Israeli border crossing and a pair of
Christian shrines popular with Western tourists. A separate plot to
attack the Los Angeles International Airport was foiled when U.S.
customs agents arrested the would-be bomber as he attempted to
cross the U.S.-Canadian border in a car packed with explosives.
Seized documents and an expanded surveillance web identified
still more alleged participants, raising the number of suspects to
twenty-eight. Out of all the names on the list, one in particular
evoked surprise: a Jordanian from Zarqa whose given name was
listed as Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh.
Zarqawi was back.
When he left Jordan just two months earlier, Abu Musab al-
Zarqawi had made it as far as western Pakistan and then appeared to
have gotten stuck. The informant who briefly trailed him sent back
word that he was attending daily prayers at an Arabic-speaking
mosque in Peshawar and staying clean. Now, just weeks later, he had
resurfaced with a bit part as a consultant to one of the biggest
terrorist plots against Jordan in years.
Zarqawi appears to have played only a minor advisory role, but
wiretaps that linked him to the plot were sufficient to earn him new
criminal charges and a guilty verdict in absentia. He would also be
featured in a report that landed on Robert Richer’s desk at the CIA’s
Amman station.
“It was the first time,” the American intelligence officer recalled
later, “that we had heard Zarqawi’s name.”
In dismantling the plot, the Jordanians had saved lives while
averting an economic and political disaster. The jihadists had
deliberately targeted symbols of Jordan’s vital tourist industry, at a
moment when the country and its unexpected young monarch were
still finding their footing after King Hussein’s death. Nine months
into his reign, Abdullah II was struggling to implement economic
and political reforms in the face of heavy resistance from Jordan’s
old guard, including the army generals, security chiefs, and tribal
leaders who had held positions of privilege under his father. A
successful attack could have altered the face of Jordan, crippling its
economy and weakening the new king’s grip on the country.
For the Mukhabarat, there was little euphoria over the plot’s
disruption. The Islamists had signaled their determination to attack
Jordan, and they had come close to succeeding. And even though
some of the participants were now in jail, the key planners were in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, where they were free to try again.
Among this group was Zarqawi, whose intentions were now clear.
In September, Zarqawi had sat in the office of the Mukhabarat’s
Captain Abu Haytham, begging for a chance to put Jordan behind
him and start a new life. Less than three months later, the spy service
was bitterly ruing the decision to allow him to leave.
“Despite everything that happened,” Abu Haytham would lament,
“he had not forgotten about Jordan.”
Indeed, Zarqawi’s interest in his home country would never
slacken, even as his focus shifted to bigger targets. “The way to
Palestine is through Amman,” Zarqawi often told friends.
The Mukhabarat would soon learn of other plots to attack Jordan.
The next one to invoke Zarqawi’s name would be organized and
planned by him alone.
—
Zarqawi’s sojourn in Pakistan had not gone as he planned.
He arrived in Peshawar in September with the intention of
traveling onward to the northern Caucasus, where a new war pitting
Chechen separatists and Islamists against the Russian Federation
was just getting under way. If he could link up with Chechnya’s
volunteer Islamic International Brigade, Zarqawi would at last have a
chance to fight Russians, something he had never managed to do
during the Afghan civil war. But it was not to be. Pakistan’s
government, which helped bankroll the Afghan rebels in the 1980s,
was far less tolerant of itinerant Arab jihadists in 1999, and Zarqawi
struggled to obtain connections and travel documents. As he waited,
most of the Islamist army in Chechnya was destroyed when Russian
planes dropped massive fuel-air bombs into mountain passes on the
Chechen-Dagestan border.
Then, six months into his trip, Pakistani officials notified him that
his visa had expired and he would have to leave the country. Zarqawi
was suddenly confronted with a choice of either returning to Jordan
—with the near certainty of arrest and imprisonment for his role in
the Millennium Plot—or heading across the mountains into
Afghanistan, a destination that offered far less appeal than it did
when he last visited. Not only had the country been devastated by six
years of civil war, but the conflict’s newest phase also lacked the
moral clarity that had attracted Zarqawi and tens of thousands of
Arab volunteers in the 1980s and 1990s. Now, instead of a struggle
between Islamists and communists, the Afghan contest pitted a
confusing array of Muslim warlords and Taliban generals against one
another in ever-shifting alliances.
Still, Zarqawi chose Afghanistan. With a pair of friends, he made
his way to Kandahar, eventually arriving at the headquarters of the
one former Afghan Arab who might have been expected to welcome
him: Osama bin Laden. But instead of getting a warm greeting from
his old mujahideen comrade, Zarqawi was rudely snubbed. The al-
Qaeda founder refused even to see Zarqawi, instead sending one of
his aides to check out the Jordanians. Bin Laden’s caution with
visitors of any stripe was likely well founded: the deadly attacks on
two U.S. embassies in Africa the previous year had landed Bin Laden
on the FBI’s most-wanted list. Bin Laden had good reason in
particular to be wary of visitors who associated themselves with
Muhammad al-Maqdisi, Zarqawi’s former cellmate and mentor.
Maqdisi had infuriated the rulers of Bin Laden’s native Saudi Arabia
with his essays calling for the violent overthrow of apostate Arab
regimes. Bin Laden had his own problems with Saudi leaders, and
publicly associating with Maqdisi would only make things worse.
Zarqawi was left to languish in a guesthouse for two weeks before
Bin Laden finally dispatched a senior deputy, a former Egyptian
army officer named Sayf al-Adel, to meet with him. Al-Adel, writing
about the events years later, acknowledged that he also was leery of
Zarqawi, a man who already had a reputation for being stubborn and
combative.
“In a nutshell, Abu Musab was a hardliner when it came to his
disagreements with other fraternal brothers,” al-Adel would write.
“Therefore, I had reservations.”
After exchanging traditional greetings and hugs, al-Adel took a
moment to size up the Jordanian. It was not an encouraging first
impression.
“Abu Musab was a sturdy man who was not really very good at
words,” al-Adel recalled. “He expressed himself spontaneously and
briefly. He would not compromise any of his beliefs.”
Zarqawi’s one big idea, it seemed, was “the re-establishment of
Islam in society,” and he had rigid views on what such a society
should look like. But he had no handle on how to begin working
toward that goal, al-Adel said. Moreover, in quizzing Zarqawi about
events in his old neighborhood, the al-Qaeda deputy found the
Jordanian curiously uninformed.
“He had adequate information about Jordan, but his information
about Palestine was poor,” al-Adel said. “We listened to him, but we
did not argue, since we wanted to win him to our side.”
Despite Zarqawi’s many shortcomings, al-Adel gradually came to
feel sympathy for his visitor, who, in his lumbering, inarticulate way,
reminded al-Adel of a younger version of himself. Anyone as
stubbornly opinionated as Zarqawi could never be part of al-Qaeda,
and al-Adel never suggested that he should join. But the al-Qaeda
deputy had an idea about a different way Zarqawi could be helpful to
the organization. He raised it with Bin Laden the next morning.
By late 1999, al-Qaeda had built a powerful support network in
Afghanistan, in North Africa, and across the countries of the Persian
Gulf. But it lacked a comparable presence in the countries of the
Levant. Al-Qaeda’s great goal was the eventual destruction of Israel;
yet it never managed to put its cadres in place in Jordan or the
Palestinian territories to prepare the ground for such a blow, starting
with the necessary step of overturning Jordan’s pro-Western
government. Perhaps Zarqawi, with his Jordanian roots and deep
ties to Palestinian Islamists from his prison days, could help fill a
critical gap.
“How could we abandon such an opportunity to be in Palestine
and Jordan?” al-Adel asked. “How could we waste a chance to work
with Abu Musab and similar men in other countries?”
Zarqawi’s trustworthiness remained in question, so al-Adel
proposed an experiment: Let the Jordanian run his own training
camp, specifically catering to Islamist volunteers from Jordan and
the other countries of the Levant as well as Iraq and Turkey. Al-
Qaeda could provide start-up money, and then watch from a distance
to see what Zarqawi could accomplish. The “distance” in this case
would be a separation of some 350 miles: the camp for Levantine
fighters would be “somewhat remote from us,” al-Adel
acknowledged, located near the Iranian border in Herat, a city on the
opposite end of Afghanistan from al-Qaeda’s base. Zarqawi would
not be obliged to swear allegiance to Bin Laden, or to sign on to every
point of al-Qaeda’s ideology. But there would be plenty of cash from
wealthy Gulf patrons, as well as what al-Adel described as full
“coordination and cooperation to achieve our joint objectives.”
Zarqawi considered the proposal for two days and decided to
accept.
His first training base was initially made up only of a handful of
close friends from Jordan, along with their families. But Zarqawi
sent invitations to some of his old mujahideen comrades and prison
contacts, and soon others were making the trek to western
Afghanistan. When al-Adel stopped by weeks later to check on
Zarqawi’s progress, he counted eighteen men, women, and children.
In another two months, the camp’s population had swollen to forty-
two people, including Syrians and Europeans. One of the Syrians,
Abu al-Ghadiya, a trained dentist and comrade from Zarqawi’s
mujahideen days who spoke four languages, served as a kind of
travel agent and logistics chief, in a preview of the role he would
assume years later, when he ran the Zarqawi network’s supply
pipeline through Syria and into Iraq. For the moment, though, the
most reliable route for recruits headed for Afghanistan passed
through Iran. Although Zarqawi disliked Shiite Muslims and viewed
Iran’s leaders as heretics, he managed to link up with several helpful
Iranians who ran safe houses and smuggled men and supplies to the
Afghan border.
The camp’s leader, meanwhile, had turned into an enthusiastic
commanding officer. He had taken a second wife, Asra, the thirteen-
year-old daughter of one of his Palestinian campmates, discomfiting
some of his al-Qaeda sponsors, who viewed the marrying of children
as unseemly. He spent his free time reading books, learning basic
computer skills, and polishing his speaking ability, trading his
habitual Zarqa slang for the classic Arabic of the Koran. He
supervised his recruits’ instruction in everything from firearms to
Islamic history and religion.
“They were establishing a mini Islamic society,” a proud al-Adel
declared.
But it was not to last. Back in Kandahar, Bin Laden had given the
final approval for the September 11, 2001, attacks that would draw
the United States into war against al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts.
According to al-Adel, Zarqawi was kept in the dark about al-Qaeda’s
plans until after the strikes against New York and Washington were
carried out. But Zarqawi’s Herat base would be targeted by the
Americans along with Bin Laden’s in the weeks of fighting that
followed.
Zarqawi’s disciples and their families eventually organized a
convoy of vehicles and traveled across Afghanistan to join al-Qaeda
in the defense of Kandahar. The U.S.-backed Northern Alliance,
supported by American commandos and air strikes, had already
captured Kabul, the capital, and were preparing to march on the
Taliban government’s final stronghold. But soon after the Herat
group’s arrival in Kandahar, a U.S. bomber struck a house where
senior al-Qaeda leaders were meeting, wounding several of them and
burying others, including Zarqawi, under debris. The Jordanian was
pulled from the rubble with serious wounds, including several
broken ribs. He was still undergoing treatment when Bin Laden fled,
deserting the Taliban and stealing away to his private sanctuary in
the eastern mountains, the fortress known as Tora Bora.
Zarqawi collected his followers and a few al-Qaeda stragglers and
made a dash in the opposite direction, toward Iran, where he sought
safety in the border towns through which his recruitment network
once ran. There the refugees huddled in small groups, as al-Adel
recounted later, to consider their dwindling options. In eastern
Afghanistan, Bin Laden’s mountain redoubt had fallen under heavy
U.S. bombardment. In Iran, government officials who had initially
granted entry to the al-Qaeda refugees had shifted course, arresting
dozens of the newcomers, including most of the Herat contingent.
Where on earth could al-Qaeda’s men find a haven that offered both
physical safety and a chance for the organization’s surviving
members to rest and regroup?
In Iraq’s northeastern mountains, there was one such place. Just a
few miles from the Iranian border, a handful of Kurdish villages and
towns had attained a precarious autonomy outside the writ of the
Iraqi dictatorship. These Kurdish provinces were protected under the
U.S. no-fly zone established at the end of the first Persian Gulf War
in 1991, and within their boundaries a number of wildly disparate
political factions had taken root. One of the Kurdish groups was a
Taliban-like movement that included scores of Afghan war veterans
and called itself Ansar al-Islam, or “Helpers of Islam.” Its leaders
were Sunni Muslim extremists who quickly imposed harsh Sharia
law in the villages they controlled. They banned music in all forms,
forced women to cover their faces in public, and outlawed schools for
girls. They also developed a fondness for experimenting with
poisons, building a crude lab in which they exposed stray dogs to
cyanide and homemade ricin.
Beyond these charms, northern Iraq offered other advantages for a
Jordanian on the run. Zarqawi could blend more easily with the local
population than he did in Afghanistan, where he spoke none of the
local languages. And the region’s extreme isolation offered a chance
to recuperate without interference.
After reaching the Ansar al-Islam base, Zarqawi moved into
primitive quarters in the tiny village of Sargat, a cluster of stone
hovels on a dead-end road leading up into the hills. With a handful of
his Herat followers and a few thousand dollars of leftover al-Qaeda
money, he set about re-creating the training camp he had established
in Afghanistan. There would be important differences, starting with
the absence, this time, of any significant al-Qaeda influence now that
Bin Laden was in hiding more than two thousand miles away. He
would have new allies and supporters, including sympathetic
Islamists in Baghdad, who sheltered him when he traveled there in
secret to obtain medical treatment for his broken ribs. In addition,
Zarqawi was beginning to think more broadly about the targets of his
jihad. Until 2001, Zarqawi’s two great hatreds were Israel and the
government of his own country, Jordan. Now the pain from his
cracked ribs provided a constant reminder of his wish to inflict harm
on the United States. He said as much to al-Adel one day shortly
before leaving Iran to join Ansar al-Islam’s forces. It was the last
time the two men would meet.
“When he came to say goodbye before he left Iran,” al-Adel
recalled, “he underlined the importance of taking revenge on the
Americans for the crimes they committed during the bombardment
of Afghanistan, which he witnessed with his own eyes.”
Zarqawi’s rough character had been thrice remolded: by war, by
prison and by the responsibilities of command at the helm of his own
Afghan training camp. He had come to regard himself both as a
leader and as a man with a destiny. And now, in al-Adel’s view, his
energy and thinking had been altered again, honed this time by
“hatred and enmity against the Americans.”
In the West, newspapers were beginning to speculate about
whether America’s government, under the leadership of President
George W. Bush, was preparing for a possible second war against
Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Zarqawi, for one, believed the stories. In
conversations with disheartened Islamists in the bleak months of
2002, he talked of the epic conflict still to come, and how he had
been steered by destiny to precisely the right place for engaging the
great enemy of Allah, according to Fu’ad Husayn, a Jordanian
journalist who met Zarqawi in prison and later penned a biography
about the terrorist leader’s early years. At that moment, Bin Laden
was on the run in Pakistan, and the Taliban’s rear guard was being
chased by U.S. commandos across the eastern mountains of
Afghanistan. Yet the real showdown still lay ahead, Zarqawi
predicted, in a country that had had no history of serious religious
militancy in at least a hundred years.
“Iraq,” Zarqawi told friends, “will be the forthcoming battle against
the Americans.”
5
“I did it for al-Qaeda and for Zarqawi”
Laurence Foley was never a flashy man, but there were certain things
about the Boston native that stood out, even in a city as cosmopolitan
as Jordan’s capital. He was big by Amman standards, with an ample
midsection that had grown to accommodate the many diplomatic
dinners and lunches required of a midlevel official at the U.S.
Embassy. He wore a fringe of snowy hair that stood out like bleached
cotton against his freckles and ruddy Irishman’s complexion. He
liked to take long strolls with his golden retriever, Bogart, in
neighborhoods where the sight of a human walking any kind of pet
still attracted stares. More striking, to friends, was his refusal to
succumb to fretting over security, as so many Westerners did in the
anxious months after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“Jordan is a safe place,” the sixty-two-year-old assured family
members who saw the reports about rising threat levels for
Americans and became worried for him.
In the weeks and months after the attacks, as hostility toward
Americans soared, some families retreated to gated enclaves near the
embassy, which also sprouted new security fences and heavily armed
military guards. But Foley, who had served in far more dangerous
places during three decades of overseas work, elected to keep his
two-story villa in West Amman, with its promise of an expat’s
version of Jordanian normality behind the wrought-iron window
grills and rosebushes. In the evenings, he and his wife, Virginia,
continued their walks with Bogart along Abdullah Ghosheh Street,
greeting neighbors with a wave and a phrase or two in simple Arabic.
Each morning, Foley rose early to drive himself to the embassy in his
used Mercedes, a burgundy-red 280-Class with diplomatic plates,
which he kept on a small carport behind an ornamental gate. He kept
to his schedule—deliberately, defiantly—even as new warnings were
quietly passed in the early autumn of 2002 of a plot to kidnap
Americans in Jordan.
His job at the mission—arranging financing for clean-water
projects and business partnerships for Jordanian entrepreneurs—
was not particularly prestigious, but it was important, and Foley
embraced it with energy and passion. He liked working in Amman’s
refugee settlements and drawing the residents into conversation. His
endless questions about life in the camps prompted some to suspect
that Foley was a CIA spy, though most were charmed by the portly
American with the disarming grin. His bosses were so impressed that
they decided to present him with a special award, and so, on the
evening of October 27, 2002, the embassy honored Foley with a
plaque and a dinner party that continued late into the evening. He
came home tired but ebullient, as Virginia recalled afterward.
“I am where I want to be,” he told her, “doing what I want to do.”
The next morning, he rose at the usual time, dressed, and headed
for the carport at 7:20 a.m. He was reaching for the door of the
Mercedes when a figure rose suddenly from the far side of the car.
The man’s face was swathed in a black-and-white-checkered head
scarf, or keffiyeh. His right hand held a small handgun tipped with a
silencer.
Pip. Pip.
Foley staggered. The gunman stepped forward and emptied the
entire clip.
Pip. Pip. Pip. Pip. Pip.
Foley crumbled to the pavement, shot in the face, neck, shoulder,
and chest. The man in the keffiyeh scrambled over a low wall and
sprinted toward a car and driver waiting a block away. The incident
had played out in less than a minute, with so little commotion that
no neighbor heard the shots or saw the body sprawled in a bloody
pool between the Mercedes and the rosebushes.
But someone, many miles from West Amman, did happen to be
listening in an hour later, when the gunman telephoned a contact
somewhere in northern Iraq.
“Inform the sheikh,” the gunman said. “Everything was done
properly.”
—
The snippet of intercepted conversation between the shooter and his
contact had been a routine grab by the National Security
Administration, or NSA, the spy agency that operates America’s vast
global surveillance network. Since the September 11 terrorist attacks,
the NSA had been methodically sweeping up prodigious amounts of
data, concentrating on regions of the world that might conceivably be
harboring Osama bin Laden or any number of other al-Qaeda
operatives. In the summer and fall of 2002, the northeastern corner
of Iraq was one such place. Soon officials at the highest levels of the
White House and Pentagon would be intently focused on a handful of
mountain villages so remote they did not register on many maps of
the region.
A United States diplomat had been assassinated—an exceedingly
rare event, even in this turbulent part of the world. And the early
suspicions, based on the initial analysis of the shooter’s phone call,
pointed to al-Qaeda, generally, and specifically to a man whose name
still had not penetrated the consciousness of the majority of analysts
in the CIA’s counterterrorism center.
The one analyst who knew Abu Musab al-Zarqawi the best had
reasons to be skeptical. Nada Bakos, a newly minted thirty-three-
year-old officer who had just landed at the intelligence agency office
two years earlier, was quickly becoming the CIA’s top expert on the
Jordanian. In later years, this rancher’s daughter from central
Montana would help lead the hunt for the terrorist, working for
weeks at a stretch in dusty Iraqi military bases a few miles from
where Zarqawi was presumed to live. She would track his known
movements, interrogate his captured fighters, and even accompany
U.S. soldiers on midnight raids on suspected safe houses. She dug
into his personal history and habits with such intensity that co-
workers teased her about her Jordanian “boyfriend.”
But something about the rush to blame Zarqawi made her uneasy.
It was conceivable that Zarqawi had ordered the hit, she allowed, but
it would also be quite convenient. The Jordanians would be eager to
show that the crime was a deliberate act by international terrorists,
and not mere random violence of the type that could damage the
country’s reputation with the tourism industry. Moreover, the few
officials in the Bush White House who knew Zarqawi’s name had
lately shown a strange fascination with the Jordanian. Bakos’s
division at the CIA was constantly fielding queries from Bush
appointees about rumored connections between al-Qaeda and
Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi president now at the center of the
administration’s crosshairs. If Iraq had played even a minor role in
supporting al-Qaeda’s September 11 terrorist attacks on New York
and Washington, the case for an invasion would be clear-cut. The
CIA was able to knock down most of the rumors about Iraqi links to
9/11, but the Zarqawi case was murkier. Hadn’t the Jordanian been
seen in Baghdad, getting medical treatment in one of the city’s state-
run hospitals? Wasn’t he the same Zarqawi who had been given cash
and land by al-Qaeda to set up his own training camp in western
Afghanistan? After the start of the Afghan offensive, didn’t he flee to
Iraq instead of joining Bin Laden at Tora Bora? A still more
disturbing question: did the Ansar al-Islam camp’s rumored poisons
laboratory suggest a link to Saddam Hussein, whose interest in
chemical weapons in the 1990s was well documented?
Bakos and her colleagues dutifully fielded the questions and tried,
within the confines of the limited intelligence on Zarqawi in late
2002, to answer them.
Now there would be many more questions. A U.S. diplomat had
been shot, and the best evidence so far suggested that the deed had
been ordered from Iraqi soil, by a man with clear connections to al-
Qaeda.
To most Americans, and even to most CIA analysts, Zarqawi
remained an unknown figure in an obscure cul-de-sac of the global
jihadist movement. But at senior levels of the Bush White House, he
had just catapulted to the top of the terrorist heap.
—
There were times during Nada Bakos’s tumultuous first two years at
the Central Intelligence Agency when history seemed to hurtle
straight at her, like random shrapnel, or a brick crashing through a
windshield. One such moment came early on the morning of
September 11, 2001, when Bakos and other young analysts crowded
around a TV monitor in time to see the second airliner pierce the
aluminum skin of No. 2 World Trade Center and explode out of the
building’s northern side. Amid the gasps and tears, a single name—
al-Qaeda—rippled through the ranks of officers as they watched the
black smoke billowing over Lower Manhattan. Co-workers began
streaming out of the building under a general evacuation order, but
Bakos, then a rookie analyst, with honey-blond hair and soft brown
eyes, couldn’t bring herself to leave.
“I kept wondering, ‘What can I do?’ ” she said afterward. “I hope
they ask us to do something.” Indeed, minutes later, the CIA
counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, rallied a group of two hundred
officers who had stayed behind, issuing what would become the first
orders of the agency’s years-long campaign to find, destroy, and
defeat Osama bin Laden. “We’re at war now,” Black said, “a different
kind of war than we’ve ever fought before.”
Another moment came just over a year later, when Bakos found
herself in a small conference room with the vice president of the
United States. The country was edging closer to war with Iraq, and
Dick Cheney, then the salesman-in-chief for the Bush
administration’s war strategy, had decided to pay a highly unusual
visit to the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, campus to query the agency’s top
terrorism experts in person. Cheney’s office had been prodding the
CIA for months over possible links between the September 11 attacks
and Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. Zarqawi had emerged as an
intriguing figure, but the CIA’s reports on the man were far more
cautious than those coming from the Pentagon’s Office of Special
Plans, the shadow intelligence service set up by Defense
Undersecretary Douglas J. Feith, an Iraq hawk and a Bush
appointee. What did the agency really know?
The vice president had arrived that morning with a handful of
aides, all scowls and dark suits, for what was to be the second
showdown with the agency over its Iraq files. The first meeting,
chaired by CIA director George Tenet, had gone badly. The senior
managers who attended had no ready answers to Cheney’s questions
about suspicious contacts between alleged al-Qaeda operatives and
Saddam Hussein. His questions implied serious gaps in the agency’s
knowledge about the Iraqi leader and his support for terrorists,
possibly including Bin Laden himself.
Tenet convened a second meeting to bring in the more junior
officers who knew the file best. And so it was that Bakos, in her third
year as a CIA officer, was invited to participate in the education of
the second-most-powerful man in the country.
The meeting was in the headquarters building’s seventh floor, near
the executive suites, in a room overlooking the dense woodlands that
provide an extra security buffer between the spy agency and
Washington’s crowded Virginia suburbs. Cheney and his advisers sat
on one side of a long table, facing a row of midlevel managers armed
with files and notes from a practice session—dubbed a “murder
board”—the day before. Bakos, who was among the youngest
intelligence officers in the room, took a seat behind her boss. Her job
was to serve as the backup, fielding any questions that slipped past
the front line. Nervous at first, she eventually relaxed and watched
with fascination as Cheney personally led the questioning. He peered
skeptically over his glasses at the CIA’s experts, and his tone was
polite but insistent, like that of a seasoned prosecutor breaking down
a reluctant witness.
Nada Bakos sat silently in her chair against a far wall, listening but
not entirely believing. There were plenty of good reasons for going
after the man who had helped facilitate the Millennium Plot in 1999.
But a cabal including the radical jihadist and the fiercely secular
Iraqi leader—a man who routinely tortured and killed Islamists in his
country? Was Cheney serious?
Cheney was more than serious. In the weeks that followed, his
aides would react furiously to a top-secret CIA report—which Bakos
had helped write—all but demolishing allegations of operational ties
between Saddam Hussein’s government and al-Qaeda. The stories
circulated by Bush aides about secret contacts between the two
longtime foes “appear based on hearsay,” the report said, with “no
substantiating detail or other information that might help us
corroborate them.”
The answers Cheney sought did not exist; yet, the more the CIA
pushed back, the more insistent the Cheney team became. At least
once, a Bush aide telephoned Bakos directly at her desk to quiz her
about a line in one of her reports. The call violated long-established
protocols that barred political appointees from directly contacting
individual analysts, a rule intended to protect CIA employees from
political influence. Bakos quickly hung up and complained to her
boss, who phoned the White House, incensed about the breach.
“They were asking us to prove a negative: to prove to them that
Zarqawi wasn’t part of al-Qaeda, and wasn’t working with Saddam,”
Bakos said. “And even when we tried to do that, the answer would
be: ‘So what? All those people have the same agenda, so who cares?’ ”
—
It was hardly the role Bakos had imagined for herself when she
applied to the spy agency just over two years earlier. The application
had been a lark, a casual bet she had placed with herself. Long after
she was hired, relatives back home still believed Bakos was an
administrative assistant of some kind, answering phones and
opening mail. No one from tiny Denton, Montana, had ever done
anything as glamorous as tracking terrorists for the CIA.
Bakos once dreamed of being a veterinarian, work that seemed
well suited for a young woman who grew up around horses and spent
long summer days in solitude, roaming the ranch with a favorite
stallion. Her horizons as a girl were framed by her tiny high school,
with its graduating class of nine students, and the cop shows she
loved to watch on television. But even then, Bakos knew she wanted
more.
A car accident during her freshman year at Montana State nearly
snuffed her ambitions. But Bakos was eventually able to return to
college and channel her energy into a new major—economics—and a
vague plan to work in international relations. She married, and
worked briefly for a cement manufacturer and a mining company.
Then, a few months before her thirtieth birthday, she packed her
belongings into her Ford F-150 pickup truck and drove across the
country to Washington, D.C. She was newly divorced, and had
neither a job nor firm prospects, but she had been urged by her
stepfather, a Vietnam War veteran, to try the intelligence service. He
had seen an advertisement in The Economist and figured Bakos was
as capable as anyone.
“They’re never going to hire me,” she had told him. “Why would
they hire me?”
“Just apply,” he said.
She couldn’t shake the idea. She had been thinking about working
as an economic analyst for a government agency, perhaps the State
Department. The CIA sounded like an adventure.
“Why not?” she finally asked.
Bakos filled out an application and took an exam, and, to her
amazement, an agency recruiter called back to set up an interview.
Five months after that, she was walking through the agency’s iconic
entrance, past the sixteen-foot seal of inlaid granite bearing the
agency’s logo. She worked at first as a technical specialist, deep
within the agency’s bureaucracy, but quickly made the jump to
intelligence analyst, a demanding job that combined sleuthing skills
with an ability to process vast amounts of data from the CIA’s
electronic and human spy networks. Bakos’s economics background
landed her on a team that tracked Saddam Hussein’s financial
crimes, including his rampant cheating on UN trade embargoes. But
soon the job was expanded to include other intelligence on Iraq,
including the dictator’s support for terrorist networks—which, in
turn, led her to Zarqawi.
Slender and blond, she attracted notice in a workplace that
remained predominantly male, particularly in the leadership ranks.
But what stood out most was her astonishing command of the
subject matter. Not only had she absorbed every scrap of available
data about Zarqawi and his top deputies, but she also possessed a
remarkable talent for picking out patterns from the mountains of
seemingly random detail. One of her supervisors at the time called
her “simply one of the best analysts I’ve ever met.”
“She reminds me of someone who counts cards at Las Vegas,” the
now retired senior CIA officer said. “She understands all the
permutations that come from each particular draw. That’s something
you can’t teach.”
Bakos would tell her friends that the job was the first that truly
seemed to fit her. “It’s the center of the action,” she would say. Yet,
for the first time, she also was being confronted with unpleasant
truths. One of them, demonstrated repeatedly throughout her career,
was that political leaders tended to choose selectively from a menu of
classified material in order to present a skewed, self-serving version
of reality to the voting public. All presidents had indulged in the
practice, though some perhaps more than others.
And now the lesson was being learned again. The Cheney visit had
ended with sour looks all around. The vice president and his team
left for Washington without a single addition of consequence for
their Iraq file. For some of the CIA analysts in the room, the visit was
deeply dispiriting. The White House was clearly preparing for
invasion, and Cheney and his team seemed unfazed that the available
evidence undermined the administration’s case.
“In my opinion, we didn’t know nearly enough,” Bakos said. “But I
was completely naïve about the process for going to war.”
Years later, Cheney would insist that his focus on possible Iraqi
ties to terrorism was appropriate. “I asked tough questions,” he
acknowledged in his written account of his visits to the CIA. In
surveying possible threats to the country in the wake of September
11, Cheney concluded that there was “no place more likely to be a
nexus between terrorism and [weapons of mass destruction]
capability than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.”
“With the benefit of hindsight—even taking into account that some
of the intelligence we received was faulty—that assessment still holds
true,” Cheney wrote.
Justified or not, the White House clearly wasn’t finished with
Zarqawi. The intense interest in the Jordanian’s possible ties to Iraq
would continue up to the start of the invasion, and, indeed—to Nada
Bakos’s dismay—for years after that. The murder of a U.S. diplomat
in Jordan had only dialed up the pressure even more.
—
The daylight shooting of Laurence Foley in one of Amman’s safest
neighborhoods set off something akin to panic at senior levels of the
Jordanian government. No American diplomat had ever been
seriously harmed, let alone assassinated, in Jordan in the country’s
history. King Abdullah II took charge of the official response,
meeting with CIA and State Department officials to coordinate the
initial investigations. He and his wife, Queen Rania, paid a call on
Foley’s widow to offer sympathy and assistance in preparing her
husband’s body for return to the United States. Meanwhile, the
police and the Mukhabarat began rounding up scores of Islamic
radicals for questioning in Foley’s slaying. Within forty-eight hours,
more than one hundred people were jailed, and yet intelligence
officials had no clue who was behind the killing, or why Foley, out of
the thousands of Americans living in Amman, had been targeted.
Who would go to the trouble of stalking and executing a midlevel
bureaucrat whose main duty was improving Jordan’s drinking-water
supply?
On October 30, dual escorts of U.S. marines and Jordanian
ceremonial guards carried Foley’s casket to a military transport plane
at an Amman airport, trailed by Virginia Foley and Bogart, the
couple’s golden retriever. Across town, at the Mukhabarat’s
headquarters, meanwhile, the interrogations ground on. An obscure
jihadist group’s claim of responsibility was investigated and
dismissed. Detectives squeezed, threatened, and cajoled. Weeks
passed, and not a single useful lead had been produced, other than
the snippet of a phone call, apparently made from a cheap “burner”
phone containing a stolen memory chip.
Then, in late November, one of the Mukhabarat’s informants
overheard whisperings about a strange Libyan man who had moved
into an apartment in the Marka refugee settlement, on Amman’s
outskirts. The foreigner had arrived in September, ostensibly to help
a friend open a women’s clothing shop specializing in the black
abayas and head coverings worn by the pious. The two had rented a
small storefront and posted a sign that read “The Little Princess.”
They also rented a small warehouse, to the bafflement of neighbors,
who wondered why a tiny clothing shop would require so much
storage space.
The Jordanian partner was a Palestinian named Yasser Ibrahim
Freihat, a struggling businessman with jihadist sympathies but
lacking any known connection to radical groups or crimes. The
Libyan looked much more interesting. After tracking him for several
days, the Mukhabarat became convinced of his identity: he was
Salem Ben Suweid, a veteran of the Afghan civil war who had been
arrested three years earlier, after entering Jordan under a forged
passport. Police at that time suspected that he had al-Qaeda
connections and kicked him out of the country. If this was truly
Suweid, he had managed to sneak into Jordan a second time without
being detected.
After midnight on December 3, Mukhabarat agents raided the
warehouse, the Little Princess shop, and then the apartments of the
two men. They rousted Suweid and Freihat in their bedclothes and
began a thorough ransacking of their belongings for anything
suspicious. Suweid’s house yielded a bonanza. Agents found gloves
and masks, bulletproof vests, tear-gas canisters, and over ten
thousand dollars in American currency. In a back room they found
Suweid’s weapons cache: five Kalashnikov assault rifles along with
ammunition, a handbook on explosives, and a notebook with
diagrams of potential targets. But there was no sign of a silencer or a
seven-millimeter handgun that would match the shell casings found
at Foley’s villa.
At 4:00 a.m., the two men were delivered to the Mukhabarat’s
counterterrorism branch and into the hands of Abu Haytham, the
counterterrorism section’s deputy, and Ali Bourzak, the division
chief and legendary interrogator known as the Red Devil. By 6:00
a.m., as the approaching dawn softened the clouds over the Judean
Hills to a dull gray, Suweid was a broken man. He signed a
confession, admitting to planning and carrying out the assassination
of the diplomat Laurence Foley. Freihat, his business partner, had
acted as his lookout and driver, he said.
It was quick work, even by the Mukhabarat’s standards, and Abu
Haytham knew the confession would invite suspicions. Jordanians
and even Westerners would assume that the spy agency had used
torture to produce a suspect in a murder case that had damaged the
country’s standing with its most important ally. So, with the ink on
the confession still drying, the captain resorted to a tactic he often
used when a suspect’s credibility was in question: he organized a
guided tour of the crime scene.
As a subdued Suweid sat in handcuffs in the backseat, Abu
Haytham and his driver began heading toward West Amman, home
to most of the city’s embassies and diplomats.
“Take me to the place,” he ordered.
Suweid directed the driver through a maze of side streets until the
vehicle stopped in front of the carport where Foley’s body had lain.
The house was empty now; Virginia Foley had left Jordan with her
husband’s body and would never again live in the Middle East. All
signs of the slaying had long since been scrubbed away.
The prisoner sat quietly in the backseat with his head bowed.
“Show me how it happened,” Haytham commanded.
Suweid slowly recounted the story just as he had laid it out in his
confession. He had slipped across the Jordanian border from Syria in
September with orders to find American and official Jordanian
targets to strike. After setting up the front company with Freihat, he
sent his old friend back into Syria to retrieve a cache of weapons,
including the Kalashnikovs and a handgun. Then, in October, he had
begun cruising Amman’s diplomatic district and wealthier
neighborhoods popular with Westerners.
Foley had been a chance discovery, Suweid said. Open and
gregarious, the American had made an impression during his
frequent visits to Amman’s refugee enclaves, where he had worked
with Palestinians on water projects. His friendly questions about life
in the camps had led some to suspect that he was an operative of
some kind. Everyone knew about the red Mercedes with the
distinctive diplomatic tags, which Foley continued to use even after
other embassy staffers had switched to ordinary Jordanian plates.
Suweid found Foley’s house and studied it for three days. He
noticed Foley’s white, thinning hair and late-middle-age paunch. He
observed the absence of guards and security cameras, and the low
wall that ran along the front and side of the house, offering both easy
access and ample hiding places. He jotted notes on Foley’s morning
routine: the early risings, the dog walks, the set-your-clock regularity
of his 7:20 a.m. departures for the office, always alone in the
Mercedes’s front seat.
Finally, on October 28, as the city’s muezzins were sounding the
call for dawn prayers, the Libyan and his partner climbed into a
borrowed Hyundai and headed toward Amman’s western side, with
the pistol and mask hidden in a small satchel on Suweid’s lap.
Whether Foley was a spy, Suweid did not know. But he was looking
to kill an American, and he now had his chance.
“I thought it would be easy, with just a few shots, to kill him,”
Suweid told Abu Haytham.
He showed the Mukhabarat officer the spot where he had breached
the wall, and where he had crouched while waiting for Foley to
emerge from the house. He recounted how he had shot the diplomat
without a word, and then shot again to ensure that the wounds were
fatal. He pointed to the place where Freihat had waited in the idling
Hyundai, and described how the two had hurried back to the Marka
neighborhood afterward, stopping at one point to toss the handgun
into the polluted Zarqa River. They had returned home in time to
change clothes and open the Little Princess store, precisely at 10:00
a.m.
Abu Haytham listened intently, and then asked, again, the
question that had confounded him since news of the murder first
broke:
“Why?”
“I did it,” Suweid said, “for al-Qaeda and for Zarqawi.”
—
Was Zarqawi truly involved?
Jordanian officials waited nearly two weeks before announcing the
arrests and publicly linking Zarqawi to the crime, perhaps in the
hope that the CIA would find additional evidence bolstering the
connection between the shooter and the man who was rapidly
becoming Jordan’s most famous fugitive. As it was, many Jordanians
were prepared to believe Suweid’s lawyer when he told the Amman
newspapers that the claim of a Zarqawi role had been induced
through torture.
Investigators would counter by leaking details about the
intercepted call between Suweid and his contact in Iraq, a man they
identified as Muammar Yousef al-Jaghbeer, a known Zarqawi
disciple. Jaghbeer himself was arrested years later in Iraq, and his
statements to his American captors supported the claim that Zarqawi
had personally dispatched Suweid to Jordan with a budget of fifty
thousand dollars and instructions to find and kill Americans—any
Americans.
Yet, oddly, Zarqawi never claimed responsibility for Foley’s
murder, even as he took credit for hundreds of other killings,
including those of numerous U.S. citizens. Islamists who knew
Zarqawi during his time in northeastern Iraq have insisted that he
was not involved.
Nada Bakos, one of the CIA analysts who saw the intelligence in
real time, said some key questions were never fully answered.
“The evidence was ambiguous,” she would later say. “We were
convinced of Zarqawi’s role, analytically. Whether you could put
together a criminal case, that’s a different story.”
Still, the analytical case provided more than sufficient grounds for
action. A grave crime had been committed against a U.S. government
employee on official duty overseas, and there were reasons for
believing that Zarqawi was at least complicit.
Justice would have to be served, and that meant capturing Zarqawi
himself. Fortunately, the U.S. government knew, in those waning
weeks of the autumn of 2002, exactly where he was.
6
“This war is going to happen”
The man who would become the CIA’s chief spy in northern Iraq had
barely heard of the suspected terrorist called Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
when he arrived in the country in the summer of 2002. But within
weeks, Charles “Sam” Faddis knew the Jordanian’s home address,
down to the square meter on his targeting grid.
The chances to go after Zarqawi would never be better than this.
Faddis, a six-foot-two navy captain’s son from the Appalachian
foothills of southwestern Pennsylvania, had slipped into Iraq with a
team of CIA operatives to gather intelligence on Iraqi military units
as well as Ansar al-Islam, the militant oddballs who lived on the
Iranian border and maintained loose ties with al-Qaeda. Though
already forty-seven and a lawyer, he had pushed hard for the
assignment. Faddis had been anxious to find a way to get into the
fight after the September 11 attacks, and his counterterrorism
background, Middle East experience, and mastery of Turkish had
made him particularly suited to lead the mission. Now he and his
team were living in safe houses and conducting surveillance of Ansar
al-Islam’s base, home to Zarqawi and several dozen other refugee
jihadis from Afghanistan. Donning Kurdish clothes, the officers
sometimes crept so close to the base they could clearly see the
perimeter guards with their long beards and slung AK-47s.
The target was remote in the extreme. Sargat, the hamlet where
Zarqawi had landed after his flight from Afghanistan, was the last
stop on the rutted road leading to Iraq’s border with the Islamic
Republic of Iran. A few miles to the northwest was Halabja, a town
forever associated with one of the great genocidal atrocities of the
late twentieth century. There, on March 16, 1988, Saddam Hussein
attacked Kurdish villagers with deadly nerve gas, killing as many as
five thousand men, women, and children in history’s worst chemical
attack against a civilian population. The region never fully recovered;
after the first Iraq war, in 1991, daily patrols by U.S. aircraft kept
Saddam’s planes and tanks out of Kurdish settlements, but the
absence of a central authority gave rise to local militias and warlords
that skirmished with Iraqi ground troops and with each other.
By the time Zarqawi arrived, the Ansar al-Islam militants had
already carved out a small enclave that also included the town of
Khurmal and several other small villages, which they administered
with Taliban-like zeal. Officially at war with both the Iraqi regime
and Kurdish nationalist groups, they built hillside defense works
offering a commanding view of the mountain passes, as well as
escape routes that led across the border into Iran. The main base in
Sargat consisted of seven small buildings, without heat or electricity
except for a single generator, encircled by earthen walls and bunkers
festooned with black banners. A separate cluster of cinder-block
dwellings served as housing and training facilities for Zarqawi’s men,
who mostly avoided blending with their Kurdish-speaking
counterparts. Locals would remember them as a mix of Arab
nationalities with uniformly stern views about behavior and dress.
Some villagers grumbled afterward about the impracticality of some
of the Islamists’ rules in a community where both men and women
spent long hours tending livestock and crops.
“They used to force women to wear the cover and a gown while
going to the fields and gardens to work,” one man complained to a
TV interviewer a few months after the militants had left.
But the CIA’s interest in the Islamists had little to do with religious
codes. Now that al-Qaeda had been chased from Afghanistan, the
Ansar al-Islam base represented the largest known gathering of
militants with ties—albeit minor ones—to Bin Laden’s group.
Faddis’s orders were to assess the strength of the combined force of
Arab and local Islamists living in the Iraqi enclave. If possible, he
was also to determine how, if at all, Ansar’s militants were
coordinating their operations with Iraqi government forces.
Regardless of whether al-Qaeda and Iraq had colluded in the past,
the White House worried that Saddam Hussein might use terrorists
as proxies to strike a blow against the West. Friendly Kurds had
reported seeing chemical weapons in Ansar’s camp, deepening
suspicions within the White House that Saddam was arming the
Islamist militants for a future terrorist strike.
The CIA team leader was skeptical. Faddis had spent years in the
region, and he understood the bitter hatred nearly all Kurds felt
toward the Iraqi tyrant after years of genocidal policies that had
wiped out two thousand Kurdish villages and nearly two hundred
thousand ethnic Kurds in the 1980s. For Kurdish militants to unite
with Saddam for any reason was nearly impossible to fathom.
Still, Faddis told his team to keep an open mind.
“Look, if we can produce solid intelligence that proves Saddam is
in bed with al-Qaeda, that’s fabulous,” he recalled telling his men
during a group huddle in the summer of 2002. “But we’re not saying
anything remotely like that until we get solid evidence that’s
happening. We’re not going to pass off rumors and bullshit as the
truth.”
Faddis’s group consisted of eight men, all of them with extensive
military experience and two of them members of the CIA’s secret
paramilitary unit known as the Special Activities Division. Their base
was a small house provided to them by friendly Kurds a few miles
from the Ansar camp. It served as an operations center as well as
living quarters for the men, who spent much of their days conducting
surveillance and joining in the questioning of captured militants
seized by friendly Kurds. Their access to Ansar and al-Qaeda
prisoners was extraordinary; the Americans were able to interrogate
dozens of prisoners, and they considered each new account against a
growing database of intelligence gleaned from earlier detainees as
well as their own surveillance of Ansar’s camps. The findings were
beamed to CIA headquarters in the form of hundreds of classified
electronic messages, relayed to Langley via Faddis’s satellite phone.
Faddis quickly grasped the stark differences between the Afghan
exiles—mostly Arabic-speakers with at least rudimentary education
and knowledge of the world—and the simple Kurdish farmers and
goat herders who filled Ansar’s ranks. Yet the two groups shared the
same ideology and a common interest in the tradecraft of terrorism.
Together they had set about creating a miniature Afghanistan in the
Iraqi mountains, an Islamic theocracy whose harsh codes were
enforced by the gun and the blade.
It was true, he learned, that the militants harbored a deadly secret:
a stockpile of poisons they were testing for possible use in terrorist
attacks abroad. Through the CIA’s interrogations, and with
additional help from well-placed spies, the nature of Ansar’s poisons
fixation became clear. The group had managed to acquire dozens of
gallons of deadly chemicals, including cyanide, and a small supply of
castor beans for making highly lethal ricin. Each of the ingredients
could be purchased easily and legally—potassium cyanide is used in
film developing—and there was no sign that Ansar’s militants
possessed the equipment or know-how for making real chemical
weapons. Still, the experiments seemed serious enough. Inside their
makeshift lab, amateur technicians mixed cyanide with skin cream
and other cosmetics. Their rumored experiments on stray dogs were
later confirmed in videotapes that were discovered in the fort’s ruins.
“Their abilities are crude, but their aspirations are huge,” Faddis
remembered thinking at the time. “They are out for blood, and they
are no joke.”
The other question preoccupying the White House—whether Iraqi
forces were somehow helping the Islamists—was even easier to
unravel. Faddis’s team picked up the trail of suspected Iraqi
operatives in the area near the Ansar camp, and confirmed that the
men were members of Saddam Hussein’s feared intelligence service.
But Faddis soon discovered that the Iraqis were doing exactly as he
was: trying to collect intelligence on the militants. The Iraqis
watched from afar and tried to recruit informants—a risky
proposition, given Ansar’s history of poisoning suspected spies and
displaying their severed heads on stakes outside the fort. Far from
colluding with the Islamists, the Iraqis appeared fearful of them.
Still, the Bush administration had promised to hunt down al-
Qaeda-allied terrorists wherever it found them, and to Faddis, this
bunch fit the definition perfectly.
The United States had a “golden opportunity,” Faddis wrote in one
of his cables to CIA headquarters in Langley. Ansar al-Islam was a
terrorist organization with an ambitious international agenda. It was
harboring dozens of Arab militants with known links to al-Qaeda.
More disturbingly, it possessed chemical poisons that could
potentially be used with horrifying effect in the cities of Europe or
the United States. But the threat in its entirety could be erased,
Faddis wrote, with a single well-placed blow.
“We knew exactly where every one of these Islamist terrorists
slept,” Faddis said afterward, describing his detailed accounts to CIA
headquarters. “We knew where each gun was, literally down to every
machine-gun position and mortar tube.”
Best of all, he added, “None of them knew we were there.”
As Faddis hoped, his cables created a stir in Washington. At
Langley, and later at the Defense Department, a series of meetings
was convened to discuss what to do. At the Pentagon, a forty-eight-
year-old brigadier general named Stanley McChrystal—soon to rise
to prominence as the head of special forces in Iraq—was asked to
come up with options for attacking the base. One idea was to hit the
Islamists with a missile barrage, followed by a helicopter assault by
teams of American and Kurdish commandos, who would scoop up
any evidence of biological or chemical weapons production.
The plan was deemed workable, but the Bush White House split
sharply over whether to order the raid. Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld favored the strike, but other senior aides, including
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, advised against it. The
administration was already deep into the planning for an invasion of
Iraq, opponents said, and any strike on Iraqi soil carried the risk of
an escalation that could start the war prematurely. Other critics of
the plan simply worried that McChrystal’s proposal was too
sprawling. “It’s big enough to be an invasion,” one of the brigadier’s
superiors complained. “You were in special operations. Can’t they do
anything small anymore?”
Bush decided to nix the plan, for now.
“It was like getting punched in the gut,” Faddis said later. “We
were all putting ourselves at risk. When the mission was sidelined,
you knew right then and there what it meant. We weren’t going to
pull the trigger now. And when the time came when we did pull the
trigger, the important targets will no longer be here.”
Faddis tried again, suggesting a less ambitious campaign that
would rely on local Kurds to do most of the fighting. With a little air
support, a few 150-millimeter mortars, and some logistical help from
the CIA team, the local guys could destroy the base on their own, he
argued.
“For the love of God, just give us two B-52s, or just the mortars,
and we’ll get it done,” Faddis pleaded. “Give it to us tomorrow, and
we’ll get it done the day after. Al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam don’t
have a clue we are here. Total stealth.”
The response from Langley was the same.
“I hear you, Sam,” came the reluctant reply, according to Faddis.
“All I can tell you is, that’s the way it is. The last time I checked, the
president outranked you.”
Faddis and his team remained in northern Iraq with orders to
continue their surveillance. Zarqawi, meanwhile, was free to build
his network without fear of attack or interference. CIA officials at the
time understood that the Jordanian was becoming increasingly
dangerous. As Tenet, director of the spy agency, later noted, Zarqawi
was clearly on the move in those prewar days, training his recruits at
the Ansar al-Islam camp while dispatching envoys to Middle Eastern
and European capitals, seeking money, volunteers, and allies. “He
was able to forge ties between Algerians, Moroccans, Pakistanis,
Libyans and other Arab extremists located through Europe,” Tenet
would write of Zarqawi in his memoirs. “Over several months of
tireless links we identified Zarqawi-connected terrorist cells in more
than 30 countries.”
Apprised of this, the Bush administration held one final debate on
the possibility of a strike against Zarqawi and the Ansar al-Islam
camp. It happened in early January 2003, just two months before
the start of the Iraq war, and weeks before then Secretary of State
Colin Powell was to give his now famous speech to the UN Security
Council, outlining the rationale for invasion. By then, White House
officials were reluctant to take any action that might detract from the
all-important battle for public opinion, according to an account of
the meeting in Days of Fire, the journalist Peter Baker’s acclaimed
history of the Bush White House. A strike on the militant base now
would undermine one of the pillars of Powell’s upcoming speech: the
existence of terrorist networks on Iraqi soil.
“That would wipe out my briefing,” Powell said, according to
Baker’s account. Besides, he added, “We’re going to get [Ansar al-
Islam] in a few weeks anyway.”
—
The administration was still debating a possible strike on Zarqawi’s
camp, when, on January 23, 2003, a delegation of U.S. generals
arrived in Amman for a visit cloaked in unusual secrecy. Reporters
were kept far away when General Tommy Franks, commander of the
Pentagon’s U.S. Central Command, landed at the airport, and the
palace imposed a blackout on details of his meetings with Jordanian
officials, including whether King Abdullah II had participated. Later,
anonymous military sources revealed the purpose of the visit in
carefully worded leaks to the Western press: with a war against Iraq
just weeks away, the United States was preparing to offer Jordan its
advanced Patriot missile-defense system, in hopes of securing the
Hashemite kingdom’s support when the shooting began.
“We are considering it,” one of the members of the U.S. team told a
Jordanian journalist during the visit. In fact, the missile batteries
would be shipped to Jordan within days, along with six new F-16
fighter-bombers, bolstering Jordan’s defenses in preparation for a
possible war next door.
But the U.S. assistance came at a price. For months, the Bush
White House had been pressuring Jordan to get behind its plan to
topple Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. The squeeze had begun in
the late summer, when the king met with Bush and his top deputies
during an August 2, 2002, visit to the White House. The usually
charming Texan was cool and stiff, as Abdullah recalled later. Aides
warned the monarch that the president was upset over comments he
had made to a British newspaper, accusing the Bush team of being
“fixated on Iraq” and determined to start a war that would “really
open a Pandora’s box in the Middle East.”
Bush, crunching on ice cubes as the two men sat in the Oval Office,
said he hadn’t yet decided whether to invade Iraq. “When I do, you
will know,” he said. He called Iraqi president Saddam Hussein a
“thug” who had to be challenged. “I don’t want people to think, 20
years from now, that I chickened out on confronting him,” he said.
Later that day, Bush brought up Iraq again, this time framing the
standoff with Saddam as a moral, even religious obligation.
“You and I have two great fathers, and we both believe in God,”
Bush said, as Abdullah later recalled. “We have an opportunity to do
the right thing.”
Abdullah was stunned. He despised Saddam, and he knew
America’s vast military could quickly destroy the Iraqi dictator’s
army. He had offered, without public acknowledgment, support for
the U.S.-led assault on the Taliban in Afghanistan, and even
volunteered Jordan’s help in tracking down Osama bin Laden. Yet he
was convinced that war against the Iraqi tyrant would be a colossal
mistake. An attack by U.S. troops on an Arab leader—even one as
unpopular as Saddam—would inflame the region, putting Jordan at
risk. But it was clear that Bush had made up his mind. Back in
Amman, the monarch told his aides to get ready. “This war is going
to happen,” he said.
Through the late summer and fall, the war drums grew
increasingly urgent, and so did the appeals to Jordan to back the
administration’s war plan. A steady stream of American politicians
and generals visited Amman, pressing the king to allow U.S. forces to
stage along the country’s border, or to fly sorties through Jordanian
airspace. Vice President Dick Cheney phoned Abdullah personally to
ask for permission to use Jordan as a springboard for the assault on
Baghdad. Against the intense wrangling over war preparations, the
shock over the Foley assassination quickly faded.
Abdullah ultimately claimed a middle ground. His father, Hussein,
had famously opposed the first Gulf War, a stance that set back the
country’s relations with both Washington and key Arab allies.
Abdullah likewise would maintain a posture of opposition to a
conflict that Jordanians overwhelmingly rejected as unjust, and he
refused to allow significant numbers of U.S. troops into the country.
But he did agree to offer the Americans behind-the-scenes support,
mostly in the critical arena of covert operations involving small
groups of U.S. commandos.
The decision to accept the Patriot missile batteries was a last-
minute concession. Publicly, the monarchy could claim that the
missile-defense system would shield Jordanians from any errant
Iraqi SCUDs that might threaten Jordanian territory. In reality, the
Americans wanted an additional safeguard against a possible Iraqi
attack on Israel in retaliation for the invasion. It was yet another sign
that war was coming.
“I tried to walk the tightrope of opposing the war and staying out
of it,” Abdullah acknowledged afterward. “But I was certain of one
thing: the longer the war lasts, the more terrible the consequences
would be.”
7
“Now his fame would extend throughout the Arab
world”
The world’s introduction to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi came on
February 5, 2003, in the sixty-first minute of Colin Powell’s speech to
the UN Security Council making the case for war against Iraq. It
began with a declarative sentence that, like many others in the
seventy-five-minute presentation, was technically true but widely off
the mark.
“Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden
and his al-Qaeda lieutenants,” Powell began, just before Zarqawi’s
bearded image appeared on a large screen behind the council’s
circular table.
Nada Bakos, watching on a TV monitor at work, heard the line and
cringed. Yes, Zarqawi lived in the remote mountains of northeastern
Iraq—in an area off limits to Iraq’s military. To suggest that Saddam
Hussein was providing sanctuary to him was contrary to everything
that Bakos, the Zarqawi expert, knew to be true. It was like claiming
that America’s twenty-second president, Grover Cleveland, had
“harbored” Geronimo, the famed Apache chieftain of the frontier
West who attacked settlers and Blue Coats from his base along the
U.S.-Mexican border.
She continued watching, transfixed.
“Iraqi officials deny accusations of ties with al-Qaeda. These
denials are simply not credible,” Powell continued. “Last year an al-
Qaeda associate bragged that the situation in Iraq was, quote, ‘good,’
that Baghdad could be transited quickly.”
True enough. But were the terrorists gaining passage through
official Iraqi complicity, or because of weaknesses in the country’s
notoriously corrupt and inefficient border security?
To those who knew the subject matter best, the speech was an
extraordinary performance, an artful rendering of a selective set of
facts that favored invasion. Powell later described the presentation as
one of the biggest blunders of his career, a mistake he would
attribute to sloppy intelligence and wishful thinking at senior levels
of the Bush administration. In reality, every word of the Zarqawi
portion of the speech had been written by senior officials of the CIA
after weeks of rancorous debate with White House officials over what
should and should not be left out. To his credit, Powell rejected out
of hand an earlier script written by White House aides, one that
included much stronger claims about terrorist links gleaned from
untested informants and unconfirmed rumors picked up by the
Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.
Still, there were lines in the speech that baffled Bakos and her CIA
colleagues. Powell acknowledged at the beginning that Zarqawi and
his Ansar al-Islam allies operated in an area outside Saddam
Hussein’s control. But he then asserted that “Baghdad has an agent
in the most senior levels of the radical organization,” suggesting that
Iraq effectively controlled the group. Nothing in the CIA’s vetted
reports confirmed that such a relationship existed.
Powell paused at one point to mention the assassination of
Laurence Foley, the diplomat killed in Amman three months before,
a “despicable act” that he credited to Zarqawi. After the slaying, he
said, the State Department had contacted Iraqi intelligence through a
third country—it was Jordan, officials later confirmed—demanding
that the terrorist leader be turned over for trial.
“Iraqi officials protest that they are not aware of the whereabouts
of Zarqawi or of any of his associates,” Powell said. “Again, these
protests are not credible. We know of Zarqawi’s activities in
Baghdad.”
The assertions were coming faster than Bakos could mentally
counter them. It was becoming painful. This was not how
intelligence analysis was supposed to work. When Cheney had made
similar claims on Sunday talk shows, Bakos often found herself
yelling at the television screen, as though she were contesting a
referee’s blown call in a football game. Now Powell, like Cheney, was
“asserting to the public as fact something that we found to be
anything but,” she later said.
Ultimately, the speech would tarnish Powell’s reputation and
further undermine the credibility of the Bush administration with
key allies, particularly after claims that Iraq harbored weapons of
mass destruction turned out to be false.
The other painful side effect would not be fully appreciated until
much later. With one speech, the White House had transformed
Zarqawi from an unknown jihadist to an international celebrity and
the toast of the Islamist movement. The image of the mysterious
Zarqawi glowering at world leaders from the UN Security Council’s
screen sent hordes of reporters scurrying to their computers to figure
out who he was. Newspaper reporters and TV crews flocked to
Jordan to write profiles and interview people who claimed to know
him. Zarqa, the gritty industrial town of the terrorist’s youth, now
had a new favorite son.
Watching the transformation with special bitterness were the
Jordanians who had tried for so long to keep Zarqawi on a leash.
Samih Battikhi, then chief of the Mukhabarat, erupted in a rage
when he saw Zarqawi’s photo behind Powell at the UN Security
Council.
“This is bullshit!” Battikhi shouted.
Abu Mutaz, the young counterterrorism officer who had once
sought to influence Zarqawi’s behavior, was sitting with a colleague
in a Dead Sea hotel bar when Powell appeared on the TV screen
talking about his former case.
“We were sick about it,” Abu Mutaz said, recalling his reaction that
day. “I kept asking, ‘How could they do this? How can they think this
way?’ Eventually, I decided it must be politics. Just politics.”
Even some of Zarqawi’s old friends and allies in Amman were
amazed by the turn of events. On Web sites that promote jihadist
causes, Islamists swapped stories and gossip about Zarqawi’s
exploits, and bloggers wrote paeans to his courage and manhood,
recalled Hasan Abu Hanieh, who knew Zarqawi in the 1990s.
“With that speech, Colin Powell gave him popularity and
notoriety,” said Abu Hanieh, the Islamist-turned-author from
Amman. “Before anyone knew who he was, here was the secretary of
state of the world’s most powerful government saying Zarqawi was
important. Now his fame would extend throughout the Arab world,
from Iraq and Syria to the Maghreb and the Arabian Peninsula.
People were joining al-Qaeda because of him.”
It was one of the great ironies of the age, Abu Hanieh said. In
deciding to use the unsung Zarqawi as an excuse for launching a new
front in the war against terrorism, the White House had managed to
launch the career of one of the century’s great terrorists.
“And Zarqawi responded,” Hanieh added, “by turning all their
warnings about terrorism into reality.”
—
Sam Faddis was in another part of Iraq in March 2003, when, more
than a week after the start of the U.S. invasion, the Bush
administration finally authorized an attack on Ansar al-Islam’s
camp. Dozens of Tomahawk missiles slammed into the compound at
Sargat, leveling the buildings and destroying the equipment the
Islamists used to mix their poisons. U.S. commandos, backed by
hundreds of Kurdish militiamen, chased the remaining Islamists into
hills, where some managed to scurry to safety across the Iranian
border. From the dead and captured, the soldiers recovered
passports and identity cards from more than a dozen countries, from
Algeria to Yemen. But there was no sign of Zarqawi. Other CIA
operatives later confirmed that the Jordanian had by then already
moved to Baghdad to await the arrival of the U.S. troops.
Among the first Americans to enter the shattered Ansar camp was
a CIA operative who had been among the eight members of Faddis’s
surveillance team. In his description to Faddis, the man described a
ruined base and his sinking feeling that an opportunity had slipped
away.
“Everybody who mattered left before we got there,” the CIA officer
told Faddis. “All that was left were the foot soldiers. The cannon
fodder.
“It was better than nothing,” he said. “But we missed our shot.”
BOOK II
IRAQ
8
“No longer a victory”
The Iraqi officer was crying, again. He sat at the far side of the table,
head cradled in shackled hands, sobbing with such abandon that he
could be heard outside the small trailer that served as an
interrogation cell. He cried until it was impossible to make out his
words, if indeed there had been any.
Nada Bakos paused to see if the man could compose himself. The
room was stifling and smelled of stale clothes and sweat, and a
solitary air conditioner struggled vainly against the 110-degree Iraqi
heat. Bakos was exhausted, mentally and physically, yet she resolved
to keep her own emotions in check.
She tried the question again, calmly.
“Were you aware that Zarqawi was in the country?”
More sobs. Hasan al-Izbah, until recently a senior manager in
Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service, was a broken man, and it was
unclear whether fear or humiliation had brought him to his current
state. He would not look at the Iraqi translator, who politely repeated
Bakos’s questions, or the American MP who watched from the
doorway. He could not bring himself to look anywhere near Bakos, as
though being in the presence of an American CIA interrogator—and
a female officer, at that—was a fate too embarrassing to contemplate.
Bakos tried a different angle.
“What kind of contact was there between Zarqawi and the
Mukhabarat?”
Silence. This wasn’t working.
Everything within Bakos’s line of vision was steeped in dreariness:
drab trailer walls, the salvaged furniture, the mottled greens and
browns of the soldiers’ desert-camo uniforms, the graying stubble of
the prisoner’s quivering chin. It was weeks after the fall of Baghdad
and less than a month after her first face-to-face encounter with U.S-
occupied Iraq. Now she spent her days in a bombed-cratered air base
north of Baghdad, using whatever combination of charm, guile, and
menace she could muster to glean secrets from men who until
recently had been running spy operations for Iraq’s intelligence
service.
It was frustrating work, and not only because of the unrelenting
grimness of the task, or because Bakos—who had never served in the
military or in law enforcement—felt underqualified. What grated her
most were the scripted questions from Washington and Langley,
pushing her ever harder to find something that Bakos knew did not
exist.
The mood in Baghdad was changing. Bakos and her fellow CIA
officers could sense the shift during their still-unconstrained travels
into the city’s neighborhoods to meet contacts or visit a favorite ice-
cream place. The smiles and shy waves of the early weeks of the
occupation had long since been replaced by sullen stares and drawn
shades. Iraq was rapidly tiring of occupation, while the Bush
administration’s attention seemed permanently fixed on settling the
score with its political rivals in Washington. The moral
underpinnings of the White House’s war effort were collapsing like
rotten timbers, and aides to the president were working furiously to
control the damage. The weapons of mass destruction that had
loomed so threateningly in Bush’s speeches had not been found after
four months of searching. Likewise, Americans had seen nothing of
Saddam Hussein’s supposed links to al-Qaeda and other terrorist
groups. Congress was beginning to push for answers, and so, in the
summer of 2003, the White House ratcheted up the pressure on the
CIA’s analysts to find some.
Washington was particularly interested in any gleanings from
conversations with former senior security officials who would know
about the Iraqi intelligence service’s secret dealings with foreigners
and might be persuaded to talk in exchange for money or special
favors. “What are you learning about terrorist links?” Langley
wanted to know.
“It doesn’t stop,” Bakos thought to herself, astonished and
perplexed. Indeed, the questions continued throughout the rest of
2003 and the following year, and the next.
Occasionally, there would be a breakthrough of a sort: a statement
from a detainee, or a recovered document that seemed to offer
something definitive. Bakos witnessed one such moment, when a
homesick Iraqi official was persuaded for a brief moment to reveal
what he knew.
The question was, was anyone at the White House listening?
—
Bakos had volunteered for Iraq, despite her own misgivings about
the war.
“We had invaded, and now it was all hands on deck,” she
remembered afterward.
She landed in May 2003 in a country that struck her as wild and
chaotic and more than a little sinister for a young intelligence officer
on her first war posting. The country itself was in better shape than
she had imagined. Even after two wars and a decade of economic
sanctions, Baghdad was largely intact, and certainly better off than
some of the other Middle Eastern capitals she had visited. She drove
to appointments on broad, palm-tree-lined avenues and well-
engineered freeways with green directional signs that reminded her
of the ones back home.
Life at work during the early months was a succession of long days
in the interrogation trailer with breaks for meals and sleep. U.S.
forces now held dozens of Saddam Hussein’s generals and
intelligence chiefs, some of whom would surely know the locations of
any secret WMD stashes, or possess insight into terrorist plots that
had been engineered with Iraqi support.
American officials hoped that some of them could be persuaded to
cooperate if offered the right inducement, such as emigration papers
or cash. Among these men, none appeared more promising on paper
than the weeping Hasan al-Izbah. The Iraqi was not only a high-
ranking intelligence official; he also happened to be Iraq’s official
liaison to Palestinian militants regarded by the West as terrorists.
Saddam Hussein had openly backed violent groups such as the Abu
Nidal Organization, in part to shore up his anti-Israel credentials
with fellow Arabs. Someone within Saddam’s spy agency could
illuminate the murky world of Iraqi terrorist links, and perhaps it
could be Izbah—if Bakos could persuade him to talk.
Bakos had sat across the table from numerous Iraqi officials
during her first weeks in the country, but she had never met with one
quite like this. He was surprisingly young, perhaps in his late thirties,
and he bore little resemblance to the thuggish operatives who
seemed to make up the bulk of Saddam’s intelligence arm. Clean-
shaven except for his prison stubble, and lacking even the standard-
issue mustache worn by nearly all Iraqi government officials, he had
the polished look of a Western business executive. But whatever
confidence he might have had before the invasion had collapsed into
soggy mush. When he wasn’t crying during interrogations, he mostly
shut down.
Bakos could see the man was frightened, and she leaned on her
translator to try to discover why. Izbah’s story was complicated, but
more than anything he was afraid for his family, especially a young
son. Saddam’s Baath Party and its intelligence service had killed and
tortured thousands of Iraqis over the decades. Now they were out of
power, and survivors and relatives would be seeking revenge. What
would happen to his children, especially with Izbah in prison?
Bakos thought briefly and offered a small gesture.
“If you help me,” she said, “I can let you contact your family.”
Izbah softened, thinking about the offer. Then he nodded his
assent. The old regime was finished, and he had nothing to lose and
potentially much to gain if he talked. Here, finally, was a chance to
shine a torchlight into one of the deepest dungeons of Saddam’s
security network, guided by a man who knew every crevice.
Bakos guided Izbah through a web of Iraqi terrorist connections,
letting him describe in detail the Palestinian and Iranian operatives
that Saddam had supported over the years, at least until he grew
weary of them and ordered them killed. But when the subject turned
to al-Qaeda, Izbah shrugged. There was nothing to talk about, he
said. Perhaps there had been a low-level meeting years earlier, a
discreet encounter intended to size up the other side. But nothing
had come of it. Iraq’s secular regime persecuted and killed Islamic
extremists, and al-Qaeda’s leaders abhorred the Iraqi dictator. The
distrust was too great to allow even the most rudimentary
cooperation.
“What about Zarqawi?” Bakos finally asked.
“We had heard of him,” Izbah said. “But there was no
relationship.”
Nothing at all? Bakos pressed further to see if Izbah would hedge
his answer.
“If you had met him,” she asked, “is he the kind of person you
would have tried to recruit?”
The answer was simple and emphatic: “No.”
Izbah had kept his promise, and now Bakos fulfilled hers. A phone
was brought in, and the former spy chief was allowed to call his wife
for the first time since his capture, weeks earlier. Bakos stayed in the
room for a moment to make sure the call went through. When a voice
came on the other end of the line, Izbah again broke down in a geyser
of tears.
Leaving the Iraqi in the care of the American MP, she edged
toward the door and slipped away.
—
The line of visa applicants outside the Jordanian Embassy was small
for a Thursday, even one in scorching early August, when
temperatures routinely top one hundred degrees before 10:00 a.m.
Only a few dozen Iraqis had arrived by midmorning on August 7,
2003, forming a queue that hugged the shade of a concrete wall that
ran along the front of the building. Dusty taxis and ancient sedans
rolled to the curb to discharge passengers as the Iraqi guards, their
uniforms already stained with sweat, gestured and barked with more
than the usual gusto, evidence of a jitteriness that had infected the
staff in the past twenty-four hours. A day earlier, someone had
tossed a handwritten note over the wall, warning that the compound
was about to come under attack.
The embassy’s security detail had taken the note seriously, yet they
were mystified by the strange threat. The kind of carnage that would
soon become so familiar—the car bombs and suicide assailants that
blew up outside mosques and marketplaces—was still unknown in
Baghdad. And why would the embassy be singled out? Jordan, after
all, was a brother Arab state that had deep historic and cultural ties
with its Iraqi neighbor, and the embassy itself, a handsome two-story
villa in one of Baghdad’s most fashionable districts, served mainly to
assist Iraqi travelers. Amman, so stable and so affordably close, had
long been a preferred destination for middle-class families looking
for a shopping holiday or simply an escape. The high demand for
visas was the main reason the Jordanians erected the embassy’s high
wall, built not for security but to control the daily crowds that had
become as much a part of the scenery as the palm trees along
Arbataash Street.
And so the sudden appearance of a shabby green passenger van at
the embassy’s front gate stirred concern, but not panic. As the
sentries watched, the young driver pulled to a spot within a few feet
of the concrete barrier, then hopped out of the vehicle and began
walking away from the embassy building at a fast clip. In the seconds
before the guards could make their way over to investigate, the bomb
hidden inside the van’s cargo bay was detonated by remote control.
The blast was so powerful it sent the van’s front section spiraling
skyward to land on a rooftop two buildings down. It tore a thirty-foot
hole in the embassy’s barrier wall, killing guards and visa applicants
and crumpling the frames of passing cars. The explosion shook a
nearby children’s hospital so violently that some doctors thought the
hospital itself was under attack, until the waves of wounded began
flooding the emergency ward. Seventeen bodies were recovered—all
of them Iraqis—including entire families with children who were
incinerated inside passing cars. The severed head of a young girl, her
long hair scorched and tangled, lay in the street, discovered by
passersby who covered it with cardboard and then, amid the horror
and confusion, began frantically digging in the hard dirt to try to
bury it.
Never, since the start of the U.S. invasion, had anyone deliberately
attacked such an overtly civilian target. Across the capital, enraged
Iraqis flailed at phantom suspects. Some blamed the Americans,
citing rumors about a U.S. helicopter that had been seen firing a
missile at the time of the explosion. Others faulted the Jordanians
themselves, arguing that the monarchy had brought trouble to their
country by secretly working against Saddam—or maybe, according to
an opposing theory, by secretly working with Saddam. The crowd
that gathered outside the wrecked embassy compound grew
increasingly agitated until, at last, dozens of men surged into the
building, smashing portraits of King Abdullah II and his father, King
Hussein, and chasing embassy workers down the street.
At official levels, the reaction to the bombing was equally
confused. Jordan’s information minister speculated that the
bombing was the work of an Iraqi political faction with grievances
against the Jordanian monarchy. A Pentagon spokesman saw al-
Qaeda behind the attack, though the Bush administration’s security
expert in Baghdad ruled out any role by the terrorist group. The most
prescient observation came from L. Paul Bremer III, the Bush-
appointed head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, who thought
the blame might lie with foreign fighters connected with Ansar al-
Islam, the Islamist extremist group that had operated in Iraq’s
remote northeastern mountains before the invasion. U.S. intelligence
operatives were seeing evidence that some of Ansar’s fighters had
migrated into Iraqi cities to prepare to carry out attacks like this one.
“We may see more of this,” Bremer said of the car bombing, in one
of several interviews granted to American reporters that week. “We
have seen a new technique for Iraq that we have never seen before.”
Regardless of who was behind it, the attack deepened the unease
that Iraqis and some Americans were beginning to feel. For U.S.
soldiers, routine patrols through Iraqi neighborhoods were becoming
ever more hazardous, with near-daily ambushes and sniper fire.
Within hours of the embassy bombing, a buried bomb detonated as
an American Humvee rolled past, killing two GIs and sparking a
firefight that continued into the evening. Another soldier was fatally
shot as he stood guard duty.
For ordinary Iraqis, the killings of innocents outside the embassy
reinforced a sense of abandonment, a feeling that the American
occupiers cared little about Iraqi self-governance and were unwilling
or unable to provide basic security. “When Saddam was in power we
could protect the embassies. Now there are no procedures to do
that,” Gatia Zahra, a young Iraqi police lieutenant told American
journalists as he watched rescue workers pick through the embassy
debris for body parts.
In Washington, U.S. officials promised to assist in the
investigation while making clear that they regarded the bombing as
an internal police matter for Iraqi authorities, and one of many
inevitable bumps on the road to building a stable democracy.
President George W. Bush felt compelled to interrupt his August
vacation to reassure the country that his administration’s Iraqi
venture was on track.
“We’ve made good progress,” he told White House pool reporters
at his Crawford, Texas, ranch. “Iraq is more secure.” Asked about
comments by one Pentagon official suggesting that American forces
might have to stay in Iraq for as long as two years, Bush declined to
answer directly. “However long it takes to win the war on terror, this
administration is committed to doing that,” he said.
Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, also brought
up the bombing while speaking to a group of African American
journalists that evening in Dallas. She suggested that the turmoil in
Iraq was not unlike the birth pains experienced by Germany as it was
refashioned into a democratic state after World War II.
“Remnants of the regime and other extremists are attacking
progress—just as they did today with the bombing of the Jordanian
Embassy,” she said. “And coalition soldiers continue to face mortal
dangers. But democracy is not easy.”
This day had surely been one of the hardest. More people had died
than on any single day since the war’s combat phase had ended, and
a new type of terrorism had emerged, one that targeted civilians with
powerful explosives hidden in cars. It was all so contrary to the
image presented by the White House—that of a reborn Iraq striding
confidently toward stability and democracy—that Rice seemed to go
out of her way to lower expectations.
“The road is hard,” she said.
In fact, it was far harder than anyone at the White House had
dared to imagine. Before August ended, Baghdad would see two
more car bombings, each more destructive than the last. By the time
the president returned to Washington in September, the nature of
the conflict had radically, and permanently, changed.
—
The target of the second blast was perhaps the only foreigner in the
Iraqi capital whom everyone genuinely liked. Sergio Vieira de Mello,
the dashing Brazilian who headed the United Nations mission in
Iraq, was a diplomat’s diplomat, a savvy and experienced
peacemaker who could be elegantly charming in five languages.
Officially neutral on the war itself, he was the face of the
international effort to put Iraq back together after the shooting
ended. He was a tireless advocate for Iraqis, overseeing delivery of
food and medicine while refereeing squabbles among Iraqi factions
and between the Iraqis and the Americans. In the late summer of
2003, as temperatures and tensions soared, the man everyone knew
as “Sergio” was the embodiment of dignified calm, as crisp as one of
his trademark silk ties that never seemed to wilt or sag even on the
hottest days.
Vieira de Mello was a frequent presence at the heavily fortified
bases and converted palaces that served as command centers for the
generals and civilian appointees who ran U.S.-occupied Iraq. Once,
he stopped by the intelligence operations center where Nada Bakos
worked, introducing himself to the CIA officers and getting into
polite but pointed arguments with senior managers just beyond the
earshot of the American analysts. But the diplomat insisted that UN
offices be kept free of the symbols of military occupation. He set up
his own command post in Baghdad’s Canal Hotel, a low-slung
building with arched windows used by UN agencies since the 1990s.
A perimeter wall was hastily built after the fall of the Iraqi
government, but visitors streamed through the compound gate
without frisking or questioning by the mostly Iraqi guards. UN
officials insisted that the Americans remove a military observation
post that had been set up on the hotel’s roof, as well as the U.S. Army
truck that barricaded the narrow street that ran along the rear of the
compound. “The presence of coalition forces does intimidate some of
the people we need to speak to and work with,” one of the mission’s
senior managers explained to reporters.
At 4:30 p.m. on August 19, 2003—twelve days after the Jordanian
Embassy bombing—Vieira de Mello sat at his desk on the hotel’s
third floor, oblivious to the large flatbed truck racing its engine at the
entrance to the same narrow alley that had until recently been
blocked. Two foreign visitors and a handful of UN aides had arrived
in the diplomat’s suite for a meeting on Iraq’s refugee crisis, and they
had just finished introductions when an explosion sheered away the
building’s front side. The truck’s driver had detonated a monstrous
bomb rigged from old aircraft munitions, obliterating the vehicle and
cleaving through three floors of UN offices like a knife through a
layer cake.
“The explosion went off and we were thrown into the air,” one of
the foreign visitors, Gil Loescher, a Notre Dame University professor,
said afterward. “Immediately the ceiling of the third floor collapsed
upon us and we were thrown down, catapulted down, two floors to
the first floor.”
Loescher regained consciousness to find himself lying upside down
with his legs crushed beneath ceiling debris. Vieira de Mello lay
buried in rubble a few feet away, but he had managed to reach his
cell phone to call for help. As the rescue team burrowed their way
toward him, the diplomat slowly bled to death, becoming one of
twenty-two people to die in the bombing. It was the deadliest attack
ever on a United Nations facility.
The discovery of the young suicide bomber’s body in the wreckage
removed any doubt that the attack was the work of terrorists and not,
as some U.S. officials initially suggested, an attempt at score settling
by loyalists to the former Iraqi regime. Bush, in one of his first public
statements on the bombing, acknowledged that “al-Qaeda-type
fighters” appeared to be infiltrating the country. “They want to fight
us there because they can’t stand the thought of a free society in the
Middle East,” the president told reporters at a campaign fund-raiser
three days after the Baghdad attack.
But which fighters?
While FBI teams combed the shattered UN building for bomb
fragments to analyze, experts from the NSA and CIA began digging
backward through vast troves of intercepted phone calls and texts,
looking for any that might be linked to preparations for the bombing
or to conversations between operatives after the deed was carried
out. Nada Bakos, then in the home stretch of her first deployment to
Iraq, was put in charge of sifting through preliminary findings and
preparing reports for senior CIA and White House officials back in
Washington.
A few of the calls picked up by the NSA’s eavesdroppers made an
immediate impression. They were brief, with limited small talk,
clearly intended to relay messages. There were no names or place-
names used, just vague references to a deed, along with what
sounded like a congratulatory message.
“Brother,” one of the callers said, “Allah was merciful today.”
At the CIA, the agency’s telecom sleuths traced the calls as far as
they could, through digital signatures embedded in electronic phone
records. The callers, it turned out, had used cell phones equipped
with prepaid SIM cards stolen from a vendor in Switzerland. Who
ultimately came to possess them, and how they ended up in Iraq, was
anyone’s guess.
It would be another ten days, and another gruesome bombing,
before Bakos and the other analysts caught a break. The next strike
was far worse than the others, and occurred not in Baghdad but in
Najaf, a Shiite provincial capital and home to one of the most
important shrines for the country’s majority Shiite Muslim
population.
August 29, 2003, was a Friday, the Muslim holy day, and huge
crowds had jammed the city’s gold-domed Imam Ali Mosque to hear
a sermon by Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir al-Hakim, a highly
influential Shiite cleric who had returned from exile in Iran in the
weeks after the U.S. invasion. A moderate whose family had been
persecuted by Saddam Hussein, the grandfatherly Hakim was
regarded by U.S. military officials as a potential partner, a man who
preached a message of unity and patience and seemed open to
working with Iraq’s U.S.-appointed interim council. On this day, the
portly cleric climbed the mosque’s minbar in his robe and turban to
deliver a blunt critique of the occupation forces, decrying their
failure to bring security to the country, and specifically mentioning
the bombings at the Jordanian Embassy and UN headquarters.
Iraqis should take responsibility for their own security with the
support of the full population, the imam said. “We should join efforts
in order to return full sovereignty to the Iraqi people by forming an
Iraqi government,” he said.
Hakim had just finished his sermon and was walking toward his
motorcade when a car bomb exploded, followed quickly by a second.
The blasts killed at least eighty-five people who had crowded the
plaza for a glimpse of the cleric, and wounded more than five
hundred. Thousands of worshippers and pilgrims fled the shrine in a
panic, trampling over the dying and injured as they rushed the gates.
Of Hakim, a man who had embodied the hopes of so many Iraqis as
well as Americans, nothing identifiable was found except for a hand
bearing the imam’s wedding ring.
The shock from the assassination quickly reverberated across the
country, igniting protests in several cities and dampening hopes for
uniting Iraqis behind an interim governing council. In Baghdad, tens
of thousands of people from the city’s Shiite slums marched through
Sunni neighborhoods, chanting “Death to Baathists!” and “No to
America! No to Saddam! Yes, yes to Islam!” U.S. cable news stations
interposed images of enraged protesters with video of an ill-timed
visit to Iraq by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld the same week.
The Pentagon’s top official repeated his now familiar line attributing
the violence to “dead-enders” from Saddam Hussein’s deposed
regime, perhaps with help from Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants
from Lebanon. Aside from these distractions, progress in Iraq had
been “extraordinary,” Rumsfeld insisted.
“Baghdad is bustling with commerce,” he said.
At the battered shrine, meanwhile, yet another search for bomb
fragments and other clues was beginning to yield results. Strewn
across the vast debris field were pieces of old aircraft munitions and
homemade wiring remarkably similar to those found after the
bombings at the Jordanian Embassy and UN headquarters. The
evidence increasingly pointed to a single actor: someone with
significant bomb-making skills and a determination to wreak havoc.
The NSA’s antennas again strained for signals, and now the
Americans’ surveillance bore important fruit. An intercepted phone
call contained another congratulatory message: Allah had been
“merciful” again. But this time the phone numbers lit up as a match
in the CIA’s database: the recipient of the call had also been
telephoned after the bombing of the UN building. Moreover, the CIA
now knew more about the batch of SIM cards from Switzerland. One
of the electronic chips had been found on a Syrian man arrested a
few days earlier. The man, a self-described Islamist, had admitted to
traveling to Iraq to wage jihad. He claimed to be the disciple of a
Jordanian holy warrior, one whom foreign fighters called Zarqawi.
Bakos, back at Langley recovering from her first Iraq tour,
followed the reports of foreign fighters moving in Baghdad and
wondered if Zarqawi was among them. Now it was clear: the
intercepted calls linked him not only to the Najaf carnage but also to
the UN attack, and perhaps the embassy bombing as well. Somehow,
just five months after the destruction of the Ansar al-Islam training
camp, Zarqawi had managed to move his network into a strange
capital and build an operation with sufficient intelligence-gathering,
firepower, and logistical support to carry out a chain of sophisticated,
large-scale terrorist attacks in close succession. Zarqawi was not only
part of the worsening violence in Iraq, he was helping direct it.
Bakos studied the reports and prepared to write the summary that
would be included in the next day’s briefing papers for the White
House. By now the essential conclusion looked solid: Abu Musab al-
Zarqawi was behind the attacks. The terrorist the Bush
administration had cited as a reason for attacking Saddam Hussein
had in fact become empowered by the Iraqi leader’s defeat. A minor
worry before, when he was confined to a remote corner of Iraq’s
northern mountains, now he had been set loose in the Iraqi
heartland and was becoming more menacing by the day.
Much later, intelligence officials and terrorism experts who
studied the early war years marveled at Zarqawi’s strategic cunning.
Whether deliberately or by coincidence, he picked targets that would
confound U.S. ambitions for Iraq and ensure that the occupation of
the country would be long and painful. The opening salvo against an
Arab embassy would effectively discourage other Muslim nations
from participating in Iraq’s rebuilding in a way that might give the
Americans legitimacy. That blow was followed by two others that, in
sequence, showed “brilliant strategy,” said Bruce Riedel, a senior CIA
terrorism analyst who went on to advise two U.S. presidents.
“By attacking the UN, he drove out all the nongovernmental
organizations and discouraged anyone from opening an embassy,”
Riedel said. “Then he went after the Shia-Sunni fault line with
attacks on the Shiite mosques.
“So first he isolated us in Iraq,” Riedel said, “then he put us in the
midst of a civil war.”
It was too early to draw such conclusions in August 2003, so Nada
Bakos simply wrote what she knew, trying to avoid thinking about
the trouble her report would surely cause at senior levels of the Bush
administration.
Bakos’s supervisors pressed her repeatedly on the details. No one
was anxious to break the news to the White House that Zarqawi was
responsible for the killings, Bakos recalled later.
“Take another day,” she was urged by one of her supervisors.
“We’re not writing this unless we’re absolutely sure.”
The edits and rewrites continued through the day and well into the
night. It was after midnight when the draft was finished, and nearly
3:00 a.m. by the time Bakos returned to her apartment for a few
hours’ sleep.
Hers was just a single report, but it ran contrary to the
administration’s official narrative for the war. Some in the White
House would find it threatening, she knew, and perhaps would try to
bury it. But it was the truth.
“It’s why we were being so cautious,” Bakos said. “We knew there
would be push-back, because what we were telling them meant that
this was no longer a victory. It was a freaking nightmare.”
9
“So you guys think this is an insurgency?”
A few days after the bombing of the UN building, Robert Richer was
driving home from Canada after a long-deferred family vacation
when his CIA phone rang. On the line was one of the agency’s
briefers, working on detail to the White House, anxious to know
about an alarming document that had just made its way to the
president’s desk.
The president wants to know if the agency stands by this report—
the one about the beginning of an insurgency in Iraq, the briefer
said.
Richer, who happened to be crossing the Ambassador Bridge from
Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit at the time, waited until he was on the
American side to pull over. Yes, he knew the report, he said. He had
personally signed off on it just a few days before.
“It’s factual,” said Richer, the CIA’s former station chief in Jordan,
who had now risen to become chief of the agency’s Near East
Division. “It’s the chief of station’s view. We stand behind the
analysis.”
The tension on the other end of the line was palpable, even from
five hundred miles away. The White House did not like the use of the
word “insurgency” in conjunction with a war that President George
W. Bush had declared essentially won. Anyone with a casual interest
in the news could see that violence in Iraq had grown dramatically
worse since the early summer. Besides the string of spectacular car
bombings, American soldiers were dying at a rate of more than ten a
week from snipers’ bullets and hidden roadside bombs. But
“insurgency” was a dangerous word, conjuring up images of Vietnam
and endless guerrilla warfare. At National Security Council meetings,
the Pentagon’s civilian managers ran PowerPoint presentations
highlighting provinces in Iraq that were relatively peaceful. The
attacks elsewhere in the country were isolated and scattered, the
work of a few Baathist holdouts loyal to Saddam Hussein, who was
then still in hiding. “How important are these?” asked an aide to
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at one such meeting attended by
Richer.
How important? Richer, who made frequent visits to Baghdad’s
CIA station, was incredulous. Real important, he thought to himself.
“We’re seeing it every day,” he told colleagues.
That Iraq harbored terrorists was beyond dispute. But no one had
dared used the word “insurgency” to describe the conflict until
August 30, 2003. On that day, the CIA’s Baghdad station chief, Gerry
Meyer, dashed off a cable to headquarters just hours after the double
explosions that killed the Shiite cleric Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir
al-Hakim and scores of worshippers at the mosque in Najaf. The
secret cable was called an “aardwolf,” spy-speak for a kind of formal
assessment for headquarters from one of the agency’s field stations.
Meyer, having witnessed the effects of August’s trio of car bombings,
warned that the conflict was rapidly entering a perilous new phase.
Foreign jihadists were beginning to pour into Iraq, drawn by the
prospect of a fight against Americans, and aligning with shadowy
groups intent on unleashing mayhem to destabilize the country and
discredit the U.S. occupiers and their Iraqi supporters. The
emergence of this insurgent army could potentially reverse the
progress of the past five months, Meyer wrote. Moreover, with the
new arrivals, waves of future suicide bombers were already in the
country, poised for attacks that would be carried out regardless of
whether Saddam Hussein was caught.
The report’s stark tone caught White House officials by surprise
and drew a loud dissent from the administration’s point man in
Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, the diplomat who ran the Coalition
Provisional Authority. Bremer complained that the report’s
conclusions were overdrawn and excessively negative, and it was his
reaction that prompted the CIA to track down Richer on his vacation.
“There was a firestorm,” recalled Richer, who retired from the
agency in 2005. “The CIA is saying that an insurgency is developing,
and now the White House is pissed off.” In effect, he said, two
versions of reality were colliding in Iraq: the one witnessed by the
agency’s spies, and another that sought to reinforce the message
communicated so dramatically by Bush in May on the deck of the
aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.
“The problem for the White House,” Richer said, “was that the
president had just landed on a ship to say that we had won.”
For now, Meyer’s report would simply be ignored. It would be
another ten weeks and scores of additional deaths before the
president’s top national security aides sat down again to debate
whether the use of the word “insurgency” was appropriate in
describing the conflict in Iraq. More months passed before the White
House acknowledged that there actually was one.
—
If Abu Musab al-Zarqawi could have dictated a U.S. strategy for Iraq
that suited his own designs for building a terrorist network, he could
hardly have come up with one that surpassed what the Americans
themselves put in place over the spring and summer of 2003.
Countless articles and books have documented the Bush
administration’s missteps, from the refusal to halt massive looting
after the invasion to the wholesale dismantling of the Iraqi military
and security structure by Bremer’s CPA. But no Americans
appreciated the magnitude of the blunders more than the
intelligence officers and U.S. diplomats in Iraq who were watching
Zarqawi’s organization gain momentum.
Years later, CIA officials who were brought into the final planning
for the March 2003 invasion expressed astonishment at the lack of
forethought on how the country would be managed after Saddam
Hussein’s deposal. Junior officers were pressed into service at the
eleventh hour to draft papers on possible risks U.S. soldiers could
face in attempting to preserve order in occupied Iraq. But by then it
was already too late to affect the outcome.
“Right before the invasion, I asked the Pentagon, ‘Is anyone
writing policy on force protection?’ The answer was no, so I said I’d
do it,” said one former CIA analyst who was enlisted to help. “I was
doing military analysis because they had literally no one doing it on
the inside.”
Weeks later, as Baghdad skidded into lawlessness, a brief window
of opportunity slammed shut. One State Department official, who
was among the first to arrive in the Iraqi capital after the city fell,
said the initial greeting from Iraqi citizens was not so different from
the exultant reception the Bush administration officials had
predicted before the war.
“The thing is, people really were glad to see us,” said “Mike,” a
retired diplomat whose employment as a security contractor
excluded him from using his real name. “No actual flowers were
thrown, because that culture doesn’t throw flowers. But every night
there was celebratory gunfire, and as I would travel around Baghdad,
everyone was delighted to see us.”
But Iraqi views hardened after weeks of frenzied looting of
everything from government offices to priceless museum artifacts to
the rebar on newly constructed buildings, Mike said. Having neither
the mandate nor the military-police brigades to restore order, U.S.
forces came across as both impotent and indifferent to Iraqi
perceptions of injustice and suffering. More Iraqis began viewing the
occupying troops with a suspiciousness bordering on contempt.
“We had created a black hole,” he said.
The failure to provide security after the invasion had been a sin of
omission: U.S. officials had not anticipated the breakdown in civil
authority that would follow the invasion. By contrast, the decisions
to dissolve the Iraqi army and ban Baath Party members from
positions of authority were as deliberate as they were misguided. In
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, anyone seeking a management job—from
school principal or police captain to the head of the intelligence
service—was obliged to join the Baath Party. So were applicants for
Iraq’s universities. Overnight, tens of thousands of professional
workers and experienced bureaucrats were out of work, and U.S.
officials in Iraq found themselves confronting two mammoth
problems. One was an absence of the kinds of local security agencies
best equipped to preserve order and root out illicit networks. The
other was a large contingent of embittered and well-connected Iraqi
officials who now had to fend for themselves without salaries or
pensions.
“We put these people out on the streets—people who had the tools
and knew how to use them,” Richer said, recalling his exasperation
over the de-Baathification decision—the CPA’s “Order No. 1” issued
on May 16, 2003. “We put them out there without paychecks. Some
of them had fifteen or twenty years in the military, and we didn’t
even let them collect their pensions.”
It was in this reordered Iraq that Zarqawi would find both freedom
to maneuver and powerful allies willing and able to support his
cause. Captains and sergeants who once served Saddam Hussein now
enlisted in Zarqawi’s army, and some rose to leadership positions.
Others offered safe houses, intelligence, cash, and weapons,
including, investigators later concluded, the aerial munitions and
artillery shells that provided the explosive force for Zarqawi’s biggest
car bombs.
Except in the CIA’s classified reports, Zarqawi’s role in the Iraq
insurgency was still largely unknown. The agency’s analysts
disagreed on key details, including whether the terrorist was in Iraq
or perhaps directing events from Syria or some other foreign city.
But throughout the fall of 2003, as officials in Washington debated
whether an insurgency existed in Iraq, the run of spectacular attacks
continued.
On September 22, the UN headquarters in Baghdad was struck for
a second time, though by this date many of its employees had already
left the country. A security guard was killed, and nineteen people
were wounded.
On October 12, a Toyota Corolla barreled past security barriers and
exploded outside the lobby of the Baghdad Hotel, a luxury high-rise
in a neighborhood of pharmacies and doctors’ offices. Six people
were killed and more than thirty wounded, including three U.S.
soldiers.
Most dramatically, on October 27, terrorists launched a wave of
coordinated suicide bombings across Baghdad, striking the
headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross and
four police stations. At least thirty-six people were killed, including
an American GI, and two hundred people were wounded.
On November 10, the CIA’s Baghdad station chief sat down again
to describe the unraveling security situation in a formal report to
headquarters. The images Gerry Meyer sketched this time were even
more dire. The insurgency he described was not only real, it was
winning. The terrorists, with help from Baathist allies, were well
supplied and appeared capable of moving freely, with little fear of
either American troops or the hastily reconstituted but ineffective
local police departments. In the eyes of ordinary Iraqis they
appeared to be powerful and “largely unchallenged,” he wrote,
eroding any lingering hope that American military might be able to
stabilize the country.
“The ease with which the insurgents move and exist…is bolstering
their self-confidence further,” Meyer wrote, according to a version of
the “aardwolf” obtained by American journalists soon after it was
transmitted to Langley. As for the terrorists’ supporters—disaffected
Sunni Muslims and former officers of Saddam Hussein’s security
establishment—they had been handed a perfect opportunity to
regroup, the station chief said. “The continued sense of isolation in
the Sunni heartland, the complete dissolution of the army and other
institutions of security, rigid de-Baathification, and the lack of
economic opportunities or political direction gave these regime
elements the confidence they needed to repair their networks and
reestablish themselves,” the report said.
Meyer’s brutal candor caused some of his colleagues to fear for his
job, and, sure enough, the new report infuriated senior Bush aides,
prompting accusations that the CIA was trying to undermine the
president politically, with an election year just getting under way.
On November 11—the Veterans Day holiday for government
employees—the White House convened a second meeting to kick
around Meyer’s latest report and its implications. Robert Richer was
again summoned, this time in person, along with CIA director
George Tenet and his top deputy, John McLaughlin, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and other national security aides. The
president began the meeting with a blunt question to the CIA
contingent.
“So you guys think this is an insurgency?” he asked.
McLaughlin began a prepared briefing framed around the question
“Who is the enemy?” But when he used the word “insurgent,” a
skeptical Rumsfeld interrupted.
“Define ‘insurgency,’ ” he demanded.
McLaughlin and other CIA officials began ticking off a list of
components of a classic insurgency from a standard Pentagon field
manual. Iraq, they said, was facing an organized resistance
movement that sought to overthrow central authority through
subversion and armed conflict. They described the collusion between
domestic opponents and foreign terrorists and highlighted what was
known about the movement’s leadership, tactics, and weapons.
According to one participant, the Defense Department’s
representatives were unmoved.
“The military wasn’t interested in hearing this,” the official
recalled years later. “They were hoping they were done with the war,
and they didn’t go in for any talk about insurgencies.”
Bush, by contrast, was thoughtfully quiet. His parting comment as
the meeting ended suggested that he had accepted the turn of events
in Iraq, even if he wasn’t ready to talk about it publicly.
“I don’t want any commentary,” he said.
One month later, the White House enjoyed a brief respite from the
tide of grim news with the announcement of the capture of Saddam
Hussein during a December 13, 2003, raid on a remote farmhouse
near his hometown of Tikrit. But the former dictator’s arrest brought
no relief from the now daily attacks on coalition troops and Iraqi
civilians. Zarqawi, after months of fighting from the shadows, was
gaining confidence as the de-facto leader of a full-blown insurgency
in Iraq. His movement, now supported by thousands of embittered
Iraqis and sympathetic Islamists from across the Muslim world,
would soon pose the greatest single threat to American ambitions in
Iraq.
Gerry Meyer, the man who had warned of the growing insurgency
in two CIA reports, did not survive in his post as Baghdad station
chief long enough to see the uprising come to full flower. Within
weeks of his November 10 report, he was relieved of command and
ordered back to Washington.
For years afterward, when CIA officials would dissect the mistakes
of the war’s early months, some would marvel at the improbable
confluences that enabled Zarqawi to achieve so much so quickly. Like
a seed stirred up by a vile wind, the Jordanian had landed at
precisely the right time in a patch of soil that had been perfectly
prepared to enable him to take root.
“The fertile soil was Iraq after de-Baathification,” Richer said. “The
rain and sunshine were the ineptitude of the provisional authority
and U.S. misunderstanding of Iraqis and their culture.
“All of that,” he said, “allowed Zarqawi to blossom and grow.”
—
The lushest swath of Iraqi soil for sprouting an insurgency turned
out to be a band of dusty towns and villages north and west of the
capital. Within the boundaries of the region that became known as
the Sunni Triangle, anxiousness about the American invasion turned
quickly to resentment and then, for some, to open hostility.
Zaydan al-Jabiri, a tribal leader with a large sheep ranch near
Ramadi, vividly remembered the day he lost faith in the Americans
as liberators, or even as an improvement on Saddam Hussein’s police
state. It was April 28, 2003, nearly three weeks after Baghdad fell,
and three days before U.S. president George W. Bush’s “mission
accomplished” speech. The forty-year-old sheikh had been watching
closely for clues about how the occupation forces would manage
commerce—prolonged curfews and travel restrictions could be
disastrous for a man who traded in wool and fresh mutton. Like
many in his Dulaim tribe, he had been willing to give the newcomers
a chance. Then came the event that changed everything.
Until that day, a Monday, Zaydan had seen little of the Americans
invaders. The columns of tanks with their coffee-stain desert
camouflage had deliberately avoided the provincial cities during the
early phases of the campaign, but now they were backtracking,
clearing out any lingering resistance and consolidating their lines.
On April 23, soldiers from the Eighty-second Airborne Division and
Third Armored Calvary Regiment had rolled into the nearby city of
Fallujah and set up camp inside government buildings and a school.
On the evening of April 28, a crowd of about two hundred protesters
defied a citywide curfew and gathered outside the school building,
chanting and yelling at U.S. paratroopers inside. The Americans
would later say that some in the crowd had brandished weapons, and
shots were fired. In any case, the GIs opened up with a volley that
killed seventeen demonstrators and wounded seventy. Investigators
from Human Rights Watch later found no evidence of bullet damage
to the school where the troops were staying. Iraqis were outraged,
but Zaydan was among the tribal officials who counseled restraint.
“We tried with all our might not to create problems with the
Americans,” he would say years later. After gathering informally to
discuss a solution, the heads of the major clans from central Anbar
Province picked emissaries to meet with the U.S. commanders in
Fallujah.
“We went to them and we said, ‘We are tribes, and we can have a
tribal solution: you pay diyya—blood money,’ ” Zaydan recalled.
“ ‘These [victims] had families, some had kids. Pay the families
money to guarantee their future, so their kids won’t be part of the
resistance.’ ”
The reply came days later. Yes, the United States was willing to
compensate the victims’ families. The rate was set at three thousand
dollars for each dead Iraqi.
Zaydan was furious. “Three thousand dollars? That’s what you pay
to replace one of your police dogs!” he fumed.
“After that, we realized that the Americans had no good
intentions,” he said.
It was the first of a series of unhappy encounters for Zaydan, a
man who might have seemed a likely ally to any army that toppled
Saddam Hussein. He had been barely thirty years old when members
of his tribal family decided to back a coup attempt, organized by an
Iraqi air force general from a prominent Anbar clan, against the
dictator. When the plot was discovered, Saddam rounded up and
executed more than 150 army officers and detained more than a
thousand other Iraqi Sunnis, including Zaydan and one of his
brothers. Zaydan, condemned to die with the others, was granted
clemency at the last minute, in a general pardon intended to repair
relations with the powerful Sunni tribes that had long helped
Saddam stay in power.
Yet, even after the death sentence, and despite his deep antipathy
for many of the dictator’s policies, Zaydan settled into an odd
ambivalence toward the Iraqi leader. He admired Saddam’s
toughness. He privately cheered his fearless defiance of the West,
which for many Sunnis evoked a glorious past when Iraq was part of
a mighty empire, and Baghdad was a global center of science and
learning. For all their technology, the Americans were arrogant
upstarts, with little appreciation for the cultural richness of a land
that had given birth to written language, mathematics, astronomy,
and the law. Iraq was not a mere product of lines drawn on a colonial
map, whose value lay in the oil buried beneath its sands. It was a
country of tribes that traced their lineage to the beginning of
civilization itself.
“The Americans and their media made us imagine that Iraq would
never be Iraq until Saddam Hussein went away,” Zaydan said. “Iraq
is seven thousand years old. America is only two hundred years old.
It’s like comparing a Mercedes to a Hyundai.”
Still, Zaydan saw little point in opposing the American invasion,
even after the killings in Fallujah, just forty miles from his ranch.
“We’re not an army,” he said, “and we didn’t want to look like we
were defending the regime.” But as the occupation neared its first
anniversary, his concerns about U.S. intentions multiplied. It was
clear to Zaydan’s mind that the Americans intended to stay
indefinitely. Worse, they had stripped power from Iraq’s long-
dominant Sunni tribes and handed it over to Shiites, leaders Zaydan
viewed as “thieves and bandits” whose true allegiance lay with Iran.
In Baghdad, Sunnis were being targeted by roving bands of Shiite
militiamen. Zaydan watched with conflicted emotions as other
members of his tribe formed secret cells, initially for self-defense but
later to engage in hit-and-run attacks against American troops.
Stories began to circulate about a mysterious Jordanian who paid
hard cash to any Iraqis who joined his movement. Zaydan would
never swear allegiance to the jihadist who called himself Zarqawi.
But others in the Dulaim clan did.
The sheikh tried to meet once more with American military
commanders in Fallujah. It was on July 4, as he later remembered,
and he showed up unannounced with other tribal leaders, bearing a
gift: flowers to commemorate the American holiday. The marine
officer who met with the Iraqis struck Zaydan as agitated and
suspicious, perhaps with good reason: Iraqi leaders generally visited
the base to make a request, usually for compensation for some kind
of injury or damage. Years afterward, Zaydan could not recall the
reason for the meeting, but he still remembered the argument that
ensued.
At one point, the American commander managed to insult his
visitors with a comment that seemed to lump together Iraqis and
terrorists. One of the sheikhs, angered, accused the Americans of
being dupes of Ahmad Chalabi, the exiled Shiite politician who
provided the Bush administration with faulty intelligence about
weapons of mass destruction.
“We know you were deceived by Chalabi into coming to Iraq!” one
of the sheikhs declared.
Zaydan tried to smooth things over, but it was clear that the
meeting was over. More insults followed, and one of the Iraqis
banged the table loudly.
As he got up to leave, Zaydan was struck by the impossible gulf
between the man in the camouflage and the Iraqis in their tribal
dress. Even when they used the same vocabulary, somehow the
words were not the same.
As the Iraqis were leaving, Zaydan managed a parting word to the
marine commander.
“You’ll never be able to stay in Iraq,” he said.
A conflagration had begun, Zaydan saw, and he would do nothing
to stand in its way.
“This,” he said later, “is when the real battle started.”
10
“Revolting is exactly what we want”
In January 2004, some ten months after his arrival in Baghdad, Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi sat at a keyboard to compose a letter to Osama bin
Laden. It had been two years since his departure from Afghanistan,
and almost four years since the al-Qaeda founder had refused to
meet him in person at his Kandahar compound. But now Zarqawi
was ready to offer a truce.
He opened with a sentimental flourish.
“Even if our bodies are far apart, the distance between our hearts
is close,” he wrote to the author of the September 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks.
A lot had happened since their last communication, and Zarqawi
felt compelled to account for his time in Iraq, as though Bin Laden
had somehow missed the news of the insurgency. The situation in
Iraq was different from anything the two commanders had
experienced in Afghanistan, he said, both in good ways (Iraqis spoke
Arabic) and bad (awful terrain, with few hiding places). Zarqawi
maintained that he was making good progress in the campaign he
had started, and he hoped that Bin Laden might be willing to help.
But first he would offer a jihadist’s view of the battlefield and a
sketch of the major combatants, including his own small army.
He started with the Americans. For all their firepower, he said,
they were “the most cowardly of God’s creatures,” uninterested in a
real fight and preferring to remain on their bases. But they’d be gone
soon enough, he predicted, leaving the country and the war to others.
As for Iraqi’s Sunni minority—the group most likely to be
sympathetic to his cause—Zarqawi was equally scornful. The Sunnis
were leaderless and divided, “more wretched than orphans at the
tables of the depraved,” he said. Even the Iraqi soldiers who joined
the jihadists lacked real experience in fighting and preferred lobbing
grenades or firing occasional mortar rounds to confronting the
enemy directly.
“The Iraqi brothers still prefer safety and returning to the arms of
their wives, where nothing frightens them,” Zarqawi wrote.
“Sometimes the groups have boasted among themselves that not one
of them has been killed or captured. We have told them in our many
sessions with them that safety and victory are incompatible, that the
tree of triumph and empowerment cannot grow tall and lofty without
blood and defiance of death.”
Turning to the country’s Shiite majority, Zarqawi launched into a
bile-spewing screed that continued for pages.
“The insurmountable obstacle, the lurking snake, the crafty and
malicious scorpion, the spying enemy, and the penetrating venom,”
he wrote, straining with his metaphors. He dismissed Iraq’s majority
religion as worse than paganism, having “nothing in common with
Islam except in the way that Jews have something in common with
Christians under the banner of the People of the Book.” Shiites had
designs on destroying the Sunni faith, and they had craftily allied
themselves with the U.S. occupiers.
“They have been a sect of treachery and betrayal throughout
history and throughout the ages,” Zarqawi declared.
Bin Laden was an odd choice to receive such a rant. Though Sunni
himself, the al-Qaeda founder saw himself as a unifier of Muslims
and had never expressed interest in attacking Shiite innocents. In
fact, he had condemned it, as Zarqawi doubtlessly already knew.
Perhaps the Jordanian believed he could change Bin Laden’s mind,
for he proceeded to the heart of his message: a plan for a coming
battle that called for killing Shiites in even greater numbers. Such a
campaign, he argued, would simultaneously achieve three objectives:
destabilizing Iraq, eliminating a hateful apostasy, and, most
important, forcing Sunnis to take up arms in a war that would lead to
their liberation—a war that he would ignite—an “awaking of the
slumberer and rousing of the sleeper.”
The solution that we see, and God the Exalted knows better, is for us
to drag the Shi’a into the battle because this is the only way to prolong
the fighting between us and the infidels….The only solution is for us
to strike the religious, military, and other cadres among the Shi’a with
blow after blow until they bend to the Sunnis. Someone may say that,
in this matter, we are being hasty and rash and leading the [Islamic]
nation into a battle for which it is not ready, a battle that will be
revolting and in which blood will be spilled. This is exactly what we
want.
Now Zarqawi had a favor to ask: His organization, though small,
had been behind nearly all the major terrorist attacks in Iraq,
excluding the far-northern cities—twenty-five strikes in all,
according to his count. But he could accomplish much more with al-
Qaeda’s official endorsement and global resources, he argued. “All
that we hope is that we will be the spearhead, the enabling vanguard,
and the bridge on which the Islamic nation crosses over to the victory
that is promised,” he wrote. If Bin Laden agreed with Zarqawi’s
strategy—“if you adopt it as a program and road, and if you are
convinced of the idea of fighting the sects of apostasy”—then Zarqawi
was prepared to swear allegiance. “We will be your readied soldiers,
working under your banner, complying with your orders,” he said.
If the alliance was not to be, there would be no hard feelings,
Zarqawi assured Bin Laden. But either way, the al-Qaeda leader
would be hearing from him. Very soon, he said, he would step out of
the shadows and publicly announce himself to the world.
“We have been waiting until we have enough weight on the
ground,” he said. Now, at last, “the decisive moment approaches.”
—
On a chilly February night a few weeks after Zarqawi composed his
letter, Brigadier General Stanley McChrystal rested on the staircase
of a darkened townhouse in Fallujah, in the violent heartland of the
Iraqi insurgency, listening to his soldiers as they swept from room to
room, searching for fighters and hidden weapons caches. At that very
moment, the object of his search also waited in darkness, straining to
interpret sounds: the low rumble of idling diesel engines, the
banging of metal against wood, the shouts in American English, the
barking dogs, the crunch of heavy boots against glass.
By sheer luck, the commander of U.S. special forces in Iraq had
delivered a team of commandos to the very housing block where
Iraq’s most dangerous terrorist had lain sleeping. The two men were
less than 150 feet apart, separated only by a couple of thin concrete
walls and the blackness of a city that had been mostly without
electricity since the U.S. invasion nearly a year before.
“I was likely standing less than a block from Abu Musab al-
Zarqawi,” McChrystal acknowledged afterward.
It had been just another in an endless string of raids that winter,
targeting an insurgency that even the most optimistic in Washington
could no longer deny. The Pentagon had established teams of
special-forces operators with responsibility for rooting out cells of
the local and foreign fighters behind Iraq’s worsening violence. The
man now in charge of the mission was widely regarded as a soldier’s
soldier, the kind who occasionally went along on dangerous midnight
raids in hostile territory. Now forty-nine, McChrystal had himself
been one of the army’s elite soldiers, a member of the storied
Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment, known for its “further, faster,
harder” credo and a history of achievement stretching from
Normandy’s beaches to the Battle of Mogadishu, depicted in the
book and film Black Hawk Down. A distance runner known for his
legendary self-discipline—he regularly ran seven to eight miles a day,
ate a single meal, and slept no more than four hours a night—
McChrystal had landed the job as chief of the U.S. Joint Special
Operations Command, or JSOC, barely four months earlier. Now he
was channeling his prodigious energy into the search for the terrorist
gaining renown among Iraqi Sunnis as the fiercest foe of the
American occupation.
On this night, the plan called for a perilous house-to-house search
in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in all of Iraq. In just
over a month, Fallujah would become forever associated with the
deaths of four American security contractors who were ambushed
and then dismembered, dragged through the streets and burned,
with their bodies left dangling from a Euphrates River bridge. But for
now the night’s destination was just another GPS coordinate on
McChrystal’s battle map, a location that had been flagged by military
intelligence and needed to be checked and crossed off the list. The
general strapped on his pistol and climbed into a Humvee with the
others in the team, intending not to fight but to observe.
This was to be no stealth raid. Rather than swooping into the
village by helicopter, McChrystal and his team made the journey
from Baghdad in a convoy of Humvees and armored trucks,
lumbering noisily along on unlit streets and then to the Highway 1
expressway that heads west toward Jordan and Syria. They rode for
an hour on nearly empty freeway, pulling off at the point where the
desert gives way to the flat roofs and scrawny palms of Fallujah’s
outer suburbs. Finding the first target house in the dark, the Delta
Force soldiers tossed flash-bang grenades through the door and
blitzed from room to room with wordless precision.
McChrystal stepped through the doorway of one house as a
weapon search was under way. The lights were on here, so the
commander flipped up his night-vision goggles and watched as his
soldiers interrogated a group of Iraqi men who had been rousted
from sleep. In the next room were the women and children, most of
them sitting up on futons swaddled in blankets to ward off the cold.
The children looked up at the lanky American with obvious curiosity.
But in the eyes of the women he saw something else—an intensity of
emotion that would stick with him for years.
“It was pure, unadulterated hatred,” McChrystal said.
This was the first time McChrystal had lingered inside an occupied
house as his men worked through it. There would be many such
encounters to come, and they left an indelible impression. Once,
during a raid in Ramadi, the GIs rounded up several men from a
suspected safe house and forced them to lie facedown on the
concrete with their hands behind their heads. From inside the house
appeared a small boy of about four years. Seeing his father lying on
the ground, the boy walked between the rows of prostrate men and,
without a word, lay down next to his father, placing his tiny hands
behind his head.
“We’re still thinking of ourselves as liberators,” McChrystal said
afterward. “But you’ve got these big guys—huge, in their body armor
—carrying weapons, turning over mattresses. We weren’t trashing
furniture. We weren’t tossing the place. But you can imagine
someone coming into your house, with your wife and kids there, and
going through your drawers. I remember thinking, ‘What if this was
my house?’ It’s a memory you would keep with you forever.” The
searchers finished their work, and the crashing and shouting moved
farther down the block.
As the commando teams progressed to the next house, a solidly
built figure in dark clothes slid open a second-floor window and
dropped into the dark alley below. Picking himself up, he felt his way
to a back street and vanished, perhaps heading north over the
railroad tracks, or hiding in the shadows to wait the Americans out.
Only later, after finding his cast-off belongings, did the Americans
learn how close they had come to capturing Zarqawi.
It was an opportunity missed, one that might have altered the
history of the war. It would be more than a year before American
troops would again come this close.
Zarqawi’s escape was disappointing to the new special-forces
commander, even though he and other American generals had not
yet imagined how destructive the Jordanian would become. Later, in
his memoir, McChrystal recalled his first Fallujah mission as a
relatively tranquil time, “before Iraq became truly hellish as it turned
into a civil war.”
“The bloody consequences of our failure were not immediately
apparent,” he wrote. “On that night, Zarqawi was not yet Iraq’s
bane.”
Yet McChrystal could see the contours of battles to come. In the
eyes of an Iraqi family, he had glimpsed the raw emotion that
Zarqawi—or someone like him—could exploit in raising money and
volunteers. The raids on civilian houses, though necessary, were only
deepening the rage that many Iraqis felt after months of blackouts,
sewage overflows, and chronic job shortages, all of it “producing
fury, most understandably directed at us,” he wrote.
“With calculated barbarism, Zarqawi was already at work
exploiting our failures, making us look powerless or sinister, or
both,” McChrystal said. “His disappearance into the dark that night
was troubling, but I was consumed with this Iraqi family. Watching
them watch us, I realized this fight was going to be long and tough.”
—
But to begin such a fight, McChrystal had to build a force equal to the
task of rooting out an insurgent network hidden across a province
the size of New York State. Not since Vietnam had an American army
faced a challenge like this one, and the army and marine units spread
across Iraq in early 2004 were nowhere near prepared.
McChrystal was himself learning the job on the fly. In his rapid
ascent through the ranks, he had gained a reputation as something of
a troubleshooter, an innovative thinker who excelled at spotting
dysfunction within an organization and was never shy about shaking
things up.
Born into an army family—his father was a major general, and all
five of his siblings either served or married into the military—
McChrystal had been a brilliant underachiever as a youth, earning
admission to West Point but also racking up a hundred demerits for
drinking and insubordination. His decision to enter Special Forces
School had seemed at best a detour for an officer looking to climb the
promotional ladder. But McChrystal repeatedly impressed his
superiors with his extraordinary drive and his penchant for
challenging the status quo. His self-discipline—and an insistence on
high standards for those under his command—earned him a
nickname that would stick: the Pope.
McChrystal was promoted to brigadier general a few months
before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and he briefly
helped direct the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan before being
tapped as vice director of operations for the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs
of Staff. When the Iraq war began, he was chosen to do the daily
televised briefings from the Pentagon for the news media. He stood
at the podium on April 14, 2003, when the Pentagon formally
announced the Iraqi government’s capitulation. “I would anticipate
that the major combat engagements are over,” he said.
Just six months later, he was in Iraq, commanding a hybrid force
of elite commandos and intelligence officers in a military campaign
that was only getting started. Indeed, as McChrystal and his team
made their first visits to key command posts over the late fall and
winter, the entire country appeared to be slipping into disarray. Even
in Mosul, the ethnically divided northern city once championed as a
model for effective U.S.-led reconstruction, the army’s grasp of
security was weakening. The city had been seized and occupied by
101st Airborne Division troops under the command of then Major
General David Petraeus, who moved quickly to reopen government
facilities and schools, rebuild the local security force, and repair
infrastructure. But soon after Petraeus turned over the city to a
smaller American garrison in January 2004, insurgents moved in.
Gunmen even shot down one of the helicopters in McChrystal’s
entourage during one of his visits to the region.
So much had gone wrong, so quickly. Yet, as he settled into his
first headquarters at the Baghdad International Airport, McChrystal
was startled by the near absence of any organized strategy for the
kind of war the Americans suddenly found themselves fighting. Even
the special-forces unit created to battle the insurgency—most
commonly dubbed “Task Force 6-26” but assigned other names as
the war continued—lacked basic procedures for handling intelligence
collected from the battlefield or gleaned from informants.
Some of the lapses were jaw-dropping. One day, as McChrystal
was visiting a holding facility for new detainees, he passed by a small
office that had become the drop-off point for evidence collected
during raids. In the room was a waist-high pile of documents,
notebooks, computers, cell phones, and other detritus, much of it
shoved into trash bags or empty sandbags and never examined.
“What is that?” McChrystal asked an aide.
“That stuff was sent down here with detainees,” came the reply.
“Well, that’s raw intelligence,” the general said. “What are we
doing with it?”
“When the interpreters have free time, we have them come in here
and look through it,” the aide said.
McChrystal was furious.
“It was unbelievable,” he said, recalling his reaction. “Of course,
the interpreters didn’t have free time. And they wouldn’t know what
they were looking for. So this stuff was just sitting there, literally like
ripe fruit rotting.”
A few months into the job, McChrystal decided to gather his JSOC
commanders from Iraq and Afghanistan for a two-day conference to
talk about the unfolding insurgencies in both countries. He issued
reading assignments—including Modern Warfare, the 1961 French
classic treatise on counterinsurgency—and arranged for a screening
of The Battle of Algiers, a fictionalized but historically accurate 1966
portrayal of the French army’s bloody efforts to subdue Algeria’s
National Liberation Front insurgency in the 1950s. After the film
ended, he prompted a debate about two troubling themes. The first
was the use of torture, and how it ultimately undermined France’s
position, tactically and morally. The other was what McChrystal
described as the French army’s cluelessness about Algerian culture,
including why the insurgency’s message held such potency for so
many of the country’s ordinary citizens. The similarities to the
current conflict were strikingly obvious, but McChrystal gestured
toward a wall to drive home the point.
“We fundamentally do not understand,” he said, “what is going on
outside the wire.”
Equally striking to McChrystal was the fact that Zarqawi, a
foreigner, had managed to build such an impressive network after
less than a year in the country. Clearly, the Jordanian was getting
help from Iraqis. But he also was displaying undeniable skill as an
organizer and a strategist.
Zarqawi’s own intelligence-collection ability was remarkably
effective, judging from his ability to strike many miles from his
presumed base. His personal security showed surprising
sophistication, including a knack for flying just below the Americans’
electronic surveillance nets. Operationally, he was audacious yet
careful, picking relatively easy targets and powerful but simple bomb
designs. Most impressive of all was his ability to think strategically:
Zarqawi was not merely seeking to wage war. He was changing the
battlefield itself, using terrorism as a brutal forge for creating new
enemies and allies as it suited his purposes. Just now, it suited
Zarqawi to stir hatred between Iraq’s Sunnis and Shiites.
This sectarian resentment was woven into the country’s fabric, a
legacy of massacres and pogroms that dated back to Islam’s founding
generation. And yet, particularly in the later decades of the twentieth
century, Iraqis had come to share a common national identity and a
uniquely Iraqi sense of patriotism, one that had been made stronger
by an eight-year war against Iran’s Shiite-led theocracy. Before
Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, Sunnis and Shiites mingled easily in
Iraqi schools and universities and often lived side by side in mixed
neighborhoods. Now, thanks in large measure to Zarqawi, the
country was segregating itself into armed enclaves. Soon the nights
belonged to Shiite and Sunni gangs who carried out reprisal killings
and dumped mutilated bodies in alleyways and irrigation canals.
“Zarqawi aimed to get Iraqis to see each other as he saw them,”
McChrystal wrote. “And to him they were not countrymen or
colleagues or neighbors or in-laws or classmates. They were either
fellow believers or an enemy to be feared and, in that fear,
extinguished.”
While Zarqawi hoped to create problems for Iraq’s interim
leadership and American occupiers, the sectarian violence he
instigated quickly developed its own momentum. Shiite self-defense
militias, some of them just as vicious as Zarqawi’s thugs, seized
control of entire neighborhoods and waged running duels with U.S.
troops as well as rival Sunnis. Some, like the Badr Brigade, turned to
Iran’s security service, the Revolutionary Guard, for weapons,
training, and money. In short order, Tehran, seeing an opportunity
to bedevil America—a bitter foe since the 1979 revolution that
brought the Shiite Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power, and had
even armed Saddam in his war with Iran—was running its own proxy
armies inside Iraq. Soon the country’s highways were seeded with
sophisticated, Iranian-designed IEDs, specially engineered to
penetrate the shells of American Humvees.
Zarqawi had essentially created a three-sided war, with U.S. forces
drawing fire from the other two sides at once. His embrace of
“revolting” violence, so passionately described in his letter to Bin
Laden, had been distilled into a book, titled The Management of
Savagery. The volume, which began circulating on jihadist Web sites
in early 2004, urged unflinching cruelty in order to achieve the
Islamists’ ultimate objectives.
“If we are not violent in our jihad and if softness seizes us, that will
be a major factor in the loss of the element of strength,” writes the
book’s author, an al-Qaeda theorist who called himself Abu Bakr
Naji. “Dragging the masses into the battle requires more actions
which will inflame opposition and which will make people enter into
the battle, willing or unwilling.
“We must make this battle very violent,” he said, “such that death
is a heartbeat away.”
—
Less than two weeks after his letter to Bin Laden, Zarqawi’s bomb
makers prepared to deliver another such blow, an attack on Shiite
civilians far bloodier than any since the start of the war.
On March 2, 2004, millions of Shiites around the world would
commemorate the martyrdom of one of the religion’s great icons,
Husayn Ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, on the holy
day known as the Day of Ashura. For Iraqi Shiites, the date was
especially meaningful as the first observance of the holiday since the
toppling of Saddam Hussein and his government’s policy of strict
controls on religious pilgrimages.
By midmorning, huge crowds—unofficial estimates topped a
million people, including tens of thousands of visiting Iranians—
swarmed Shiite religious shrines in Baghdad and in Karbala, the city
in central Iraq where Husayn Ibn Ali was said to have been killed.
Among the pilgrims in both cities were several young men who
quietly worked their way through the throng, wearing heavy vests
concealed under their coats. At 10:00 a.m., near-simultaneous
explosions ripped through the crowds, hurling shrapnel and body
parts. As the panicked crowds began to flee, mortar shells fired from
several blocks away fell into the courtyard, killing dozens more.
Investigators later confirmed a dozen explosions and nearly seven
hundred casualties, including nearly 180 dead.
This time, U.S. officials quickly pointed to Zarqawi as the likely
culprit. In less than twenty-four hours, the top U.S. military
commander in the Middle East, General John Abizaid, told a
congressional panel that he possessed “intelligence that links
Zarqawi” to the Ashura bombings.
“The level of organization and the desire to cause casualties among
innocent worshippers is a clear hallmark of the Zarqawi network,”
Abizaid testified on March 3.
Many Iraqis looked elsewhere for blame. The country’s leading
Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, condemned the American
occupiers for allowing the collapse of security in a country that,
despite its problems, had been mostly stable. Others were convinced
that the Americans themselves were behind the massacre, refusing to
believe that Muslims could commit such atrocities.
Some lashed out at journalists, who, for many, represented the
closest tangible symbol of the West. Near Baghdad’s bomb-damaged
Imam Musa al-Khadam shrine, an Iraqi woman, draped from head
to toe in a black abaya, trailed a pair of American reporters,
screaming insults.
“Why,” she shrieked, “have you Americans done this to us?”
Barely a year had passed since Zarqawi arrived in central Iraq,
armed with only a few weapons, some cash, and his own ambitions.
His stated goals were to isolate and harass the American occupiers
and ignite conflict between Iraq’s Shiite and Sunni communities. He
had managed to achieve both, and, what’s more, Iraqis had come to
blame the Americans for the violence that he himself had sparked.
As he had hoped, Iraq was sliding into chaos, and Zarqawi would
soon unveil new tactics to deepen the misery in the country and
horrify the Western world. But first he had unfinished business to
resolve. He had not forgotten his first object of loathing—Jordan.
11
“It would surpass anything al-Qaeda did”
On February 29, 2004, Dallah al-Khalayleh, the revered mother of
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, died after a long battle with leukemia.
Jordanian agents had been watching the house for weeks as she lay
dying, and monitored the funeral service to see if the woman’s doting
son would show up. He did not.
Zarqawi likewise stayed far away when, on April 6, a Jordanian
court sentenced him to death in absentia for the murder of the
American diplomat Laurence Foley. Instead, he prepared a gift, a
reminder to the monarchy’s leaders that he had not forgotten about
them. It would be, in Zarqawi’s mind, a gesture on an epic scale,
greater than anything he had accomplished so far in Iraq. With one
awesome blow, he would seek to eviscerate Jordan’s security
establishment, paralyze the monarchy, and eclipse Osama bin Laden
as the most audacious Islamist warrior of his time.
The man he selected for the mission was a Jordanian of
Palestinian descent named Azmi al-Jayousi. A stocky thirty-five-
year-old with thinning auburn hair and light, European features,
Jayousi had been with Zarqawi since his Afghanistan days. He picked
up explosives-making skills at the Jordanian’s Herat camp in
western Afghanistan, at some point losing a finger for his troubles.
When Zarqawi moved to the mountains of northern Iraq, Jayousi
went to work at Ansar al-Islam’s chemical lab, tinkering with
combinations of simple toxins and testing the results on dogs. Now
Zarqawi sat down with him to sketch out a plan for a device that
would draw on all of Jayousi’s talents: a massive bomb, powerful
enough to level buildings, that would simultaneously release a large
cloud of poison gas in the heart of the Jordanian capital. Similar to a
radioactive “dirty bomb” that uses conventional explosives to spread
radiation, this would be a true terror weapon, unleashing panic as
invisible toxins wafted through the city. With a favorable wind, his
“suicide chemical attack,” as his followers called it, could potentially
kill thousands.
But first the bomb maker would have to find a way to get to his
target. Jayousi, like Zarqawi himself, was well known to Jordan’s
Mukhabarat, having been arrested and imprisoned for his links to
radical causes in the 1990s. He might be recognized at the border,
even with a fake passport. Zarqawi took no chances. With the help of
his Syrian logistics chief, the polyglot dentist Abu al-Ghadiya, a
scheme was devised for moving Jayousi and an accomplice across
the Jordanian border inside a gasoline tanker truck. Ghadiya
arranged for the terrorists to hide inside the fuel tank itself, in a
compartment outfitted with breathing tubes so the stowaways would
not be overwhelmed by fumes during the two-hour trip through
customs and across the Syria-Jordan border. The men would bring
no supplies with them other than an explosives recipe and thick wads
of Jordanian dinars and euro notes, the first installment on a budget
that eventually topped a quarter of a million dollars.
Once he was safely across the border, Jordanian friends whisked
Jayousi to a safe house from which he could begin his preparations.
Jayousi bought a used Opel, then went on a shopping spree. He
assigned aides to rent warehouse space in three towns in northern
Jordan, and purchased four other vehicles from different vendors.
One was a Chevy Caprice, which, with its powerful V8 engine and
Detroit-steel frame, contained sufficient muscle for punching
through a security checkpoint. Then he bought three trucks, two of
them to be converted into giant bombs, and a third to hold vats of
chemicals. Finally, he put teams of helpers to work on a dozen
different tasks, from welding reinforced bumpers onto the trucks to
buying and stockpiling chemicals—pesticides, potassium cyanide,
hydrogen peroxide, glycerin, acetone—in batches just small enough
to avoid raising suspicion. The supplies, twenty tons in all, soon lined
the walls of a small warehouse in the northern city of Irbid, in jugs
and crates marked with orange warning labels. Among his workers
were twelve who were slated to serve on the mission itself, with no
expectation of ever returning home.
Jayousi oversaw the work like a malevolent maestro, steering his
Opel from one warehouse to the next to avoid having to
communicate over a telephone line that might be tapped. Between
visits, he cruised through Amman to gather intelligence personally
on potential targets: the Mukhabarat headquarters; the monarchy’s
royal court complex with its palaces; the U.S. Embassy; the new
Mecca Mall, with its five floors of shops and restaurants.
Jayousi found that he could travel around Jordan without
interference, and, with weeks to go before his mid-April deadline, he
began to relax. A man with a notorious sweet tooth, he visited pastry
shops to buy kanafeh, a cannoli-like tube of sweetened cheese in a
pastry crust of long noodle threads. Then he began to contemplate a
riskier outing: a visit to his old neighborhood to see his wife. The
woman had no idea that her husband was in Jordan, but Jayousi,
anxious as he was for a reunion, was savvy enough to know that any
attempt to contact her would likely be noticed and reported to the
Mukhabarat.
In the end, for the lonely Jayousi, love trumped prudence. One day
in early April, he sent one of his deputies to watch the family’s house.
When the lookout spotted Jayousi’s wife walking home from a visit
with her parents, he drove his car next to her and introduced himself.
The two spoke for a moment; then the woman disappeared into her
house. When she emerged again, she had her bags and three children
in tow.
Jayousi’s plans were coming into shape, and now he had his wife
to help him while away the hours until everything was ready.
The target date for delivering Zarqawi’s mighty bomb was less than
two weeks away.
—
The tripwires began firing off almost at once, starting in the outlying
towns and far suburbs of the capital and pulsing through invisible
networks that led to the Mukhabarat’s operations center. The
agency’s sensors at first picked up odd puzzle pieces, such as the
disappearance one day of the entire family of a well-known Zarqawi
associate, the Palestinian called Jayousi. The jihadist himself had not
been seen in Jordan in years. Had he smuggled his family to Iraq to
join him?
A bigger clue landed on the desk of Abu Mutaz, the youthful
counterterrorism officer who had tried to turn Zarqawi after he
emerged from prison with the 1999 amnesty. Nearly five years later,
Abu Mutaz was a captain with subordinates and responsibilities that
extended to regional offices across the country. Now one of those
offices, in Irbid, a city near the Syrian border, was picking up
multiple reports about strangers with large amounts of cash and a
highly specific shopping list: a small number of used but sturdy cars
and trucks, and warehouse rentals located away from houses and
pedestrian traffic.
Abu Mutaz pressed for details. The mysterious shoppers had
behaved strangely enough to pique local interest, and since then, the
suspicions had deepened. Routine queries about their identities ran
into dead ends. In fact, it soon became clear that the buyers were not
the real buyers.
“They’re using middlemen,” Abu Mutaz concluded. “We don’t
know anything about who’s behind this.”
The Mukhabarat’s men picked up one of the intermediaries, a local
car broker in his forties who had gotten into trouble for shady
dealings in the past. Since his earlier scrapes with the law, he had
gone straight and even become religious, though not a zealot. When
the Mukhabarat came for him, he grew exceedingly nervous, quickly
blurting everything he could remember about the men who had hired
him to buy a Chevy Caprice.
“I didn’t even take a commission!” the broker protested.
But the names the broker supplied turned out to be fakes, and the
phone numbers he had scribbled down no longer worked. Now the
only firm leads the Mukhabarat had were descriptions: details about
the vehicles—including the Chevy and a large yellow truck of German
make—and vague accounts of the mysterious men who had bought
them. Everything about the transactions, from registration papers to
licenses plates, had been stolen or fabricated.
Meanwhile, more disturbing reports were landing on Abu Mutaz’s
desk. Several hardware stores in the area had reported large cash
purchases of certain chemicals closely tracked by the intelligence
service because of their potential use in explosives. Alarmed, Abu
Mutaz appealed to his supervisors. Soon agents throughout the
country joined the now urgent search for the Caprice and the yellow
truck.
“We had been patiently gathering information, until we heard
about these chemical supplies,” he remembered afterward. “The
amounts suggested that this was no longer a search for a few
terrorists trying to make a weapon. This appeared to be a much
bigger project.”
So far, the Mukhabarat’s leaders had seen no reason to bring
American officials into the case. There had been no mention of
specific targets, and no suggestion of involvement by al-Qaeda or
Zarqawi in whatever was unfolding in Irbid. Practically speaking,
there was little the CIA could offer. The skills essential for solving
such a case were ones that the Jordanians already possessed, in
abundance. In the gritty art of human intelligence-gathering, they
were wired in a way that the Americans, for all their money and
technical wizardry, were not. And Abu Mutaz was widely regarded as
one of the best.
Abu Mutaz hailed from tiny Tafilah, a three-thousand-year-old
East Bank town where ancestral roots matter more than schooling or
wealth. He used his good grades and tribal connections as a ticket to
an overseas education in Qatar, where he had studied journalism and
envisioned a career in newspapers or television. Instead, he was
offered an entry-level post in the Mukhabarat after scoring high on
an entrance exam. His writing skills quickly earned him a spot
drafting reports for the director on counterterrorism cases. But Abu
Mutaz was a natural as a field intelligence officer, showing real talent
for recruiting informants among the jihadists. Though not especially
religious himself, he had an open, authentic manner that made
people trust him. “For every person, there’s a key that will get you
inside—you just have to find it,” he often said.
But cracking an Islamist almost always required a second key: a
way to penetrate a religious code designed to keep outsiders away.
Abu Mutaz knew the Koran as well as almost any jihadi, and
sometimes he sat for hours with a single detainee, matching him,
verse for verse, in endless theological debates. More than once
during these sessions, he would excuse himself for a few hours on the
pretense of attending prayers at the local mosque. Instead, he would
skip across town to fortify himself with a beer or two at a hotel bar.
The job also required extraordinary patience, a quality with which
Abu Mutaz was naturally gifted. Once, he worked for four months to
win over a single jihadist, a young radical who showed promise as a
potential informant. The youth appeared to be a fence straddler: he
had trained as a militant in Afghanistan, yet he remained attached to
his family and secular life in Jordan. Abu Mutaz decided to pressure
the young man through his parents, so he staked out the
neighborhood to learn all he could about the man’s mother,
including the stores she visited. He found the woman’s favorite
grocery store and then began cultivating a friendship with the shop
owner. One morning, he arrived at the shop with a basket of squabs
—domestic pigeons, a delicacy in Jordan—and asked the grocer to
host a special luncheon, inviting the jihadist, his mother, and Abu
Mutaz himself as guests. As lunch was ending, the Mukhabarat agent
took the mother aside and asked for help in keeping her obviously
bright, talented son from ending up in the spy agency’s prisons. The
two became friends, and the son, ever dutiful, became one of Abu
Mutaz’s best informants.
Now Abu Mutaz called in every chip and leaned on every
neighborhood gossip on the payroll to come up with something
concrete about what he had come to fear was a major terrorist plot.
The entire Mukhabarat, with its plodding, low-tech efficiency, was
now engaged in the search. Word spread through tribal networks and
village councils that the agency’s men were desperately seeking
information to head off a possible attack.
The big break came from a walk-in, an Irbid businessman who
showed up at the local police precinct with a possible tip. The man
had heard about the Mukhabarat’s search, and wondered if his
newest tenants might be somehow linked. He had recently rented a
garage and warehouse on the main Irbid-Amman highway to
strangers who paid in cash and were oddly vague about their plans.
No customers ever came around, and the renters were oddly
secretive, covering up the road-fronting windows and erecting a
fence around the property at their own expense. Once, during a visit
to his property, the man had managed a quick peek through a gap in
the window coverings.
“There is a large truck inside,” the man told police.
Police swooped into the warehouse, surprising a small handful of
workers, who gave up without a struggle. In an interior storage room,
lined up like stacks of paint cans, were barrels of chemical
precursors, enough, the Mukhabarat’s men figured, to level a large
swath of central Amman. Sacks of cumin seed—an explosives
enhancer—lay in another corner. And in the garage, as promised, was
a truck: a yellow German-made MAN, matching precisely the
description of the vehicle on the Mukhabarat’s search list. The
workers had just finished welding to the front of the truck a frame of
hardened steel, the same kind of barrier buster used by Iraqi
insurgents to drive truck bombs deep into a targeted building before
detonating. The delivery system for Zarqawi’s bomb was fully
operational.
Other raids followed in quick succession. At separate locations a
few miles from the warehouse, investigators found other vehicles, as
well as Jayousi’s laboratory. For the latter, the bomb maker had
picked a rural site next to a livestock ranch, where no neighbor
would likely notice if odors escaped from the mixing of chemicals.
By now, between interrogations and scraps of recipe notes from
the laboratory, Abu Mutaz knew with near precision what the
plotters intended. This was to be a suicide bombing like none other:
a “dirty chemical bomb” that blended conventional explosives and
poisons, creating a toxic cloud that would kill as it settled over the
capital. The epicenter was to be the Mukhabarat’s own headquarters,
with the main detonation to take place at a fueling station for the spy
agency’s vehicles, not far from where Abu Mutaz worked.
“By the time we found them they were nearly ready,” Abu Mutaz
recalled afterward. “The plan was to start with an attack on the main
gate, using RPGs and small arms to kill the guards. Then the main
truck—the MAN—would destroy the fuel station, followed by the
other trucks carrying explosives and poison chemicals in layers. After
the explosion the place would become so toxic that not even the
ambulances would be able to enter. It would surpass anything al-
Qaeda did, anywhere in the world.”
But there was still a missing piece: the bomb maker had not been
found.
Jayousi had been careful. Few in the Irbid cell knew his real
identity, and none of them knew where he was staying. He used only
prepaid calling cards and switched mobile phones every few days to
thwart any effort to track his movement. When the raids began, he
disappeared into a safe house in Marka, a Palestinian enclave outside
Amman, apparently intending to wait out the Mukhabarat before
fleeing or trying again. But by now the Jordanians had a name—a
familiar one, at that—along with a photograph they could broadcast
on state-run television. They also possessed what turned out to be a
critical piece of intelligence: Jayousi’s wife and children were with
him. Precisely how they traced the family to the Marka hideout—an
errant phone call, perhaps, or a relative’s indiscretion?—is unclear.
But as night fell on Monday, April 17, 2004, commando teams moved
into position around the apartment building with high confidence
that the bomb maker was inside.
At 2:10 a.m. on April 18, a dozen soldiers crouched with guns
drawn as an officer banged loudly at the door.
“Police!” the lead officer shouted.
The reply was a burst of submachine-gun fire through the door,
showering the hallway with bullets and splinters. One of the soldiers
fell, wounded in the shoulder. The others blasted their way into the
apartment. They shot and killed the first defender, and then raced
through darkened rooms looking for others.
They found Jayousi huddled in a bedroom with his wife and
children. The man who specialized in designing bombs capable of
killing large numbers of innocents made no move in his own defense,
clinging instead to the wife he had brought along, at great risk. Even
as the police moved in, he insisted on keeping his family close,
bunking his kids amid boxes of C-4 military explosives and the fuses
and detonators that were to have been the final ingredients in
Zarqawi’s history-making bomb.
Later that morning, Abu Haytham, the intelligence captain who
had been the last to meet with Zarqawi before his flight to Pakistan
in 1999, peered into an interrogation room to see another face from
his past. The suspect sat in his chair, alone now, his hair matted and
his eyes puffy from a lack of sleep. But it was the same Jayousi he
remembered from years before, clean-shaven and a little stouter, this
time facing accusations that all but guaranteed that he’d never again
live with his wife as a free man.
Abu Haytham walked into the cell with a small tray and sat down.
The bomb maker looked up briefly, but his expression registered only
exhaustion and defeat. This would be easy.
The captain slid the tray across the table, putting the honey-
drenched cheese pastries directly under Jayousi’s nose.
“Have a kanafeh,” he said.
—
Two days later, Abu Mutaz sat next to Jayousi as the bomb maker
retold his story, this time with video cameras rolling. Throughout the
capital, Jordanians were waking up to news reports about the
disrupted terrorist plot, which, according to official estimates,
carried the potential for killing up to eighty thousand people in
central Amman. But Jayousi, answering questions from a
Mukhabarat officer, spoke in the flat monotone of a mechanic
explaining a transmission overhaul. He described the stealthy border
crossing, the financing, the faking of documents, the hiring of
welders, and the crafting of special canisters designed to hold
corrosive toxins. Then he talked about the attack itself:
The men in the Caprice would have RPG weapons, and their task was
to strike the obstacles and kill the guards. Then the big MAN truck
would break through. There was a bumper installed on the truck to
allow it to remove any barrier. It was even designed to go through a
wall and continue until it came to the center of the General
Intelligence. I think the administration of the General Intelligence
was in the center. That’s where the truck would explode.
Any guards not killed in the explosions would either be in shock or
so injured they couldn’t fight back. Then the other cars would enter
the location slowly, one at a time, and each would slowly park
wherever it wanted. There would be no resistance. Being an expert in
explosives, it was my understanding this would destroy the General
Intelligence and everything around it, with even distant sections
being destroyed.
Only when he was asked about the reasons for the attack did
Jayousi become animated. All of it, he said, had been done under the
orders of a man he described as his commander and mentor since
the day he had turned up at the Herat training camp in western
Afghanistan.
“I promised my loyalty to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” he said, as the
video camera rolled. “I agreed to work for him—no questions asked.”
To be killed in such an operation was to have been an honor, he said.
“If I die, I become a martyr,” he said, “and those I kill will go to
hell.”
—
No one followed the details of the plot with greater foreboding than
the man who, in the fantasies of the radicals who dreamed it up,
might have been the chief victim. For King Abdullah II, the events of
April 2004 had been much more than a close call. In seeking to
explode a toxic bomb in central Amman, Jayousi had officially
delivered the Iraq war to the Jordanian capital.
Abdullah had warned that the violence unleashed in Iraq could
never be neatly contained. He had expressed his deep misgivings
prior to the invasion to senior U.S. officials, including the president
himself. Even after the lightning victory over Saddam Hussein’s
army, Abdullah predicted to friends in the region that the war would
lead to “unforeseen negative consequences that we would be dealing
with for decades.” But he had not imagined that it would be as bad as
this.
The monarch had also lodged compaints with U.S. officials about
the aftermath of the invasion. In July 2003, before Iraq spiraled into
chaos, Abdullah met with L. Paul Bremer, the White House–
appointed head of Iraq’s provisional government, and urged him to
reconsider decisions to disband the Iraqi army and blacklist
members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. Pulling Bremer aside
during a meeting at an economic forum in Jordan, the king warned
that the decisions “would blow up in all of our faces,” according to
his account of the conversation.
“I said I hoped he understood that if he was going to de-Baathify
across the board, he would be setting himself up for major resistance
across the board, and would create a power vacuum that someone
would have to fill,” Abdullah wrote in his 2011 memoir. As for
disbanding the army, “it was crazy…a recipe for anarchy and chaos,”
he said.
Bremer’s reply was brusque, as he recalled it.
“I know what I’m doing,” the American diplomat said. “There’s
going to be some kind of compensation. I’ve got it all in hand, thank
you very much.”
To the king, it was no surprise to see how quickly security
unraveled. As a Sunni himself, he could empathize with Iraq’s
minority Sunnis, who, after decades of privileged status, saw
themselves as increasingly isolated and threatened. Those anxieties
would drive some Iraqis toward radical Islamists, who in turn would
open the door to foreign jihadists. Of course al-Qaeda and its allies
would leap at a chance to establish a base in a strategically important
corner of the Middle East.
“They could shift their operations from Afghanistan to the heart of
the Arab world,” he said.
Soon another American stumble would give the extremists a
powerful boost. In the same month the chemical plot was disrupted,
U.S. television networks carried images of GIs abusing prisoners at
Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Arab anger boiled over at photos
of naked inmates wearing dog collars and being sexually humiliated
by female soldiers. Abdullah, during a visit to Washington that
spring, urged President George W. Bush to apologize to Iraqis for the
degrading treatment of prisoners, which Bush did, with Jordan’s
king standing by his side.
But other officials showed little interest in views that clashed with
the administration’s official narrative of a steadily improving Iraq. A
few months after the Abu Ghraib scandal erupted, Abdullah was
queried about conditions for ordinary Iraqis during a private New
York dinner party attended by prominent journalists and
government officials. Even with the upsurge in terrorist attacks,
surely women’s lives had improved since the dictator’s removal, one
of the dinner guests suggested.
“They’re ten times worse,” the king replied. “When you had a
secular regime under Saddam, men and women were pretty much
equal.”
Abdullah’s candor did not sit well with some Bush appointees in
the room. Liz Cheney, the vice president’s elder daughter, then a
senior official in the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs section,
turned to one of the king’s aides with a word of unsolicited advice,
according to the king’s memoir: Abdullah should avoid making such
discordant statements in public. The aide initially wondered if the
comment was meant as a joke, but the next day, Cheney telephoned
him again to reinforce the message. She said she had discussed the
king’s remark with Paul Wolfowitz, the Defense Department official
who had been one of the architects of Bush’s Iraq policy, and both
had agreed that Abdullah should keep his views to himself.
The monarch was exasperated.
“What I said over dinner was true,” he wrote afterward. “I was
shocked that some members of the administration and their
supporters seemed to feel that there could be no dissent on Iraq—
and that in America, a country that prides itself on opinionated self-
expression, they would try to muzzle inconvenient news.”
The reality that was becoming painfully clear to Abdullah was an
Iraq engulfed in flames and seeding the entire region with dangerous
sparks. Jayousi and his poison bomb had drifted into Jordan on a
fire whirl, and Jordan’s Mukhabarat had only narrowly managed to
stop them. Meanwhile, the man who directed and financed the plot
remained free inside Iraq to try again.
—
The Mukhabarat prepared one more blow against the sponsors of the
chemical plot. To discredit the jihadists and expose the barbarity of
the crime they had nearly succeeded in carrying out, the intelligence
directorate aired excerpts from Jayousi’s videotaped confession on
state-run television. All of Jordan would be able to watch the
Palestinian coldly recite his plans to level a portion of the capital.
Arab news channels broadcast the performance to a wider audience
across the Middle East, including in Iraq, where Jayousi’s puffy face
filled a screen in the safe house in which Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was
staying.
Zarqawi surely knew what had happened to Jayousi and his other
soldiers. But after watching the video, he decided to make an equally
public response.
“Yes, there was a plot to demolish the Jordanian General
Intelligence Directorate [GID; the Mukhabarat] building,” Zarqawi
said, speaking into a microphone for an audio recording posted to
Islamist Web sites.
The terrorist tried to deflect the accusations about toxic weapons
as a Mukhabarat fiction. “God knows,” he said, “if we did possess [a
chemical bomb], we wouldn’t hesitate one second to use it to hit
Israeli cities such as Eilat and Tel Aviv.” He insisted that his targets
were military—the apostate regime and its security forces—and that
the arrest of Jayousi and his aides was a temporary setback.
“The battle between us and the Jordanian government has its ups
and downs,” he said. To the monarchy, he warned: “Terrifying events
are awaiting you.”
In fact, the collapse of his plan sent Zarqawi into a funk,
Mukhabarat officials discovered much later, in piecing together a
larger narrative of the plot from informants and captured jihadists.
He disappeared for days, refusing to talk to aides about the bomb
plot and what had gone wrong.
“This was supposed to be his ‘shock and awe,’ the thing that would
give him a global reputation,” said a Jordanian intelligence official
who participated in the agency’s review. “Zarqawi really did want his
own name to precede Bin Laden’s. And more than that, he really
wanted to hurt the GID.”
But Zarqawi’s moodiness was short-lived. Already, in the final days
of April 2004, an unexpected opportunity had fallen his way. He
began to see a path to jihadi stardom that required only a single
spectacular death.
12
“The sheikh of the slaughterers”
The camera’s recording light flicked on. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
clutched a script in both hands and began to read. He was dressed in
black, from his baggy trousers and tunic to the ski mask that
concealed his face, and he towered over the pale figure in the orange
jumpsuit who sat on a blanket in front of him. The seated man
shifted uncomfortably, his legs and arms bound with ropes.
“Nation of Islam, great news!” Zarqawi began in Arabic, with
exaggerated inflection. “The signs of dawn have begun and the winds
of victory are blowing.”
Zarqawi was flanked by four of his men, also hooded and dressed
in black. The men carried rifles and wore ammunition pouches and
fidgeted like athletes loosening up for a contest. Most fixed their
attention on the prisoner as Zarqawi spoke, as though the young man
might somehow throw off his ropes and try to flee. Everyone in the
room behaved as though acutely aware of the video camera except
for the man in the jumpsuit, who stared straight ahead as though in a
daze. Whatever his thoughts, Nicholas Evan Berg gave no sign of
awareness of what was about to happen to him.
Before the hooded men came into the room, Berg had been made
to sit on a plastic chair before the same camera and answer questions
about himself. He appeared relaxed, his hands resting in his lap, and
he spoke as calmly as though interviewing to open a bank account.
“My name is Nick Berg,” he began. “My father’s name is Michael,
my mother’s name is Susan. I have a brother and sister, David and
Sarah. I live in West Chester, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia.”
His eyeglasses were missing, and he had grown a scruff of beard
that made him seem younger than his twenty-six years. But he
sounded confident and friendly, very much the same Nick Berg who
had traveled alone to Iraq two months earlier with outsized notions
about starting a business repairing communication equipment.
Zarqawi had seized him because he was looking for an American, any
American. But in Berg he had found an American archetype: a young
man bursting with ambition and big plans, trustful of others, and
possessing an unshakable faith in his own ability to succeed, in a
country and culture unknown to him, through sheer persistence and
the logical power of his ideas. How a would-be entrepreneur from
suburban Philadelphia came to play a starring role in Zarqawi’s
grotesque coming-out video involved a journey as improbable as any
that occurred during the war.
Berg had come to Iraq uninvited, and against the advice of nearly
everyone he knew. But whereas others saw only danger, he saw in
Iraq’s ruins an opportunity to fulfill two of his most pressing needs in
the early months of 2004: jump-starting his struggling business, and
being part of something noble and important, specifically the
transformation of a country benighted by decades of dictatorship.
Berg had made a similar attempt two years earlier in Africa,
prospecting for business opportunities in Kenya while also helping
with humanitarian causes. On the last day of his Kenyan visit, he had
famously given away the entire contents of his suitcases, to return
home with only the clothes he was wearing. Now he would redirect
his energy and resources toward a country whose “liberation” he
heartily supported, hoping to help open a new world of opportunities
for Iraqis, and also for himself.
“I am reasonably confident we can score some work out of this,”
Berg wrote in a January 2004 e-mail to friends, during his initial
scouting visit to Iraq. “It is treacherous, though.”
Berg’s reasons for being in Iraq mystified U.S. and Iraqi officials
and virtually everyone else, except those who knew him personally. A
self-described inventor and adventurer, Berg was never known to
hold more than a passing regard for convention. As a boy, growing
up amid the split-level houses and boutique shopping centers of
West Chester, he was regarded as mildly eccentric, the kind of kid
who grew a yeast colony for fun and kept a ready supply of wires and
duct tape with him in a small toolbox. He amused friends with an
ever-changing array of homemade gadgets, from an electric “truth
detector” to a battery-powered alarm that was rigged to shout “Get
out of here!” whenever intruders entered his cabin at summer camp.
High-school classmates remembered the brainy prankster with the
piercing blue eyes and unusual hairstyle, cropped extremely short
except for a tuft of dark-blond curls that tumbled over his forehead.
He played the sousaphone in the marching band, competed in
science fairs, read obscure philosophy texts, and tested his physical
limits with cross-country bicycle treks of a hundred miles or more.
Even at home he hewed sharply against the grain: a religious
conservative, an exuberant capitalist, and an unapologetic
interventionist in a family of secular Jews whose liberal political
leanings bordered on pacifism.
“He went where no one else did,” Peter Lu, a high-school friend,
said of him. “If there was a path, you could bet Berg wouldn’t be on
it.”
Berg was assured admittance to a good college, but he dropped out
of Cornell University just shy of a diploma. He drifted through a
succession of schools and jobs, never earning a degree but gaining
experience as a volunteer relief worker in Africa and as a service
technician for radio towers, discovering, in the latter role, that he
possessed both the talent and steely nerve to make a living fixing
transmission equipment while dangling from atop a six-hundred-
foot metal spire. Gradually, he began to formulate a vision for a
business that would incorporate all his eclectic interests. At age
twenty-four, with support from his family, he formally launched
Prometheus Methods Tower Service, naming himself as president.
His business plan called for helping developing countries build radio
towers out of Lego-like clay blocks that he designed himself, using
cheap, local materials. The idea was unorthodox and improbably
ambitious, and it suited him perfectly.
Now he needed a market, and Iraq, with its ruined infrastructure
and open spigots gushing with U.S. contractor dollars, seemed to be
just the place.
“There are so many parties involved in this work and they all
subcontract to people, and none of them are specialists like us,” he
wrote home in another e-mail. “It’s unheard of for a company to
actually have skilled specialists here—I think this gives us an
advantage, but we have to get past the ‘I have a friend’ stage. I’m
hoping a good business manager will move this along.”
Berg’s initial scouting visit to Iraq was sufficiently encouraging
that the young entrepreneur returned in March 2004 to try to land
his first real clients. Working on his own, he drove around the
countryside, looking for communications towers, and offered to
inspect and repair any that were damaged or broken. He climbed
rickety steel masts, created prospect lists, and wrote more cheerful e-
mails to friends at home. It was slow going, but Berg’s enthusiasm
never flagged, right up to the day when Iraqi police in the city of
Mosul noticed a strangely dressed foreigner prowling around a radio
tower outside of town.
The Iraqis had no idea what to make of the bespectacled young
man with his tool kit and notebooks filled with sketches of
communications equipment. Convinced that Berg was a spy—Israeli,
perhaps, if not Iranian—the officers arrested him. He was taken to a
Mosul police station on March 24, 2004, and placed in detention,
ending abruptly the young businessman’s Iraq adventure. Or so it
seemed.
—
The plight of a solitary American civilian who runs afoul of Iraqi
authorities is normally a matter for junior consular officers at the
U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. But the strange case of Nicholas Berg soon
commanded the attention of more senior officials at the State
Department and the Pentagon. Eventually, queries about the
businessman made their way to the CIA’s counterterrorism division
in Langley, where Nada Bakos was then the principal analyst in
charge of the Zarqawi file.
Reports afterward showed that the Iraqi police quickly deposited
Berg with U.S. forces in Mosul, who were just as baffled as the Iraqis
by the earnest young man and his story about traveling across Iraq
prospecting for business opportunities. By chance, Bakos happened
to know one of the American military policemen who were present
when Berg was taken in.
What are you doing here? Berg was asked. And asked again.
“No one could figure out what his deal was,” Bakos recalled. “Why
was he wandering around Iraq by himself, looking for something to
do? No one could believe he was just going around looking for a job.”
Meanwhile, background checks turned up another oddity. Three
years earlier, a suspected al-Qaeda terrorist had used an e-mail
address and Internet password that had belonged to Berg. There was
an explanation, albeit a bizarre one: The ever-trusting Berg had once
loaned his laptop computer to a stranger during a bus trip, and when
the man had trouble accessing his e-mail, Berg had given him his
personal log-on information. The stranger turned out to be a friend
of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called “20th hijacker,” who was
arrested while undergoing pilot training to fly one of the planes in
the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
With so many questions swirling around the young businessman,
army officials in Mosul were reluctant to let him go. In the end, they
had no choice: Berg’s family in Pennsylvania had been anxiously
telephoning State Department officials, asking them to investigate
their son’s disappearance. When they learned, in an April 1 e-mail,
that Berg was being held by American forces against his will, they
were furious. The family filed a lawsuit accusing the military of false
imprisonment, and a day later, on April 6, 2004, Berg was released.
Berg spurned an offer for a seat on a military plane back to the
United States, opting instead to travel to Baghdad to sort out his own
arrangements. He checked into a hotel on the day of his discharge
and made a few phone calls. Then, on April 10, he vanished
completely.
Again the family pressed for answers, and again the U.S. Embassy
sent out queries to detention centers and military posts. But there
was not a scrap of news about Berg all that week, or the next.
Finally, on May 8, a military patrol spotted an object hanging from
a highway overpass. Pulling closer, they were horrified to see a
human torso in loose orange clothing, dangling from a rope, with its
hands and feet bound. Beneath the corpse, on a bloodstained
blanket, was the severed head of a young white man with a scruffy
sandy-blond beard.
Nicholas Berg had been found.
—
Two days later, the video containing one of the Iraq war’s most
disturbingly iconic images began streaking across the Internet. Bakos
had no desire to see it, but in the end she forced herself. The viewing
took place in a CIA conference room with two other analysts present.
On the screen was Berg, trussed and seated on the ground in his
orange jumpsuit, his expression blank. Five hooded men in black
stood behind him against a light-colored wall, and the man in the
middle was reading from a script. She knew the voice and recognized
the familiar stocky build, even with the mask. It was Zarqawi.
Bakos noted the orange jumpsuit, so familiar to anyone following
the still-unfolding scandal over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by
American military guards. Zarqawi had never been accused of
subtlety or sophistication in his few previous attempts at public
statements. Was he sending a message to Muslims, inviting them to
witness an act of symbolic revenge for the humiliation of inmates at
Iraq’s most notorious prison?
He was.
“Is there any excuse left to sit idly by?” the man with the script was
saying. “How can a free Muslim sleep soundly while Islam is being
slaughtered, its honor bleeding and the images of shame in the news
of the satanic abuse of the Muslim men and women in the prison of
Abu Ghraib. Where is your zeal and where is the anger?”
The screed continued for several minutes, with more appeals to
Muslim pride and numerous Koranic references, including a nod to
the Prophet Muhammad as “our example, and a good role model,”
for having ordered the beheadings of prisoners after a revolt by
Jewish merchants in the city of Badr. Then, addressing the U.S.
president directly, he delivered a warning:
Hard days are coming to you. You and your soldiers are going to
regret the day that you stepped foot in Iraq and dared to violate the
Muslims….We say to you, the dignity of the Muslim men and women
in the prison of Abu Ghraib and others will be redeemed by blood and
souls. You will see nothing from us except corpse after corpse and
casket after casket of those slaughtered in this fashion.
With that, Zarqawi then pulled a long knife from a sheath and
pounced on Berg who, tied as he was, toppled onto his side. As the
other men held the prisoner, Zarqawi grabbed Berg’s hair with one
hand and with the other began to cut at his throat. There was a brief,
terrible scream, and then a frenzy of movement as the other hooded
men held Berg’s legs and shoulders while Zarqawi continued to
struggle with his grisly task. More seconds passed of thrusting and
sawing, as the camera wobbled and jerked. And still more seconds.
Bakos felt the nausea starting to build.
“Just get it over with,” she found herself thinking. But it wasn’t
stopping.
Bakos finally excused herself and left. “There’s no utility in
watching this,” she thought.
She missed only the final frames, in which one of Zarqawi’s
companions, a tall figure in a white hood, lifted the head, now free of
its body, and held it aloft like a trophy, then set it gently on the
victim’s back.
—
Zarqawi’s message to the world was five minutes and thirty-seven
seconds of grainy video shot with a shaky, handheld camera,
depicting an almost unimaginable act of cruelty. It was an instant
global hit.
Countless thousands of computers downloaded the images, from
North America to South Asia and across the Middle East. Some
viewers cried out in disgust. Others reacted with sadness, despair, or
rage. But they watched.
To ensure proper credit for the deed portrayed, the video helpfully
included a title: “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi shown slaughtering an
American.” The man who had longed to eclipse Osama bin Laden as
the Islamist world’s daring man of action had done just that, at least
for the time being.
Other terrorists had beheaded their victims. Two years earlier, the
Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl had been murdered by al-
Qaeda operatives in a similarly public fashion. But Pearl was a
seasoned journalist who had traveled to Pakistan looking for a story
about al-Qaeda. Nick Berg was targeted and killed simply because he
was an American. And the video of his execution hit at the very time
when millions of Americans were connecting to broadband, and
when support for the Iraq war was plummeting.
Even the White House, which earlier in the month had been
promoting business opportunities in Iraq, was forced to confront
Zarqawi’s brutal deed.
“Their intention is to shake our will. Their intention is to shake our
confidence,” President Bush said, speaking to journalists in
Washington about the terrorist act witnessed by so many Americans,
in such excruciatingly intimate detail. He defended progress in Iraq
but declined to take reporters’ questions.
Other U.S. politicians, including some in the president’s
Republican Party, could sense the shift in the public’s mood, even
before opinion polls confirmed it. The Abu Ghraib scandal had, for
many, ripped away the last tattered remnants of moral rectitude
underpinning America’s war with Iraq. The popular image of a high-
tech U.S. military machine delivering shock and awe to Iraqi forces
had also been tarnished, replaced by video clips on the nightly news
of IED attacks and flag-draped coffins. And now Americans were
witnessing in their living rooms a new kind of savagery.
“If you had your thumb on the pulse of America, that pulse beat
changed when Americans heard about the beheading of Nick Berg,”
Representative Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican, told The New
York Times in an interview. “It jolted everybody’s memory again
about why we were there in Iraq and who we’re dealing with.”
But whom, exactly, were the Americans dealing with? To many
viewers, the men in the video were al-Qaeda, one black hood
indistinguishable from another. Three days after the release of the
video, another message seemed designed to answer the question.
On May 13, 2004, jihadist Web sites posted a message announcing
a new terrorist organization that called itself “al-Tawhid wal-Jihad,”
or Unity and Jihad. It was to be a kind of Islamist super-group: a
merger of smaller factions of Iraqi insurgents and foreign fighters
under a single umbrella, with Zarqawi as leader. The statement
referred impressively to a “decisive historic turning point.”
“This merger is a strength for the people of Islam, and blazing
flames for the enemies of God, where they shall burn until the
retrieval of the stolen rights, and the establishment of God’s religion
on the Earth,” the message read. “It is a ticket and an inducement for
the groups and sects to rush for the fulfillment of this legitimate duty
and factual necessity. We give our word [to] the Islamic Nation that
we shall not betray or retreat, and we shall keep our promise until we
reach either one of two aspired outcomes: victory or martyrdom.”
The communiqué listed two co-leaders, with Zarqawi—the
“sheikh”—taking top billing. Just over three months earlier, in a
letter to Bin Laden, Zarqawi had asked for a partnership with al-
Qaeda and said that, in any event, the world would soon be hearing
from him. That moment had arrived. With the release of the Berg
video and the announcement of a pan-insurgent group with himself
at the helm, Zarqawi had staked out a spot at the forefront of the
global jihadist movement. No longer was he merely the leader of a
particularly violent terrorist faction in Iraq. He was now a rival to
Bin Laden himself as the terrorist that the West feared and young
Islamists most wanted to emulate. Yes, Bin Laden had his videos,
too: the Saudi appeared in his golden robes and dye-blackened
beard, delivering ponderous sermons from behind a desk. Zarqawi’s
showed a vital, charismatic young man in ninja garb, killing an
American with his own hands.
CIA analysts studying the video and communiqué wondered if the
young Jordanian had overreached. Zarqawi was an upstart who
lacked formal education and had never been regarded as having the
vision or brainpower to run a large organization. He also lacked the
kind of institutional support that had helped make Bin Laden
successful, including backing from recognized Islamic scholars
whose fatwas gave spiritual cover to such violent deeds as killing
unarmed civilians or employing suicide tactics. Zarqawi sought no
such approvals, and he had taken upon himself the responsibility of
deciding how jihad against U.S. forces would be waged.
Nada Bakos wondered if Zarqawi’s main achievement had been to
elevate himself as a priority target, and not just for the Americans.
“Zarqawi jumped the shark,” she mused afterward. “Even al-Qaeda
tried to abide by principles, using its theologians to interpret Sharia
law. But Zarqawi interprets the law however he wants. He creates his
own rules, like a cult,” she said. “He is becoming the megachurch.”
There would be a backlash, surely. The high priests of al-Qaeda
and the other established jihadist networks would not look favorably
on such exuberantly heterodox behavior, especially when it offended
the sensibilities of the wealthy and pious Arabs who supplied the
organization with most of its cash.
But many ordinary Muslim men lined up to join Zarqawi’s swelling
congregation. In Iraq and elsewhere, admirers had begun to refer to
the Jordanian by a new nickname that had come into use in the days
after the Berg video first aired.
Bin Laden would remain the respected figurehead, the man who
years ago had fought the Soviets and planned the attacks on New
York and Washington. But Zarqawi was now hailed as the “sheikh of
the slaughterers,” a terrorist for a brutal new age when broadcasting
butchery on the Internet would be used as a tactic to win support
among hardened jihadists and to sow fear among everyone else.
13
“It’s hopeless there”
On June 23, 2004, diplomat Robert S. Ford tossed his bags onto an
armored airport bus and took his place for the final leg of a journey
he had tried to avoid. In twenty-five minutes he would be in the
Green Zone again, navigating its mazes of blast walls and trailer
villages, breathing in the city’s hot, sweaty air with its accents of
diesel fuel and rotting garbage. Six months after swearing off
Baghdad for good, he was back, just in time to see the country’s
fortunes careen sharply toward the worst.
Signs of Iraq’s unraveling lay scattered along the airport road.
Barriers and checkpoints now dotted the ten-mile highway in a vain
attempt to stop the daily shootings and bombings along what U.S.
soldiers dubbed “Route Irish” and Iraqis called “Death Street.” A
year earlier, getting from the airport to the international district had
been as simple as catching a shuttle. Now a ride into town meant
booking a secure taxi, outfitted with armed escorts and bulletproof
glass, that might cost as much as a thousand dollars per trip. Or, for
a senior member of the U.S. diplomatic corps, it meant a seat on the
steel-plated embassy van that raced between the terminal and the
Green Zone at terrifying speed.
“Not a good sign,” Ford thought to himself.
By every measure, Iraq was a more sinister place, especially for
Americans. Though Ford, at forty-six, was one of the State
Department’s top Arabists, his light brown hair and blue eyes
marked him as a Westerner. During his last assignment in Iraq, Ford
had been held at gunpoint for two hours by a group of Shiite
militiamen. This stint, he suspected, would be even more eventful.
Ford’s earlier tour had been his own idea. Weeks after the fall of
Baghdad, the State Department had issued an urgent appeal for
Arabic-speaking volunteers to help the struggling U.S.-led interim
government. Ford was then a veteran Middle East diplomat with
near-flawless language skills and a comfortable post as the number
two official at the U.S. Embassy in Bahrain. Like many of his
colleagues, he had been dubious about the Bush administration’s
Iraq adventure. Still, the need appeared genuine. He raised his hand,
and soon afterward he was boarding a military transport to Iraq,
arriving in August 2003 in a capital city still reeling from the UN
headquarters bombing that killed Sergio Vieira de Mello. His first
assignment landed him in the Shiite holy city of Najaf as a diplomatic
liaison to a contingent of U.S. marines in charge of securing the
town. But the marines he met were mostly interested in getting out
of Iraq as quickly as possible, and local leaders were caught up in a
bloody feud between rival Shiite militias the Americans were seeking
to disarm.
The encounter with the Shiite militiamen occurred in his first week
on the job. Ford had a habit of plunging headlong into challenges,
and in Najaf he set out at once to meet community leaders and build
relationships away from the marine base. One Saturday afternoon, as
he was meeting with one of the city’s prominent clerics, a group of
twenty-five militiamen burst into the house with guns drawn and
clustered around Ford and a marine major who had accompanied
him on the visit. The gunmen grabbed a young Iraqi translator and
dragged him outside, where they savagely punched and kicked him.
Ford grasped for the only weapon available to him: a bluff. He
pulled within a few inches of the man who seemed to be in charge.
“I’m Robert Ford, the coalition’s representative here from
Baghdad,” he began in Arabic. “I have a meeting with your militia
leader at midnight tonight. You can tell him I’m going to be late
because you’re holding me.”
It worked. The Americans were released, and the militants
scurried to their vehicles, first releasing the Iraqi translator, whose
injuries were severe enough to warrant hospitalization. Minutes
later, Ford, undaunted, was pressing his marine escort to call on the
militia group’s commander immediately to try to leverage the
episode into an agreement on disarming.
The marine glared at Ford, this hyperenergetic diplomat with an
apparent death wish.
“Goddamn nut!” he swore. The Americans returned to their base.
Ford’s attempts at bridge building resumed the very next day, but
the disappointments and frustrations piled up quickly. Months later,
when he was formally asked to return to Iraq for a second stint, it
wasn’t the physical danger that compelled him to say no. Nor was it
the awful weather, the Spartan living conditions, the freezing-cold
showers, or the impossibly complex, constantly shifting nature of
Iraq’s sectarian and tribal rifts. It was the sense of waste and futility
that hovered over nearly every endeavor like a toxic cloud.
“Oh, no, no, no, no. I already volunteered for Iraq once, and I don’t
want to go back,” Ford told his boss over the telephone when the new
request came. “It’s hopeless there. It’s not a serious effort. I want
nothing to do with it.”
And yet back he went. Back to the Green Zone, with all its surreal
contrasts: the palaces and palm-lined swimming pools, and the
dreary barracks, with walls of sandbags that offered scant protection
from the mortar shells that fell randomly from the sky, like exploding
lawn darts flung by a giant. Back, despite his wife’s anger and his
own personal misgivings about losing another chunk of his life—and
possibly more—to what was surely a hopeless cause. Back, because
he felt he had no choice.
“You can’t say no unless you quit,” he said afterward. “And we
didn’t have enough money to quit.”
In fact, Ford’s transfer orders had come from the very top of the
State Department. The newly appointed U.S. ambassador to Iraq,
John Negroponte, had asked Secretary of State Colin Powell to
appoint Ford to the prestigious post of political counselor in the U.S.
Embassy. Though relatively junior for such an assignment, Ford had
won admiration at Foggy Bottom for his internal memos and e-mails
candidly assessing the Iraq war’s impact on the region. He had also
earned admiration from colleagues for his bravery after years of
unflinching service in some of the Middle East’s roughest
neighborhoods. A former Peace Corps volunteer conversant in five
languages, he spent most of his professional life in provincial towns
from the Moroccan interior to coastal Turkey, working like a
journalist to gain local knowledge and build a source network.
Nothing seemed to intimidate him, friends remembered.
“He spent his entire career in dangerous places,” Robert
Neumann, the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, said of Ford.
“He’s not someone who stays in the [embassy], but someone who
gets out and develops a very broad range of contacts. If you
constantly have to feel totally safe, you’re basically useless in those
jobs.”
This time, Ford’s role would be different. The Bush administration,
sensing its Iraq experiment slipping out of control, had moved to
expedite the installation of an interim Iraqi government that would
quickly assume primary responsibility for securing the country and
organizing elections. The insurgency that U.S. officials had been so
slow to acknowledge was now an indisputable fact, and the costs—
financial, political, and human—were soaring. With a U.S.
presidential election looming, Ford later recalled, “there was a drive,
full speed ahead, to turn over sovereignty to the Iraqis and get us
out.”
To that end, the Coalition Provisional Authority would go out of
business to make way for an Iraqi interim government headed by a
new interim prime minister named Iyad al-Allawi. The transition
officially occurred on June 28, 2004, less than a week after Ford
arrived in the country. The Americans pledged to stick around only
until Iraq was strong enough to stand on its own. How long would
that take? Months, surely; perhaps even a year? No one knew. The
Sunni towns north and west of Baghdad were sliding rapidly into
lawlessness, and parts of Fallujah and Ramadi were effectively
controlled by insurgents, some of them foreigners who had traveled
to Iraq for jihad. The new Iraqi leadership and its U.S. backers
desperately needed Sunni allies: respected, credible Sunnis who
could help pacify the region and lead the Sunni tribes through a
democratic transition that included elections and a unity government
that shared power equally among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds.
One of Ford’s assignments was to identify such allies and try to
win them over. In his first month on the job, he traveled to Fallujah
and arranged meetings with U.S. military commanders and Arab
diplomats to get a sense of the task ahead of him. It was worse than
he imagined. In Fallujah, the capital of the insurgency and
traditionally the most rebellious city in Iraq, townspeople were in no
mood to negotiate. The marines picked off occasional targets from
their base on the outskirts of town, but most of the city remained a
“denied area” to Americans in the weeks after the killing of the four
American security contractors, officers told Ford.
“Insurgents and foreign fighters largely operate without constraint
within the city,” read a classified State Department cable describing
Ford’s meeting with the marines. “Coalition forces are still seeking to
disrupt insurgents and foreign jihadists with surgical strikes against
Abu Musab al Zarqawi–related targets within the town in order to
prevent Fallujah from operating as a safe-haven for extremists.”
A Jordanian diplomat with extensive contacts within the Sunni
tribes described the situation as all but hopeless. Sunnis remained
bitterly opposed to the American presence in Iraq, and though some
were conflicted about the presence of foreign insurgents, others
welcomed them as a bulwark against persecution by Shiite militias
seeking to settle scores after decades of Sunni rule. Out of
desperation, some tribal elders had even taken up the idea of
restoring the Iraqi monarchy that had been overthrown in the 1958
coup, the Jordanian said.
“Sunnis are hostile, divided, leaderless, and unable to envision a
political solution acceptable to others,” the diplomat told Ford,
according to a cable that bore eerie echoes of Zarqawi’s own analysis
of the country’s Sunni minority.
There was still another obstacle, much harder to gauge from
diplomatic interviews. Somewhere in the western desert, Zarqawi
was also making his own plans for Iraqi’s Sunni heartland. He, too,
was gathering intelligence, recruiting allies, and laying the
groundwork for future governance, though his vision differed from
the Americans’ in every conceivable way.
Ford’s decades of diplomatic experience had shown that political
solutions existed for almost every conflict. Eventually, even Sunnis
and Shiites would weary of killings and destruction and grope toward
a solution that would allow the sides to peacefully coexist as Iraqis.
But Zarqawi was no Iraqi, and he had no interest in coexisting.
Zarqawi’s objective was to raze and tear down, leaving a scorched
terrain too depleted to support the return of a secular country called
Iraq.
—
The Iraqi city of Ramadi was not yet the “capital of the Islamic state
of Iraq,” as Zarqawi’s followers would soon call it. But already, in the
early summer of 2004, there was little doubt about who controlled
the town.
A sprawl of low-rise concrete buildings and palm trees on the
Euphrates River an hour west of Baghdad, Ramadi had the post-
apocalyptic feel of a city that had been a free-fire zone between
powerful armies. Decapitated buildings lined an abandoned market
street strewn with broken concrete and shattered glass. People and
cars darted and weaved as though pursued by invisible assailants.
From behind walls of sandbags and Hesco barriers on the city’s
outskirts, the local U.S military commanders proclaimed Ramadi to
be under U.S. control. In reality, the Americans’ jurisdiction
extended only to their bases and outposts and the range of their
heavy machine guns. Marine patrols into the city’s neighborhoods
invariably sent insurgents scurrying through the alleys like
cockroaches.
Zaydan al-Jabiri watched them run, and said nothing. The rancher
and Sunni tribal leader who had once tried to mediate disputes
between Iraqis and Americans had long since given up on
peacemaking. It wasn’t merely a frustrating occupation; it was
dangerous. One of the sheikh’s oldest friends, a physics professor at
Anbar University, had taken a risk by agreeing to meet with visiting
Coalition Provisional Authority officials to talk about ways to control
the spasms of violence that had turned so much of Ramadi into
rubble. The day after the meeting, the professor was pulled from his
car at an intersection and shot dead in the middle of the street.
In many more instances, death was frighteningly random. In the
weeks after sixteen U.S. marines had been killed in a series of
ambushes around the city, the Americans were in a vengeful mood.
Firefights erupted daily in residential neighborhoods, and bullets
tore through bedrooms where families slept. Checkpoint sentries
reflexively shot at motorists who approached too quickly or failed to
heed warnings shouted at them in English. In the desert outside
Ramadi, forty-five Iraqis had died when American warplanes stuck a
building that U.S. officials insisted was an insurgent safe house.
Iraqis said the jets mistakenly struck a wedding celebration. Amateur
video showed bodies of women as well as children and infants.
Outraged and humiliated, Ramadi’s Sunnis initially welcomed the
resistance fighters, including the foreign Islamists who poured into
the city promising to drive away the invaders. Compared with the
local insurgents, the Islamists were organized, disciplined, and
fearless. But it was soon clear that their plans included more than
fighting Americans. The foreigners commandeered houses and
forcibly collected “taxes” and supplies from shopkeepers. Declaring
themselves in charge, they rolled into residential neighborhoods
armed with heavy weapons and a harsh moral code that banned
drinking, smoking, female education, and Western fashion and
hairstyles. One Ramadi man defiantly lit a cigarette in front of such
an Islamist patrol and was shot dead on the spot.
Businesses suffered as well, despite the insurgents’ crude attempts
at establishing courts and maintaining essential services. It was
quickly clear that the rebels had neither aptitude for nor interest in
running anything. Their checkpoints and roadside bombs made
transportation a high-risk enterprise, even when the cargo consisted,
as in Zaydan’s case, of cows and sheep. In town, the hallmarks of
modern civilized life slipped away, one by one: garbage collection,
phone service, electricity. Shopkeepers who tried to stay open found
themselves subjected to arbitrary and occasionally bizarre
regulations. In some neighborhoods, grocers were threatened with
punishment if they displayed cucumbers and tomatoes in the same
stall. The jihadists maintained that the vegetables resembled male
and female body parts and should not be permitted to mingle.
Despite the hardships, some merchants chose to back the Islamists
anyway, hoping at least to enjoy a measure of protection. Zaydan
demurred. The presence of foreign troops in his city irritated him.
Yet he was equally resentful of what he saw as the Islamists’
impertinence in challenging the traditional authority of the tribes.
He was appalled by the Islamists’ tactics and disdainful of their
thuggish, swaggering behavior. He complained to friends about the
personality cult that seemed to be developing around the Jordanian
named Zarqawi, the black-clad phantom whose exploits were already
legendary in some of the city’s neighborhoods.
“He surrounds himself with the scum of Anbar,” Zaydan
complained. “The people accept him because they are sheep without
a shepherd. But the men close to him are lowlifes, people with no
conscience. And they are drawn to Zarqawi because he has a lot of
money.”
Zarqawi himself was rarely seen in the town, but his Iraqi deputies
quickly earned notoriety as colorful butchers. Most famous was a
religious zealot called Omar the Electrician, a stocky tradesman with
chipped teeth who, in his twenties, had shot a police officer in
Saddam Hussein’s government in an act of revenge over the killing of
a relative. He sought refuge with Ansar al-Islam, the Islamist group
that had sheltered Zarqawi in Iraq’s northeastern mountains. When
Zarqawi entered Baghdad, Omar the Electrician came along, and
rose to become the leader of Zarqawi’s brigade in Fallujah. His band
became among the most notorious in Iraq, staging hit-and-run
attacks on American patrols and running kidnapping-for-ransom
operations to raise money. Hostages who couldn’t pay up were killed,
though not by Omar himself. He “swore he’d never personally
beheaded a hostage,” one of his comrades told journalists. “He said
he chose men who don’t have hearts to do the actual killing.”
Zarqawi eventually began to solicit pledges of support—bay’at, a
loyalty oath—from Anbar tribal leaders and elders. In the summer of
2004, word was passed to Zaydan through a cousin that Zarqawi was
looking for a declaration of allegiance from him. The question was
relayed over coffee, the first of two occasions when Zaydan would
receive such a request. “Will you publicly pledge your support to
Zarqawi?” the cousin asked.
How to respond? Inside, Zaydan was furious. The arrogance of this
foreigner—this criminal—who dared to presume that he could assert
authority over tribal traditions that had held sway for centuries! For
all he knew, Zarqawi was an American agent, sent by Washington to
stir unrest so the Westerners and Iranians could have an excuse to
destroy Iraq utterly and divide the spoils among themselves.
But even Zaydan dared not utter such opinions aloud. He chose to
deflect the question, for now.
“Who is Zarqawi?” he shrugged. “I never met him.”
—
In July 2004, the Bush administration announced that it had
increased the reward for information leading to Zarqawi’s capture,
from ten million to twenty-five million dollars—identical to the
bounty offered for Bin Laden’s head.
Zarqawi celebrated his rise in the most-wanted rankings with a
video, posted to jihadist Web sites. In it, he was introduced under his
new favorite moniker—“the sheikh of the slaughterers”—and his
voice boomed with confidence. He talked about famous Muslim
warriors such as Musa Ibn Nusayr, a hero of the Islamic conquest of
Spain, implying his own place in the chain of great men. Then he
made an impassioned plea for Muslims from across Iraq and around
the world to join him.
“This is a call for help from the depths, to the lions in Baghdad and
al-Anbar, and to the heroes in Diyala and Samarra, and to the tigers
in Mosul and the north: Prepare for battle,” he said.
His intended audience by now knew exactly the kind of battle he
meant. Since Berg’s savage murder, Islamist media were awash in
Zarqawi-inspired gore. The Jordanian’s men carried out dozens of
executions, many of them videotaped, including the beheadings of a
Bulgarian truck driver, a South Korean translator, and an Egyptian
contractor. Scores of others would follow, including Americans,
Britons, Japanese, Austrians, and Italians. Lebanese kidnapping
victims who were freed through ransom told stories of torture and
unimaginable cruelty in makeshift prisons; of poor immigrant
laborers who lacked money for ransom being killed slowly with
electric drills; of other victims being held down while their tongues
were hacked out. Young foreign-born Islamists who answered
Zarqawi’s call to jihad most often ended in suicide-bomber school.
Some would be called upon to sacrifice their own lives to destroy
targets with no discernible gain other than to kill a few innocent
Iraqis who happened to be in the wrong place.
In recruiting volunteers for suicide bombings, Zarqawi was
knowingly defying a Koranic commandment that strictly forbids
Muslims from taking their own lives. Some Islamic scholars have
held that military suicide missions might be permitted under
extreme circumstances, and jihadists have argued for decades over
exactly where the lines fall. Zarqawi seized on a small loophole in
Islamic law and stretched it to absurd proportions, using hand-
picked clerics to sanction the use of “martyrdom operations” for any
purpose that suited him. The result was a torrent of suicide attacks
unrivaled in the history of the jihadist movement, scholars later
concluded.
As Zarqawi himself later wrote, such operations were the most
“deadly weapons we have in our possession: weapons with which we
can inflict the deepest wound upon our enemy.” He added,
somewhat cynically: “All of this is notwithstanding the fact that these
kinds of operations are of little effort for us; they are uncomplicated
and are the least costly for us.”
In the videotape appealing for new recruits, Zarqawi offered the
usual platitudes about heavenly rewards. More appealing, perhaps,
was his invitation to be part of a movement that transcended history
itself. The liberation of Muslim lands was a worthy goal, but it was
only the start. Zarqawi promised nothing short of a reshaping of the
global order. “You shall overcome America, by Allah. You shall
overcome America, though it may be after a while,” he said. “It shall
remain a mole of shame on the cheek of time.”
For the first time, Zarqawi also revealed a conviction regarding his
own destiny as a midwife for the new golden age of Islam. He
referred to apocalyptic passages in the Hadith describing the end-
times struggle that would lead to Islam’s ultimate triumph.
According to the ancient prophecies, mankind’s final battle would be
fought in northern Syria, near a village called Dabiq. The story
echoes early Christian teachings about the epic contest between
forces of good and evil at Armageddon.
Jihad’s “flames will blaze,” Zarqawi said, “until they consume the
Armies of the Cross in Dabiq.”
—
The claim was audacious. Around the world, other Islamist leaders
and religious scholars argued furiously about Zarqawi.
Among his harshest critics were a number of fellow jihadists,
including some who knew Zarqawi well. One of the sharpest rebukes
came from the terrorist leader’s old cellmate and mentor from
Jordan, the man who was first to recognize Zarqawi’s leadership
potential within al-Jafr Prison. Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi had
been in and out of detention during the years when Zarqawi was
away, and the differences that emerged between the friends during
their last weeks in jail had widened in the years since. Now Maqdisi
watched in disapproval as his former protégé killed Muslim men,
women, and children who had nothing to do with overthrowing a
corrupt leader.
“I hear and monitor the chaos that rages today in Iraq, by means of
which they seek to blemish the Jihad and its honorable image by
blowing up cars, planting bombs in the roads, and firing mortars in
the streets, markets, and other places where Muslims congregate,”
Maqdisi wrote in a letter he posted on his personal Web site,
assuming—accurately—that Zarqawi would see it. “The hands of the
Jihad fighters must remain clean, so as not to be sullied with the
blood of those whom it is forbidden to harm, even if they are
rebellious sinners.”
Maqdisi had no qualms about using violence, but he was a stickler
for the rules, as he understood them. Zarqawi, the pupil, had
somehow missed some of the nuances.
“An example of this,” he wrote, “is when the fighter crosses the
lines of Sharia by abducting or killing a Muslim for non-Sharia
reasons—such as claiming he worked for the infidels when the work
doesn’t reach the level of giving aid to the infidels.”
And there was another thing: suicide bombing. Islam forbids it, he
declared, except in rare cases where there are no other means of
waging the struggle. Zarqawi’s men had compounded the sin by
using suicide bombers to kill the innocent, he said. That the intended
victims were Shiites was no excuse.
“Even if our Sunni brothers in Iraq have many justifications, this
does not justify blowing up mosques,” Maqdisi said. “Permitting the
[spilling of] blood of the Shiites is a mistake in which Jihad fighters
had best not become entangled.”
A religious backlash to Zarqawism stirred among mainstream
Muslims as well. The most significant repudiation of Zarqawi’s
ideology came from his native country, organized by the man whose
amnesty decree in 1999 had inadvertently given Zarqawi his chance.
In 2002, King Abdullah II had been scolded by American officials
for warning that an invasion of Iraq would “open Pandora’s box,”
and he was taking no pleasure in seeing his predictions coming true.
Sickened by the bombings and beheadings carried out in Allah’s
name, the monarch began a series of private meetings with religious
scholars to talk about a way to draw a line between Islam, the ancient
faith, and the hateful takfiri creed used by Zarqawi to justify the
killing of those he regarded as apostates.
It was no easy assignment. Unlike Shiites or Roman Catholics,
Sunni Muslims lack a centralized religious hierarchy that settles
theological debates. Muftis, Sunni clerics of a certain rank, can issue
religious edicts called fatwas, but any two can disagree wildly on the
same topic: what is a damnable sin to one scholar may be regarded
as permissible or even obligatory behavior to another. Since his
arrival in Iraq, Zarqawi had become a master at exploiting the
contradictions in the system, surrounding himself with like-minded
clerics who issued fatwas to condone suicide bombings and the
killing of Muslim innocents, actions that would be regarded as anti-
Islamic under almost any reasonable interpretation of Koranic texts.
The best antidote, Abdullah felt, was a strong denunciation that
carried the moral weight of all branches of Islam, everywhere in the
world. It must be a statement of clarity and universality, equally
acceptable to mainstream Sunnis and Shiites from Cairo to Kabul,
and from Tehran to Timbuktu. To begin the task, Abdullah deputized
one of his cousins, a Cambridge-educated Islamic scholar named
Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad, and pulled together the country’s top
clerics and religious experts to draft a declaration that sought to
address three key questions:
Who is a Muslim? Who is empowered to issue fatwas? And under
what circumstances can one Muslim brand another as an apostate?
On November 9, 2004, the king took a seat next to Jordanian Chief
Justice Iz al-Din al-Tamimi as the judge read a short declaration that
Abdullah hoped would serve as the template for Muslim rejection of
takfiri beliefs.
“We denounce and condemn extremism, radicalism and
fanaticism today, just as our forefathers tirelessly denounced and
opposed them throughout Islamic history,” al-Tamimi read. “On
religious and moral grounds, we denounce the contemporary concept
of terrorism that is associated with wrongful practices, whatever
their form may be. Such acts are represented by aggression against
human life in an oppressive form that transgresses the rulings of
God.”
The statement drew little notice in the West. In Washington, the
news media and political establishment were busily dissecting
President George W. Bush’s narrow reelection victory over his
Democratic rival, John F. Kerry, the previous week. Within thirty-six
hours of the declaration, the spotlight would shift to France, where
the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat would die while receiving
treatment for the flu, sending much of the Arab world into spasms of
mourning.
Still, Abdullah continued to lobby Muslim leaders to support his
declaration. Months later, more than two hundred Islamic scholars—
representing more than fifty countries, from Saudi Arabia and Egypt
to Iran and Lebanon—gathered in the Jordanian capital to craft a
more expansive statement that carried the same blanket rejection of
religion-inspired violence. Over the following year, a total of five
hundred Islamic scholars and seven international Islamic assemblies
would formally endorse what came to be called “the Amman
Message.”
“It is neither possible nor permissible to declare as apostates any
group of Muslims who believes in God,” the statement said.
It was the first time scholars and religious leaders from across the
Islamic world had come together to denounce takfiri ideology
collectively, in a consensus statement considered legally binding for
observant Muslims. No one expected an immediate halt to the
bloodshed in Iraq, and, indeed, the killings continued as before. Yet
Abdullah, reflecting on the effort afterward, said there had been no
choice but to speak out. Even though Zarqawi might be fighting
Americans and Shiites, his chief targets were ultimately the minds of
young Muslims he hoped to win to his cause. Each bombing shown
on the nightly news, each grotesque video uploaded to the Internet,
brought Zarqawi closer to his goal. And until now, the rest of the
Muslim world had offered nothing substantial in reply.
“The ability of a few extremists to influence perceptions through
acts of barbarity places greater responsibility on the moderates, of all
religions, to speak up,” the king said. “If the majority remains silent,
the extremists will dominate the debate.”
—
Another contender for the sympathies of young Muslims was
beginning to see Zarqawi in a more charitable light. Osama bin
Laden had never tried to disguise his personal dislike for the
Jordanian. But three years after the attacks of September 11, 2001,
Zarqawi offered the potential for something that Bin Laden
desperately needed: a win.
The al-Qaeda founder was trapped in an exile of his own making,
able to do little more than pass along instructions and advice by
courier to operatives hundreds of miles away. By co-opting Zarqawi,
al-Qaeda could share the credit for his successes and draw in new
energy from his suddenly white-hot celebrity. Over time, perhaps it
could also rein in some of Zarqawi’s worst excesses.
The partnership was officially confirmed by Bin Laden in an
audiotape broadcast on Arab cable-news channels. In his usual low-
key manner, he announced a new branch of the al-Qaeda movement,
and an impressive promotion for the man he designated as the
leader.
“It should be known that mujahed brother Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
is the emir of the al-Qaeda for Jihad Organization in the Land of the
Two Rivers,” Bin Laden said. “The brothers in the group there should
heed his orders and obey him in all that which is good.”
The statement from Zarqawi’s side—a choreographed response,
Western analysts believed—gushed with enthusiasm. It heralded a
historic merger, the details of which would bring “great joy to the
people of Islam, especially those on the front lines.”
“It was with good tidings of support during this blessed month that
Tawhid wal-Jihad’s leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (God protect him)
and his followers announced their allegiance to the Sheikh al-
Mujahideen of our time, Abu Abdullah Osama bin Laden, God
protect him,” the posting stated.
More than a mere partnership, this merger marked a new
beginning, the birth of a movement that would cleanse Muslim lands
of “every infidel and wicked apostate” and pave the way for a
restoration of the Islamic caliphate, it said.
“This is undoubtedly an indication that victory is approaching,
God willing, and that it represents a return to the glorious past,”
Zarqawi’s statement continued. “We shall, with great fury, instill fear
in the enemies of Islam.”
Zarqawi promised Bin Laden that he would obey him, “even if you
bid us plunge into the ocean.” Yet he could not resist pointing out
that it was Bin Laden who had come around to accepting Zarqawi’s
plan for running the insurgency. “Our most generous brothers in al-
Qaeda came to understand the strategy,” he wrote, “and their hearts
warmed to its methods and overall mission.”
Al-Qaeda now officially had a franchise in Iraq, and the rough-
talking thug from Zarqa had a new title: emir. Or, in English, “the
prince.” The marching orders for al-Qaeda’s newest franchisee came
courtesy of Osama bin Laden himself: Stop the Iraqi elections.
14
“Are you going to get him?”
Iraq’s historic first vote for a National Assembly was set for January
30, 2005, and Bin Laden, in the same audio statement that
welcomed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi into the fold, denounced the polls
as sinful. “An apostasy against Allah,” he said. In fact, Zarqawi was
already hard at work to ensure that the elections failed. He didn’t
have to stop all voting; he needed only to keep enough of Iraq’s
Sunnis away from the polls to discredit the results. His campaign to
make Iraq unsafe for democracy seemed designed to frustrate the
efforts of the U. S. Embassy’s chief political officer, whose impossible
mission that winter was persuading Sunni politicians to run for
office.
Robert Ford was seeking something that was, in the minds of
many of the Iraqis he canvassed, tantamount to a death warrant for
them and perhaps their families. It was hard to argue otherwise.
Over the past year, Sunni government officials and candidates had
been shot, stabbed, kidnapped, blown up at home, and blown up in
their cars. Most distressing to Ford were the cases involving Iraqis he
had gotten to know personally, like the nervous Anbar governor he
met in Ramadi on one of his first trips outside the Green Zone. This
man, Karim al-Burjas, a former army general, confided to Ford that
he was thinking about quitting his job in fear for his safety. Five days
later, gunmen from Zarqawi’s organization attacked his house and
kidnapped his three sons, the youngest of whom was only fifteen.
Burjas resigned immediately to secure their release. His hastily
appointed replacement was forced to double as governor and mayor
of Ramadi, because no one in the city wanted the post.
“Local government is in a state of crisis,” Ford’s office wrote in a
confidential cable to Washington after the Ramadi visit.
Ford continued his search. As he often did during these months,
he paid a visit to the one Iraqi Sunni official who could be counted on
for frank, if occasionally harsh, advice. Tariq al-Hashimi was a
former army colonel whose English accent and tailored suits
betrayed his affinity for the West. He often infuriated other senior
Americans at the embassy with his long diatribes about the U.S
mishandling of the occupation. But he possessed an agile mind, a
strong grasp of Sunni political currents, and fearlessness in
expressing his views. Ford listened respectfully, and the two men
eventually became friends.
In his thirties, Hashimi had become involved in underground Iraqi
politics as part of the Muslim Brotherhood, the conservative religious
organization with branches across the Islamic world. He rose to
prominence in what became known as the Iraqi Islamic Party, while
also pursuing an advanced degree as an economist. After Saddam
Hussein’s overthrow, the party emerged by default as the strongest
and most organized political faction for Iraqi Sunnis, with Hashimi
as its leader. When the Americans scheduled January elections for a
National Assembly to draft Iraq’s constitution, Hashimi’s party
initially embraced the idea and offered a slate of candidates. But
then, a few weeks before the voting started, it abruptly shifted course
and withdrew completely.
Ford made the journey from the Green Zone to Hashimi’s villa to
ask him to reconsider. The retired colonel, ruggedly handsome with
close-cropped silver hair and a trim beard, was gracious, as always,
addressing the diplomat by his first name. Then he invited Ford and
his American compatriots to get lost.
“We’re not going to put candidates in the election, because we’re
not going to get ourselves killed,” he said flatly.
Hashimi had a long list of complaints that he recited for any
American who would listen. It usually began with the grievance
shared by most of Iraq’s Sunnis: Since the overthrow of Saddam
Hussein, Sunnis had been politically marginalized—and in many of
Iraq’s ethnically mixed neighborhoods, brutalized—by Shiites
seeking revenge after decades of oppression. Sunnis had been evicted
from Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad and Basra, and some had
been tortured and murdered by Shiite gangs and even Shiite police
officers. The killings happened on both sides, of course, but many
Sunnis, after decades of comparatively privileged status under
Saddam, were incensed that U.S. forces were failing to stop the
attacks. Rather than providing security, American troops raided
Sunni houses at night to search for weapons and insurgents,
destroying property and violating Arab cultural taboos against
allowing strange men inside the private chambers where women and
children slept.
“You target us with arrests, left, right and center,” Hashimi
complained. “Frequently, you get it wrong, and then you embarrass
people like me.”
But aren’t Sunnis shooting at American soldiers and blowing up
their Humvees? Ford wondered. And what about Sunnis who provide
sanctuary to terrorists like Zarqawi?
Hashimi, as Ford well knew, was equally unhappy about Zarqawi
and other foreign fighters who had taken over whole villages and
urban neighborhoods across western Iraq. Weeks earlier, U.S. troops
had waged a brutal block-by-block battle to drive them out of the city
of Fallujah, only to see them slip away to Ramadi and other cities.
Zarqawi had turned Sunni residential neighborhoods into war zones,
and innocent Iraqis were being killed in car-bomb attacks. Still,
Hashimi refused to concede the point.
“Of course they’re fighting you,” he replied. “You’re making their
lives hell.”
Despite the bluster, it was clear to Ford that Hashimi wanted
Sunnis to have a proper voice in the future Iraqi government. But it
wasn’t going to happen now, not with Zarqawi regularly broadcasting
messages promising death to any Iraqis who ran for office or lined up
to vote. Hashimi could not in good conscience ask his fellow Sunnis
to take such a risk, he said.
“They’ll be murdered by hard-line Sunnis in places like Ramadi
and Fallujah,” he said. “In places like Mosul, if they’re not murdered,
there will be a boycott anyway, so they’ll lose, under your stupid
proportional representation system, to the Shiites and the Kurds.”
Over the following weeks, Ford and his embassy colleagues sent
reports to the Bush administration urging that the election be
postponed until Iraq’s security improved and Sunnis could be
persuaded to participate. The United States should not serve as
guarantor for a vote that would be seen by a third of the country’s
population as illegitimate, the diplomats warned.
“We told Washington this,” Ford said later. “Shiites will vote,
Kurds will vote, but the Sunnis will not vote. You’ll get a heavily
lopsided Shiite-Kurdish government, without any Sunnis. And that
will make the problem worse.”
It was a message that few at the highest levels of the Bush
administration wanted to hear. Some administration officials
suggested introducing alternate ways of voting so Sunnis could cast
ballots at home, without exposing themselves to violence at a polling
booth. One proposal would have allowed Iraqis to vote over the
Internet or by cell phone, but that option was quickly ruled out as
impractical. Even assuming that computers could be found, many
parts of Anbar Province had only sporadic electric power, and often
none at all. When Ford pointed out the impracticalities, a White
House aide scolded him for being “unhelpful.”
In any case, President Bush was adamant about keeping on
schedule. Under the White House’s plan, there would be elections for
a constitutional assembly, then a new Iraqi constitution, then a
second round of voting for a new Parliament, and, finally, a
legitimately chosen Iraqi government that would assume
responsibility for the country and its myriad problems. Even a single
day’s delay would mean postponing the moment when the United
States could symbolically hand over the keys and move on.
“The president,” Ford recalled, “would not hear of it.”
On January 30, 2005, millions turned out to cast ballots in the
country’s first democratic election. TV news programs showed
smiling Iraqis holding up fingers dyed with purple ink to signify that
they had cast their votes. True to Zarqawi’s warnings, insurgents
carried out scores of attacks, mostly on polling stations in Sunni
areas. At least forty-four people died.
U.S. and Iraqi officials declared the election a success. Despite the
violence, Zarqawi had failed in his threat to “wash the streets in
blood.”
Yet, by another key measure, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq had
achieved exactly what he wanted: throughout the country, from the
Syrian border to the Persian Gulf, Sunni voters stayed home. In
Anbar Province, the participation rate among Sunnis was a mere 2
percent. Over the next ten months, other Iraqis would approve a
draft constitution that would decide how power and oil wealth would
be divided among the country’s three major sectarian groups and
thirty-six million people. But Sunni voices would be muted during
those discussions, and the Sunnis’ despair about their diminished
status—a disenfranchised and persecuted minority within a country
they once owned—would only deepen in the years to come.
Still, with Ford’s patient prodding, Hashimi eventually agreed to
enter politics, rising to become Iraq’s vice president and one of the
country’s most prominent advocates for Sunni concerns. But just a
week after his swearing in, gunmen from Zarqawi’s network
ambushed Hashimi’s brother and sister in separate, targeted attacks
on Baghdad’s streets. A second brother, a senior military adviser to
the Iraqi government, was shot and killed five months later inside his
house.
Two days after his sister’s funeral, Hashimi consented to a
televised interview with the BBC. The usual swagger was missing,
and a slight quaver in his voice betrayed the strain of a man who had
just buried two siblings, both killed in an attempt to frighten him
into resigning. But Hashimi insisted he would not quit.
“We are satisfied that our course is sound,” he said. “The blood
that was shed and the martyrs who have fallen are the price that we
pay.”
—
As the body count grew, so did the ranks of Zarqawi’s enemies. Even
in Anbar Province, where so many had welcomed the foreign fighters
when they were killing U.S. soldiers and Shiites, some now would
deliver the terrorist to the Americans if they could. Almost daily, tips
came in: to police stations, to military patrols, to informants who
spoke to other informants along a chain that terminated in the CIA’s
ever-expanding operations center in Baghdad.
One such tip, in February 2005, almost netted Zarqawi. It
unfolded as the CIA officer Nada Bakos watched—mesmerized,
anxious, then furious—from monitors streaming live video from a
surveillance drone flying overhead.
The morsel of intelligence that had fallen to the Americans was
this: One of Zarqawi’s top lieutenants would be traveling on the
highway from Fallujah to Ramadi on February 20 on his way to an
important meeting. The circumstances suggested better-than-even
odds, U.S. officials believed, that Zarqawi would be making the
journey as well. A surveillance drone and teams of commandos were
positioned along the route to watch.
Sure enough, in midafternoon, the drone picked up the deputy’s
car and began trailing it as it sped west. Two other vehicles,
including a small truck, followed the first at a discreet distance,
racing along a flat desert road lined with irrigated farms and groves
of date palms.
The sudden appearance of a military roadblock brought the tiny
convoy to a screeching halt. The first vehicle was quickly swarmed by
soldiers, but the others veered off the road into the desert, spun
around, and tore off in different directions. The drone overhead
locked its camera on the pickup truck as its driver, either from
intuition or alerted by the aircraft’s high-pitched whine, began
swerving violently in an apparent attempt to avoid any missiles
heading his way. The pickup skidded and jerked, narrowly missing
abandoned cars and road signs in the driver’s futile effort to
outmaneuver the drone.
Bakos watched, transfixed. What incredible luck if Zarqawi’s
career were to end inside a hulk of twisted metal on the road to
Ramadi, she thought.
“Just wreck!” she said, shouting at the silent images on the screen.
“Die in the car, already!”
But Zarqawi would not die, not on this day. The speeding truck cut
sharply again and flew down a dirt road toward a small farmhouse
surrounded by dense palm groves. One figure leapt out of the truck,
but the driver pressed onward, finally coming to a halt under a
canopy of palm fronds.
Zarqawi still might have been caught, but for a technical glitch that
occurred at the worst possible moment for the Americans. The
surveillance drone’s camera chose to reset itself just as Zarqawi was
making his escape through the palms. When American soldiers
arrived, they were forced to work slowly through the groves, moving
carefully to avoid ambush or a booby trap. By then, the fugitives had
long since disappeared, leaving the truck wedged against a date
palm. Searching the truck, the soldiers made an extraordinary find.
Resting on the seat was a laptop computer—Zarqawi’s computer—
next to a sack containing a hundred thousand dollars in mixed
currencies. The truck’s occupants had been in such a panic that they
had not paused to grab even these treasures.
It took two weeks to break the computer’s encryption, and far
longer to translate and analyze the entire hard drive fully. By then,
most of the immediately usable details—addresses of safe houses,
operational plans, cell-phone numbers—were obsolete. Yet the
laptop held something of inestimable value: it was the closest that
American analysts had come to being able to peer inside Zarqawi’s
brain.
One file contained dozens of photographs, including a series of
passport images showing Zarqawi trying on different looks and
disguises, from clean-shaven businessman with wire-rimmed glasses
to Arab sheikh with a mustache and checkered kaffiyah. Another
held Zarqawi’s medical files, with more photos and notes about
therapy for various war injuries. There were memos and e-mails
laying out the terrorist group’s changing structure, in which Zarqawi
carved out an “operational commander” role for himself while
allowing Iraqis more visibility as the nominal leaders of al-Qaeda in
Iraq. Still other folders contained long e-mails to al-Qaeda leaders,
including Bin Laden himself, as well as PowerPoint presentations
and priceless video recordings of meetings of Zarqawi’s leadership
council, in which the Jordanian discussed strategy and plans. While
a few of the individual documents were already familiar to U.S.
counterterrorism experts, others were new.
“There was a PowerPoint briefing that was as good as any given by
one of our commands,” said a military analyst who was among those
who pored through the computer’s contents. “His organization, as a
line-and-block chart—all of it was laid out there. Kind of a who’s-
who.”
One video captured an entire war-council session, with fly-on-the-
wall intimacy that was at once fascinating and chilling. Here were
hardened killers sitting on a circle of blankets like schoolchildren,
listening with rapt attention as one of their members sang a song and
another recited poetry. Zarqawi, when it was his turn, told jokes and
stories. Then he talked about his vision for Iraq and the region, and
how, from rubble and ash, the jihadists would lay the foundation for
something that was utterly new, yet as old as Islam.
Here Zarqawi departed from the usual jihadi rhetoric. Other
radical Islamists spoke vaguely of the restoration of the caliphate
from Islam’s golden age, when all Muslims lived under a single
religious authority that erased the national boundaries imposed by
the West. But Zarqawi wasn’t talking about the distant future. He
spoke of the caliphate in the present tense, with himself as the leader
of a liberation army that was already on the march.
“He was already building it,” said the military analyst who studied
the laptop’s contents. “His thinking was strategic and very long-
term.”
Bakos, too, was struck by Zarqawi’s performance. Back at CIA
headquarters in Langley, she studied the laptop’s trove. The images
deepened her conviction about the pathologies that drove the
Jordanian and his core followers: the cultish behaviors and
messianic thinking that distinguished them as different from Bin
Laden and his aides. A formal analysis by CIA psychologists reached
similar conclusions: A classic narcissist, Zarqawi truly appeared to
see himself as the incarnation of one of the ancient Islamic warriors
he so admired. Now his belief in his own greatness was swelling like
a tumor. Long-settled doctrinal issues, such as the prohibition
against killing innocents, no longer mattered, because Zarqawi’s
opinions trumped centuries of Islamic scholarship.
“There are some who study the Koran and understand it,” Bakos
later said of the evolving thinking on the Jordanian terrorist.
“Zarqawi can recite parts of the Koran—he couldn’t read it for the
longest time, because he was barely literate—and he’s just going to
interpret it however he wants, even though he lacks the education
and background.”
The study of Zarqawi was now Bakos’s full-time pursuit. Just a
year earlier, fed up with the constant requests to chase phantom al-
Qaeda connections to Saddam Hussein, she had tried to quit the CIA
in an angry pique. She gave her boss notice and didn’t return to work
for four days, until a senior manager phoned to try to talk her into
coming back. As a sweetener, she was promised a new job as a
targeting analyst, focused solely on Zarqawi. “Targeters,” as they are
known in CIA-speak, are the agency’s super-sleuths, assembling the
trail of evidence that would lead to the capture or killing of a single
terrorist regarded by the agency as a threat to the country. Some, like
Bakos, lived divided lives, shuttling between the frenetic world of the
CIA’s counterterrorism office and dangerous outposts overseas.
Often they stayed on the case until their quarry was removed from
the CIA’s list, usually by death. Bakos, as a newly minted targeter,
would be able to dip into intelligence streams from across the U.S.
government’s vast networks to find the clue or security stumble that
could put Zarqawi out of business for good.
Between Iraq deployments, Bakos returned to what, for her,
passed as a normal life. She moved into Washington’s Cleveland
Park, a charming neighborhood of late-nineteenth-century homes
and stylish cafés, dropping off her bags in a house that was a few
blocks from the National Zoo. The extreme secrecy of her job—her
family still had only a vague idea of what she did for a living—limited
her socializing mostly to work friends. Though Bakos was no crafter,
she joined a “knitting and wine” club made up of other female CIA
analysts, just for the companionship.
“We could talk openly, and it was just nice,” she said. “It was more
about the wine drinking than the knitting.”
But the next morning, it was back to the hunt.
One July day, five months after the near miss in the desert outside
Ramadi, a fresh piece of the Zarqawi puzzle turned up in the daily
cables from Baghdad. The surveillance net had snagged a singular
piece of correspondence: a letter to Zarqawi from al-Qaeda’s number
two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Bin Laden’s deputy had authored a
six-thousand-word performance appraisal that sought to express the
organization’s concern about its newest subsidiary. The CIA’s
acquisition of the letter was a closely guarded secret, so Bakos was
only allowed to view it from inside a secure chamber that analysts
call “the vault.” She read, her fascination growing with every line.
The problem, which Zawahiri outlined in restrained prose, was
simply this: Zarqawi’s bloodthirstiness was beginning to damage the
al-Qaeda brand among Muslims. It was fine to kill Americans and
Iraqi soldiers, Zawahiri wrote, but the car bombings, the attacks on
Shiite mosques, and the gory execution videos were sending the
wrong messages. To ordinary Muslims, images of dead Shiite
children and beheaded Bulgarian truck drivers were not inspiring,
they were repulsive. “The mujahed movement must avoid any action
that the masses do not understand or approve,” Zawahiri warned.
Among the things which the feelings of the Muslim populace who love
and support you will never find palatable are the scenes of
slaughtering the hostages. You shouldn’t be deceived by the praise of
some of the zealous young men and their description of you as the
“sheikh of the slaughterers,” etc. They do not express the general view
of the admirer and the supporter of the resistance in Iraq, and of you
in particular by the favor and blessing of God. And your response,
while true, might be: Why shouldn’t we sow terror in the hearts of the
Crusaders and their helpers? And isn’t the destruction of the villages
and the cities on the heads of their inhabitants more cruel than
slaughtering? All of these questions and more might be asked, and
you are justified….However, despite all of this, I say to you: that we
are in a battle, and that more than half of this battle is taking place in
the battlefield of the media. And that we are in a media battle in a
race for the hearts and minds of our [Muslim community]. And that
however far our capabilities reach, they will never be equal to one
thousandth of the capabilities of the kingdom of Satan that is waging
war on us. And we can kill the captives by bullet. That would achieve
that which is sought after without exposing ourselves to the questions
and answering to doubts. We don’t need this.
The admonition was accompanied by praise for Zarqawi’s courage
and military accomplishments, and Zawahiri closed the letter by
asking for some cash (“If you’re capable of sending a payment of
approximately one hundred thousand, we’ll be very grateful to you”).
Still, the intent was unmistakable. Here was evidence of a serious
disagreement between the main branch of al-Qaeda and its Iraqi
franchise.
Zarqawi replied in a fashion, though not to al-Qaeda directly. Two
weeks after Zawahiri’s reprimand, he penned an open letter to his
old mentor and cellmate, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, rebuking him
and all Islamists who would question his methods. Maqdisi might be
a respected Islamic scholar, but he didn’t know everything, Zarqawi
wrote.
“He does not and should not have a monopoly on knowledge, and
not everything he says is correct, especially when it comes to Jihad
and the current state of affairs,” he said.
Zarqawi declared that everything he did—from killing Shiites to
sending suicide bombers to their deaths—had been sanctioned by
“righteous, truthful, Mujahideen scholars.” But he couldn’t name
them, he said, because some were in prison and might be harmed.
A second rebuttal came in the form of an audiotaped message
posted on jihadist Web sites in September 2005. Two months after
al-Qaeda’s number two leader cautioned him against killing Shiites,
Zarqawi announced a new military offensive, specifically targeting
the Rafidha, or “those who refuse”—a pejorative term for members of
the Shiite faith.
“The al-Qaeda Organization in the Land of Two Rivers is declaring
all-out war on the Rafidha, wherever they are in Iraq,” Zarqawi said
in the recorded message. He warned that other Iraqi groups would
also be targeted unless they publicly renounced the Iraqi transitional
government that had come to power after the January 2005
elections.
“You must choose between the good side and the bad side,” he
continued. “Any tribe…whose allegiance to the crusaders and their
agents is proven will be targeted by the mujahedeen in the same way
the crusaders are.”
Such open defiance of al-Qaeda’s leadership was mystifying,
coming from a man who had worked so hard to obtain Bin Laden’s
approval. Bakos and other counterterrorism officers picked apart the
letters and transcripts from inside their classified “vault,” wondering
whether Zarqawi was making a conscious play for global leadership
of the jihadist movement, or just being boneheaded.
“We kept reading the letters over and over, just astonished at his
tone,” Bakos recalled afterward. “He was not deferential. He was
emboldened, arguing with Zawahiri on what he thought was the right
strategy to wage jihad in Iraq.”
Bakos tried to imagine how it looked from Zarqawi’s perspective,
at the head of an army of thousands of fighters, all devoted to him
and willing, even eager, to sacrifice their lives. Zarqawi had achieved
something no mujahideen force had accomplished since the Afghan
war: humbling a global superpower by miring it in bloody guerrilla
war. He had plenty of money, weapons, and volunteer fighters.
Unlike al-Qaeda’s leaders in their self-imposed exile, he was fighting
Americans and their Iraqi allies on a daily basis. As measured by
plummeting U.S. support for the war in opinion polls, he was
succeeding. Why should he take advice from Zawahiri?
His brutal tactics were offending some Muslims, it was true, but
were they hurting Zarqawi’s cause? Bakos was no longer sure. The
hard-core jihadists—the ones willing to fight and die on Zarqawi’s
orders—were streaming into Iraq at a rate of 100 to 150 a month to
join “the sheikh of the slaughterers.” Zarqawi had embraced the
emerging power of the Internet to craft a reputation as a fierce
warrior who killed Allah’s enemies without mercy. The images he
posted, though repulsive to most people, made him an icon and a
hero to many thousands of young men who saw him as avenging the
Muslim nation for centuries of perceived humiliations and defeats.
Here was evidence that Zarqawi no longer believed he needed Bin
Laden’s stamp of approval. Some analysts had begun to describe his
organization as a local chapter or franchise, but it was clear that
Zarqawi didn’t see it that way. This was no al-Qaeda offshoot. This
was al-Qaeda 2.0.
“People think he’s hurting al-Qaeda’s brand,” Bakos said. “The
truth is, he’s helping his own brand, because he’s winning.”
—
That same summer, as Zarqawi and al-Qaeda sparred over the
permissibility of hacking the heads off of hostages, President George
W. Bush convened the first White House security meeting devoted
primarily to the Jordanian terrorist.
It took place on the morning of June 29, 2005, in the cramped
confines of the Situation Room. Bush, now six months into his
second term, settled into his leather chair at one end of a polished
wooden table as the other places filled up with familiar faces: Vice
President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Steve Hadley.
The morning’s presenter was Michael V. Hayden, the four-star air
force general and future CIA director, who was then the principal
deputy in the office of the director of national intelligence.
Hayden opened with a quick sketch of the life of Iraq’s most
infamous terrorist. He talked about Zarqawi’s upbringing in gritty
Zarqa, his early delinquency, his adventures in Afghanistan, his
religious conversion, and his jail time. He described the Herat camp,
the flight to Iraq’s eastern mountains, the assassination of the
diplomat Laurence Foley, and links to the Millennium Plot. Then he
began to outline Zarqawi’s early terrorist forays in Iraq, including the
mix of cunning and “dumb luck,” as Hayden put it, that enabled him
to land well-aimed blows against Iraq’s leading moderate Shiite
cleric and the head of the United Nations mission in Baghdad.
Bush looked up.
“He killed Sergio?” the president asked, referring to the diplomat
Sergio Vieira de Mello, killed in Zarqawi’s spectacular bombing of
the UN building during the war’s first summer. Bush had met the
dapper Brazilian and liked him. “I didn’t know that.”
For the operations briefing, Bush turned to Rumsfeld, who in turn
introduced a newcomer to the group. Stanley McChrystal, the Joint
Special Operations Command chief and the officer in charge of the
hunt for Zarqawi, happened to be on a visit to the United States and
was tapped to update the president in person.
“Stan’s going to tell you what we are doing to get Zarqawi,”
Rumsfeld told Bush.
McChrystal, now a major general, ran through a slide presentation
as Bush asked occasional questions, according to the officer’s written
account of the meeting. When he finished, Bush studied the general
for a long moment.
“Are you going to get him?” the president asked.
McChrystal summoned up all the conviction he could muster.
“We will, Mr. President,” he said. “There’s no doubt in my mind.”
Later in the meeting, Bush turned to McChrystal again. “Do you
want to kill him or capture him?” Bush asked.
“I’d like to capture him, Mr. President.”
“Why don’t we just kill ’im?” Bush asked, to nervous laughter
around the room.
“Well, Mr. President, to be honest, I want to talk to him. He knows
things we want to know.”
Bush appeared satisfied. He smiled.
“Good point,” he said.
In fact, McChrystal was confident, though there was no hard proof
that he was any closer to capturing Zarqawi. McChrystal’s Task Force
6-26 had zeroed in on several of the terrorist’s lieutenants, killing
some and interrogating others inside Balad Air Base, which served as
the unit’s headquarters. With each capture, the Americans’
intelligence network grew stronger. And still it wasn’t enough.
Better intelligence raised McChrystal’s estimation of his
adversary’s ability. Educated or not, Zarqawi had repeatedly shown
himself to be an able field commander, capable of transforming
waves of untrained recruits into soldiers and suicide bombers who
struck with purpose and discipline. From captured operatives, a
portrait emerged of a leader with quiet, understated charisma and
personal fearlessness. “This guy is the real deal,” one of McChrystal’s
deputies said during a strategy session.
It was hard to disagree. Zarqawi possessed a “jihadist mystique—a
potent mix of violence and real charisma, perfumed by thick
propaganda efforts,” McChrystal would later write. And now it was
“wafting outside of Iraq’s border.”
Records seized by McChrystal’s men also shed light on a
remarkably sophisticated system for recruiting, transporting,
training, and deploying suicide bombers from across the Middle East
and beyond. Often the initial contact was one of Zarqawi’s
propaganda videos, available to anyone with a computer and
Internet connection, and handily supplying an e-mail address for
communication. After the opening e-mail exchange, an army of
handlers stood ready to guide the potential recruit through screening
and indoctrination and then along a chain of safe houses and, finally,
a perilous journey by foot across the Syria-Iraq border. Once inside
Iraq, the volunteer would be relieved of any cash he had brought
along, and then shunted to a kind of holding cell for further
indoctrination in near-complete isolation.
“By design, often the first time a suicide bomber saw Iraqis in the
flesh was in the moments just before he killed them,” McChrystal
said.
Recruits such as these rarely, if ever, saw Zarqawi, whose intense
personal security tightened further as U.S. troops and CIA operatives
stepped up their search. As McChrystal’s men discovered in
interrogations, Zarqawi kept his whereabouts secret to all but a small
handful of top aides. He never used a cell phone, and he remained
constantly on the move. He had acquired a third wife—an Iraqi,
believed to be in her midteens—and his entourage now included two
children from his second marriage. But Zarqawi hid them so well
that the American search teams never saw a trace of them.
The hunters were improving, too, however. By mid-2005,
McChrystal’s Zarqawi team had expanded to include some of the best
counterterrorism operatives and experts from across the U.S.
government, from veteran special-forces soldiers to CIA analysts to
techno-wizards from the NSA. To ensure that they meshed as a unit,
he placed them together around plywood tables in a large
“Situational Awareness Room,” or SAR, surrounded by banks of
video monitors carrying live feeds from a fleet of drones in constant
orbit overhead.
McChrystal set out to neutralize what he perceived as Zarqawi’s
greatest single advantage: an ability to control the tempo of the fight.
Zarqawi’s nimble command structure allowed him to strike quickly
and shift course to adjust to his enemy’s movements. To defeat
Zarqawi, the Americans would have to be even quicker.
“If we could apply relentless body blows against AQI [al-Qaeda in
Iraq]—a network that preferred spasms of violence followed by
periods of calm in which it could marshal resources—then we could
stunt its growth and maturation,” he said afterward, summarizing
what became his strategy for the group the Americans now called by
its new name. “Under enough pressure, AQI’s members would be
consumed with trying to stay alive and thus have no ability to recruit,
raise funds, or strategize.”
To keep the blows coming, the Americans needed to “operate at a
rate that would exhaust our enemy but that we could maintain,” he
said. For Task Force 6-26, that meant keeping up with McChrystal’s
brutal personal regimen of sixteen-hour days with few diversions
other than eating and fitness training. The general routinely worked
through the night, catching a few hours’ sleep beginning around
dawn, followed by a daily run in Balad’s 120-degree midday heat.
The night-owl schedule allowed the analysts to stay in sync with
the commandos who conducted nightly raids on suspected insurgent
hideouts. Captured fighters were immediately evaluated in an
interrogation building next door to McChrystal’s operations center.
Other specialists quickly sorted through the night’s “pocket litter”—
cell phones, paper notes, maps—for scraps of information that might
point the way to the next night’s raids. The NSA’s surveillance
experts, arrayed around the same wooden tables as the commandos
and CIA officers, added an additional layer of data from the day’s
video footage and cell-phone intercepts. The numbers of airborne
cameras steadily grew, until much of the country was under twenty-
four-hour scrutiny—an “unblinking eye,” as McChrystal termed it—
with the added advantage of being able to run the tape backward to
retrace the movements of insurgents planting roadside bombs.
By the fall of 2005, the impact of the new strategy was
unmistakable. McChrystal’s teams were slowly eviscerating Zarqawi’s
command structure, removing scores of midlevel operatives
responsible for everything from logistics and communications to
recruitment and training. The list of Zarqawi lieutenants killed or
captured grew to one hundred names, then two hundred. Of twenty-
one known senior deputies, those closer to Zarqawi in the command
chain, twenty were crossed off the wanted list, either dead or in
prison. From Balad and Baghdad came a steady flow of confidential
military cables reporting disrupted terrorist plots and vast stores of
weapons and explosives seized and destroyed. One report dispatched
to the Pentagon in late September described the discovery of a letter,
signed by Zarqawi himself, authorizing an attack on the infamous
Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, where many of Zarqawi’s men
were being held. The strike was to be carried out by “AMZ
elements”—the military abbreviation for Zarqawi’s forces—in
October or November, during the annual Ramadan observance, a
time when an act of martyrdom is said to carry special rewards in the
afterlife.
That plot having been exposed, Ramadan was relatively quiet by
Iraqi standards. But five days later, on November 9, 2005, the TV
monitors in McChrystal’s operations center flashed urgent news.
Across the border, in the Jordanian capital, three hotels were struck
by suicide bombers in coordinated attacks. Scores had been killed.
McChrystal was at work that night, and he watched with his aides
as news reports showed the Amman Radisson Hotel’s shattered
lobby and the covered bodies lined up in the driveway. There was
little question about who was behind the attack. In McChrystal’s
mind, there was also little doubt that Zarqawi had made a grave, and
possibly fatal, miscalculation.
“That,” McChrystal said to a deputy sitting near him, “was a screw-
up.”
15
“This is our 9/11”
On the morning of the attack, Sajida al-Rishawi awoke for dawn
prayers with the certain knowledge that the new day would be her
last on earth. She idled away the hours in an empty rented
apartment, killing time until her partner returned with the package
that would allow them to start the final preparations. Finally, Ali
arrived, and within minutes he had carefully begun to unwrap the
bombs that had led them to make the perilous journey across the
Iraqi desert to Amman. At last they lay side by side: his-and-hers
suicide vests, tailor-made for the couple and constructed to be
powerful, yet slim enough to go unnoticed under their street clothes.
Rishawi had not seen the vests until now; suddenly the time was
nearly at hand. She picked up her vest, felt the surprising weight,
touched the pouches bulging with steel bearings. It was important,
she knew, to familiarize herself with the cables and detonating
switch, and to make the little adjustments to ensure a proper fit
around her shoulders and belly. Even a suicide vest should fit
comfortably.
“He put one on me, and wore the other,” the thirty-five-year-old
Ramadi woman would say. “He taught me how to use it, how to pull
the trigger and operate it.”
Captain Abu Haytham listened quietly, careful to avoid any
reaction that might halt the torrent of words. It was the second day
of Rishawi’s interrogation, and he was relieved that the woman was
finally talking. All around Amman, memorials were still under way
for the victims of the worst terrorist attack in Jordan’s history: three
simultaneous bombings at three hotels that had killed sixty people
and shaken the country to its foundation. Abu Haytham, the senior
deputy in the Mukhabarat’s counterterrorism division, was now deep
into a guided reconstruction of the crime, led by the suicide bomber
who had lived.
The interest in Rishawi extended far beyond her role in the plot.
The attack’s principal author had quickly claimed responsibility, and
the Mukhabarat had concluded from other evidence that Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi was behind the deed. The question now was whether this
hollow-eyed, emotionally distraught Iraqi woman could help point
the way to Zarqawi himself. A suicide bomber could never have been
part of Zarqawi’s inner circle, but this woman had been selected for
an unusually complex mission, one that required forged travel
documents and an international border crossing. Someone had
regarded Sajida al-Rishawi as worthy of a role in al-Qaeda in Iraq’s
first mass-casualty terrorist strike outside of Iraq. She might know
the names of her recruiters, or perhaps the identities of the men who
had trained her, or acquired the fake passports, or assembled the
bomb. She might know of other operatives who were even now
preparing for future attacks inside Jordan.
Others from the intelligence service were simultaneously playing
out different strands. With a renewed urgency, the spy agency’s
teams arrested and interrogated Jordanians and foreigners
suspected of having connections with the terrorists. Newly
assembled undercover teams were moving into western Iraq to troll
for snippets of information that might offer forewarning of Zarqawi’s
next strike. Yet the best hope for stopping Zarqawi lay in finding an
insider, someone who could guide the Jordanians through the
elaborate layers of the terrorist’s security cocoon.
Inevitably the Iraqi woman would talk. With Rishawi, there would
be no cause for anything more coercive than the captain’s own voice.
The outlines of the woman’s unhappy life emerged slowly, between
bouts of quiet sobbing. Rishawi came from the volatile heartland of
Iraq’s Sunni tribal region, the sister of two men who had joined
Zarqawi’s insurgent movement in the early weeks of the American
occupation. One of her brothers had become a midlevel officer with
AQI before being killed by U.S. troops in the town of Fallujah. The
Americans had also killed a second brother and a brother-in-law. The
woman had been distraught over their deaths, and she felt a tug of
obligation: according to tribal custom, Sunni Iraqis are obliged to
avenge the killings of family members. The fall of 2005 brought a
painful anniversary—one year since the first brother’s death—along
with the news of the first use of women as suicide bombers in the
Iraqi capital. The authorities had been taken by surprise; females
were usually waved through security cordons, and their loose-fitting
abayas, together with Iraqi taboos against searching women, made it
easy to conceal explosives.
So Rishawi volunteered.
“I want to kill Americans,” she told Abu Haytham, describing her
pitch to the AQI contact she had met through her brothers.
Zarqawi’s plan would unite the unmarried Rishawi with Ali, a man
she knew from her hometown, as husband-and-wife suicide
bombers, an ordinary middle-aged married couple who could walk
into any public building without drawing a second look.
In early November, the couple met with two other Iraqi volunteers
and their AQI contact to finish preparations. Rishawi and her
partner were handed fake passports identifying them as a married
couple, and told, for the first time, that they were participating in a
critical mission across the border in Jordan, one that would target
U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials. They also were given a realistic-
sounding cover story: they were traveling to Amman for infertility
treatments to help them conceive. As a final step, they were brought
before one of Zarqawi’s hired clerics for a hasty and legally dubious
marriage ceremony. It was done not for the couple’s sake—
presumably, they would never live to consummate a marriage—but
to avoid violating one of Zarqawi’s strict religious codes. To the
Islamists, it is forbidden for a woman to travel unless accompanied
by her husband or a close male relative.
They waited for the Eid al-Fitr holiday, with its traditional feast
marking the end of Ramadan, and the next morning they began the
daylong trek across the desert to Jordan. Their travel documents
passed scrutiny at the border crossing; finally, wearily, they arrived
at the rented apartment arranged for them in one of Amman’s
predominantly Iraqi neighborhoods. The bombing was still four days
distant: November 9, a date that Jordanians, like Europeans,
abbreviate as 9/11.
When the day came, Ali produced the vests and helped her with
the fitting. He secured the twenty-pound band of RDX explosive and
shrapnel around her waist and, to ensure that everything was firmly
anchored in place, wrapped layers of duct tape around the outside.
Then they climbed into a rented car and made their way to the
Radisson Hotel, where they arrived a little before 9:00 p.m.
The festive sight and sounds that greeted them in the hotel’s grand
Philadelphia Ballroom confused Rishawi, according to her account to
Abu Haytham. Instead of English-speaking intelligence operatives in
Western suits, she saw something far more ordinary and familiar.
A wedding.
Peering through the ballroom door, Rishawi saw families with
small kids, and young girls and women wearing the formal gowns of
a bridal party. Men were lined up along one side of the room, and
women on the other, for the dabke dance that is traditional at Arab
weddings. She watched, unsure what to do.
A hotel clerk approached the couple. Were they looking for
someone? Rishawi’s partner murmured something about wanting to
see an authentic Jordanian wedding. Now they were forced to move.
Inside the ballroom, the two Iraqis separated and worked their
way toward opposite corners, with Rishawi taking a spot near the
women and girls. With one hand she reached into her overcoat and
began to fumble with the detonator switch on her bomb. Why it
failed to explode was never clear—was it a mechanical fault, or
faltering nerves?—but the woman began motioning to her partner
that there was a problem. With an agitated look, he pointed toward
the ballroom door.
As she turned to leave, she could see him begin to climb onto a
table. Then came the awful explosion.
“I didn’t know what to do and I couldn’t get rid of the belt,” she
would later say. “So I ran.”
Rishawi fled through the lobby with the panicked wedding guests,
stepping over the wounded and dying. When she finally stopped,
gasping for breath, she was far from the hotel, still wearing the
suicide vest and the black overcoat, now flecked with blood.
Later, in a taxi, she became agitated and confused, unable to
remember addresses or landmarks. Shop owners and passersby
would remember the strange woman in black who climbed out of the
cab to ask for directions, speaking nervously with an Iraqi accent,
and then walked with an odd, stooping gait. One who encountered
her remembered that the woman was “just not normal.” Rishawi
remembered stumbling up to the home of her sister-in-law and
collapsing onto the bed, where the Mukhabarat’s men eventually
found her.
Now, after days of replaying the events in her head, the confusion
had turned to despair. Where were the American intelligence officers
she had been sent to kill? Surely this had not been Zarqawi’s
intention.
“They told me I would be killing Americans,” she complained
repeatedly to Abu Haytham. “All I wanted was to avenge the deaths
of my brothers.”
She had been duped, and yet she clung, childlike, to the belief that
something had gone wrong with the planning of the operation.
Though she had never met Zarqawi, she could not grasp that the
leader of AQI had really wanted her to sacrifice her own life to kill
mothers and children at a wedding party. The fault was probably
hers, she said, for, deep down, she had never been sure that she
would be capable of pressing the detonator when the moment came,
with her future and that of so many strangers balanced on a tiny
metal pin.
“I didn’t want to die,” she said softly.
The questioning continued for days, but the limits of Rishawi’s
helpfulness were already becoming clear. She had never met any of
the senior leaders in Zarqawi’s organization. She was not a foreign
recruit who might possess knowledge of safe houses or smuggling
routes. Nor was she an Iraqi insider who might have insights into
Zarqawi’s patterns of movement. She was not, in fact, very bright.
But for Zarqawi and his men, Rishawi had been perfect: a grief-
stricken woman who could be persuaded to carry out a revenge
mission against a target that did not exist. Even at that, she had
failed.
Abu Haytham could not bring himself to feel pity; the horrific
images from the Radisson ballroom were still too fresh. He left
Rishawi in her cell and went back to his office, back to the task that
now mattered more than any other: finding Zarqawi.
For Abu Haytham, the quest would become an obsession. Within
the Mukhabarat, the counterterrorism deputy’s stamina was
legendary; everyone knew he often slept and showered at the office
so he could work longer hours. Now, days would pass before he went
home at all. Joining him on the case were scores of officers detailed
from other divisions. Even translators and file clerks were pulled in
to work the search.
“Everyone got the call,” one officer remembered. “It was just, ‘Get
your weapon and come to work.’ ”
—
Zarqawi had searched for a way to spur his five million Sunni
countrymen into action, and by that measure he had succeeded.
Jordanians throughout the country were enraged and united—
against him.
Within hours of the blast, thousands of people swarmed Amman’s
streets. Large crowds gathered in a square near Amman’s oldest
mosque, many chanting, “Burn in hell, Zarqawi!” Others marched
somberly behind a woman in a black mourning dress who wore a
sign expressing sympathy for “the brides of Amman.” Religious
leaders denounced the deed and its perpetrator from the minbars of
the country’s mosques during Friday prayer services. In the
terrorist’s hometown of Zarqa, his brother and fifty-six other
relatives posted an ad in a local newspaper publicly renouncing their
kinship with him.
Since the widely reviled U.S. invasion of Iraq two years earlier,
Jordanians had been mostly quiet about the terrorist campaign
under way next door. Though disturbed by the images of Iraqi car
bombings and executions, some took satisfaction in witnessing the
crumbling of the Bush administration’s plans for reshaping the
Middle East. In some of Amman’s poorer neighborhoods, Zarqawi
had been regarded as a kind of folk hero, protecting Iraq’s tribal
brethren from persecution by Shiites and Americans.
Now, and for years to come, Jordanians would speak of Zarqawi
with contempt.
“This was a criminal cruel act that Islam has nothing to do with,”
one of the Amman protesters, a shopkeeper named Jamal
Mohammad, told the city’s English-language newspaper as he
twirled a large Jordanian flag.
“Zarqawi is a delirious criminal. He has lost his mind,” spat
another.
Other Muslim voices echoed the refrain, from Internet chat rooms
to newspaper op-eds to university campuses. In Iraq, Zarqawi had
claimed that U.S. troops were his enemy, yet he killed innocent
Iraqis. Now, in Amman, he railed against the monarchy and its
servants, but he chose to slaughter women and children attending an
ordinary Sunni wedding ceremony. Even the conservative Muslim
Brotherhood denounced the bombings as “ugly and cowardly
terrorist acts that cannot be justified under any logic or pretext.”
The news of the bombing sent King Abdullah racing back to
Jordan from Kazakhstan, where he was on a state visit. He flew all
night, receiving updates and fielding sympathetic calls from other
leaders, before finally arriving in Amman at 5:00 a.m.
Later that day he toured hospitals to visit the wounded survivors
and appeared on national television to calmly assure Jordanians that
the monarchy would “pursue these terrorists and those who aid
them.” Inwardly, he was seething, he acknowledged afterward.
“We’re going on the offensive,” he told a hastily called meeting of
the heads of Jordan’s security establishment. “What Zarqawi did was
reprehensible. The gloves are off, and I want you to get him.”
What Abdullah meant was not entirely clear at the time, perhaps
even to him. But that day marked the beginning of a shift in Jordan’s
security policies. The Mukhabarat prided itself on keeping
Jordanians safe, and the monarchy was seen as a reliable partner in
sharing information about suspected terrorists with other countries,
including the United States. But now Jordan would take a much
more aggressive posture against al-Qaeda. Breaking with a long
reluctance to work directly with U.S. troops, the monarchy began to
deploy specially trained Mukhabarat teams to help American special-
forces operators break up terrorist cells inside Iraq.
The change in tone was already clear a day after the attack, during
a brief conversation between the king and Robert Richer, the former
CIA station chief in Amman, who had become friends with the
monarch during his two stints in Jordan. Richer, who now held the
number two post in the CIA’s clandestine Directorate of Operations,
called the king to express condolences and ask about the
investigation.
“This is our 9/11,” Richer recalled the king saying. “This changed
our optic.”
Abdullah had known one of the wounded victims personally, and
his visit to the hospital both moved and infuriated him. “They
attacked innocent civilians,” he fumed. “They killed the bride’s
father. They killed her husband’s father.”
The demonstrations faded in the weeks that followed, but
Jordanian resolve appeared to hold. Even Islamists who had
previously defended Zarqawi seemed ready to see him go, one
longtime undercover operative said.
“People who would have never worked with the Mukhabarat were
coming forward,” the operative said. “Everyone wanted to talk about
him now. Zarqawi had crossed a line.”
—
So fierce was the outcry over the bombings that Zarqawi felt
compelled to offer excuses. In the weeks that followed, he staged a
remarkable retreat from the swaggering, supremely confident
persona so familiar to millions of people around the globe.
Stung by the protests in his hometown, Zarqawi tried at first to
claim a media distortion, as he did after the failed chemical plot. Just
hours after acknowledging responsibility for the blasts, he issued a
second audiotaped message, claiming that the dead wedding guests
had been collateral damage from an attack on foreign intelligence
operatives elsewhere in the hotel. Any Muslim deaths were due to an
“unintended accident,” Zarqawi said, resulting perhaps from falling
debris from the real attack elsewhere in the building, or even from a
separate bomb planted by the Americans themselves.
“Our brothers knew their targets with great precision,” he said.
“God knows we chose these hotels only after more than two months
of close observation showed that these hotels had become
headquarters for the Israeli and American intelligence.”
But not even al-Qaeda was buying it. In July, Osama bin Laden’s
top deputy had gently reprimanded Zarqawi for his gratuitous use of
violence. Now arrived a much sharper rebuke from one of Bin
Laden’s closest advisers. Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a Libyan who had
been a close ally of the al-Qaeda founder for two decades, ordered
Zarqawi to stop defiling al-Qaeda’s image among Muslims. He
scolded the Jordanian for acting without permission in the case of
the “recent operation of the hotels in Amman.” From now on, he
said, Zarqawi should seek approval for any major operation.
“Let us not merely be people of killing, slaughter, blood, cursing,
insult, and harshness,” Atiyah wrote. “Let us put everything in
perspective. Let our mercy overcome our anger.”
A veteran of Algeria’s grisly civil war between radical Islamists and
the state, Atiyah cautioned Zarqawi against mistakes that had
brought down other jihadist movements that alienated themselves
from local populations. “They destroyed themselves with their own
hands, with their lack of reason. Delusions. Their ignoring of people.
Their alienation of them through oppression, deviance and severity,
coupled with a lack of kindness, sympathy and friendliness,” he
wrote. “Their enemy did not defeat them, but rather, they defeated
themselves, and were consumed and fell.”
For once, Zarqawi made no efforts to defend his actions. In
January, two months after the Amman bombings, Zarqawi
announced that he was giving himself a kind of demotion. Al-Qaeda
in Iraq would have new Iraqi leadership and broader Iraqi
representation as part of a new organization that called itself the
Mujahideen Shura Council. Zarqawi would take a less prominent role
as a strategic adviser, a move intended “to dismiss all the differences
and disagreements,” according to a statement issued by the new
group in January 2006.
Zarqawi appeared to experience a rare moment of self-doubt. In a
memo written after the Amman attacks, he refers to the group’s
predicament as “this current bleak situation” and acknowledges that
things would likely worsen.
“In Iraq, time is now beginning to be of service to the American
forces and harmful to the resistance,” Zarqawi wrote in this memo,
later found in one of his safe houses. He described Iraq’s growing
national army as “an enormous shield protecting the American
forces,” and he lamented the toll from the mass arrests of his fighters
and disruptions in the money supply from abroad. He began
thinking aloud about unconventional ways to knock the Americans
off balance and restore AQI’s momentum. What if the United States
could be somehow drawn into a war with Iran? he wondered. Well
aware of the intelligence debacles behind the U.S. decision to invade
Iraq, Zarqawi mused about his chances of planting false evidence
that could provoke U.S. fury against Tehran. Perhaps he could
launch a terrorist attack against the West and plant evidence that
would implicate Shiite agents backed by Iran. Or maybe he could
disseminate “bogus messages about confessions showing that Iran is
in possession of weapons of mass destruction,” he wrote.
Perhaps Zarqawi understood the improbabilities of pulling off
such a scheme, as there is no evidence that he ever tried. There were
more practical steps that he could take to improve his chances
against the Americans, and he listed them as well. One was to try
even harder to incite sectarian conflict: between Shiites and Sunnis,
Shiites and Kurds, Shiites and just about everyone.
The last step listed on the memo was an admonishment that had
the feel of a self-directed critique.
“Avoid mistakes that will blemish the image of the resistance,”
Zarqawi wrote.
—
Then, suddenly, he was back.
After weeks of relative quiet, Zarqawi prepared an attack that
would eclipse, at least temporarily, his blunder in Amman. His plan
showed ambition, strategic cunning, and a theatrical flair rarely seen
in Iraq’s meat-grinder insurgency. More than anything Zarqawi had
done to this point, this act would extinguish the American
administration’s hopes for an orderly end to the war.
Before dawn on February 22, 2006, five armed men in military
uniforms walked into the courtyard of the thousand-year-old al-
Askari Mosque, a revered shrine in the heart of the ancient Iraqi city
of Samarra. The morning was moderately cool, and a crescent moon,
penetrating through thin clouds, reflected off the mosque’s iconic
gold dome, one of the most celebrated structures in all of Shiite
Islam. Moving quietly, the gunmen managed to subdue the mosque’s
guards and proceeded to plant explosive charges along the mosque’s
roofline.
At 6:44 a.m., two huge blasts shook the city awake. Residents
poured into the street to see a rubble pile where the dome had stood.
An entire outer wall had collapsed, and the dome cratered inward,
leaving a concrete stump and a tangle of twisted rebar.
The bombs themselves injured no one—there would be no
accusations this time that Zarqawi had murdered innocent Muslims.
But destruction of the shrine touched off waves of killings and
reprisal killings as rival bands of Shiites and Sunnis shot and hacked
their way through the town, sometimes wiping out entire blocks.
Days later, the body count at the city morgue had surpassed thirteen
hundred, and the entire country appeared to be teetering. At the U.S.
Embassy, the diplomat Robert Ford’s office convened a series of
urgent meetings with Iraq’s political and religious leaders, pleading
for calm. A confidential memo dispatched to the White House that
evening bore the ominous heading “Sectarian Nerves on Edge.”
“In public and private our contacts are speaking with genuine
concern about the possibility of civil war,” the memo read.
Bush administration officials quickly concluded that Zarqawi was
to blame, and they watched in growing dismay as the toll from
sectarian killings grew to surpass anything the Jordanian might have
accomplished with explosive powder and shrapnel. Senior White
House officials came to view the Samarra bombing as one of the
tipping points of the war. Some credited Zarqawi for having “lit the
match” that set the nation’s sectarian tensions fully ablaze.
Bush took the news of the Samarra massacres particularly hard.
“I don’t think anything disturbed him more than the sectarian
violence that occurred in the wake of the Samarra mosque bombing,”
Peter Baker quoted John Negroponte, the former U.S. ambassador to
Iraq, as saying of the president. “I think it looked to him like the
whole game was going down the drain. He was really bothered by
that.”
From then onward, Negroponte said, when Bush’s aides would
brief him about the events in Iraq, “it was almost as though he was
pleading with us not to give him any more bad news.”
Zarqawi, on the other hand, was exultant. In the Samarra
bombing’s aftermath, he celebrated his success by doing something
he had studiously avoided until now: he commissioned a photo
session.
The Jordanian had made a number of resolutions during the
weeks following the Amman debacle, and one of them was to
improve his media game. Zarqawi had practically pioneered the use
of Internet violence as a weapon and a recruiting tool, and he had
personally starred in the Nicholas Berg execution video, though his
face had been concealed by a mask. He now concluded that he,
Zarqawi, should play the lead part in al-Qaeda in Iraq’s public
rebranding. He would no longer be the masked “sheikh of the
slaughterers,” nor would he consent to being filmed reading long
sermons from behind a desk, in the fashion of Bin Laden and his
deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. Instead, Zarqawi would project himself
as a kind of jihadist action figure.
The new video was shot over several days during the weeks
following the Samarra bombing, and was edited and mixed to give
the final product a professional gloss. The content would be all
Zarqawi: Zarqawi meeting with his military council; Zarqawi
studying a map; Zarqawi walking with other fighters through the
desert; Zarqawi blasting away with a light machine gun.
Every scene conveyed the image of an outlaw warrior in his prime.
In al-Qaeda’s videos, Bin Laden sometimes sat next to his gun, or
posed awkwardly while firing a few shots from a Kalashnikov, a
gaunt, turbaned figure with a gray beard surrounded by much
younger men. By contrast, Zarqawi moved with the confidence and
vigor of a man who relished a fight. He dressed fully in black, from
his beard and gangsterlike skullcap to his ninja’s black pants and
tunic. The only color contrast came from the green ammo pouch
strapped to his chest and his jarringly white Made in the USA New
Balance sneakers.
His narration bristled with the old Zarqawi swagger, but with
fewer taunts and insults, other than the usual rhetorical blasts
against the “crusader” army and its allies. Instead, he addressed
Iraqis as “my treasured nation” and spoke in a poetic cadence.
“Your enemy is uncovered, by the will of Allah, weakened,
unprotected, and broken in pieces,” he said. “Do not give him a
chance to take its breath, continue your stabbings one after the other.
O flag holders, stand.”
There was little need for bluster; the sectarian fire that Zarqawi
had tried to ignite was sweeping through Iraqi provinces on its own
momentum. Within days of the hotel bombs in Amman, U.S. soldiers
in Baghdad discovered a secret underground prison where Shiite
police officers systematically beat and tortured Sunni detainees.
Inside the converted bomb shelter, the soldiers found nearly two
hundred malnourished Sunni men, many of whom later described a
daily regimen of beatings and electric shocks.
The bunker was located less than a block from the residence of
Iraq’s Shiite interior minister, Falah al-Naqib, who would later
acknowledge that “there were some mistakes made.” The discovery
offered proof that the random sectarian attacks initiated by Zarqawi
had prompted organized campaigns in response, supported in some
cases by institutions of the Iraqi government. Even jihadists who
questioned Zarqawi’s war against the Shiites began to believe that
the Jordanian’s strategy was succeeding.
16
“Your end is close”
The border towns along Iraq’s western frontier were already
considered Zarqawi country in the early months of 2006. But, more
practically, they were the domain of another man: an Iraqi customs
officer who kept a self-interested eye on the stream of commerce
flowing from Jordan and Syria into Iraq’s western desert.
Zaid al-Karbouly nominally worked for the state, but he had long
been in the pay of al-Qaeda in Iraq, a client who offered a far better
salary, and other perks besides. Over time, Karbouly had been
rewarded with ever-higher positions of authority within the terrorist
organization, as befitted a man who regularly delivered intelligence
on incoming shipments available for plunder. Sometimes he would
perform shakedowns on his own.
Karbouly’s stature in Zarqawi’s criminal network and his
reputation for personal avarice inevitably drew the attention of
Jordanian spies who worked the border towns. So it was that, amid
the soaring interest in Zarqawi following the Amman bombings, the
Mukhabarat set a trap for the man who was known in the border
towns as Zarqawi’s personal customs agent.
It was now spring, five months since the hotel bombings, and fears
inside Jordan of a second wave of Zarqawi-led violence had mostly
ebbed. Extraordinary new restrictions were now in place throughout
the country, from tighter controls at the border crossings to the
concrete barriers and metal detectors that appeared overnight
outside every major hotel and government facility. Still, the country
was awash in Iraqi refugees, as well as visitors who crossed the
border for medical treatment or to purchase Western goods that
were hard to find in Iraq. One of the regulars was Karbouly, who was
known to enjoy spending his illicit takings in Jordan’s shopping
malls and boutique stores. The Mukhabarat’s officers simply waited
for him to cross and, at the right moment, whisked him away. Soon
he was in the spy agency’s notorious holding cell, feeling the
impatient stares of two of its top interrogators: Captain Abu
Haytham and his boss, Ali Bourzak, the Red Devil.
Karbouly talked. Eventually, he even agreed to make a confession
on videotape, admitting to a string of crimes including the shooting
of a Jordanian truck driver during a shakedown and the kidnapping
of two Moroccans who were turned over to Zarqawi’s men for
ransom. But the Jordanians were far more interested in what
Karbouly could tell them about the network itself, and on that
subject the details came surprisingly easily. It was as though
Karbouly had been eager for a chance to unburden himself.
“He seemed almost relieved,” said a former senior intelligence
official who closely followed the case. “He didn’t turn himself in. But
once we had him, it was clear that he wanted out of that world.”
Assured that the Jordanians would protect him, “he just started
spewing,” the official said. Suddenly the agency’s interrogators were
filling notebooks with rare insider accounts of AQI’s command
structure and tactics. One of Karbouly’s jobs, according to the former
senior intelligence official, was to oversee incoming supplies for
Zarqawi’s bomb factories—a job that gave him broad familiarity with
terrorist cells around the country.
“He wasn’t a bomb maker, but he understood how to get the
material to the right places so it all came together,” the official said,
“He was sort of like a project manager.”
Abu Haytham had spent time with dozens of men on the fringes of
the Zarqawi network, and he recognized Karbouly’s type. A Sunni
tribesman from the Iraqi border town of al-Qa’im, he was in his early
forties, much older than the typical foreign radical who crossed into
Iraq to perform jihad. Though sympathetic to Zarqawi’s cause and
adamantly opposed to the U.S. occupation, he was also a career
bureaucrat who looked out for himself and knew how to adapt to
changing currents. Yet, somehow, a flicker of conscience had
survived under the tough exterior. Karbouly was congenitally corrupt
and inured to the daily violence around him, but he found himself
gagging on Zarqawi’s cruel excesses. The hotel bombings had been
the worst, but there were other examples as well, including acts that
Karbouly himself had witnessed.
Abu Haytham was puzzled. Killing innocents was Zarqawi’s
specialty, he noted. How could Karbouly avoid it? But the man was
emphatic. The slaughtering of innocents was wrong. It was un-
Islamic.
As the Mukhabarat continued probing, a story emerged about the
Jordanian truck driver Karbouly had killed. The trucker had been
stopped just inside the Iraqi border with a trailer filled with goods
that, according to the cargo manifest, were intended for one of the
American bases farther south. Drivers who were caught carrying
such supplies were often executed as a way to discourage others.
From Zarqawi’s men came orders to kill this one.
Karbouly still remembered the man’s name—Khalid—and the fear
in his voice after he was handcuffed and blindfolded.
“He said, ‘What will you do?’ I said, ‘I will kill you,’ ” Karbouly said
in his confession. “He started to beg me: ‘Please, do not kill me,’ and
so I said, ‘I must kill you.’ ”
“He kept on begging me, and I pulled my personal pistol and said
to him, ‘Say your prayers,’ ” Karbouly said. “He said them as he was
begging.”
Karbouly shot the driver twice in the head and left the body, along
with the man’s passport and papers, next to the road. As an
afterthought, he took his victim’s cell phone with him.
When the trucker’s phone rang a short while afterward, Karbouly
reflexively answered. It was the dead man’s brother. The customs
agent made up an awkward story and said Khalid was fine, then hung
up.
Moments later, looking at the phone still in his hand, he began
scrolling through the personal files where the driver kept photos. He
stopped on an image of four young girls, clearly Khalid’s daughters.
“I had a kind of reaction,” he said.
After that, each death that he witnessed felt like a reopened
wound. In the second year of the insurgency, when Zarqawi had
declared war on Shiites, Karbouly was at first sympathetic, having
been incensed by stories of ethnic cleansing in Shiite neighborhoods
in Baghdad and Basra. But now it was too much. Once, he had
watched the grisly spectacle of a Shiite captive being beheaded by a
gang of Zarqawi’s thugs, for no discernible reason other than the fact
that he was Shiite.
As the bodies piled up, Karbouly began to see clearly who Zarqawi
was, and what Iraq was becoming.
“We didn’t know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites until
Zarqawi came,” he said. “Now, every day, there is a killing.”
By his own accounting, Karbouly was a peripheral player in the
terrorist group: a sergeant, perhaps, not a general. But for the
Jordanians, the arrest of a midlevel Zarqawi soldier—and a talkative
one—was a breakthrough. Soon Karbouly was generating volumes of
detailed reports about Zarqawi’s operations in the border towns
through which the group’s supply lines passed. He knew dozens of
other operatives like himself, and he knew the names of more senior
commanders, including some who were high enough in the
organization to take orders from Zarqawi’s carefully guarded inner
circle.
Karbouly did not know the location of Zarqawi’s safe house. But
with his help, the Jordanians were coming closer than they had ever
been.
—
Throughout the spring of 2006, U.S. reconnaissance aircraft kept an
unusually close watch on an Iraqi village called Yusufiyah, a cluster
of bungalows and small farms built along a Euphrates River
irrigation canal just south of Baghdad. The surrounding region had
long been regarded as a staging ground for insurgent attacks on the
capital. But in early April, an informant fingered the town as an
occasional venue for high-level AQI meetings. Sure enough, on the
morning of April 8, a drone assigned to Major General Stanley
McChrystal’s Task Force 6-26 caught sight of an unusual convoy of
vehicles entering the town. Within two hours, an assault team of elite
army Delta Force operators was on its way.
The helicopters swooped into Yusufiyah at 1:56 p.m., and minutes
later the commandos crashed through the door of what they believed
was a terrorist safe house. A wall of small-arms fire erupted from
inside. One defender, wearing a large suicide belt, rushed the
Americans, followed by a second, but both were shot dead before
they could blow themselves up. A third would-be bomber detonated
prematurely, splattering an interior wall with body parts but injuring
no one else. After the shooting stopped, the soldiers found six bodies
and rounded up five survivors, one of them wounded. They also
seized caches of assault rifles, ammunition, and grenades and, from
one room, some homemade videotapes.
The cleanup was still under way when surveillance cameras picked
up other vehicles converging on another farmhouse, a few miles up
the road. Again the helicopter rotors turned, and again the Delta
team stacked around a locked door with blasting charges ready. But
this time the occupants gave up without a fight. Twelve Iraqi men
were handcuffed and squeezed onto the helicopters for the flight
back to Baghdad.
At McChrystal’s operations center, analysts reviewed the day’s
takings with bafflement. Task Force 6-26’s counterterrorism experts
came up mostly empty in their attempts to find background files on
the twelve men arrested in the farmhouse. Yet everything about the
Yusufiyah meeting suggested that the group was important. Several
of the men were older and were treated by the others with obvious
deference. Oddly, out of twelve adult Iraqi men, only one was
arrested carrying a cell phone, suggesting the others had been savvy
enough to get rid of theirs at the first sign of the approaching
commandos.
The Yusufiyah detainees were quickly transferred to McChrystal’s
Balad Air Base, where the general tasked his best interrogators and
analysts with breaking down their stories. The Americans were
already convinced that several of the detainees were Zarqawi
network officers of some stature, and these received special focus.
Most interesting of all was a thickset former wrestler in his thirties
whom McChrystal code-named Mubassir. The man spoke
surprisingly good English, and he seemed to delight in making
wisecracks and lecturing the Americans in their own language.
During his first interrogation, he affected a posh British accent and
feigned impatience at having to sit through hours of questioning.
“How long do you think this will be? Because I do need to get back
to my family,” Mubassir said, according to McChrystal’s written
account. The man claimed he was a video consultant who had been
hired by other detainees for a one-day assignment, and he knew
nothing about terrorism. As with the others in the group, his initial
interrogation yielded nothing useful.
A separate team tore through the physical evidence obtained in the
Yusufiyah raid. Here they made a remarkable discovery: on one of
the videotapes seized in the first house, investigators found extensive
unedited footage of a man in a ninjalike black costume and white
sneakers, firing a machine gun from the hip. The significance of the
find was soon clear: the occupants of the Yusufiyah house, whoever
they were, were senior enough to own the raw outtakes from
Zarqawi’s propaganda reel.
McChrystal’s men were getting closer, yet they still had no idea of
the location of Zarqawi’s base. They spent hours studying the video
outtakes, looking for clues. Some of the scenes were inadvertently
comical, showing Zarqawi struggling to figure out how to work the
machine gun. After finally emptying his ammo clip, he handed the
weapon to an aide, who grabbed it by the barrel and then dropped
the gun with a howl of pain. The man appeared to have had no idea
that the metal would be scorching-hot. These “blooper” moments
would later be publicly released by the Americans in an attempt to
undercut Zarqawi’s propaganda image as a savvy street fighter. In a
further slap, McChrystal also persuaded White House officials to
reduce the reward for Zarqawi’s capture from twenty-five million to
five million dollars. The symbolic demotion would do untold damage
to Zarqawi’s towering ego, he reasoned.
Still, the Americans were grasping at shadows. In the weeks that
followed, they continued searching the region near Yusufiyah, and
added several new areas of northern and western Iraq to the priority
list, based on an analysis of the terrain that served as the backdrop
for the propaganda video. The interrogations of Mubassir and the
other Yusufiyah detainees dragged on day after day, producing
nothing. In the nearly three-year-old hunt for Zarqawi, the
Americans appeared to have hit yet another dry hole.
—
But the searchers had important new allies. The Jordanians were
proving to be invaluable partners. Jordanian operatives now working
with U.S. special-forces teams excelled at picking up clues that
Americans often missed, such as subtle differences in accents that
could distinguish local Iraqis from out-of-towners.
Meanwhile, the Mukhabarat’s interrogations of Karbouly and
other captured Zarqawi operatives were yielding important insights.
Karbouly, from his years as a customs officer, knew the major routes
or “rat lines” that Zarqawi used to smuggle supplies and recruits.
Two major arteries crossed the Syrian border near al-Qa’im, then ran
to Sunni strongholds in the south, in Anbar Province, and northward
to the city of Mosul; a third terminated in Baqubah, an ethnically
mixed town northeast of Baghdad. Karbouly also knew enough about
Zarqawi’s past travel to sketch out a list of towns where the terrorist
likely stayed. The Jordanian spy agency forwarded the new findings
to the Americans, along with scores of tips ranging from possible
Zarqawi sightings to the locations of weapons caches.
Impressed, McChrystal decided to meet personally with some of
the Mukhabarat’s team. First the general’s top intelligence aides
huddled with Jordanian counterparts at their headquarters in
Amman. Then a small entourage led by Ali Bourzak arrived in the
middle of the night at McChrystal’s command headquarters at Balad,
the first non-British foreigners ever allowed inside the highly
sensitive operations center.
“We were just trying to learn everything we could from the only
guys who had ever sat down with Zarqawi,” explained one U.S.
official involved in the meetings.
At one point, the Americans put up a map of Iraq and asked
Bourzak where he believed Zarqawi was hiding. The Mukhabarat
official thought for a moment and then rose from his chair.
“He walked up to the map and he put his finger right in the middle
of Baqubah Province,” the official recalled.
“If I were Zarqawi, I would be here,” Bourzak said.
The Americans were mystified. Most of Zarqawi’s support base
and the bulk of the reported Zarqawi sightings were in the Sunni
strongholds of Anbar Province and northern Iraq, between the
Syrian border and Mosul. Baqubah, a city of half a million, was a
restive mix of Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds, barely sixty miles from the
Iranian border.
McChrystal’s team welcomed the input, but the Baqubah theory
struck some of the Americans as a wild guess. There had been earlier
reports of Zarqawi sightings near Baqubah; none had ever checked
out.
“We never discounted it,” the U.S. official said. “We just added it to
our calculations.”
Then, in May, another intelligence morsel arrived from Jordan
that appeared to offer more immediate promise. At the Balad Air
Base, the interrogation of the Iraqi detainee called Mubassir had
stalled completely, frustrating the Americans and spurring
Mubassir’s hopes that he might soon be released. But now from the
Mukhabarat came records of the man’s past travels to Jordan,
including several suspicious trips right around the time of the
Amman hotel bombings the previous November. There also were
hints of possible links between Mubassir and the family of Sajida al-
Rishawi, the female suicide bomber whose vest had failed to explode.
None of it directly tied Mubassir to the bomb plot, but the
Americans suddenly had a powerful new lever for prying open the
Iraqi’s lips. Two of McChrystal’s most gifted interrogators marched
into Mubassir’s cell to lay out the new evidence and deliver an
ultimatum: Help us, or we’ll be forced to hand you over to the
Jordanians for prosecution.
“We’re trying to hold on to you, but if word gets out that you’re
tied to this, it could be really bad,” the interrogators said, according
to McChrystal’s notes on the exchange.
Mubassir protested. “I can’t give you anything because I don’t have
anything,” he said. But then, just as the two Americans were leaving,
he stopped them.
“I have something to tell you,” he said.
—
Mubassir’s new confession took up eight pages of typed notes. The
highlight, by far, was a remarkable revelation about Zarqawi that had
entirely eluded the Americans until now: the Jordanian had a
spiritual adviser, an Iraqi imam called Sheikh Abd al-Rahman, who
lived with his young family in Baghdad. And the two met regularly,
about once every week to ten days.
For Zarqawi’s hunters, it was the biggest break since the search
began nearly three years earlier. If the information was true—and
assuming McChrystal’s team could find the right imam—they had
just been handed a map to Zarqawi’s hideout. Indeed, Mubassir’s
story was so good, some of the senior officers at Balad suspected that
the Iraqi was bluffing or even leading them into a trap. The doubts
grew after the Americans checked out an address for a Sheikh al-
Rahman in Baghdad and found a house in a predominantly Shiite
area—certainly the last place anyone would expect to find a Zarqawi
confidant.
U.S. and Jordanian officials raced to gather whatever they could
on Zarqawi’s supposed father confessor. Drones hovered over the
expensive house where the man known as Abd al-Rahman lived, and
trailed his silver sedan when he rode around town with his chauffeur.
Undercover agents in traditional Arab clothes waited near his
mosque to snap secret photos of the young cleric with the close-
cropped hair and trim beard. Finally, the images were shared with
the Mukhabarat’s new star informant, who cinched the case with a
single glance. It was widely known within the terrorist network that
Zarqawi had a young spiritual adviser, Karbouly said, but the man
was known only by a fake name, a nom de guerre. The cleric in the
photographs was the same adviser, the former customs agent said.
He was sure of it.
Now came the wait. For two weeks, airborne cameras watched the
house and followed the silver sedan on its mundane trips to markets,
schools, and social outings. Each morning, the chauffeur waited in
front of the house, and each evening, the cleric and his family
returned home. At the Balad Air Base, the analysts watched their
video screens and wondered if something had gone wrong. Had
Rahman been tipped off? Should they simply arrest the cleric and try
to get him to talk?
Then, around noon on a stifling hot Wednesday—June 7, 2006—
McChrystal’s team watched from their monitors as the sedan made a
sudden break from its usual orbit. It meandered through residential
neighborhoods and then turned to enter Baghdad’s main freeway,
heading to the northeast. On the on-ramp, the car abruptly stopped.
Rahman got out of the car and began speaking on his cell phone. A
few minutes later, a small blue truck pulled up behind the sedan, and
Rahman climbed in. It was a classic car swap, the kind used for
decades by spies to throw pursuers off track.
The truck sped through Baghdad’s outer suburbs and then headed
north, away from the city, and into open countryside. McChrystal
was in his private office in another part of the operations center
when one of his aides knocked on the door. Rahman was on the
move and heading away from the capital, the general was told. But
where to? McChrystal had guessed south, toward Yusufiyah. Instead,
to his surprise, the car continued north for thirty miles, then veered
east. Rahman’s destination was now unmistakable: he was heading
straight toward Baqubah, just as the Mukhabarat’s counterterrorism
chief had predicted.
The vehicles occupants made yet another attempt to shake off any
pursuers. Just inside Baqubah’s city limits, the truck pulled into a
parking lot where a different vehicle—a white pickup with a red
stripe—was waiting. Rahman got out to speak to the pickup’s driver;
then, for the second time in an hour, he switched vehicles. Soon he
and the white pickup were heading north again.
About three miles from town, outside a tiny village called Hibhib,
the pickup turned onto a small dirt road lined with thick groves of
palm trees, and then proceeded down a driveway leading to a beige
two-story house with a carport. The dwelling was all but obscured by
a canopy of palms and dense shrubs, and it was protected at ground
level by a wall and a metal gate. The Americans watched as the driver
spoke to someone inside the compound, who opened the gate to let
the truck inside. Rahman climbed out of the passenger seat, and then
the driver backed the vehicle down the driveway and drove away.
It was 4:55 p.m., Baghdad time. Every eye in the operations center
was now fixed on the grainy image of the small house under the
palms. CIA analysts and military operators in the room had been
waiting nearly three years for such a moment. Was this really the
one?
McChrystal studied the images thoughtfully as one of his deputies
replayed the frames of a white pickup entering the driveway. “I’m not
going to promise you that’s Zarqawi,” one of McChrystal’s deputies
said, as the general recalled afterward. “But whoever we kill is going
to be much higher than anybody we’ve killed before.”
As they stared at the screen, a solidly built figure emerged from the
building.
“We watched a guy dressed in all black come out and meet
[Rahman] and take him in the house,” McChrystal said. “And we
watched that same guy, in all black, walk back out. He walked the
length of the driveway to the main road and back.”
McChrystal had seen dozens of images of the man he had been
pursuing since 2003. The resemblance to the black-clad figure was
unmistakable.
“Wow, that’s Zarqawi,” he told his deputy.
“That’s right,” came the reply. “That’s what we think.”
A team of Delta commandos was on standby in Baghdad, forty
miles away, and now the command came for them to board their
chopper. To the consternation of all, one of their helicopters was
having engine trouble. Agonizing minutes passed. What if Zarqawi
were suddenly to flee through the palm trees and escape? Could
there ever be another opportunity like this?
At that moment, two American F-16 fighter jets were on routine
patrol over central Iraq, under a policy that required twenty-four-
hour coverage in case U.S. troops needed immediate air support. One
of the jets was being refueled and was effectively out of commission,
but the other was redirected toward Baqubah. An air-traffic
controller read a set of coordinates, and the fighter was soon
screaming toward tiny Hibhib, less than five minutes away.
McChrystal hoped the day would end with Zarqawi in his custody.
“I really want to capture this guy,” the general remembered thinking
as the minutes dragged by. The truth is, no one could say with
certainty that the man on the video was Zarqawi. McChrystal
reckoned the odds at 80 to 90 percent.
The deputy interrupted his thoughts.
“I don’t think we can wait,” he said. “I’m going to bomb it.”
“All right,” the general said.
It was nearly 6:00 p.m. when the command came over the F-16’s
radio: “Drop the bomb.”
The fighter swooped over the house, but, to the surprise of those
watching the screens at Balad, the building did not explode. The pilot
made a second pass, this time releasing a GBU-12 Paveway, a five-
hundred-pound guided bomb. From the center of the F-16’s video
screen came a brilliant flash followed by three jets of smoke and
dust, one shooting skyward and the others billowing through the
palm trees. About a hundred seconds later, a second bomb hit in the
same spot.
When the smoke finally cleared, the two-story house with the
carport was gone.
—
It took the Delta team another twenty minutes to arrive by
helicopter. The commandos raced up the driveway on foot, just in
time to see Iraqi police loading a stretcher into an ambulance next to
a rubble pile that had been Zarqawi’s hideout.
The Iraqis backed away at the sight of heavily armed American
commandos, and soon the soldiers were staring into the bloodied
face of the man on the stretcher. He wore a thin beard and dusty
black clothes, and he was bleeding from a deep gash on his left
cheek. If the soldiers looked closely, they might have noticed an odd
scar on his right arm, the legacy of a long-ago surgery to remove a
tattoo.
Gravely wounded but alive, Zarqawi opened his eyes to see a ring
of American faces looking down at him. Startled, he mumbled
something unintelligible and tried to roll off the stretcher to get
away, only to be stopped by American hands, some of them tattooed.
Years later, some of the soldiers present at Hibhib would claim
that the commandos delivered the final blow, squeezing the life out
Zarqawi as he lay on the stretcher. An autopsy found no evidence of
it, concluding that Zarqawi had only minutes to live in any case, his
lungs and other internal organs having been crushed by the intense
pressure wave from the exploding GBU-12 bomb. A medic at the
scene noted that Zarqawi’s carotid artery had already collapsed from
internal bleeding, and blood seeped from his nose and ears as he
wheezed through a few last breaths.
One thing that appears incontrovertible is that Zarqawi was
conscious long enough to look into American eyes.
The other certainty is that he died at 7:04 p.m. Iraqi time, as a
fading sun cast long shadows over the palm grove that had sheltered
him and his tortured dream of a resurgent Islamic state.
—
Major General Stanley McChrystal’s first and only personal
encounter with Zarqawi occurred that same evening, in a makeshift
morgue in the Balad Air Base’s detainee screening center. Zarqawi’s
body was laid out on a table so specialists could run through DNA
tests to confirm the Jordanian’s identity.
Minutes earlier, McChrystal had ordered a series of raids
throughout the country in an effort to preempt possible retaliatory
strikes by Zarqawi’s AQI followers. He was still in the operations
center when one of his men came up to him with word that Zarqawi’s
body had arrived.
He walked to the detainee facility to find the corpse laid out on a
poncho. One of the Delta team operators, an army Ranger whom
McChrystal knew well, was standing guard. A trickle of blood was
drying below a gash on Zarqawi’s left cheek, but otherwise the body
showed no signs of serious trauma. McChrystal studied the face for a
moment.
“He looks just like Zarqawi,” he said, “like out of a poster.” He
turned to the Ranger.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“It’s him,” the Ranger said.
—
Zarqawi’s death was not formally announced for another day, but the
news was already being toasted in Washington, from the White
House to the Pentagon to the CIA’s leafy campus along the Potomac.
Bush’s initial reaction was subdued. Just minutes before the news
arrived from Baghdad, the president had been meeting at the White
House with several members of Congress from both political parties.
Illinois Republican representative Ray LaHood, a staunch supporter
of the Iraq war, offered a word of unsolicited advice: “We really got
to get rid of Zarqawi,” he said.
Bush chuckled quietly, and Representative Steny Hoyer, a
Maryland Democrat, leaned over to make a private joke at LaHood’s
expense. “Why didn’t we think of that?” Hoyer whispered.
The first report of Zarqawi’s possible death came minutes later, at
3:45 p.m. EDT, but the confirmation was delayed for another five
hours. Members of Bush’s national security team reacted ecstatically,
but Bush could barely muster a smile.
“I don’t know how to take good news anymore,” he said.
The CIA officer Nada Bakos was traveling when the news broke.
Just a few months earlier, the spy agency’s top Zarqawi expert had
returned to Washington for good, after angling for a new assignment
that had nothing to do with the Jordanian. Now thirty-six, she had
been the longest-serving member of the agency’s Zarqawi team, and
she felt frustrated and more than ready for a change. She had met a
man she liked—someone far removed from the intelligence world—
and they had recently gotten married. Their low-key wedding took
place on an evening after work, and Bakos, overwhelmed by the daily
demands of her job, showed up late for the ceremony.
She was with her new CIA colleagues on June 7 when the call came
from a Langley friend that Zarqawi was finally dead. She
remembered feeling slightly numb. What was the proper way to react
to such news?
“I was happy,” she remembered afterward. “But I guess I was
disappointed that I wasn’t with people who understood what it
meant.”
In Jordan, celebrations in the capital were counterbalanced by
scenes of ugly protest in the terrorist’s hometown of Zarqa, where
some locals had begun reasserting their support for the town’s most
famous son in the weeks before his death. Near the family
homestead, relatives and local Islamists erected a tent and
announced a “martyrdom” celebration, lauding Zarqawi in television
interviews before police arrived to shut the revelers down.
Abu Haytham, the Mukhabarat counterterrorism deputy who
would soon rise to become the department head, expressed
annoyance at the outburst but refused to let it darken his mood.
“I long had this mental image of Zarqawi bragging,” he said,
remembering his early encounters with the terrorist. “He always said
that someday he would find a way to hurt us, to do something that
would cut to the heart. To me, that was the hotel bombing—the
image of those two little girls. Now, this is justice served.”
But there was not justice in Iraq, not yet. Zaydan al-Jabiri, the
rancher and tribal sheikh from Ramadi, watched the news of
Zarqawi’s death with indifference. The Jordanian might be gone, but
the foul strain he had helped to unleash was stronger than ever,
Zaydan told friends. Zarqawi’s foreign-led terrorist network had
morphed into something more insidious and homegrown. There
were scores of Iraqi jihadists standing ready to take up Zarqawi’s
mantle.
In some parts of Anbar Province, the tribes were beginning to
reclaim their rightful place, pushing aside the jihadists with threats
and sometimes with arms. Zaydan would join them, eventually
helping launch a movement that Americans called the “Anbar
Awakening.” It was an all-Sunni force that proved capable of driving
the Zarqawists out of the streets and back into underground cells, at
least for a time.
But for now, with Zarqawi dead, there were scores to settle with
neighbors and relatives who had chosen the wrong side. One of them
was Zaydan’s very own cousin, the man who a year earlier had asked
Zaydan to swear allegiance to the Jordanian criminal who aspired to
be Iraq’s leader.
“I told him, in our last meeting: ‘Your end is close,’ ” Zaydan said.
“We don’t want to lose members of the tribe, but the crimes these
people committed are too big for forgiveness.”
Days later, the cousin was found shot to death.
“We killed him. My tribe killed him,” he said. “It was treason, and
he was killed, the way that we kill.”
BOOK III
ISIS
17
“The people want to topple the regime!”
The trouble arrived in buses. Embassy officers spotted at least four of
them, all big ones, such as the tour companies use, chartered by God-
knows-who and packed with sweaty, agitated men armed with poles
and sticks. The small caravan rolled into Damascus’s posh al-Afif
district at midmorning and parked a block away from the American
diplomatic mission to discharge its jeering contents: a made-to-order
Syrian mob.
Robert S. Ford, now the U.S. ambassador to Syria, stared from a
chancery window at the sudden throng outside the embassy gates.
Throughout this morning—July 11, 2011, four months into Syria’s
“Arab Spring” uprising—there had been reports of a similar
gathering at the French mission, five blocks away. Now they were
here, a small army of men in civilian clothes, with more arriving by
car and on foot. Some were young with military-style haircuts; others
had the paunches of middle age and scruffy beards and carried
professionally printed portraits of Syria’s autocratic president,
Bashar al-Assad. An organizer wearing an ID card on a lanyard
barked orders, while a handful of police officers stood idly in clusters
farther up the block. From his top-floor perch, Ford watched as the
street darkened with bodies like the thickening clouds of a summer
storm. These were the regime’s goons, without a doubt, and their
presence here was anything but spontaneous. Ford ordered his staff
behind thick walls and waited to see how far Assad would go.
For a time, it was just the usual chants and a few rotten melons
lobbed over the gates. The attack, when it came, unfolded with
surprising speed. First came the louder thumps and bangs of rocks
striking the chancery walls and bouncing off shatterproof glass. Then
a dozen men were being hoisted over the embassy’s cement-and-steel
fence, the one the contractor had called unscalable. Now intruders
were running across the embassy grounds, shouting at one another,
pounding on doors and windows, looking for weaknesses. Some of
them clambered up a brickwork façade to the chancery roof, where
satellite dishes and radio antennas were kept. Soon they were
beating on the metal rooftop door that was the only remaining
barrier between the protesters and the frightened embassy workers
inside.
Ford stood near the battered door with two marines, both young
recruits in their twenties assigned to the embassy’s security force.
The guards fingered their rifles as Ford mentally prepared himself
for what might happen if the door burst open. Where were the Syrian
police?
The awful banging continued, and Ford could now see the
intruders’ feet through a gap in the doorframe. One of the marines
spoke:
“If they get through that door, we’re shooting.”
Ford thought quickly. Assad must have intended only to scare, not
to harm. But why was he letting his goons get this far?
“No. You are not shooting,” he insisted. “If they get through the
door, you tell them to stop. If they see your guns and they charge
anyway, then you may fire.”
More banging. The wait continued, giving Ford ample time to
second-guess himself. Surely the protesters would back away in the
face of guards with rifles, he thought. Or would they?
Perhaps more than any other American, Ford understood the
temperament of the autocrat who would have had to sign off on any
decision to unleash mobs on two Western embassies. Assad was
usually smart enough to avoid a needless provocation, but he also
was famously short-tempered and vindictive. Ford had personally
witnessed one of the president’s mood swings, and the experience
had made a lasting impression. An angry Assad could be
unpredictable, and right now Assad was furious—at him. The assault
could be called off at any moment, or the door could suddenly fly
open to whatever combination of aggression and zealotry stood on
the other side. In the broiling hot midsummer of Syria’s civilian
uprising, almost any outcome seemed plausible.
The pounding grew louder. The marines waited, rifles pointed at
the door.
—
For a time, it seemed that the Arab Spring contagion might bypass
Syria altogether. By mid-March 2011, tyrants and their security
forces had been routed in Tunisia and Egypt, and others were falling
in Libya and Yemen. But Syria was different. The country’s economic
and political elite lined up solidly behind the ruling Assad family,
and the government’s officially secularist policies and brutal secret
police kept ethnic and sectarian tensions bottled up. As protests
erupted in capitals from North Africa to the Persian Gulf, the tumult
in Damascus’s ancient passageways was limited mostly to the
honking taxis and the cries of street vendors in the souks downtown.
The president himself was hardly the type to inspire protests.
Mild-mannered by the standards of Middle Eastern autocrats—
including his ruthless father, former president Hafez al-Assad—
Syria’s forty-five-year-old leader once had ambitions to be a
physician. He studied in London as a young man and chose
ophthalmology as his specialty, because he disliked the sight of
blood. But his plans for a career in medicine derailed when his older
brother, Bassel, died in a car accident, thrusting the tall, soft-spoken
Bashar onto the leadership track. The death of Hafez in 2000 fueled
hopes for political reform in Syria, and the new president at first
seemed up for the challenge. Bashar al-Assad liberalized the
country’s economic policies and loosened restrictions on the Internet
during his first months in office. More dramatically, he closed the
country’s infamous Mezzeh penitentiary, and declared an amnesty
that released hundreds of political prisoners, including members of
the banned Muslim Brotherhood organization.
U.S. officials watched the developments closely, sensing potential
in the young Western-educated leader. What if Syria—so accustomed
to playing the part of agitator and rogue—could be persuaded to take
a more constructive role in the region? It was a distant hope, at best.
Syria under Bashar al-Assad remained a chief supplier of arms and
cash to Lebanon’s Hezbollah militants, and a conduit for jihadists
headed for Iraq. Damascus also possessed one of the world’s largest
stockpiles of illegal chemical weapons, including deadly sarin gas.
And yet there were hopeful signs. Assad’s security forces sometimes
cooperated with the United States on counterterrorism cases, and
the country’s intelligence service occasionally made a show of
arresting terrorist recruits at the airport and border crossings.
Moreover, Syria’s first family cultivated a public image that
suggested a desire for closer ties to the West. Unlike his father, who
preferred lectures and insults when entertaining Western guests, the
younger Assad could hold a finely nuanced conversation on regional
politics in flawless English. His wife, the elegantly beautiful Asma,
was a British-raised economist who wore Christian Louboutin heels
and promoted women’s rights and educational reform.
Massachusetts senator John F. Kerry, the future U.S. secretary of
state, was among a parade of American officials to pass through
Damascus and pronounce Assad to be someone the U.S. government
could work with.
“My judgment is that Syria will move; Syria will change, as it
embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States and the
West and the economic opportunity that comes with it,” Kerry, then
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, said after a 2009
visit.
By late 2010, the Obama administration was ready for a bold step:
it would appoint a U.S. ambassador to Syria for the first time since
2005, when relations between the countries hit a new low over
alleged Syrian support for terrorism. To fill such an important post,
the White House settled on a candidate with an impressive record for
managing Middle East crises: Robert Ford.
The appointment had legions of doubters. So many senators
opposed the notion of upgraded diplomatic relations with Syria that
the White House dared not risk subjecting its candidate to the usual
confirmation hearing. Instead, President Obama waited until
Congress adjourned for the Christmas recess to name Ford as the
fourteenth U.S. ambassador to Syria on December 29, 2010.
The president’s choice for the job had misgivings of his own.
Ford’s distinguished service in Iraq had earned him his first
ambassadorship in 2006, as the chief U.S. diplomat to Algeria, but
two years had passed, and he was eligible for a new assignment. Ford
considered Tunisia and Bahrain, both regarded as interesting but
quiet postings. Syria, by contrast, was a notoriously brutal police
state that openly supported anti-Israel militants. The job description
there would consist of delivering regular scoldings to the regime over
its support for terrorism.
“I don’t want to go to Syria,” Ford told his boss. “All I’ll be doing is
fighting with the Assad government all the time.”
But he went. Just three weeks after his appointment, Ford was on
his way to Damascus. A week after that, he was presenting his letters
of credence to Assad in the presidential palace.
At the ceremonial meeting in Assad’s hilltop residence, Ford
watched the Syrian leader carefully for clues about the personality
behind the charcoal suit. Seated in a powder-blue chair in a reception
hall, Assad was affable and charming, showing no trace of the
condescension so common among the region’s palace-bred autocrats.
He was tall and narrow-shouldered, with pale-blue eyes, and a trim
mustache offsetting a weak chin; he spoke with the quiet self-
assurance of a man who had grown into middle age without having
to raise his voice. The meeting was going pleasantly enough until
Ford gently broached the subject of the State Department’s most
recent report on human rights, with its lengthy catalogue of Syrian
abuses, including official repression, torture, and murder. No sooner
were the words uttered than the host’s entire countenance changed.
The volume never varied, but Assad was enraged.
“The last country in the world that I’m going to take advice from is
the United States,” he said in a low snarl. “Not on human rights. Not
after what you’ve done in Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and
Afghanistan.”
Ford listened politely, summoning up as much diplomatic reserve
as he could.
“Mr. President, the issues you just raised are perfectly legitimate,”
he said. “We should have to explain ourselves. But we’re going to
raise our concerns with you, too. And if we’re going to make any
progress on this bilateral relationship, we’re going to have to have
frank discussions about it.”
Historic events would ensure that no such discussions would take
place. Within two weeks of the meeting, Egyptian president Hosni
Mubarak was driven out of office. Four days after that, Libyan
security forces fired into a crowd of protesters in Benghazi, setting
off a civil war that would topple the Libyan leader, Muammar
Qaddafi. In early March, rioters clashed with police in the capitals of
Yemen and Bahrain. And at last Syria, having seemed impervious to
sparks from the revolutions south of its borders, caught fire in the
span of a single turbulent week. On March 18, violent protests broke
out in the southern city of Dara’a after police arrested and tortured
local teens for writing antigovernment graffiti. On March 20, a mob
torched Baath Party buildings in Dara’a, and police fired back with
live ammunition, killing fifteen. On March 25, huge crowds poured
into the streets there and in other cities, from Hama and Homs in the
west to Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, in the north. The House of Assad,
so brutally efficient at keeping the peace at home, faced its worst
domestic crisis in three decades, and the window for fruitful
diplomatic engagement with the United States, its longtime
adversary, slammed shut.
In Washington, State Department officials, scrambling to stay atop
a half-dozen simultaneous meltdowns in the world’s most turbulent
region, watched to see which path Syria’s uprising would take. Would
Assad implement political reforms to try to stay ahead of the
protesters, as the sovereigns of Jordan and Morocco had done?
Would he share the fate of Egypt’s Mubarak, jettisoned by his own
generals in a bid to preserve peace and their own skins?
Syria’s president quickly made his choice clear. From the
beginning, Assad signaled a resolve to avoid the concessions that, in
the minds of many of Syria’s elite, had directly precipitated the fall of
Mubarak in Egypt. There would be no serious effort to accommodate
protesters’ demands for political and economic reforms. Instead,
Assad would seek to bludgeon, gas, and shoot his way out of the
crisis. In the first week alone, at least seventy protesters were killed,
and hundreds of others were thrown into makeshift holding cells.
The international watchdog Human Rights Watch later confirmed
reports of twenty-seven interrogation centers set up by Syrian
intelligence, where detainees were beaten with clubs, whips, and
cables and given electric shocks. Yet the protests continued to grow.
The suffering by ordinary Syrians was, in the view of many U.S.
officials, not only tragic but also wholly avoidable, if Assad were a
more capable leader. Syria’s biggest problems in 2011 appeared to be
mostly economic: high unemployment, worsened by a prolonged
drought that had sent rural villagers into the cities looking for work.
The country’s myriad ethnic and sectarian divisions had mostly been
subdued after decades of secular Baathist rule. Many of the early
protesters in Aleppo and Hama were angry not at Assad per se but at
corruption within the president’s inner circle. Frederic C. Hof, a
former army expert on the Middle East who was appointed as special
envoy to the region in 2009, wondered in the early weeks if Assad
might still try to buy himself some goodwill by reining in some of his
more extravagant relatives and dealing leniently with those
protesting police brutality.
“The country’s problems were being exacerbated by a general
impression that Damascus elites were literally making out like
bandits,” said Hof, recalling his thinking at the time. “The president
had spoken about reform and so forth, and people thought,
inshallah, maybe he’ll do something.
“If he had handled reform and protests smartly, he could have had
himself crowned emperor of Syria,” Hof said.
Instead, with brutal displays of force—nearly all of it captured on
cell-phone cameras—the Syrian leader managed to unite much of the
country against him. He still controlled considerable assets. Of
twenty-one million Syrians, Assad could reliably depend on members
of his minority Alawite sect, which controlled the country’s elite
army divisions and the security services. The remaining 87 percent of
the population would have to be bought off or subdued. But how long
could that last?
Not long. That was the consensus view of White House officials
who watched Syria implode in the spring and summer of 2011. By
April, Assad was deploying army troops against unarmed civilians.
By May, tanks barricaded the main squares of Hama, and snipers
picked off individual protesters from rooftops. The demonstrations
cooled for a while, then roared back to life in the early summer,
seemingly unstoppable.
“The early intelligence was that Syria’s ‘spring’ was not likely to go
anywhere—it would be killed in the crib, and in a vicious way,” said a
senior U.S. official who monitored the daily cable traffic from
Damascus. “Then the conventional wisdom shifted quickly. It went
from ‘Nobody could get rid of Assad’ to ‘There’s no way to stop these
people.’ ”
—
Robert Ford could not sit still. In twenty years of assignments in the
Middle East, he had never failed to find a path to the turbulent
center of whatever crisis happened to be unfolding in his host
country. It was about to happen again in Syria, this time in a way
that would capture the attention of millions of people and put the
United States clearly on the side of the demonstrators—or so it
seemed to the Syrians themselves.
Ford would admit to no particular bias, but in fact he owed a debt
to ordinary citizens of Syria for kindnesses shown to him nearly three
decades earlier. In 1983, Ford, then a skinny twenty-five-year-old
student of Arabic with a mop of curly brown hair, made his first trip
to Syria during a break in classes at the American University in
Cairo. He and a schoolmate traveled by bus from Amman to
Damascus and arrived in the Syrian capital very late, after most of
the shops were closed. The city was packed with Iranian visitors on
holiday, and the two Americans were turned away by one hotel after
another. Just as they were resigning themselves to a night on the
street in a strange city, a friendly hotel clerk called them over.
“You’ll never find a hotel this late at night,” the man said to the two
dirty, road-weary foreigners. “Sleep at my house tonight, and I’ll
bring you back here early tomorrow.”
Minutes later, the two youths were in the modest apartment where
the man lived with his family. Though it was past midnight, the
Syrian prepared a small supper, and the three stayed up talking for
hours. When it was time to sleep, the host apologized for not inviting
the Americans to stay longer. “If you stay more than tonight, I will
have the secret police knocking at my door tomorrow,” he explained.
Other Syrians Ford encountered were equally warm. Just days
before, an American warship had shelled a Syrian troop position in
the hills above Beirut. Yet, when Ford found himself on a bus filled
with Syrian soldiers, he was treated with a graciousness that still
stuck with him decades later. “Welcome!” the troops said after
discovering two Americans on the crowded bus. Some gave up their
seats for the foreigners, and others peppered them with questions
about dating rituals and whether all American women were like the
ones on the hit TV show Baywatch. In a more serious moment, one
of the officers in the group pulled Ford aside to make a request.
“When you get back to America,” the officer said, “tell them we are
not barbar”—barbarians.
Some twenty-eight years later, the government’s barbar were
loose in cities throughout Syria, snuffing out ordinary lives. The
working-class Syrians whom Ford had admired when he was a young
man were organizing into neighborhood defense committees, the
precursors of rebel militias. For now, nearly all the killing was being
committed by one side, and it was hard to be dispassionate, even for
a neutral diplomat whose job was to appeal to both sides for
restraint. Whatever his personal feelings, Ford could not stray
beyond the script approved by Washington, which, in the
midsummer of 2011, was sharply divided over what to say. President
Obama had not yet called on Assad to resign, as he had done more
promptly in the cases of Mubarak and Qaddafi. Among some of the
president’s aides arose new worries that the Syrian regime could
suddenly collapse on itself before the U.S. administration could take
a stand. The timing was critical: During Egypt’s uprising, Arab
leaders lambasted Obama for symbolically abandoning Mubarak, a
longtime U.S. ally, while he remained the country’s legitimate head
of state. On the opposite side were Egyptian protesters who accused
the White House of acting cowardly, waiting until Mubarak was all
but finished before publicly breaking with him.
There were, however, ways to show support for peaceful protest
without uttering a word. Since the early weeks of the uprising, Ford’s
senior staff had held low-key meetings with opposition leaders and
posted carefully worded encouragement on the U.S. Embassy’s
Facebook page. But Ford’s big gesture—the one that would infuriate
the Assad regime and symbolically ally Washington with the
protesters—grew out of a bid to prevent a massacre in Hama, a city
in northwestern Syria where anti-Assad rallies were regularly
drawing huge crowds. After weeks of clashes and scores of deaths,
Assad fired the provincial governor on July 3, 2011, and deployed
tanks and troops in rings around the city’s suburbs. An uneasy calm
prevailed for three days, with large numbers of protesters occupying
Hama’s center while Assad’s heavily armed security forces waited on
the outskirts.
Ford watched the standoff from afar before making his move. He
dispatched to Hama one of his aides, a twenty-six-year-old woman
who passed easily between the capital and the outlying cities, for a
personal assessment of the demonstrators and their intentions. She
came back with photos and an impressive report: tens of thousands
of people were gathering in the city’s main plaza daily, and—contrary
to Syrian media accounts of looting, vandalism, and kidnapping—the
crowds were as well behaved as anyone could hope. Ford relayed the
reports back to Washington.
“They’re releasing doves in the air and selling flowers,” Ford said.
“It’s entirely peaceful.”
But from the suburbs came ominous signs of preparations for
battle. Intelligence reports suggested that Assad had decided to send
his tanks into the city with the intention of smashing the opposition
movement and turning Hama into an example for the rest of the
country. Until now, Assad had simply ignored U.S. and European
entreaties to exercise restraint. But as he watched the preparations,
Ford wondered: would the Syrian leader risk an attack if he knew
that a sitting U.S. ambassador was in the city to witness the
outcome? Traveling uninvited to the uprising’s bloody epicenter
would be seen as a provocation, so Ford resolved to keep the visit as
stripped down as possible. There would be no events or speeches,
just the silent witness of an American diplomat whose mere presence
would attract attention far beyond the city’s borders.
“I would just be there to watch,” Ford would later explain. “I’d
have to be there myself, because otherwise it wasn’t going to have
any credibility.”
On the morning of July 7, without a word to the Syrian authorities
or his own bosses, Ford climbed into an SUV with three of his staff
and headed north in a tiny convoy that included Ford’s friend the
French ambassador, Éric Chevallier. They crossed the ridge of stark
brown hills above the capital and pushed onward through the lush
farmland and ancient cities of the country’s northwestern heartland,
heading toward Hama and what was certain to be a confrontation,
though when it would occur or how it would unfold was anyone’s
guess. It was far from clear whether they would even make it to their
destination. All along the 130-mile highway—and particularly on the
approach to Hama—were security checkpoints, and at each one,
police would want to know why two foreign diplomats were passing
through their territory without prior clearance from Damascus. Even
if Assad’s men allowed them to pass, there were no guarantees that
Hama’s demonstrators would welcome a pair of uninvited emissaries
from Western governments that many Syrians viewed with suspicion
and even hostility.
Yet the startled guards simply waved the travelers through. Hours
after setting out, Ford’s tan SUV pulled safely into central Hama and
past large crowds milling around the city’s Assi Square. The city’s
center had a jubilant feel, as though liberation had already occurred.
Someone had hung a huge purple banner from the town’s clock
tower with the words “Long Live Free Syria—Down with Bashar al-
Assad!” The troops, tanks, and even police remained behind their
cordons in the suburbs; in central Hama, there was not a baton or
uniform in sight.
As planned, the two ambassadors checked in to a Hama hotel that
would serve as a base during their visit. They visited a hospital to talk
to workers caring for protesters injured in earlier clashes with police.
Then they held a series of discreet meetings with opposition leaders,
away from the glare of TV cameras. Ford, in his meetings, took pains
not to overpromise, he recalled later. The important thing, he
stressed, was to avoid violence.
“If you become violent, we will not support you,” Ford said.
Western intervention in Libya notwithstanding, no U.S. troops would
be coming to the rescue if the Syrian opposition got itself into a war,
he explained. “After the Iraq war, the last thing we’re going to do is
send the military to Syria. It will never, ever happen.”
The next day, a Friday, was the week’s big protest day. As Ford and
Chevallier set out in their SUVs, they found the central plaza packed
with people—one hundred thousand or even more, according to later
estimates. The crowd was exuberant but orderly, until someone
happened to recognize the diplomatic license plates on the tan
vehicle working its way along the edges of the demonstration. The
night before, Syrian television had broadcast a less-than-flattering
report about an American delegation arriving in the country’s fourth-
largest city.
“The ambassador of America, in Hama!” one of the protesters
shouted.
Within seconds, the car was mobbed by cheering Syrians who
pressed against the car until it could barely move. Onlookers threw
rose petals and garlands until the driver had to stop and clear the
windshield in order to proceed. A chant began from somewhere in
the throng and quickly grew into a roar.
“The people want to topple the regime!”
Someone in the crowd captured the moment on a cell-phone video.
Grown men leapt for joy, and others waved tree branches or tried to
touch the car. Ford, wearing sunglasses, sat behind the driver, eyes
straight ahead. He had intended only to bear witness, but now his
visit itself had become an event. He directed his driver to leave the
city as quickly as possible, but within hours the video shot by cell
phone had flashed around the world—including in the Syrian capital,
where an enraged Assad railed against Ford’s interference in an
internal matter.
“The presence of the U.S. ambassador in Hama without previous
permission is obvious proof of the implication of the United States in
the ongoing events, and of their attempts to increase tensions,” the
regime said in a statement issued through the Foreign Ministry.
The fuming from the capital was all but eclipsed by the jubilation
in Hama, a city that was, at least for that brief moment, Syria’s first
and only free province. A local organizing committee appointed a
pair of civilian guards on motorcycles to serve as an official escort,
parting the crowds so Ford’s SUV could safely navigate its way back
to the Damascus highway. But in the center of town, the celebrating
continued late into the evening without a pause, and the tanks in the
suburbs stayed behind their lines. On this day, at least, Assad would
hold his fire.
—
Three days later, Ford and his marines stood watch on the embassy’s
top floor, waiting to see if the heaving rooftop door would hold. The
feared backlash had come, and one of the targets, it now seemed
clear, was Ford himself.
The Alawite toughs—the same kind that traveled by bus to beat up
protesters in cities around the country—continued in their quest to
find things to smash. They ripped down the American flag from its
rooftop mast, set fire to it, and raised a Syrian flag in its place. From
the French Embassy came alarming reports of shots being fired. The
assailants there used a battering ram to break into a garage, then
proceeded to demolish the ambassador’s car. Three embassy workers
were hurt in skirmishes before French guards let loose with a
warning volley that scattered the mob.
In Washington, the State Department’s Near East Division worked
the phone lines, looking for anyone in the Syrian government who
might possess an off-switch. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton, furious, called a news conference to denounce the embassy
assault and the Syrian leader presumed to be behind it. This time it
was Clinton who veered off the White House script, with harsh words
that stopped just short of demanding Assad’s ouster.
“President Assad is not indispensable, and we have absolutely
nothing invested in him remaining in power,” Clinton said, sounding
out each syllable with an icy resolve. “From our perspective, he has
lost legitimacy.” It was the first time any U.S. official had publicly
challenged the Syrian leader’s right to rule.
For whatever reason, the attacks in Damascus’s diplomatic quarter
abruptly subsided. The police officers who had stood idle as rioters
scaled the U.S. Embassy fence now busied themselves doing their
jobs, shooing the assailants out of the embassy compound, though
making no arrests. From the improvised defensive post on the
embassy’s top floor, the sounds of conflict gradually softened until
the compound was again quiet.
When it was safe, embassy workers ventured outside to survey the
damage. Detritus from the morning’s mayhem lay scattered
everywhere: shattered glass, graffiti, rocks, and rotten fruit. The
attackers had nearly destroyed the main entranceway, and had even
managed to rip down the metal letters from the U.S. Embassy sign
on the front gate. But the more serious scarring was harder to see.
The government of Syria had allowed a mob to besiege the American
diplomatic mission. And then, whether through inaction or by
design, it had let the intruders rampage through the embassy
grounds—a violation, in essence, of sovereign U.S. territory.
But what to do about it? After the usual protests were lodged, the
White House still had a significant card to play. President Obama
had not yet uttered what his staff would call the “magic” words:
“Assad must go.” Now the debate flared again over whether and
when the United States would declare to the world that Assad’s
expiration date had passed. The pressure for a vigorous U.S.
response came from all quarters: from Congress, from Syrian exiles,
from editorial writers, from staunch allies such as France. Nearly
everyone saw the Assad government as a weak regime—far weaker,
surely, than that of Egypt’s Mubarak, who had been dislodged from
power in a month. Each day’s news brought fresh reports of trouble
for Assad, from the defections of senior Syrian army officers to the
rapid shrinking of the country’s foreign-currency reserves. There was
a strong White House belief, as the Syria adviser Frederic Hof would
later say, that Assad’s “days were numbered, and it was a very low
number.”
But what if Assad refused to leave? What, if anything, was the
United States prepared to do? Hof was among a minority of senior
advisers who worried that Assad’s exit would not be as quick as
conventional wisdom suggested. If the Syrian president found a way
to hang on, it would be the Americans who would be seen as weak.
“The president doesn’t ‘do’ advice or opinions; if he says Assad
should step aside, it’s our job to make sure the guy steps aside,” Hof
would later explain.
Obama did call for Assad’s resignation soon afterward, on August
18, 2011—five weeks after the embassy assault, and five months after
Assad’s first attacks on civilians—in a statement released in
coordination with the leaders of France, Germany, and Britain.
“We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a
democratic transition or get out of the way,” Obama said. “He has
not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for
President Assad to step aside.”
Administration officials later acknowledged that the president’s
statement may have raised expectations for U.S. actions that were
not explicitly promised. As Middle East governments teetered in
early 2011, the White House found itself repeatedly thrust into the
unaccustomed role of “arbiter for legitimacy for various leaders,”
said Benjamin Rhodes, a former White House speechwriter who
became Obama’s deputy national security adviser. In the case of
Syria, Obama was personally appalled by Assad’s use of snipers and
tanks to kill protesters. Rhodes described the president as “very
disgusted by the behavior of the Syrian regime over a long period of
time.” Obama felt compelled to put the United States on record as
opposing Assad’s behavior, Rhodes explained, though it was clear to
the White House that “we frankly do not have the available options,
short of overwhelming intervention, to forcibly remove Assad from
power.”
At the time, little else seemed needed. “Everyone thought nature
was going to take care of it,” said a senior administration official
involved in the policy debates. “Assad would be gone, and very soon.”
But Syria’s president had no intention of leaving, and he still had
cards of his own to play. Though perhaps powerless to stop the
uprising, Assad, in the summer of 2011, already had a plan in place to
change radically what the fighting was about.
As the standoff in Hama was coming to full boil, Assad introduced
a new theme in speeches and public statements denouncing the
uprising. No longer were the protesters mere “vandals” and
“criminals.” Now the Syrian leader spoke of a struggle against
“takfiris”—radical Islamists.
“This kind of ideology lurks in dark corners in order to emerge
when an opportunity presents itself,” Assad had said in a televised
speech to the nation. “It kills in the name of religion, destroys in the
name of reform and spreads chaos in the name of freedom.”
The notion that the protesters of Hama and Dara’a were religious
extremists was patently absurd. Indeed, the early demonstrations
were remarkable displays of unity, drawing Sunnis, Shiites,
Christians, Kurds, and even some members of Assad’s Alawite sect.
Yet Assad would continue to insist that Syria was locked in mortal
combat against jihadists who wanted to ignite sectarian warfare and
transport the country back to the Middle Ages.
The lack of a visible Islamist presence in the uprising seemed at
first to undercut the president’s claims. But over the months that
followed, two different groups—one inside the regime, one based
abroad—would take steps to introduce true takfiris to the conflict,
turning Syria’s domestic crisis into an international disaster.
18
“Where is this Islamic State of Iraq that you’re
talking about?”
In the fall of 2011, Jordan’s King Abdullah II phoned his Syrian
neighbor Bashar al-Assad to offer a friendly warning. Though
couched in diplomatic niceties, it was a message of fearful urgency, a
wake-up call to an old friend whose burning house happened to be
attached to his own.
The monarch had tried to convey the message in subtler ways,
sending personal envoys to Damascus to meet with the president and
his ministers. Now he would appeal to Assad directly. Abdullah,
almost alone among the region’s leaders, saw Syria sliding into a
years-long civil war that would split the country and imperil the
entire Middle East. A thoughtful response might yet avert the
calamity to come. There were no signs of such thoughtfulness
coming from Damascus, yet Abdullah would dutifully offer his best
advice.
The two men were not particularly close, though they had gotten
along well and had much in common. Both were sons of powerful
and iconic rulers, and each had been a surprise choice as his father’s
successor. The two leaders had studied in Britain, and both had
glamorous and thoroughly modern wives with Western educations
and careers of their own. Even their children were friendly, having
bonded over Super Mario video-game competitions during family
visits. Yet the two leaders’ responses to the Arab Spring unrest had
been worlds apart.
In Jordan, as in most of the region’s countries, the revolutions in
Tunisia and Egypt propelled large crowds of protesters into the
streets of the capital, demanding change. Abdullah was prepared for
them. He dismissed the sitting prime minister in favor of a popular
and reform-minded former general, Marouf Bakhit, whom he
charged with the task of cleaning up corruption and making local
government more accountable. Then the king began introducing a
series of political reforms to speed up national and local elections
and devolve more power to the prime minister and his Cabinet.
Jordan’s opposition movement quickly lost steam in the face of a
monarch who seemed as determined to change the system as they
were. Abdullah later explained that he welcomed the Arab Spring,
because it gave him an excuse to shake up a tradition-bound political
system that protected the country’s elite: wealthy oligarchs and rich
royals who had no interest in giving up their privileges.
Now the king hoped to talk Assad into considering similar reforms,
for his own sake and the region’s, according to officials present when
Abdullah began the diplomatic outreach to his old neighbor. The
phone call between the two leaders began with the usual small talk
about family. Then Abdullah proceeded to ask about the uprising and
to tick off some of the steps he had taken and what he proposed to do
next.
Assad cut the king off.
“You should worry about Jordan and yourself,” the Syrian said.
The call ended shortly after that.
The brush-off stung. Abdullah had expected more of Bashar al-
Assad. Assad’s father had been a ruthless man, a striver who had
climbed from poverty to power through a mixture of cunning and
brute force. But Bashar was not his father. After assuming the
presidency, he had impressed Abdullah’s aides by bringing in a
number of young advisers who were intelligent and worldly, some of
them having achieved success in international banking or
multinational corporations. The Americans weren’t the only ones
who believed that Syria’s president might still prove to be a true
reformer, once he had built a sufficient power base to resist
challenges from the generals and spy chiefs who controlled the
country’s security infrastructure.
“The king extended a hand to Bashar, thinking he could pull him
in,” one of Abdullah’s senior aides recalled. “We thought, ‘Here’s a
guy who could actually transform Syria and move it in a different
direction.’ When the repression began—and then became
increasingly violent—we were shocked.”
The implosion of a neighboring country was no idle concern.
Jordan shares a 233-mile border with Syria, and there were dozens
of unofficial crossing points used by tribes that straddled the dividing
line. A prolonged conflict would inevitably affect Jordan, Abdullah’s
advisers knew. There would be refugees, perhaps, and a host of new
criminal enterprises pitching camp in the border towns to smuggle in
weapons and contraband. Jordanian businesses could lose access to
the main transportation artery connecting them to markets in
southern Turkey and the European cities beyond. A more serious
destabilization could mean a loss of control over major Syrian
weapons systems, from antiaircraft missiles that could shoot down
passenger jets to Assad’s lethal stockpiles of chemical weapons. Even
a few shells of stolen VX or sarin gas could kill hundreds, perhaps
thousands, in terrorist attacks.
To most security analysts in the fall of 2011, such an extreme
outcome seemed unlikely. The common refrain, repeated by
intelligence officials from Jerusalem to Washington during the
autumn months, was that Assad’s “days are numbered.” The regime
was now losing entire army battalions to defections, and the
country’s dwindling supply of dollars—crucial for purchasing
everything from ammunition and aircraft parts to the loyalty of pro-
regime militias—was nearly tapped out. Assad’s military
commanders had begun confining some of the army’s Sunni brigades
to their barracks out of fear that they could not be trusted to fight for
their president.
But was Assad truly finished? Abdullah wasn’t so sure.
The king and his security advisers parsed each day’s intelligence
reports in endless strategy sessions. Often these were held late at
night in the hilltop palace, with the monarch in jeans or sweat
clothes, poring over briefing books and quizzing his aides over tiny
glasses of Turkish coffee and tea. All signs pointed to a momentum
shift in favor of the opposition, yet Abdullah, studying the furious
maneuverings of another Arab leader whose hilltop command center
was just a hundred miles from his own, could see glimmers of a plan
falling into place.
“This is going to take much longer than anyone thinks,” Abdullah
told his aides.
As the Jordanians saw it, the regime and the opposition each
commanded about a third of Syria’s population. Between the two was
a fearful middle, an anxious mix of ethnic and religious minorities as
well as merchants and professionals who were waiting to see which
side would prevail. If Assad could play to their fears—if he could
successfully paint the rebels as terrorists and religious zealots bent
on ethnic and sectarian cleansing—he could turn the fence straddlers
into passive allies. More than half the country would support the
regime, and Assad could likely count on controlling Syria’s most
critical real estate: Damascus and Aleppo, the country’s largest cities
and commercial centers, as well as the crucial seaports along the
coast. He could thus afford to cede a few inconsequential desert
towns to the rebels, for now.
Assad’s bank accounts were running low, it was true, but, again,
his predicament was not as dire as it appeared—not as long as he
could rely on powerful friends abroad. Iran could be counted on to
bankroll its Syrian ally indefinitely, in order to preserve its supply
route to Iranian-backed Hezbollah militias along Lebanon’s border
with Israel. And Russia’s Vladimir Putin would be only too happy to
sell weapons and parts to his longtime Syrian trading partners, who
also happened to be hosts to Russia’s only naval base in the Middle
East.
As Abdullah surveyed the crisis that fall, it seemed clear that Assad
had every intention of clinging to power. And despite predictions to
the contrary, he appeared to have enough firepower, money, and
troops to keep up the fight for a very long time. Multiple proposals
for settling the conflict had been floated, including offers for a
comfortable exile abroad that would assure the safety of Assad and
his family and spare the country from a destructive civil war. But
Bashar al-Assad was not interested.
“This,” the king told his advisers, “is going to get quite bloody.”
There was yet another ominous development that fall, a slight shift
on the rebels’ side that barely attracted attention outside the
community of intelligence analysts focused on Syria’s uprising. It
was widely known that Assad had declared a general amnesty in the
early months of the uprising, leading to the release of inmates from
ordinary prisons, though not the protesters locked in the secret
police’s special detention centers. Now Syrians were learning just
how cynical Assad’s goodwill gesture had been. Among the inmates
discharged over the spring and summer were a number of radical
Islamists who belonged to known terrorist organizations. Some were
jihadists who had been picked up while attempting to cross into Iraq
to join the insurgency there. Others were suspected al-Qaeda
members who had been snatched by the CIA and secretly delivered
to Syria under the spy agency’s “extraordinary rendition” program.
The freed Islamists were too few in number to threaten the regime
seriously, but their presence inside the country would help supply a
veneer of truth for Assad’s extremist claims: now there were, in fact,
a handful of authentic jihadists in the opposition camp. It was the
same tactic used by the Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, who
emptied his jails in an apparent attempt to sow strife among the
regime’s opponents.
Jordanian and U.S. intelligence officials studied the reports with a
mixture of incredulousness and alarm. Among the released prisoners
were several familiar names. Some had been part of the support
network for the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, running
weapons and recruits across the border into Iraq. Now they were free
to return to old haunts and perhaps old habits.
Still, measured against the region’s other crises, it seemed a small
thing.
“There are only a handful of true al-Qaeda types,” a Middle East
intelligence official said of the jihadists who were observed setting up
shop inside Syria in late 2011. “We know exactly where they are. And
when this is all over, we know how to get them.”
—
At the same moment, other outsiders were watching the events in
Syria with wary hopefulness, like a starving coyote eyeing a buffalo.
These were men who had once called themselves al-Qaeda in Iraq,
and disciples of Zarqawi. Now they spent their days hiding out in the
shabby outer suburbs of Mosul and a handful of other towns,
communicating only rarely, for fear of detection. They had adopted a
new name—the Islamic State of Iraq—and they maintained the
pretense that the organization was a real country, with an
administration and departments and even a flag. That the state was
fictional was clear even to family members. “Where is this Islamic
State of Iraq that you’re talking about? We’re living in a desert!” one
of the leader’s wives complained, according to testimony in an Iraqi
police case. Yet, to the man at the top of the organization, the Islamic
State was already real, and it was about to get bigger, God willing.
The leader was new to the job, having been abruptly promoted
from the group’s number three slot when the previous leaders were
killed in a raid by U.S. and Iraqi troops. Unlike previous
commanders, he was not a warrior but a scholar, a professor of
Islamic law who held a doctoral degree. At just thirty-two, he was
somber beyond his years, a man who prized correctness and was
fussily attentive to even the most minor rules governing speech and
dress. He had grown up as Ibrahim Awad al-Badri, the son of a
conservative Muslim preacher from the Iraqi city of Samarra. His
self-chosen jihadist name was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
He was physically unremarkable, a man of medium height with
thinning hair and a naturally thick beard that, in middle adulthood,
had expanded into an unruly bush. But Baghdadi possessed a
prophet’s fierce conviction in destiny—the world’s, as well as his
own. As he had watched the Arab Spring uprisings unfold in the early
months of 2011, he could see a divine hand shaping events, jostling
and tugging at history’s great boughs until the ripened fruit fell at
Baghdadi’s feet. It was sure to happen anyway, but to nudge things
along, Baghdadi began offering helpful suggestions that February,
through the Islamic State’s media arm, to the masses of protesters in
Cairo. After finishing off their country’s apostate president, Egypt’s
throngs surely must recognize their obligation to continue the
revolution across the Sinai and beyond, the messages suggested.
“Here in your midst has the market of Jihad opened and become
easy to reach!” declared one missive posted to Islamist Web sites in
February. “No mature, able-bodied person has any excuse to stay
behind with those who refrain from making Jihad.”
The same posting included a special plea to empty Egypt’s prisons,
home to many of the country’s most committed and experienced
Islamists. Nearly all of the Iraqi group’s leadership, including
Baghdadi, had served time in the Middle East’s notorious detention
centers. “Freeing the prisoners is one of the foremost of obligations
upon you,” the message read. “Do not let things settle unless you free
every last one of them.”
The entreaties were ignored. To the dismay of Islamists around the
world, the crowds besieging government ministries in Cairo and
Benghazi showed little appetite for replacing a secular tyrant with a
religious one. In Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the rhyming slogans chanted
by demonstrators ranged from demands for better living conditions
—“Bread, freedom, social equality”—to expressions of national pride
—“Hold your heads high, you’re Egyptian!” Even after Osama bin
Laden’s death in May, there were no calls for jihad, and no unfurling
of al-Qaeda banners or portraits of the slain terrorist leader. Opinion
polls showed steadily falling approval for Bin Laden’s movement
throughout the Muslim world starting around 2004, or just around
the time Zarqawi began commanding international attention with
videotaped beheadings and suicide bombings. Support for attacks on
Muslim civilians—the Islamic State of Iraq’s calling card—had fallen
even more.
Zarqawi’s diminished descendants would occasionally dispatch a
suicide bomber into the Iraqi capital to kill and maim. In the months
after Baghdadi assumed command, the group claimed responsibility
for attacks on bank customers, on parishioners at a church service,
and on a queue of young men outside an army recruiting office. But
with American troops now out of the country, and with Iraqis
focused mainly on the novel political theater of dueling partisans in
the Iraqi Parliament, the attacks seemed increasingly pointless to
everyone but the terrorists themselves.
Baghdadi’s lieutenants could still build a lethal car bomb, and they
somehow managed to find a steady supply of hapless adolescents
willing to steer a suicide vehicle toward its target. But Zarqawi’s old
organization was as hollow as its leaders’ talk about a Pan-Arab
Islamic state. The group was nearly broke. It had lost its sanctuary
and freedom of movement, so essential for communication, training,
and resupply. And it was selling an ideology that the Muslim world
seemed no longer to care for. Five years after Zarqawi’s death, the
Islamic State of Iraq had become the thing that terrorist
organizations fear even more than their own annihilation.
It had become irrelevant.
—
The decline began soon after the death of Zarqawi, though initially it
was hard to tell from the body count.
Stripped suddenly of its charismatic leader and chief strategist, al-
Qaeda in Iraq still managed at first to maintain and even surpass the
scale of butchery achieved under the Jordanian. The twelve months
following Zarqawi’s death were the deadliest of the war for U.S.
troops, with 904 killed. The monthly Iraqi civilian death toll hit an
all-time high of 3,266 in July 2006, the month after U.S. bombs
demolished Zarqawi’s Baqubah hideout.
But the battlefield was changing. Violence-weary Sunni tribes,
banding together into militias that called themselves “Sons of Iraq,”
were beginning to drive foreign jihadists from their villages,
sometimes killing them. President George W. Bush’s troop surge of
2007 had flooded the country with thousands of fresh combat
soldiers. Most important, America’s highly successful “fusion cells”—
the antiterrorism teams of U.S. intelligence and special-forces
operatives—had taken the pursuit of Islamist militants to a lethal
new level. The cities of the Sunni Triangle that had served as a
sanctuary and operating base for Zarqawi were rapidly becoming
hostile and even dangerous to his followers, day and night.
At the U.S. special-forces base at Balad, the same formula General
McChrystal had used to track and kill Zarqawi was yielding fresh
successes each day, and often multiple times a day. The effort
continued at a steadily rising tempo through 2008, when McChrystal
received his fourth general’s star and a promotion to Joint Staff
Chief. His replacement, Vice Admiral William McRaven, kept the
same policies in place until U.S. combat operations in Iraq officially
ended in 2010.
The daily search started with an astonishing array of electronic
sleuthing tools, capable of sweeping up every mobile-phone call, e-
mail, and text message sent by anyone, anywhere in Iraq. When
someone dialed a number that matched a phone in Balad’s growing
terrorist database, technical teams went to work, tracking the caller’s
location and movements. U.S. drones and airplanes served as mobile
cell towers that could tap directly into calls made from suspicious
phones. Airborne surveillance cameras gave U.S. spies enhanced
capabilities to trail suspicious cars and trucks.
Equally impressive were the teams of SEALs and Delta operators
who set out nightly to kick in the doors of terrorists whose hideouts
had been discovered in the previous day’s surveillance. By the fourth
year of the war, the commandos’ tactics had been honed to a fine
edge, so that small units of a half-dozen men could carry out multiple
raids on a single night. “Joseph,” a retired operator who participated
in scores of such missions, recalled how the intensity of the fight
changed in the months after Zarqawi’s death, when the Pentagon
authorized an all-out effort to destroy what was left of the
Jordanian’s terrorist network.
“In 2007, we took the gloves off,” said Joseph, who agreed to an
interview on the condition that his real name not be revealed. “We
were going out on missions and targeting al-Qaeda as hard as we
could. Kill-capture missions, not capture-kill. We were handing them
their ass, killing al-Qaeda every night.”
The workday began at sundown, just as the surveillance teams
were coming off their shifts. “We’d have dinner for breakfast,”
Joseph said. “Then we’d get a brief and we’d go out on a mission.
We’d hit a target, going in with [silencers] and night vision, and there
would be a gunfight, almost every night. We’d do our own
interrogations and develop our own lines of intelligence. And, based
on what we found, we’d immediately go after the next thing. And we
would do it every single day.”
The tactics worked on multiple levels. The accelerated tempo of
the nightly operations kept the terrorists off balance, unable to
coordinate or plan sophisticated attacks. The raids also produced
torrents of fresh intelligence, including insights into the recruitment
and training of suicide bombers. The ones Joseph interrogated
included teens who had been subjected to heavy indoctrination by
imams, and others who just seemed mentally unstable or slow-witted
and gullible—“just as dumb as the day is long,” he remembered.
Most important, the commandos had found a way to get under the
terrorists’ skin. The insurgents were no longer the deadliest, most
unpredictable force in Iraq. Now it was their turn to be afraid, and
exposed. The truth, as Joseph and his comrades discovered, was that
the Islamic State’s fighters were skilled butchers, but lousy soldiers.
“They’re only good at terrorizing people who aren’t armed,” he
said. “They think they’re good, but when we would wake them up in
the middle of the night, they would crap their pants.”
The skirmishes inside the darkened houses were silent and short,
often three minutes or less. Those who wisely surrendered found
themselves surrounded by bearded, heavily muscled Westerners
wearing dark clothes, armed with futuristic-looking weapons, and
accompanied by ferocious attack dogs. In Iraqi villages, the story
spread of “ninjas with lions” who would burst into town and then
vanish again. During the interrogations that followed, Joseph would
sometimes seek to perpetuate the legend.
“You’ve dealt with Americans before?” he would ask.
“Yes,” the handcuffed detainee would typically reply.
“Did they look like us?”
“No.”
“There’s a reason for that,” he would say. “I’m here for you. I’m the
devil.”
The results were soon apparent, and not just in the numbers of
killed and captured insurgents. In a single year, from 2007 to 2008,
the number of GI casualties dropped from 904 to 314, and then
dropped by half again the following year. Iraqi civilian deaths from
suicide bombs fell from nearly thirty-nine hundred in 2007 to fewer
than seventeen hundred in 2008, the start of a steep decline that
would continue through the end of the decade.
The combined effort—the surveillance, the troop surge, the Sunni
revolt, and most especially the raids—so weakened Zarqawi’s
organization that Michael V. Hayden, the CIA director, declared the
organization in 2008 to be in “near-strategic defeat.” The jihadists
who had held sway over Iraq for nearly four years were not
completely eliminated, but at last the Americans had discovered a
formula for keeping them bottled up.
“We didn’t become like them,” said an officer who supervised
fusion cells as the program was starting to click. “We became what
they were afraid of: shadows of the night.”
Everyone understood that the pressure could not be sustained
indefinitely. The direct costs of invading, occupying, rebuilding, and
stabilizing Iraq had drained more than a trillion dollars from the U.S.
Treasury, with indirect costs adding another trillion to the taxpayers’
tab. A large majority of Americans no longer supported the war, and
the Iraqis themselves were anxious to see U.S. combat forces leave
the country. The U.S. troop withdrawal began in late 2007, and the
last convoy of soldiers to exit the country would roll across the Iraq-
Kuwait border on December 18, 2011, ending a deployment that cost
nearly forty-five hundred American lives and left more than thirty-
two thousand wounded. By the most conservative estimates, the
Iraqi civilian death toll was twenty times higher.
The departing Americans were leaving to the Iraqis the task of
managing their own security. It would have been a difficult challenge
even for a country without Iraq’s history of explosive tensions along
sectarian and ethnic divides. And, indeed, by almost every measure,
the early efforts to create a stable Iraqi society fell short. Sunni
distrust of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki exploded into open revolt
in 2007, following the arrests of prominent Sunni politicians and the
dismissals of Sunni commanders in the Iraqi army and security
agencies. The following year, the Shiite-led government took steps to
disband the Sons of Iraq militias that had helped drive out foreign
Islamists, saying it would not tolerate the existence of private militias
in the country. Shiite militias, meanwhile, were tolerated and—many
Sunnis believed—officially encouraged.
U.S. forces offered the government significant help on the way out.
In 2008 and 2010, the Americans delivered a pair of powerful blows
against the Islamic State of Iraq, both aimed directly at the group’s
reconstituted leadership. The first, in October 2008, was a
commando strike on a terrorist base located inside Syrian territory, a
few miles from the Iraqi border. In a covert operation approved by
George W. Bush, special-forces teams in helicopters destroyed the
base and killed a man U.S. officials identified as Abu al-Ghadiya, the
Syrian dentist and early disciple of Zarqawi who ran the main supply
lines for money and recruits. Then, eighteen months later, American
and Iraqi forces jointly attacked a desert hideout near the Iraqi city
of Tikrit, just as a meeting of the terrorist group’s senior leadership
was under way. The Iraqi government jubilantly displayed photos of
two corpses pulled from the building’s rubble, confirming the deaths
of Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the top two
commanders of the Islamic State of Iraq since Zarqawi’s death.
The insurgents later acknowledged the deaths of “two knights
[who] have dismounted to join the group of martyrs.” The message
also promised certain revenge: a “long, gloomy night and dark days
colored in blood.” Yet the Islamic State’s ability to inflict serious
harm on Iraq’s government—even a weak, divided Iraqi government
—was seriously in doubt.
The jihadists’ new chief, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was a man of
soaring ambitions, but in late 2011, well into his second year as
leader, his boasts were as empty as the group’s coffers. The Islamic
State of Iraq lacked resources, fighters, and sanctuary. And, perhaps
most critically, it lacked a cause—a single big idea with which it could
rally its depleted forces and draw other Muslims into the fold.
Soon, within the chaos of revolutionary Syria, it would find all
four.
19
“This is the state for which Zarqawi paved the way”
In the sixth month of Syria’s uprising, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was
ready to make a move. He tapped one of his most trusted deputies, a
native Syrian and a veteran from the Zarqawi days, to lead an
expedition into the Syrian heartland. Outside the capital and other
regime strongholds, the institutions that maintained security within
Syria were failing, one by one. Here was a chance for Zarqawi’s
followers to leap to another badly weakened host.
The scouting party was tiny. “There were not more than seven or
eight of us,” the group’s leader later recalled. The men slipped across
the Iraq-Syria border, traveling along a pair of desert highways that
parallel the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, passing through small
Syrian towns that had long served as way stations for fighters
heading in the opposite direction. There, far from Syria’s contested
cities, they met with local contacts, including former members of the
Zarqawi network in Syria as well as other jihadists who were newly
released from Bashar al-Assad’s jails, as the participants themselves
would later confirm. The country they encountered was much as Iraq
had been nine years earlier: a violent, lawless place where men with
weapons moved freely. Unlike in Iraq, there was no threat of
Americans suddenly swooping in from above.
“Syria would not have been ready for us if not for the Syrian
revolution,” the mission’s leader, Abu Mohammad al-Julani,
acknowledged long afterward. “The revolution removed many of the
obstacles and paved the way for us to enter this blessed land.”
Under a plan approved by the Islamic State’s Iraqi leadership, the
men would establish a Syrian-run Islamist militia to join the rebels
already battling Bashar al-Assad’s government. They called
themselves Jabhat al-Nusra, or the Support Front for the People of
Greater Syria. The name suggested a kind of auxiliary group coming
to the aid of Syria’s outmatched opposition. In reality, Baghdadi’s
designs for the group had nothing to do with helping Syrians. The al-
Nusra Front would eventually develop an independent streak,
breaking with its parent over everything from ideology to tactics and
style. But the original idea, Western intelligence agencies later
concluded, was to create a Syrian incubator for the caliphate
Baghdadi would some day lead.
“It was to be the face of the organization in Syria, laying the
groundwork for the group’s expansion,” said a U.S. official who
helped track the organization’s rise. “It was never supposed to be a
distinct group.”
Over the months that followed, communications between the
Syrian colony and the battered Iraqi leadership became a window
into Baghdadi’s personality and growing ambitions. Like his spiritual
predecessor, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Baghdadi wasn’t chiefly
concerned with installing an Islamist government in the Syrian or
Iraqi capitals. The goal was to impose Islamic rule without borders,
and the way to achieve this was to act boldly, trusting that Allah
would bend history itself to suit his purposes. Al-Qaeda’s more
pragmatic thinkers spoke of the caliphate as a distant goal, one that
would have to wait until the Middle East’s secular regimes could be
toppled. But Baghdadi believed the opposite: raise the caliphate’s
ancient banner, and righteous Muslims would fall into line.
“He was talking about physically restoring the Islamic caliphate in
a way that nobody else did,” the U.S. official said. “He would
establish an extremist vision of Islam and cleanse the land of
apostates. And that would pave the way for a final showdown
between Muslims and nonbelievers.”
In adopting Zarqawi’s vision, Baghdadi also enthusiastically
embraced the Jordanian’s most grisly excesses. In the years following
Zarqawi’s death, his immediate successors appeared to take seriously
al-Qaeda’s warning to avoid the kinds of shocking displays that
might offend ordinary Muslims. The videotaped beheadings
subsided, and there were fewer of the kinds of gratuitous attacks on
Shiite women and children that had become a hallmark of al-Qaeda
in Iraq. Now Baghdadi would bring them all back, on a scale that
evoked the savagery of the Ikhwan hordes that had swept the
Arabian Peninsula a century earlier. And, like Zarqawi, he would find
a way to force the world to watch.
—
Had it not been for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Islamic State’s
greatest butcher would likely have lived out his years as a college
professor. Until 2003, life was steering him toward a quiet career of
teaching Islamic jurisprudence to twenty-year-olds, rather than
strapping bombs to their chests.
Islamist biographers later ascribed to Baghdadi great intellectual
gifts and a natural bent toward jihad, though none of this is borne
out in the extensive profiles pieced together by Western intelligence
agencies. Nothing in his formative years suggested that the man born
as Ibrahim Awad al-Badri possessed unusual talents or proclivities,
except for a fascination with fiqh, or the legal interpretation of the
thousands of sayings and edicts contained in Islam’s holy texts. He
was not a violent troublemaker like Zarqawi, or an adventurer like
Osama bin Laden, who moved to Pakistan after college to join the
cause of Afghanistan’s mujahideen. There were no early flashes of
charisma or cruelty. Instead, acquaintances remember a shy,
nearsighted youth who liked soccer and kept mostly to himself.
Indeed, in his first thirty-two years, Baghdadi seems to have drawn
little notice even in his own neighborhood. One family friend recalled
a young man “so quiet you could barely hear his voice.”
“He always had religious or other books attached on the back of his
bike,” the neighbor, Tariq Hameed, told a Newsweek interviewer,
recalling the studious teenager who lived nearby in one of Samarra’s
lower-middle-class neighborhoods. The son of a Sunni imam who
preached in the city, Baghdadi wore the traditional prayer cap and
white dishdasha of the religiously devout, and he preferred to spend
his free time at the mosque rather than keeping company with other
young men from the town, Hameed said. “I never saw him in
trousers and shirt, like most of the other guys in Samarra,” the
neighbor said. “He had a light beard, and he never hung out in
cafés.”
A single fact about his family background would prove crucial later
in life: as a member of Iraq’s al-Bu Badri tribe, he could claim to be
part of the same ancestral line as Muhammad—a requirement, in the
opinion of some Islamic scholars, for anyone seeking to become the
caliph, or the leader of the Muslim nation. The distinction did not
count for much in gritty Samarra, where there are hundreds of al-
Badris and dozens of other tribes that can legitimately claim to be
part of the Prophet’s lineage. Still, Baghdadi’s extended household
practically smoldered with religious fervor, which may help explain
his youthful devotion and his later drift toward fanaticism.
Baghdadi’s grandfather bore the title “Haji,” having journeyed to the
holy Kaaba Shrine at Mecca as a religious pilgrim, and there were
numerous preachers and religious teachers among his uncles and ten
siblings. His father’s sermons were noteworthy, according to one of
Baghdadi’s jihadist biographers, for their emphasis on the
“promoting of virtue and preventing of vice.”
He came of age during some of the most turbulent years in modern
Iraqi history. Born in 1971, he was in his late teens when the Iran-
Iraq War ended in a bitter stalemate after eight years of fighting and
a combined loss of at least a half-million lives. He was nearly twenty
when the Iraqi army suffered its humiliating defeat in the first Gulf
War. Somewhere in between, he likely served his mandatory stint in
the Iraqi army, though there is no evidence that he saw combat.
What is clear is that he moved to Baghdad as a young man to attend
college, and earned a bachelor’s degree in Islamic law and theology
in 1999. His plunge into the arcane world of seventh-century
religious codes appears to have brought out his puritanical side;
acquaintances remembered how the college-aged Baghdadi would
become irritated when men and women were allowed to dance in the
same room during wedding celebrations. “It’s irreligious!” he would
complain. In any case, he liked the subject well enough to continue
his studies well into his early thirties. He was thirty-two and on a
track to obtain his doctorate, and a future professorship, when the
U.S. invasion of Iraq began on March 20, 2003.
The opening bursts of the U.S. “shock and awe” bombing
campaign lit up the world of the Islamic law student, who, better
than most, understood the Koran’s injunction to defend Muslim
lands against invaders. He signed up that same year with one of the
many small resistance movements that engaged in hit-and-run
attacks against U.S. troops, though his actual contributions appear to
have been unremarkable.
And then, a few months later, he was caught. Some of the
circumstances of his capture have become obscured, but U.S. records
confirm that an Ibrahim Awad al-Badri was seized by GIs during a
raid on a house in Fallujah in late January 2004. He was then
transported to one of Iraq’s most feared destinations, the U.S.
detention center known as Camp Bucca.
He arrived on February 4. A military photographer snapped the
startled visage of a round-faced man approaching the start of middle
age, wearing wire-framed glasses and an outsized beard. For the
security-conscious Baghdadi, it remains one of only a small handful
of photographs known to exist. The next time he posed for a portrait,
more than ten years later, he would be a changed man in every
respect. His journey from devout youth to bloodthirsty extremist was
about to begin.
—
The prison where Baghdadi landed was a two-square-mile city of
barbed wire and tents, erected on a sun-scorched plain a few miles
from Iraqi’s border with Kuwait. To those helicoptering in at night,
as the U.S. sailors who guarded the prison often did, Camp Bucca
looked a bit like Las Vegas: an immense city of light in the middle of
empty desert. But inside the wire, it was more like the Wild West.
Built initially by the British for military prisoners of war, the camp
expanded rapidly under American control to accommodate huge
numbers of Iraqis swept up after the start of the insurgency. Though
the camp was designed to house twenty thousand men, the
population ballooned at times to more than twenty-six thousand, all
living in communal tents in a place where summertime temperatures
regularly climbed to 140 degrees. The heat, amplified by an oily
Persian Gulf humidity, menaced guards and inmates equally. “It
actually feels like you’re in a microwave,” a boatswain’s mate on
tower duty told a visiting navy journalist.
The camp’s commanders made substantial improvements in later
years, replacing tents with air-conditioned cinder-block huts and
adding classrooms for literacy and vocational training for carpentry
and masonry. But in early 2004, it was the Islamists who controlled
life inside the tent villages. Inmates were segregated by creed, and
the Sunnis, in their sector, lived under strict Sharia law, self-imposed
and brutally enforced. Anyone who disobeyed—or who betrayed the
others by showing cordiality toward the Americans—could suffer
punishment ranging from a beating to having an eye gouged out. In
Compound 30, where the most violent Islamists were kept, prisoners
vented their hostility by hurling feces or pellets called chai rocks—a
residue of sweet tea mixed with sand and dried in the sun—at
passing guard patrols.
One of the camp’s senior managers acknowledged that the Camp
Bucca of Baghdadi’s time was both dysfunctional and, from the
perspective of commanders looking to quell the Sunni insurgency,
counterproductive. By corralling Islamist radicals and ordinary
Iraqis in a lawless desert pen, U.S. officials inadvertently created a
“jihadi university” that helped inculcate Islamist ideas into a new
generation of fighters, the officer said.
“Extremists mingled with moderates in every compound,”
Lieutenant Commander Vasilios Tasikas, who ran legal operations at
the prison, wrote in a 2009 essay in the Military Review.
“Unfortunately, U.S. forces had adopted a model of detention
operations that assumed that those interned were ‘all bad guys’ to be
‘warehoused’ for an indeterminate amount of time and released
randomly in arbitrary groups. This approach was not only naïve and
myopic, it was also dangerous; predictably, it fueled the insurgency
inside the wire.”
If Bucca was indeed a jihadi university, Baghdadi would ultimately
become its greatest alumnus. Though hardly a tough guy, he found a
way to survive and even thrive in prison. Baghdadi forged a number
of important friendships and alliances, including one with a Zarqawi
disciple called Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, who became his chief
deputy and spokesman years later. Moreover, the young Islamic
scholar found that his academic expertise gave him a certain stature.
The camp’s mini–Islamist society needed someone who could
interpret Sharia rules, and on that score, Baghdadi was exceptionally
qualified. He could lead the daily prayers, in which inmates in their
identical yellow uniforms lined up by the thousands on their prayer
mats to pledge fealty to Allah. He was also experienced at speaking
and teaching classical Arabic, the form used in the Koran and in
formal ceremonies and speeches. Baghdadi, having lived his entire
life among clerics, could even mimic the singsong delivery of the
most learned imams of the great mosques of Baghdad and Mosul. As
a vessel, his voice was pleasant yet authoritative, and the men liked
to listen to it.
They would not have many opportunities. The scholarly qualities
that helped Baghdadi earn respect among fellow detainees also
allowed him to gain an early release. Camp Bucca regularly
discharged its less dangerous prisoners to alleviate severe
overcrowding, a source of constant tension and occasional riots
among the inmates. In late 2004, a prison panel reviewed the record
for Ibrahim Awad al-Badri and decided that the bespectacled
academic posed little threat. He was discharged on December 6,
2004, but not before a medical team took a cheek swab to preserve a
record of his DNA. If the same man were to turn up anywhere, dead
or alive, in connection with a future terrorist act, U.S. officials could
be precisely sure of whom they had.
Baghdadi emerged from his ten-month exposure to U.S. forces
with an even greater determination to fight them. Years later, his
quest to defeat America became a prayerful refrain. “Deal with
America and its allies, O Allah,” he would say in one of his public
prayers. “Harshen your grip on them….Defeat them with the worst of
defeats they will ever suffer. Divide their gatherings, split their body,
dismember them completely, and make us raid them, and not them
raid us.”
—
For a time, Baghdadi would try to avoid further entanglements with
Americans. He was married now, to the first of his three wives, and
he was father to at least one child, a four-year-old son. He returned
to school after prison and resumed his progress toward a doctorate
in Islamic law, which he received in 2007. But the degree was not yet
his when Baghdadi was drawn back into the insurgency. His old
organization had merged with several others in the advisory council
or shura created by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2006, and Baghdadi
was asked to be one of the council’s advisers on matters concerning
Sharia law.
A profile compiled by Western intelligence officials suggests that
Zarqawi, a dabbler in theology who enjoyed debating with religious
scholars, probably knew the man who would eventually replace him.
But at the time, Baghdadi was still an obscure figure, even among the
jihadists. “Zarqawi was closer than a brother to me, but I didn’t know
Baghdadi. He was insignificant,” Ahmed al-Dabash, a contemporary
and member of another militant faction, the Islamic Army of Iraq,
told London’s Telegraph newspaper in 2014. “He used to lead prayer
in a mosque near my area. No one really noticed him.”
Zarqawi’s death in June 2006 changed everything. The heirs to the
Jordanian’s al-Qaeda in Iraq movement had different ideas about
how to run an insurgency, and they quickly reorganized themselves
under a new name: the Islamic State of Iraq. Among the dominant
leaders now were a number of former officers of Saddam Hussein’s
vanquished army—Sunni colonels and majors who had allied
themselves with Zarqawi but were never fully trusted by him. With
the Jordanian gone, the former Baathists moved to assert Iraqi
control over the group, from its central hierarchy to the provincial
towns that were controlled by the Islamists in all but name. Once
again, Baghdadi’s credentials made him uniquely valuable: Here was
a bona fide Sharia expert with a solid Sunni-Iraqi pedigree who could
ensure that the group’s scattered cells toed the line, ideologically.
Baghdadi was quickly appointed chief of Sharia for a small farming
town called al-Karma, just outside Fallujah. Soon afterward, he was
placed in charge of religious affairs for all of Anbar Province. Then,
in early 2010, he was appointed as the top Sharia official for the
entire organization.
The promotion effectively made Baghdadi the third-ranking officer
of the Islamic State, subordinate only to the senior leader and the
minister of war. It’s the post he held on April 18, 2010, when U.S.
missiles and Iraqi rockets flattened a safe house outside the city of
Tikrit, eliminating the group’s number one and number two leaders
in a single blow. At least for the moment, Baghdadi, the bookish
academic dismissed by peers as “insignificant,” stood alone at the
head of the Islamic State of Iraq.
A month would pass before Baghdadi’s emirship was made official.
Despite his senior ranking, his move to the top of the organization
was by no means guaranteed. Indeed, many Western and Middle
Eastern intelligence officials believed the job would go to a more
seasoned figure with extensive experience commanding and leading
operations. Yet, although Baghdadi was still a relative outsider, he
won the support of the leadership council’s mix of former Baathists
and Zarqawists.
Among those who approved of the promotion was a ruthless Iraqi
army colonel named Samir al-Khlifawi, the leader of the group’s
military council. A former Baathist who joined the insurgency after
the U.S. invasion, Khlifawi urged Baghdadi to accept the top
leadership and promised to serve as his top deputy and mentor,
according to documents discovered years later, after Khlifawi’s death
during fighting in Syria. The white-bearded Khlifawi, more
commonly known by his jihadist name Haji Bakr, was regarded by
intelligence analysts as a savvy strategist who was chiefly responsible
for the Islamic State’s early military successes.
Despite his lack of military experience, Baghdadi offered certain
advantages to the group. One was the Sharia scholar’s willingness to
provide religious cover for acts of brutality that clerics around the
world had condemned as un-Islamic. Everything that made the
group so widely reviled—the beheadings, the suicide bombings, the
kidnappings, the extortion, the war against Shiites, the spilling of so
much innocent Muslim blood—Baghdadi not only endorsed, but
declared legally justified under Islamic law.
His other great asset was his suitability for the role of caliph—
symbolically important for an organization that wanted its “Islamic
State” claims to be taken seriously. Baghdadi, with his genealogical
and scholarly pedigrees, could aspire to heights of leadership beyond
Zarqawi’s grasp.
Over the years that followed, Baghdadi worked deliberately to
prepare himself for the mythical role to which he had been divinely
appointed, according to a U.S. official familiar with Baghdadi’s
history. “He cloaked himself with all the right religious credentials,
and paid close attention to imagery, to clothing, to the way he moved
and talked,” the official said. “He would go to great lengths to show
that he was in his rightful place.”
It was in the service of that goal that Baghdadi dispatched his
emissaries across the border in August 2011, seeking a Syrian
launchpad for the caliphate that still languished on the ground in his
native country. A successful venture, in Baghdadi’s view, would help
ensure the survival of his organization for years to come. More
important, the Islamic State would be taking a first step toward
erasing the artificial boundaries imposed by colonial powers to
divide Muslims.
“We have crossed the boundaries that despicable hands
demarcated between the Islamic states to thwart our movement,”
Baghdadi would later say of his Syrian experiment. “This is the state
for which Sheikh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi paved the way. It will not
retreat in any shape or manner from the territory to which it has
been extended.”
—
Weeks had passed since Barack Obama and European leaders had
delivered their call for Assad’s departure, and Assad was not taking
heed. The Syrian’s response was to toss a few verbal barbs at the
“colonialists” and turn up the violence against the protesters and the
volunteer brigades that had sprung up to defend them.
At the White House, the splintering of the country was a subject of
concern, but not yet alarm. The consensus among the president’s
national security aides was that Assad would leave—eventually,
according to two officials who attended high-level meetings on Syria
that fall. By all appearances, the regime was in trouble, losing
territory, soldiers, and even generals to a new rebel force called the
Free Syrian Army. History itself was arrayed against Assad, and
there was little the United States could or should do on its own to
speed up the inevitable, the officials said.
“There was a sense that this thing would run its course, and we
would do all we could to contain it,” said one senior official present
at the discussions. “We really didn’t think it would drag on.”
But it did. As the conflict edged closer to full-scale civil war, the
Obama administration grasped for a lever with which to nudge the
sides toward a settlement. There was none to be found. When
protests erupted in Egypt and Yemen, the United States had been
able to call in old chits, IOUs that had piled up over decades of heavy
U.S. economic and military support for the countries’ governments
and security establishments. In Libya, the Obama administration
secured critical legal and moral backing in the form of United
Nations resolutions authorizing collective military action to protect
civilians and support the rebels. But in the case of Syria, there was
nothing like this: No military relationships, no economic aid, not
even a significant trading partnership. At the United Nations, Syria’s
longtime Russian ally blocked even the mildest resolutions criticizing
Assad for killing his own people. When European countries voted to
boycott the relatively meager imports of Syrian oil, Assad’s other
major ally—Iran—more than offset the losses by supplying Syria with
billions of dollars in bank loans and cash.
And so Assad stayed, month after month, erecting fortresslike
defenses around the capital while seeking to wear down the rebels
through the wholesale demolishing of neighborhoods by tank and
artillery fire. Already, more than four thousand Syrians had died,
including nearly three hundred children. Thousands more fled their
homes, and those who stayed lived in darkened, ruined communities,
desperately short of everything except rage and fear.
Publicly, the Americans pushed for concerted action against Assad
at the United Nations and the Arab League. Behind the scenes, the
White House worked with allies in seeking inducements that might
persuade Assad to accept asylum and leave the country voluntarily.
Unspoken altogether, except in the secure meeting rooms, was the
acknowledgment that the conflict had at least one salutary effect: as
long as it lasted, the uprising would serve as a financial and moral
drain on the government of Iran, Assad’s most important ally.
One thing appeared certain: there was no appetite, even among the
president’s most hawkish advisers, for another military
entanglement in the Middle East. Even a minor engagement, such as
air support or the supplying of arms to rebels, was problematic as
long as Russia blocked a UN resolution needed to provide legal
cover. The practical obstacles were just as formidable. Unlike Libya’s
rebels, the Syrian opposition lacked a sanctuary from which it could
organize and resupply in safety. And though the rebels had small
arms, the Assad regime enjoyed a monopoly on the heavy weapons
needed to tip the scales in the rebels’ favor. The Obama
administration could offer humanitarian aid such as medical
supplies, and some nonlethal gear, such as computers and cell
phones. But those seeking to defend themselves against Assad’s
forces would simply have to look elsewhere for rifles, armor, and
ammunition. And beyond the reluctance to engage in another war in
the Middle East, there were those on the U.S. team who felt arming
the rebels would be pointless.
“The reality was, the opposition was not adequate to the task,” said
the senior security official who participated in debates over action
against Assad. “You would have been hard-pressed to find anyone in
2011 who thought the moderates could prevail with enough arms.
The truth is, they already had weapons. And it was clear to most of us
that we should be pushing for a de-escalation, and not ramping
things up even more.”
—
One June afternoon in 2011, as Robert Ford was contemplating what
the U.S. Embassy could do about surging violence in Hama, a small
group of U.S. congressmen and staff members gathered in the
Capitol basement for a private briefing about the events in Syria.
Leading the discussion were three American citizens with an
unusually keen interest in the fight over Syria’s future. The youngest,
a twenty-seven-year-old Syrian immigrant, was also a veteran
Capitol Hill staffer, well known to many in the room. For Mouaz
Moustafa, it was a first introduction to a new job that would prove to
be exhilarating and heartbreaking, often in the same day: enlisting
American support for Syria’s embattled opposition.
For more than an hour, Moustafa and his colleagues answered
questions from lawmakers who seemed genuinely concerned and
eager to help. Moustafa, experienced at gauging the interest of
elected officials in hearing rooms, felt encouraged.
“Everything was still early stages, and people in Congress really
wanted to know what was going on,” he said, recalling the meeting.
“They were asking good questions. We were hoping that they would
be outraged.”
It was the first of many such visits for Moustafa, who seemed born
for the part he was now playing. A Syrian-born resident of Hot
Springs, Arkansas, he possessed communications skills in English
and Arabic that had impressed his Capitol Hill bosses as well as
influential figures within Washington’s small community of Middle
Eastern political exiles. Now, in 2011, he stepped into the spotlight in
an unexpected way, speaking directly to the American government
many Syrians saw as their last resort. Working as a lobbyist for
Assad’s opponents in a Syria he barely knew, Moustafa was among a
handful of Washingtonians who would witness the unfolding
calamity from both countries.
“It was that slow car crash where you’re trying to yell at the people
at the wheel,” Moustafa said. “You just want to say, ‘Correct the
course—just barely, just a bit. We don’t all have to die.’ ”
Moustafa was an ardent believer in American-style democracy,
though his path to politics was indirect. The son of an airplane
mechanic, he immigrated to the United States as an eleven-year-old
whose only knowledge of English came from the Power Rangers
children’s TV show. As an olive-skinned foreigner in his mostly white
Arkansas grade school, he was teased mercilessly by other boys, until
an adolescent growth spurt turned him into a lanky athlete with
exceptional soccer skills. He was a star player through high school
and college, and then, after graduation, landed unexpectedly in
Washington as an intern for Arkansas Democratic representative Vic
Snyder, a member of the House Armed Services Committee. He so
impressed his boss that his summer gig turned into a staff position,
first with Snyder and then with Arkansas’s second-term U.S. senator,
Democrat Blanche Lincoln. After Lincoln’s defeat in 2010, he worked
briefly as a TV journalist before being discovered by a group of
Libyan opposition officials who were seeking a lobbyist fluent in both
Arabic and the language of official Washington. This was his job in
April 2011, when Syrian exiles prevailed on him to work for them
instead.
Soon Moustafa was briefing Congress and the White House as
director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a nonprofit that sought
to provide real-time information about conditions inside Syria, as
well as the thinking and plans of the anti-Assad opposition. So
armed, U.S. policymakers could provide the kinds of assistance that
would best help Syria’s rebels.
Or they could choose not to.
“The point was to convince people of something that already
seemed logical,” Moustafa said. Americans are naturally sympathetic
toward those who seek to liberate their country from dictatorship,
and here U.S. democratic principles “had aligned with U.S. national
interests, in terms of what we need to do in Syria,” he said. “And we
just thought the policy would shift in that direction.”
Moustafa made regular trips to the White House to meet with
senior members of the president’s Syria team, sometimes at his
initiation but often at theirs. He sat through long West Wing briefing
sessions with Samantha Power, Obama’s adviser on human rights
who would later become ambassador to the United Nations, as well
as Denis McDonough, the president’s tough-talking deputy national
security adviser, and senior officials from the State Department’s
Syria desk. All spoke sympathetically about the plight of Syria’s
embattled opposition. But any talk about possible remedies came
with a long list of caveats, legal provisos, and qualifiers.
“There was a lot of ‘This is on the table’ and ‘That is on the table,’
but then none of it really was,” Moustafa said. “As time went on, that
became clearer. The sense was: ‘Look, the president came into office
saying we were going to get out of these wars.’ ”
Back in his own office, Moustafa would hold long chats over Skype
with Syrian protest leaders, some of whom he later met in person
after he began shuttling between Washington and the region. Some
refused to be downcast, believing it was inevitable that the
Americans would come to their aid. After all, Obama had declared
that Assad must go. “The rhetoric from the administration and the
rest of the international community was that Assad was over—he has
to step down. So their thinking was: ‘Let’s come out in droves,’ ” he
said. “And they came out. I thought to myself, ‘They’re getting shot at
now, they’re going to stop.’ But then they’d be back the next week,
and the next. And they kept coming out.”
Among the defiant ones was Noura al-Ameer, a young Sunni
woman from the Syrian city of Homs whom Moustafa met online and
eventually befriended. When the first protests erupted, al-Ameer was
twenty-three, a petite brunette and college student who liked
political debates and brightly colored head scarves. In the early days,
she gushed about the extraordinary unity she observed in Hama’s
streets, as Syrians from every ethnic group and social class joined in
the demonstrations. For a time, nearly every rally featured a pair of
protesters carrying a Christian cross and a Koran to symbolize the
harmony between faiths.
“There were merchants and workers, doctors and engineers,
students and journalists,” she remembered later. “All the different
sects were there, and all the social classes from across society.”
The sense of unity somehow made protesters feel less afraid, she
said. Sunni shopkeepers and Alawite law students locked arms, even
when riot police began ripping into the crowd with batons and tear
gas. The first time it happened, al-Ameer assumed she was going to
die. But it didn’t seem to matter.
“Even if the regime killed us, we would die happy,” she said. “After
all the repression we had lived through, it felt wonderful. And it was
novel for us. It was almost a fantasy to think we would die for a cause
we all believed in.”
Al-Ameer did not die, but something else did. Slowly, the symbols
of unity disappeared, as stories circulated about sectarian killings
and assaults. In her mostly Sunni neighborhood, flyers began
appearing in doorways, warning of coming attacks from Alawite
death squads. At the same time, al-Ameer’s Alawite friends were
getting similar warnings about Sunnis. Meanwhile, the regime’s
notorious goon squads—hired gangs called shabiha or “ghosts”—
snatched women and children from the streets and then returned
them, sometimes dead, other times beaten and tortured, with tales
about being brutalized by Alawite thugs. By late 2011, a new chant
was added to the repertoire at the daily protests: “Christians to
Beirut, Alawites to their coffins.”
Then it was al-Ameer’s turn to be caught. She was on her way to a
visit with her mother when police officers pulled her off a public bus
and brought her to one of the intelligence service’s special
interrogation centers in Damascus. Again she believed she would die.
Instead, her captors locked her in a cell and forced her to listen as
they beat and tortured one of her friends. When al-Ameer still
refused to break, the officers strapped her into a chair and attached
electrodes to her temples and chest. The pain shot through her body
like liquid fire as her captors laughed to see if she would cry out.
“We’re going to exterminate all of you, you Sunnis!” one of the
officers said, using epithets that al-Ameer, years later, could not
bring herself to repeat.
After she had spent eighty-five days in prison, family members
won her release with a bribe paid to one of her jailers. She slipped
into Turkey to join the opposition in exile, but by then the mood
inside Syria had changed. The unity marches, when the young and
old locked arms and carried flowers and olive branches, were gone,
replaced by an ugly sectarianism she barely recognized.
“When I was protesting, I was surrounded by all these men and
women who were like me, dreaming the Syrian dream,” she said.
“Today if I go there I won’t find them. The regime has stolen them
from us.”
20
“The mood music started to change”
On January 24, 2012, a previously unknown Syrian rebel group
posted a short video confirming what Western intelligence agencies
already suspected: the al-Qaeda network’s first franchise in Syria was
officially open for business.
The formal unveiling came with a media rollout that might have
befitted a new car model or the latest Apple gadget. For two days,
Islamist Web sites ran banner ads promising a “special
announcement,” against the backdrop of a clock ticking down the
hours. When the time arrived, the al-Nusra Front was introduced
with a sixteen-minute video that summed up the group’s capabilities
and special features. The chief salesman spoke enthusiastically,
though carefully keeping his face away from the camera.
“We hereby bring the Islamic nation the glad tidings of a long-
awaited event,” said Abu Mohammad al-Julani, the man dispatched
into Syria five months earlier by the Islamic State’s central branch in
Iraq. A call for help had been heard, Julani said, and “what else could
we do but answer the call?”
By the time the video aired, Julani’s band had been offering its
brand of assistance for at least three months. A few weeks earlier, a
pair of perfectly synchronized car bombs had exploded outside one of
the Assad regime’s security offices in Damascus, killing forty-four
people and serving notice that a new type of combatant had entered
the fray. The al-Nusra Front later claimed responsibility; terrorism
experts had already concluded that the culprit was likely al-Qaeda or
someone trained in the group’s methods.
The original parties to the conflict denounced the introduction of
suicide bombers into the fighting. “We said from the beginning, this
is terrorism,” said a Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Fayssal
Mekdad. The main rebel opposition force disavowed the use of
weapons that killed indiscriminately. The Free Syrian Army “does
not use car bombs—it never did before and it never will,” declared its
spokesman, Ammar al-Wawi. Yet, from that day forward, car bombs
were a regular addition to Syria’s catalogue of horrors, along with
truck bombs, suicide vests, and improvised explosive devices.
Julani, in his occasional video messages, would maintain that his
al-Nusra Front was targeting only the regime’s forces and not
civilians, even those from Assad’s Alawite sect. And he insisted that
his methods would work, whereas the many others being tried—from
nonviolent resistance to hit-and-run guerrilla warfare to a useless
reliance on Western aid and Western-brokered peace accords—
would not.
“Al-Nusra Front has taken upon itself to be the Muslim nation’s
weapon in this land,” he said. This would be a harsh campaign, but
also a holy one, he said, requiring all devout Syrians to “rally around
the banner of ‘There-is-no-god-but-Allah,’ ” the black standard borne
by the Prophet Muhammad’s ancient army and appropriated in
modern times by jihadists.
Far from Syria, other Muslim audiences—including those that
Julani likely envisioned in recording the video—were more receptive.
In the Sunni Arab countries of the Persian Gulf and North Africa,
many thousands of religious Muslims began mobilizing in the early
months of 2012 to support the jihadists who were at last inflicting
real blows on the Syrian tyrant. Young men from Saudi Arabia,
Libya, and Tunisia who had watched Assad’s massacres of fellow
Muslims, shown nightly on Arabic-language cable news channels,
began trekking to southern Turkey to join al-Nusra and other
Islamist militias that were running recruitment networks in the
border towns. In far greater numbers, sympathetic Arabs began
donating cash, gold jewelry, and supplies to the Syrian Islamists’
cause. Arab governments secretly sent aid as well, usually the lethal
kind.
In Kuwait, one of the biggest providers of private funding, a
preacher named Hajjaj al-Ajmi, launched a Twitter campaign to
persuade his 250,000 followers to donate money to special bank
accounts set up to help the rebels. “Give your money to the ones who
will spend it on jihad, not aid,” al-Ajmi exhorted donors in a video
pitch posted to YouTube in 2012. Other supporters held Twitter
“auctions” to sell off cars, boats, vacation properties—anything that
could be exchanged for cash to help the Syrian rebels. A few wealthy
donors—sometimes called “angel investors” by those who benefitted
—arranged visits to the battlefield to hand-deliver suitcases full of
cash, and were sometimes rewarded by having a rebel brigade
rename itself in the patron’s honor.
“It’s anyone’s game,” a Middle Eastern diplomat acknowledged at
the time, after conceding that his own countrymen were among the
benefactors for extremist fighters. “You see different players looking
to create their own militias. It is beyond control.”
Some countries made an earnest, if belated, attempt to stem the
flow of private aid headed for jihadist groups. Saudi Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates ultimately tightened restrictions and increased
scrutiny of bank transfers to cut down on illicit giving. But others
showed little inclination to close the taps. In Qatar and Kuwait—both
wealthy Gulf kingdoms and allies of the United States—the Islamists’
backers included government ministers who believed the jihadists
offered the best chance for defeating the Assad government.
Officially, both governments denounced extremism, even as
individual ministers privately defended rebel groups that Western
governments labeled as terrorists—including the al-Nusra Front,
according to U.S. and Middle Eastern officials who participated in
such discussions.
“In their view, it’s Assad that’s the problem, and groups like al-
Nusra are the answer,” said a senior Middle Eastern intelligence
official who worked closely with both countries in coordinating
policy on Syria. “That’s why they’re OK with money and weapons
going to al-Nusra. They’re the best fighters and they’re also Sunni,
so, if they win, the new government will be more like them.”
—
Qatar, watching the conflict from eleven hundred miles away, could
afford to take chances. For Jordan’s King Abdullah II, the men with
the black flags and Gulf-financed guns and explosives were already
uncomfortably close, so much so that Jordanian border guards could
sometimes watch the fighting from the observation towers on the
Jordan-Syria frontier.
In the summer of 2012, the Islamists drew closer still. Jordan’s
intelligence service began picking up reports of fighters slipping into
the country with weapons, apparently with the intention of spreading
the revolution to the Hashemite kingdom. The Mukhabarat’s teams
watched for weeks as the infiltration teams set up safe houses and
began stockpiling supplies for what appeared to be an ambitious plan
to strike targets all across Amman.
When the plotters were nearly ready, the Mukhabarat pounced.
Eleven suspects were rounded up in a series of raids that seized
machine guns, mortars, car bombs, and explosives that had been
smuggled into Jordan for the attack. From notes and interrogations,
the agency pieced together the outlines of a plan to launch near-
simultaneous attacks on multiple civilian and government targets in
the capital, from the U.S. Embassy to an upscale shopping mall in the
center of town. Had the plan succeeded, dozens, perhaps even
hundreds, could have been killed.
The Mukhabarat’s men had scarcely finished their work when
trouble erupted on the country’s border. A passing patrol had
surprised a different group of armed Islamists as they were
attempting to cross into Syria, setting off a fierce gun battle that left
four of the militants dead. Also killed was a Jordanian soldier, the
country’s first casualty in Syria’s year-old civil war.
The king was furious. For months, he had been warning everyone
—the Americans, the Europeans, Arab allies, even Assad himself—of
the consequences if a full-blown civil war were to erupt in Syria.
Inevitably, the sparks from a sectarian or ethnic conflict would drift
beyond Syria’s borders. It had happened in Iraq, and now it was
happening again.
“This is not abstract; this is real. It’s next door,” the king told
senior aides. “And if it continues, it will be knocking at our door.”
Through late 2011 and 2012, the monarch worked furiously to
build firebreaks to prevent the conflict from widening. Already,
Syrian refugees were streaming across the border by the thousands—
a single camp, Zaatari, held 30,000 people in mid-2012 and would
swell to 156,000 a year later, becoming Jordan’s fourth-largest
metropolis—so Abdullah boosted his security forces and built intake
centers at the border crossings to ensure an orderly and carefully
monitored flow into the new tent cities along the frontier. He
convened meetings with American, British, and Arab military
officials to work up detailed contingency plans for dealing with
potential crises ranging from a chemical-weapons attack inside Syria
to incursions by Assad’s military jets into neighbors’ air space. He
worked with U.S. and British generals to create special-forces teams
that could quickly secure Assad’s depots of poison gas in the event of
a sudden collapse of central power.
The Western governments were willing to participate in planning
exercises, but slow to commit resources. Humanitarian aid trickled
in, forcing Abdullah to scramble to find resources to feed and clothe
the hordes of refugees on his border. Awkward negotiations began
for a clandestine training site in Jordan for secularist rebels, the core
of a future “Southern Front” that could advance toward Damascus
while Assad’s army was mired in fighting in the north and east of the
country. Abdullah agreed, despite his fears about getting caught in
the crossfire between rival Syrian armies. The training began in
2013, in tandem with a similar, CIA-supported program in southern
Turkey. But after authorizing the program, the White House imposed
strict limits on both the scale of the training operation and the kinds
of weapons and ammunition the fighters would receive. CIA-backed
fighters were paid $100 to $150 a month, less than half the salary
offered by the Islamists. Ammunition rations were so meager that
one commander complained that his soldiers were receiving on
average about sixteen bullets per month. Many of the new soldiers
wandered off to join other units, taking their weapons with them.
“We thought going with the Americans was going with the big guns,”
one of the CIA-supplied commanders said. “It was a losing bet.”
But the most difficult conversations involved other Arab leaders.
Jordan, utterly lacking in the oil and gas reserves that fattened its
neighbors’ coffers, frequently turned to the wealthy Gulf states for
aid during times of economic crisis. But now there would be a price:
some of the Gulf sheikhs expected Jordan to serve as a conduit for
money and weapons headed to the Islamist militias they supported
in Syria.
Abdullah was incredulous. Why, he would ask, would anyone
supply arms to jihadists whose central aim is to create a seventh-
century theocracy in the heart of the Middle East?
“Where are these revolutions going to stop?” he asked one day
during a private chat with one of his Gulf counterparts.
“I hope these revolutions continue in the Middle East,” said the
other sovereign, a man who has publicly acknowledged sharing many
of the Islamists’ religious views. “I’ve paid for the support of these
groups, and they owe allegiance to me.”
“That’s not how it works,” Abdullah snapped. “You have moved
yourself down on the menu. But eventually they’re going to come
after you.”
The flow of money and weapons into Syria continued unabated. In
private talks with his aides, Abdullah could see the possible pathways
that history might take. One possibility—that Assad, backed by Iran
and Russia, would emerge victorious through brute force—now
seemed unlikely. An alternate path would see the “loonies”—radical
Islamists—seize control in Damascus, though that also seemed
remote. A third possibility, if the region were exceedingly lucky,
would be a negotiated settlement in which Assad would be forced to
surrender power to a Syrian unity government, one that would
oversee elections while leaving essential institutions in place to
ensure order and safety for Syria’s citizens.
There was, however, yet a fourth possible outcome: prolonged
violence with no clear resolution. In this scenario, the country known
as Syria would disintegrate in a maelstrom that slowly consumed
other countries in its wake, destabilizing the region for decades to
come. Abdullah, in his discussions with aides, imagined a fractured
Syria divided into zones controlled by Sunnis, Alawites, and Kurds,
each supported and supplied by foreign partisans. Indeed, the
contours of a future divided Syria were becoming clearer, with the
regime clinging to defensive positions around the capital and coastal
cities and leaving the parched, landlocked interior to the Islamists.
“We saw a stalemate coming,” one of the king’s aides said.
The reality was, the extremists were growing stronger, and so was
the pressure from Jordan’s allies to back them—passively, if not
actively. But Abdullah refused. Alone in his office, he would click
through the day’s catalogue of videotaped atrocities: captured
soldiers executed at close range, priests and imams butchered like
sheep, pale young bodies pulled from the rubble of bombed-out
apartment buildings. Sometimes he would send the links to his
senior advisers. Nothing like this could ever be allowed to happen in
Jordan, he told them.
“I have my red lines,” he said, as one aide later recalled. “I will not
allow support for the radicals, because it will come back to bite us. It
will come back to bite my citizens.”
—
In May 2012, Robert Ford was summoned to the State Department
Building’s seventh floor for a rare private meeting with the woman
who had been his boss of record for the past three years. Ford had
met Hillary Clinton several times before, but it was unusual for a
midlevel diplomat to take the elevator alone to the elegant
“Mahogany Row” suite that serves as the personal office of the U.S.
secretary of state.
Ford was now an ambassador without an embassy. Officially, he
remained the chief U.S. diplomat to Syria, but he had been recalled
to Washington the previous October because of concerns about his
safety. The rooftop scare in July had been frightening enough, but
other incidents in the weeks that followed made clear that Syria’s
guarantee of protection for foreign diplomats no longer applied to
him.
The most terrifying scrape came on a day when Ford paid a call on
the leader of one of Syria’s few officially recognized opposition
parties in Damascus. When the U.S. diplomat arrived at the man’s
office, a crowd of about seventy-five Assad sympathizers was waiting
for him on the walkway outside. Ford and his aides ran through a
hail of eggs and tomatoes and managed to slip inside the entrance,
just seconds ahead of the mob. The Americans pushed a desk in front
of the door to brace it, and Ford turned to his hosts with a sardonic
smile. “We’re from the American embassy,” he said. When the
meeting ended, there was a second mad dash to the embassy’s cars,
which by then had been trashed so thoroughly they could never be
repaired. As he ran for his car, Ford convinced himself that he would
not survive the day with all his bones and teeth intact. “I didn’t think
they were going to kill me,” he recalled later, “but I thought for sure
they were going to beat me up.” Somehow all got away unharmed,
but Ford’s next major outing was to the airport for a flight home. He
would not return, and the embassy itself was shuttered three months
later.
Clinton knew all about Ford’s ordeals, so during their meeting on
that May afternoon, the two officials proceeded to talk about the
larger power struggles under way in Syria: the Iranians and their
growing support for Assad, the latest battlefield trends, the multitude
of rebel factions and their allegiances. Ford was going over some of
the particulars when Clinton stopped him.
“You know where this is going? This could be a regional disaster,”
she said. She ticked down a list of possible consequences: spillover
violence infecting Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq; refugee outflows in
gigantic numbers; a sectarian war that “stretches from Lebanon all
the way to Iraq.”
Ford hardly disagreed, though he tried to sound hopeful. Maybe
such a crisis could still be avoided, he offered, if the new peace
initiative recently launched by the UN’s special envoy to Syria, Kofi
Annan, gained traction.
“If we can get through the negotiations to get a transitional
government stood up—if we can reinforce the opposition enough so
they get through a negotiation—maybe we can avoid that,” Ford said.
The secretary of state was quiet, pensive. Of the possible scenarios
for Syria, they both knew, the least likely was one in which Assad
willingly negotiated an end to his own presidency.
“She just didn’t think it would ever work with Assad,” Ford said
afterward.
Ford would play a key role in the UN-brokered negotiations that
summer, and for nearly two years after that. Of the myriad obstacles
to a solution, one indeed remained constant throughout: Syria’s
steadfast refusal to consider any settlement in which Assad would
lose the presidency.
Yet, already, a new problem was beginning to crowd out the many
others facing the White House’s Syria team. The tiny bands of
jihadists spotted earlier by intelligence agencies had grown into a
small army. At National Security Council meetings, the maps
displaying the shifting lines now showed pockets of territory under
the control of jihadists, including the al-Nusra Front, a group with a
clear al-Qaeda pedigree.
Intelligence briefings were soon expanded to include updates on
the scores of Islamist groups that were now part of the ever-shifting
rebel network. Some groups were thoroughly homegrown and
worked cooperatively with the Free Syrian Army’s secular command.
Others, like the al-Nusra Front, did not. More disturbingly, young
Muslim men from around the world were beginning to stream across
the Syria-Turkey border to join the fight, evoking the great
migrations of volunteer fighters into Afghanistan and Iraq in decades
past. To encourage them, al-Nusra’s leaders set up Twitter and
Facebook accounts offering everything from theological pep talks to
practical advice on what to wear and bring.
A few of the arriving foreigners were well known to the spy
agencies, having arrived directly from other battlegrounds or having
extensive records from incarceration in U.S. detention centers.
“At some briefings,” the senior security adviser recalled, “we’d
hear, ‘Wait till you see who just showed up [in Syria].’ And then, the
next time, it was ‘So—you think that last group was bad…?’ ”
Still other new arrivals were worrisome precisely because they had
no record of previous militancy or crime. From Western Europe
came hundreds, then thousands of young men, most of them
Muslims, and all of them bearing passports allowing them to travel
freely throughout the European Union and North America. Suddenly
the talk in the West Wing wasn’t just about the risk of a destabilizing
civil war in the Middle East. It was about a destabilizing civil war
with a potential for dispersing thousands of radicalized youths across
the continents, more embers carried on the wind. This was enough to
keep even the more seasoned national security hands awake at night,
the senior adviser said.
“We weren’t convinced that al-Nusra was coming for us next week,
but we were worried about all these trained jihadis coming back to
Europe and having a passport,” the senior adviser said. “This is when
the mood music in the Situation Room started to change.”
From the CIA to the Pentagon, the concerns were given voice in
official reports. The State Department’s Syria team, which included
Ford and other refugees from the now closed U.S. Embassy in
Damascus, put together a document for Undersecretary of State
William J. Burns that sought to put the latest events and trends in
context. The classified report was never made public, but the point,
as Ford recalled afterward, was that Syria had drifted into a kind of
lawlessness that dangerous groups were beginning to exploit.
“The regime was losing control of eastern Syria—the border points
—and some of the border points along the Turkish border, too,” Ford
later said, summarizing the report’s essence. “These are large spaces
that extremists will be looking to control, just as they did in
Afghanistan and Somalia. And it’s important to build a moderate
Syrian opposition that can confront those people, as well as Assad.”
In the State Department’s analysis, the “extremists” consisted
mainly of the al-Nusra Front, which was looking increasingly
dangerous as the year 2012 neared its end. Not only was the group
indisputably linked to al-Qaeda terrorists, but it also was emerging
among the rebels as one of their most effective military
organizations, as well as a preferred destination for many of the
incoming foreign fighters. Even al-Nusra’s relatively moderate—by
al-Qaeda’s standards—behavior was cause for alarm. Though its
leaders insisted on imposing strict Sharia law in villages they
“liberated,” they largely avoided violence against Muslim civilians.
Some al-Nusra units actually made a show of picking up trash and
delivering food and water to battered neighborhoods, acts that won
them respect and even admiration.
What would happen, analysts wondered, if this new brand of
“jihadist lite” truly caught hold? What if Syria—a neighbor to Israel,
and a true linchpin of the Middle East—were to become the first of
the Arab Spring dominoes to fall to a government that was al-Qaeda
in all but name?
—
Since the beginning of the uprising, the White House’s entire
national security team had been unanimous in opposing direct U.S.
interference in Syria’s internal conflicts. By the late summer of 2012,
the prevailing view had shifted in one significant respect: Key
members of President Obama’s inner circle now regarded the notion
of arming Syria’s moderate rebels as undesirable yet necessary—the
least objectionable out of a list of exceedingly bad options.
Among the cabinet members urging a more aggressive response
was Obama’s popular and widely respected secretary of defense.
Leon E. Panetta, a former CIA director, brought rare experience to
the debate: He helped lead the fight against ISIS’s predecessors in
Iraq, and he had helped coordinate aid to the Arab insurgency in
Libya. At seventy-four, Panetta, the gregarious son of Italian
immigrants and former chief of staff for the Clinton White House,
was no one’s definition of a hawk. But at Langley and the Pentagon
he had frequently approved the use of lethal tactics—from the CIA’s
stealthy drones to missile strikes and commando raids—to kill
suspected terrorists in their hideouts overseas. Just a year earlier,
Panetta had helped direct the successful mission to kill the world’s
most famous terrorist, Osama bin Laden.
Now he watched with growing unease as terrorists moved into new
sanctuaries created by the chaos that followed the Arab Spring
uprisings. With Syria, his initial concern had been regional stability:
Sectarian fighting in Syria could spread beyond the country’s borders
to Turkey, Lebanon, and beyond. But the arrival of hardened
jihadists in Syria made the conflict infinitely more dangerous, he
believed.
“The intelligence, frankly, was very worrisome,” Panetta later
recalled. “We were seeing a lot of extremist elements going in, and
they were organizing and becoming pretty effective. The last thing we
wanted was for them to gain a foothold and use Syria as a base of
operations.”
At the time, the White House stuck to its policy of providing
nonlethal support to the opposition while using diplomatic pressure
to bring about Assad’s resignation and a new interim government.
But the results had been frustrating at best. Kofi Annan, the former
UN secretary-general in charge of peace negotiations, resigned in
disgust over the summer after repeated setbacks, including Russia’s
insistent blocking of any measure before the world body that might
pressure Assad into stepping down. On the ground, the fighting
intensified, and yet neither side could gain a decisive advantage. The
Syrian president replenished his weary forces with Hezbollah
fighters from Lebanon and used his air force to bomb and strafe
rebel positions. Turkey and the Persian Gulf countries sent fresh
torrents of cash and weapons to back a rebel force increasingly
dominated by Islamists. For the Americans, as Hillary Clinton would
later acknowledge, “every option appears worse than the next.”
Clinton began privately pushing for what she would call a
“carefully vetted and trained force of moderate rebels who could be
trusted” with American weapons. As she described the events in her
book Hard Choices, she invited then CIA director David Petraeus to
her house for lunch in July 2012 to brainstorm about ways to recruit
and build such a force. If America “was willing finally to get in the
game, we could be much more effective in isolating the extremists
and empowering the moderates inside Syria,” she wrote.
By late summer, following extensive meetings with NATO
counterparts and rebel leaders, Clinton was “reasonably confident”
that an effective strategy could be put in place, she said. Petraeus’s
CIA put together a plan for building, training, and arming a
moderate rebel army that could eventually overthrow the regime and
establish authority in provinces now effectively controlled by
Islamists. The plan was presented to President Obama at a White
House meeting in late August, and Panetta was among the core
group of senior advisers to argue for its acceptance.
“We’re outside the game,” Panetta would argue. “We don’t have
any credibility with [Syrian moderates]. We’re giving them nonlethal
assistance and they’re dying.”
Panetta was not naïve about the risks. Even the most carefully
vetted rebel group might decide to switch sides, or commit a
massacre using American-supplied guns. Arms given to friendly
fighters could easily end up in the wrong hands.
“There’s always a risk,” he said. Yet, he told the president, echoing
the views of Clinton and Petraeus, “I think we could do this.” The
alternative—allowing the conflict to run its course—also carried risks,
opening the door to even more chaos and an expanded breeding
ground for extremists, he argued.
Obama listened thoughtfully and then proceeded to pick at the
holes in the CIA’s plan, according to officials present at the meeting.
There had been many instances in U.S. history where a well-
intentioned decision to arm a guerrilla movement had horribly
backfired, the president noted, according to Clinton’s account. Why
would this time be different?
Benjamin Rhodes attributed the president’s reluctance to commit
to military intervention to his fear that it could mire the country in
another Middle East war.
“He was willing to consider options, but the question always was:
‘What happens next? What happens the day after you take out a
series of runways in Syria?’ ” Rhodes remembered. “He did not see
where a more interventionist military option led us, other than being
deeper and deeper in a conflict that is extraordinary complex and
shows no signs of having a military solution.”
Rhodes also suggested that disagreement between the president
and his advisers over Syria was less dramatic than contemporaneous
news accounts portrayed it to be.
“I think, candidly, that a lot of people have used this debate to
position themselves for posterity as being for doing something in
Syria when in fact it wouldn’t have made much difference,” Rhodes
said. The plan presented to Obama that fall “didn’t feel fully baked,”
he said, and the president was unconvinced that arming rebel
militias—assuming trustworthy allies could be found—would tip the
balance. “This is a very hard problem, rooted in a decade of war in
Iraq and decades of sectarian tensions in that part of the world,”
Rhodes said. “Sometimes we would like to think we have more
agency than we do.”
In the end, Obama, who had been elected on a promise to end
America’s involvement in Middle East wars, rejected the CIA plan.
The situation could change in the future, the president allowed,
particularly if Assad crossed the administration’s “red line” of using
or transferring his stocks of chemical weapons. But for the moment,
there would be no shipments of U.S. military hardware to Syria’s
rebels.
The debate would erupt again, but an opportunity had passed.
Clinton, disappointed, plunged back into the task of seeking the
elusive diplomatic accord that would end the conflict. She also
secured an agreement for increasing humanitarian aid—more
blankets, food, computers, phones—for Syria’s opposition.
“But all of these steps were Band-Aids,” she wrote. “The conflict
would rage on.”
Panetta resigned as defense secretary five months after the August
meeting. Looking back more than two years later, he regarded the
administration’s decision as a costly failure.
“We learned a lot about how to confront al-Qaeda and its affiliates
as a result of operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” he said. “We
know how to do this. But we have to be willing to do it.”
21
“There was no more hope after that”
The black flags came from the east, as the Hadith’s prophecies
foretold, carried by men with long hair and beards and surnames
taken from their hometowns. They came not on horseback but in
small pickup trucks, sometimes dozens at a time, kicking up dust as
they headed west across the Iraqi desert. A year after the start of the
Islamic State’s Syrian venture, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was finally
moving to assert control over a project that, in his mind, was
hopelessly adrift. Now Baghdadi would show his wayward Syrian
apostles and the rest of the world how a caliphate was meant to be
run.
To ensure unhindered access to the Syrian border and beyond,
Baghdadi placed one of his most colorful lieutenants in charge of
securing the main Iraqi highway, from western Anbar Province to the
Syrian frontier. His pick for the job, the Islamic State’s flamboyant
Anbar commander Shaker Wahib al-Dulaimi, had already gained
local notoriety as Abu Wahib, one of the terrorist group’s rising stars,
and a man utterly obsessed with his own public image. The twenty-
seven-year-old former computer programmer deliberately styled
himself after his hero, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for whom he briefly
served before being arrested and thrown in the Camp Bucca prison
in 2006. Now he sought to replicate his mentor’s look, from the
shaggy black hair, cap, and beard to his penchant for posing
unmasked for cameras while affecting the look of a jihadi superhero.
Some of his video outtakes are unintentionally hilarious, as Abu
Wahib tries karate moves or attempts to leap through the air while
firing his gun. Others are simply cold-blooded.
In the spring of 2013, Abu Wahib’s men set up a video camera as
their leader stood with his rifle in the middle of a desert highway to
flag down a convoy of tractor-trailers heading from Syria into Iraq.
After the trucks pulled over, Abu Wahib rounded up three of the
drivers and asked each for an ID card to see if he was a Shiite. The
video recorder captured the entire exchange.
The men, all Syrians who appear to range from their late twenties
to early forties, clearly understand the consequences of a wrong
answer, for all three adamantly denied having anything to do with
the Shiite faith or the Syrian regime.
“You’re Shiites, right?” Abu Wahib asked.
“We’re Sunni, from Homs,” said the youngest one, a tall, good-
looking youth wearing white jeans and a short-sleeved dress shirt.
“Are you sure?”
“We just want to live,” said the older one. “We’re here to earn a
living.”
Abu Wahib toyed with them. “What proves to me that you’re
Sunni?” he asked. “How many kneelings do you make at dawn
prayer?”
The men were nervous. “Four,” answered one. “Three,” said
another. “Five,” said the third.
Abu Wahib scoffed. “From your talk, you’re a polytheist”—a Shiite
—he declared. He made the men kneel in the sandy median between
the lanes. Then, firing his rifle in short bursts from the hip, he shot
each in the back. As they attempted to crawl away, he fired a shot at
close range into each man’s head.
“So here is the international highway in the hands of the Islamic
State!” one of Abu Wahib’s masked accomplices yelled. The fighters
set fire to the trucks, leaving the drivers’ bodies facedown as rivulets
of blood seeped into the orange dust. The videotape ended with a
recording of Zarqawi’s voice.
“Lo and behold, the spark has been ignited in Iraq,” the dead
leader was heard to say, “and its fires shall only get bigger until it
burns the Armies of the Cross in Dabiq.”
These were the men with whom Baghdadi now sought to build his
Islamic caliphate. The first batch he had sent into Syria had
disappointed him. They were too mild, certainly in comparison with
their Iraqi counterparts. They were also too Syria-focused and, very
possibly, too popular for Baghdadi’s liking. Now Baghdadi was ready
to start again, with men like Abu Wahib in the vanguard, and with
Baghdadi himself setting the tone.
—
On April 9, 2013, Baghdadi posted a twenty-one-minute audio
message on Islamist Web sites, announcing a major corporate
restructuring. Officially banished, Baghdadi said, was the group
known as the al-Nusra Front. In its place was a newly merged
organization that Baghdadi called the Islamic State of Iraq and al-
Sham. The latter word, roughly synonymous with the English term
“Levant,” referred to the lands of the eastern Mediterranean, from
southern Turkey through present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and
Israel. English-speakers would know the new organization as ISIL, or
ISIS.
In explaining the change, Baghdadi recounted a history of the
group’s previous incarnations, starting with the early days under
Zarqawi, the founder and esteemed “mujahid sheikh.” He told a story
of how Zarqawi, when he first swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden,
explained privately to his followers that he did so for strategic
reasons, and not out of some genuine devotion or need.
“I swear by Allah, I didn’t need from him money or weapons or
men, but I saw in him a symbol,” Baghdadi quoted Zarqawi as
saying. Now, in a similar vein, it had become strategically important
for the Syrian offshoot organization to unite symbolically with its
parent, he said.
“Al-Nusra Front was only an expansion of the Islamic State of Iraq,
and part of it,” Baghdadi said. “So we declare, keeping our trust in
Allah, the abolishing of the name of the Islamic State of Iraq and the
abolishing of the name of al-Nusra Front, and joining them under
one name—the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham—and also uniting
the banner, which is the banner of the Islamic State.”
The message cut a fresh trough of despair across Western capitals.
Analysts had long assumed that the al-Nusra Front was an Islamic
State offshoot, though one that had at least temporarily decided to
soften its image. Now Baghdadi was asserting publicly that the two
organizations were one and the same. Moreover, the more fearsome
Iraqi side was taking charge.
But the most emphatic response came from a surprising source:
Baghdadi’s presumed partner in the merger. No one had bothered to
secure the consent of the al-Nusra Front, which, as it turned out, had
no intention of fading away. The al-Nusra leader, Abu Mohammad
al-Julani, fired back two days later with an audiotaped message
repudiating everything Baghdadi had said. “Al-Nusra Front’s banner
will remain, nothing will be changed in it,” said Baghdadi’s old
comrade and former friend.
Julani then appealed to the world’s preeminent jihadist, al-Qaeda’s
leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to settle the dispute. The longtime
deputy of Osama bin Laden had famously quarreled with Zarqawi
over beheadings and other shock-theater tactics, and the old
Egyptian had been equally unhappy with Zarqawi’s successors. On
June 9, 2013, Zawahiri published an open letter, ordering a halt to
the merger and scolding Baghdadi for attempting such a thing
without consulting with him first. In an astonishing rebuke, he
decreed that Baghdadi would be on probation for a year as leader of
the Islamic State of Iraq. After twelve months, Zawahiri would decide
to either allow him to stay on the job or “appoint a new emir,” the
letter said.
Finally, to ensure that no fighting erupted between the groups,
Zawahiri said he was sending a personal emissary, an al-Qaeda elder
statesman named Abu Khalid al-Suri, into Syria to mediate any
future disputes. “Muslim blood is off-limits for other Muslims,”
Zawahiri declared.
“I call upon all my Muslim brothers and the Mujahedin to stop
arguing over this dispute and to stop sedition among the
Mujahedin,” he wrote, “and to seek harmony and unity, along with
winning hearts and uniting ranks among Muslims.”
It was a remarkable, and strikingly public, feud between branches
of the al-Qaeda network, one that not only contained echoes of the
dispute between Zarqawi and Bin Laden but also evoked the earlier
rift between Zarqawi and his one-time mentor, Abu Muhammad al-
Maqdisi. The squabbling continued to play out for months, with
Islamist scholars and pundits around the world taking sides in
Internet forums and chat rooms, arguing over which leader best
represented the movement’s future.
Baghdadi dealt with al-Qaeda’s advice just as Zarqawi did: he
ignored it. He issued one additional statement, claiming that he was
merely following orders from a higher authority. “I prefer the
command of Allah over the command that contravenes it,” he said.
And then he proceeded to launch his unified Islamic State of Iraq
and al-Sham as though the al-Nusra Front did not exist.
Throughout 2013, bands of ISIS fighters would fan out across
nearly every part of Syria, from the lawless eastern desert to the
populated corridors along the Turkish and Jordanian borders and to
the very suburbs of Damascus. But before the assault began in
earnest, Baghdadi had a few matters of business to attend to inside
Iraq.
He first commenced an organizational overhaul, appointing
regional governors, Sharia advisers, and military commanders to
oversee operations locally throughout Iraq and Syria. The Islamic
State would function like a real government, with flow charts for
acquiring approvals and special departments in charge of social
media, logistics, finances, training, recruitment, and even the
management of candidates for suicide missions, who were kept apart
from the regular fighters to ensure proper indoctrination.
Next, Baghdadi would crank up the violence inside Iraq,
unleashing waves of bombings that set a new mark for the gratuitous
slaughter of ordinary civilians. The body count in Iraq’s morgues
soon soared to levels not seen since the Zarqawi era, as ISIS
dispatched suicide bombers into sports arenas and community
soccer games as well as mosques, cafés, and markets. Even Iraqis
inured to bloodshed expressed shock when an ISIS recruit drove an
explosives-laden truck into an elementary-school playground in
Nineveh Province in October 2013, killing thirteen children who
were outside for recess.
The final step was an operation Baghdadi called “Destroying the
Gates.” It started with a trial run in 2012, when his fighters crashed
into a small prison near the Iraqi city of Tikrit and freed a hundred
prisoners, half of them former terrorists who had been on death row.
Then, on July 21, 2013, ISIS struck two of the country’s largest
prisons in simultaneous nighttime raids that involved multiple
suicide bombers and scores of mortar rounds. The biggest of the two
raids, on Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison, freed more than five
hundred inmates, many of them veterans of Zarqawi’s terrorist
network.
Now Baghdadi had the core elements he needed for his
reinvigorated ISIS army. Already, some of his fighters were moving
to take control of small villages and towns in northern and eastern
Syria, and now they would be joined by battle-hardened,
ideologically disciplined fighters straight from Iraq’s worst prisons.
Some of the towns they entered were already under the control of
other rebel militias, including the al-Nusra Front. When it
encountered such forces, ISIS would offer a choice: join, flee, or
fight. If the local force resisted, the Iraqis would not hesitate to kill
them.
The rift with the al-Nusra Front slowly widened into a chasm.
Zawahiri’s personal peacemaker, Abu Khalid al-Suri, remained in
Syria for a time, still hoping to find a way to end the dispute. In early
2014, he was bunking at the headquarters of an Islamist militia in
the northern city of Aleppo when five men charged into the building
with guns blazing. One of the assailants squeezed the trigger of his
suicide vest, killing al-Suri and six others.
No one took credit for the mission, but al-Qaeda refused to have
anything to do with ISIS after that. It urged its followers for the first
time not only to stay away, but to oppose Islamic State’s endeavors
actively. By then it hardly mattered. Baghdadi now controlled the
best-armed, most experienced fighters in the Syrian opposition. And
they were about to become stronger still.
—
Syria’s eastern provincial capital, Raqqa, is a shabby river town with
a long history of being overrun by foreign invaders. The Greeks were
first, followed by Romans, Persians, Mongols, and Ottomans, among
others. Then it was the jihadists’ turn. From midspring to the early
summer of 2013, a succession of ISIS convoys rolled into the city in
their white pickups, gradually kicking out the last of the Free Syrian
Army defenders and setting up the terrorist group’s official Syrian
headquarters. Raqqa’s 220,000 citizens would become the first
urban population to experience life in a city fully under the control of
the Islamic State.
The newcomers moved quickly, once the city was secure, to
establish the new order. A huge ISIS banner was draped around the
clock tower in al-Jalaa Square—renamed Freedom Square—and the
city’s new rulers began promulgating lists of behaviors that would no
longer be tolerated.
Secretly snapping photos of ISIS’s edicts was a brave young man
who called himself Abu Ibrahim. Together with a pair of accomplices,
he faithfully documented Raqqa’s transformation over the next
eighteen months, in photographs and video recordings he would take
surreptitiously and post to the Web so all the world could see.
Abu Ibrahim vividly remembered ISIS’s triumphant entry into the
city. The prelude was a week of heavy street fighting that left scores
of bodies lying in the streets and most of the city’s civilians trapped
in their houses, afraid to venture out for fear of being hit by sniper
fire. Stores and bakeries closed, and many families ran out of food.
“If you had bread, it was like having a million dollars,” he recalled.
“These were the hardest days.” The fighting gradually waned, as
militiamen opposed to ISIS either fled or switched sides. Then, all at
once, columns of foreign fighters—mostly Iraqis, Abu Ibrahim later
learned—appeared in the streets. ISIS’s men raised their black flags
over the main government buildings and claimed Raqqa as the new
capital of the Islamic State.
“They walked around with their weapons, saying everything was
going to be good now,” he said. “They even began removing the
bodies that had been lying around in the streets.”
Many in Raqqa initially did not know what to make of the
newcomers, Abu Ibrahim said. Some were relieved at least to see the
fighting come to an end. Shops reopened and the city began to feel
safe again.
But then the executions started.
The first one witnessed by Abu Ibrahaim involved a young man
that ISIS commanders described as a criminal, though the man’s
offense was never made clear. The condemned man was forced to
stand in Raqqa’s main plaza, where his sentence was publicly read.
Then he was shot in the head as a small crowd looked on. Next, ISIS
soldiers tied the corpse’s arms to a plank, crucifixion style, and left it
to rot in the square for three days.
A second crucifixion followed a few days later. Then came a group
execution, in which ISIS soldiers killed seven men and teens in the
same square. Some appeared to be stragglers from defeated rival
militias, though several were smooth-faced boys. This time the
soldiers cut the heads from the corpses and displayed them on fence
posts outside a city park.
“People were frightened, which is what they wanted,” Abu Ibrahim
said. “They wanted everyone to be terrified of them.”
Having thus announced themselves to the city, Raqqa’s new
overseers began moving to eliminate obvious challenges to their
authority. The city’s three churches were padlocked, and crosses and
other Christian symbols were hacked down or covered up. A Shiite
mosque with an elegant turquoise dome was blown to pieces.
Cigarettes and alcohol—symbols of Western corruption—were
dumped into piles and burned. Then ISIS moved to create symbols of
its own, starting with a converted police station that was painted
black, from top to bottom, and repurposed as an administration
building and Sharia court that would decide matters of crime and
punishment. Suddenly Raqqa citizens were subject to a bewildering
array of new regulations, enforced by the ISIS-appointed Hisbah, or
religious police, who were free to interpret the laws as they saw fit.
The city’s new rules began with mandatory religious observances—
all shopkeepers were required to close for daily prayers, for instance
—and expanded to include personal dress and behavior. ISIS banned
not only smoking and drinking but also Western music and displays
of Western clothing in shop windows. Women could leave their
houses only if fully covered, and even then, any outing risked a
humiliating inspection by police to ensure that the woman’s abaya
was sufficiently opaque and loose fitting, to avoid revealing any hint
of the wearer’s physical form.
Punishment for violating ISIS’s rules could range from a public
scolding or fine to floggings and worse. One unmarried couple was
beaten for sitting together on a park bench. Another man was
publicly flogged because he married a divorced woman before the
mandatory three-month waiting period had ended. Any infraction
carried an implicit threat of summary execution, which at times
seemed to be carried out almost on a whim, Abu Ibrahim said.
“Sometimes a week or two will go by with no executions, and then
suddenly there will be five at once,” he said. “For ordinary people,
there are fines and fees for everything: for running a business, for
parking your car, for picking up your trash. They take your money
and they use it to pay the salaries of the foreign fighters. And people
are afraid to do anything because of the risk of execution.”
But most troubling to Abu Ibrahim was how Raqqa’s occupiers
treated the city’s children. Schools were kept shuttered for months
after ISIS seized power, and when they finally reopened, everything
had changed. The old textbooks and curricula—the “books of the
infidels,” ISIS called them—had been tossed out, replaced by
religious training. Meanwhile, the city’s hundreds of orphaned
children and teens were moved to military camps to learn to shoot
rifles and drive suicide trucks. Abu Ibrahim would sometimes see the
young ISIS recruits in military convoys, carrying guns and wearing
oversized uniforms.
“Some are boys younger than sixteen,” he said. “When the schools
were closed there was nothing for them to do. They see these tough
guys with their Kalashnikovs and it affects them. They want to be
part of it.”
Indeed, ISIS would frequently boast about its youth camps,
offering virtual tours on social media of facilities with names such as
“al-Zarqawi Camp.” Photographs and videos posted to Twitter
showed prepubescent boys in military garb, firing weapons and
practicing maneuvers. Other images depicted young trainees being
directed to execute prisoners with gunshots to the head.
To Abu Ibrahim, the camps were ISIS’s attempt at ensuring the
movement’s survival and hedging against the possibility of future
military setbacks. The organization was investing in the creation of
cadres of fanatical young followers willing to kill others or sacrifice
their own lives if ordered to do so. “They are being brainwashed,”
Abu Ibrahim said of the ISIS youths, “to create an army of loyal
followers for the future.”
Meanwhile, ISIS was doing fine with the army it already had. A few
months after announcing its entry into Syria, the Islamic State’s
ranks had swollen to nearly ten thousand fighters, including the bulk
of the foreign volunteers streaming into Syria from fifty countries
around the world. Rival rebel groups, from the al-Nusra Front to the
secular Free Syrian Army, complained that ISIS was winning the
competition for recruits—not just because it could afford to pay
bigger salaries, but also because it claimed to be fighting for
something bigger than Syria.
The group’s Twitter and Facebook pages featured daily
testimonials from volunteers from Europe, North Africa, and the
Middle East touting the many rewards of jihad, both heavenly and
temporal. An August 2013 Twitter posting by a Syrian jihadist who
called himself Nasruddin al-Shami said he felt he had joined a
“global gathering” when he signed up for ISIS. “I chose to be a
soldier under this banner, because I found it to be Arab and non-
Arab,” he wrote. “I found people from the Peninsula, the Islamic
Maghreb, the Egyptians, and the Iraqis. I met people from the Levant
and Turkey. I met French, British, and Pakistanis. The list is long.
They were all beloved brothers whose concern is to support the
religion.”
A British ISIS recruit told a British broadcaster, “It’s actually quite
fun.
“What’s that [video] game called—‘Call of Duty’?—It’s like that,” he
said, “but really, you know, 3-D. You can see everything’s happening
in front of you. It’s real. You know what I mean?”
In Raqqa’s downtown markets, bearded, rifle-toting foreigners
seemed at times to outnumber locals as the ISIS occupation took on
a look of permanence. The group’s coffers were fattening quickly,
between the fees and bribes assessed to businesses and the sale of
more than forty thousand barrels of crude oil per day from oil wells
captured by ISIS in its march across the Syrian desert. The jihadists
who had been so anxious to capture Raqqa a few months earlier
seemed in no hurry now to push on to further conquests, Abu
Ibrahim noted. The Islamic State’s men would turn aggressive
whenever there were punishments to mete out, but between
executions and floggings, Abu Ibrahim would see them relaxing in
restaurants, gawking at Western Web sites in Internet cafés, or
buying knockoff Viagra from the drugstores.
For the occupiers, the Islamic State had finally arrived, at least in
miniature. The men with the guns seemed happy with the state of
affairs, because they were running the place. For everyone else in
Raqqa, Abu Ibrahim wrote, all that was left was the “culture of
backwardness and terror, after extinguishing the light of the mind.”
—
In April 2013, as Baghdadi was preparing to announce his
restructuring, Mouaz Moustafa slipped into the country, as he had
done many times, through a hole in the chain-link border fence of
Hatay Province in southern Turkey. He moved easily—this corner of
far-northern Syria had been liberated from Assad for nearly a year—
and made his way by foot to Khirbet al-Joz, a farming village that
had become a kind of in-country base for his Syrian Emergency Task
Force. The former congressional aide and his team had made a
project of restoring basic services in the town, still scarred by months
of fighting and looting. After helping reestablish the police
department, he had returned to meet with locals interested in setting
up a magistrate’s office to settle minor disputes. He never dreamed
who else would show up.
At the meeting was a well-dressed lawyer who introduced himself
as Muhammad. The man explained that he was representing a client
with an interest in the administration of justice in post-Assad Syria.
Pressed, he identified the group that had hired him.
“I’m here to represent the Islamic State,” he said.
Everyone in the room was floored, from the American visitors to
the Christian and Muslim clerics who had unofficially presided over
the town since the government forces pulled out.
“It was shocking,” Moustafa said. “He was clean-shaven, maybe
fifty, wearing a suit. We stopped in our tracks, because we didn’t
even know how to carry on.”
ISIS’s man at the meeting had little else to say, and appeared to be
mostly listening and taking notes. At one point he interjected that his
client tended to prefer Sharia law over secular legal codes.
“We didn’t get into a discussion,” Moustafa said, “because we
didn’t want him there.”
The man eventually left, but his presence cast a pall. Here was
evidence not only of ISIS’s presence in Syria, but also of the group’s
intention to insinuate itself into governance at a microscopic level.
For Moustafa, now two years into his job and more deeply engaged
in Syria’s struggle than he could ever have imagined, it was another
ominous turn. By early 2013, Moustafa had all but despaired of the
possibility of a major U.S. intervention in the conflict. Now he spent
most of his time looking for practical ways to improve the lives of
Syrians in areas of the country outside Assad’s control. But for every
forward step, there were steps back: infighting among rebel groups;
widespread corruption, sometimes fueled by suitcases of cash from
Arab governments; a growing sectarian divide that hampered
cooperation and sometimes led to reprisal killings. Soon the ISIS
problem—the presence of heavily armed extremists at war with
everyone else, their replacement of existing courts and police
departments with their own system of justice—would eclipse all
others, further complicating the efforts by moderate rebels to win
Western support for the opposition.
Moustafa’s perspective on Syria’s unraveling now came at close
range. He traveled to Syria constantly, often venturing within a few
miles of the ever-changing front lines. He spoke and met regularly
with rebel commanders, part of a growing personal network that also
included journalists, international relief workers, foreign diplomats,
and wealthy donors. After the U.S. Embassy in Damascus closed,
Moustafa’s reports from Syria became a useful window into parts of
the country the Americans could no longer monitor directly. When
allegations surfaced that spring about a small-scale use of chemical
weapons by the Assad regime, Moustafa was asked if members of his
network could help obtain blood and tissue samples for testing. They
could, and did.
In May 2013, Moustafa stood next to Senator John McCain when
the Arizona Republican made a surprise visit to Syria to meet rebel
commanders there. McCain was escorted through a rebel-controlled
border crossing and then to a small building that served as a
command center for the Free Syrian Army. There, he sat grim-faced
as a dozen rebel commanders took turns complaining about
Washington’s refusal to supply them with weapons, particularly
antiaircraft missiles needed to stop Assad’s bombing of civilian
enclaves. In lieu of the guns and bombs they needed, the militias
were receiving surplus army rations—the ubiquitous MREs, or meals
ready to eat, in their bland plastic packaging.
“Am I supposed to throw pizzas at those airplanes?” one of the
officers asked. Later, McCain would learn that all but two of the
twelve officers he met had died in combat.
“We need to have a game-changing action,” McCain told a TV
interviewer after returning home. “No American boots on the
ground, [but] establish a safe zone, and protect it and supply
weapons to the right people in Syria who are fighting for obviously
the things we believe in.”
But at the White House, the president stood firm, insisting that
shoveling more weapons into Syria would only make matters worse.
“I don’t think anybody in the region…would think that U.S. unilateral
actions, in and of themselves, would bring about a better outcome,”
Obama told a news conference. The only trigger for a U.S. military
response, he said, would be if Assad used chemical weapons,
“something that the civilized world has recognized should be out of
bounds.”
There would be no help from Washington, Moustafa told his
exasperated friends. The conflict, now in its second year, would
continue as before, with the armies deadlocked while the suffering of
civilians grew steadily worse. The biggest change was that risk of
violent death now came from multiple sides at once. Two Syrians
employed in the relief effort were captured by Assad’s forces and
later killed. Then two other workers, both of them young men whom
Moustafa knew well, disappeared after being stopped at an ISIS
checkpoint. Task-force members later learned that the militants had
found the workers’ laptops, confirming their employment with a
Western relief organization. The two were executed, their bodies
dumped into a pit.
In late summer, the Assad regime’s chemical-weapons attack on
civilians in Ghouta, a Damascus suburb, briefly raised expectations
of a Western military response. After U.S. intelligence agencies
released evidence showing that Assad’s army had fired canisters of
sarin gas into residential neighborhoods on August 21, Obama
signaled his intention to punish Assad for crossing America’s one
clear “red line.” Yet, despite widespread outrage over the deaths, the
White House could not muster the political support for a military
strike. Congress blocked a vote on a resolution authorizing air strikes
against Assad, and the Parliament in Britain—a country presumed to
be a key ally in any military campaign—rejected a similar proposal by
Prime Minister David Cameron’s Tory government. President
Obama managed to secure a deal, with Russia’s help, to remove all
chemical weapons from Syrian territory, and the prospect of military
intervention was again pushed aside.
Among Syria’s opposition leaders, the collapse, in their view, of
Western resolve after the Ghouta attack was a tougher psychological
blow than the chemical attacks themselves, Moustafa said. Some
rebel groups that had previously aligned themselves with the
moderate Free Syrian Army simply gave up and joined the Islamists,
who at least paid better salaries.
“People had been ecstatic when they believed the U.S. was finally
going to act,” Moustafa said. “It was one of those moments when
everyone remembers exactly where they were. The regime was
scared. We were hearing reports of people fleeing Damascus. Even
the idea of bombs falling didn’t cause concern. It was, like, ‘Thank
God. Even if we die in the bombings, at least now things will change.’
“And then, when nothing happened—that was the end,” he said.
“There was no more hope after that.”
—
Washington’s disarray over the chemical strikes looked even worse
from the inside. Syria’s “wicked problem,” as Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton famously called it, had split the National Security
Council and was now creating casualties among the president’s
senior advisers.
Frederic C. Hof, the senior diplomat who helped coordinate the
administration’s response to Syria, resigned in frustration in late
- Now Robert S. Ford, the exiled ambassador to Damascus, was
beginning to consider quitting.
Ford had been waging a fruitless battle inside the administration,
pushing for concrete measures to strengthen the moderate
opposition as a counterweight to the Islamists, who were controlling
about a quarter of Syria’s territory, including border crossings into
Iraq and Turkey. He had supported air strikes after Assad’s chemical
attack on Ghouta in August 2013, and when those failed to
materialize, he pushed for direct support to well-known and carefully
vetted moderate militias.
“Increase the assistance. Do more,” he urged. Despite White House
promises, after the chemical attack, to speed up CIA training for
rebels in Jordan and southern Turkey, the effort was too small and
too slow to make a difference. “We really aren’t doing anything,” he
said.
Making matters worse, Ford was being regularly summoned to
Capitol Hill to defend the administration’s policies in congressional
hearings. Sensing a political opportunity, Republicans hurled insults
at Ford in televised hearings, seeking to make the diplomat a symbol
for White House ineptitude in managing the crisis. At one hearing,
McCain questioned Ford’s grasp of the Syrian crisis and suggested
that the diplomat was willing to accept Assad’s continued butchery of
his own people.
“It seems like that is a satisfactory outcome to you,” McCain said.
Ford kept calm, but inside he was furious.
“Do I need this?” he thought.
The reality, as Ford understood it, was that Congress was just as
divided over what to do as the administration. Hawks such as
McCain wanted to arm the rebels, but other Republicans favored
military support only for groups that were fighting ISIS. Still other
lawmakers—Republicans and Democrats—were leery of any U.S.
involvement, reflecting an opinion held by large majorities of the
American electorate.
Ford was ready to quit by the fall of 2013, though he was
persuaded by State Department colleagues to stay on for another six
months. When he finally turned in his resignation letter in early
2014, no one tried to stop him. By then, his efforts within the
administration seemed to him increasingly futile, and the highly
partisan, highly personalized attacks from Congress had drained his
resolve to continue trying.
“I don’t mind fighting, but when my integrity is being challenged
by people who don’t even know what’s going on—it’s ridiculous,” he
said.
Ford’s resignation was officially announced on February 28, 2014.
Days later, McCain asked the ambassador to stop by his office so he
could personally thank him for his service.
Ford considered the request for a moment, then politely relayed
his reply: “No.”
22
“This is a tribal revolution”
In the decade since the group’s founding, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s
jihadist followers had been called terrorists, insurgents, and Islamist
militants. Now they were a full-fledged army. In the late spring of
2014, the troops of the Islamic State surged across western Iraq and
into the consciousness of millions of people around the world.
Moving with remarkable speed, ISIS vanquished four Iraqi army
divisions, overran at least a half-dozen military installations,
including western Iraq’s largest, and seized control of nearly a third
of Iraq’s territory.
Analysts and pundits described the ISIS blitz as sudden and
surprising, a fierce desert storm that appeared out of thin air. But it
was hardly that. The ISIS conquest of June 2014 was a carefully
planned, well-telegraphed act, aided substantially by Iraqis who had
no part in ISIS and no interest in living under Sharia law. In the end,
the movement’s greatest military success was less a statement of
ISIS’s prowess than a reflection of the same deep divides that had
roiled Iraq since the U.S. invasion in 2003.
At the root of the spring’s dramatic events was a conflict between
Iraq’s Shiite government and one Sunni tribe, the Dulaims. It
happened to be the familial clan of Zaydan al-Jabiri, the Ramadi
sheikh and rancher who had been caught up in the fight against
Zarqawi nearly a decade earlier. Zaydan had first watched his fellow
tribesmen take up arms against the Americans in 2004, amid soaring
anger over the occupation. He had then been a key participant in the
anti-Zarqawi backlash known as the Anbar Awakening, when tribal
militias helped drive insurgents out of their villages. Now the
currents had shifted again, and Zaydan would watch with approval as
his entire tribe rose up against an Iraqi government that many
Dulaims saw as a greater threat than Zarqawi had ever been.
Zaydan was now fifty, thicker around the middle, but with the
same mane of black hair, a successful businessman who wore a
tailored suit as comfortably as the dishdasha and keffiyeh he wore to
more traditional engagements. He had three wives, and a brick house
that could have been plucked out of a tony subdivision in suburban
San Diego. But beginning around 2010, Zaydan had come to view
Iraq’s government as at war with Sunnis like himself. The country’s
minority Sunnis had ruled Iraq up until the U.S. invasion, when
power was handed to Shiites. Now, with American troops out of the
way, the score settling had begun in earnest, or so it seemed to the
Dulaims. It was objectively true that Sunnis had lost positions of
power in the government and armed services, and there were
numerous documented cases in which Shiite conscripts had
brutalized Sunnis in their homes in the guise of rooting out
terrorism. In Zaydan’s mind, it was all part of an Iranian-inspired
plan to ensure that Iraq never again posed a threat to Tehran’s
interests in the region.
“The ones who are leading now were thieves, bandits, and
sectarian religious parties,” Zaydan said, referring to the cohort in
power since Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s narrow election in
2010. “Even with all the bad things the Americans did in Anbar, they
didn’t kill people in mosques, and they respected our religion. Those
who are with the Iranians do not. They want to get rid of everything
called ‘Sunni.’ I’m not saying the Americans were great, but they
were better than these.”
Then, beginning in late 2012, Sunni relations with the central
government turned sharply worse. On December 21, government
security forces raided the home of Rafi al-Issawi, a popular Sunni
politician and a former Iraqi finance minister who had been
outspoken in his criticism of the Maliki government. Thousands of
Dulaims took to the streets in Fallujah, some of them carrying
banners that read “Resistance Is Still in Our Veins.” The rally
eventually grew into a weekly pan-Sunni protest that spread to
multiple cities and continued for month after month.
After more than a year of such protests, Maliki had finally had
enough. On December 30, 2013, he sent security forces into Ramadi
to shut down the demonstrations and break up a tent city that had
sprouted in one of the city’s plazas. Clashes broke out, and on New
Year’s Day 2014, protesters set fire to four Ramadi police stations.
On January 2, rioting spread to neighboring Fallujah. On January 3,
a convoy of armed ISIS militants rolled into town. The jihadists
joined tribal militias in street battles with outmatched police and
troops, inflicting more than one hundred casualties. Finally, on
January 4, the remnants of Fallujah’s government evacuated the
town, and Islamic fighters raised the black flag of ISIS over the city’s
administration building.
The Dulaimi-ISIS alliance quickly drew support from other Sunni
tribes as well as from a shadowy organization of former Baathists
known as the Naqshbandi Order. The Sunni pact waged seesaw
battles with army troops for several weeks for control of Ramadi and
five other cities, but an uneasy truce settled over Fallujah, with ISIS
firmly in charge of the center of town. It was the first time the
terrorist group could officially claim an Iraqi city as its own.
ISIS seized the moment to fire off a stream of propaganda images
on Twitter, showing its victorious troops parading around the center
of the same city from which U.S. marines had ousted Zarqawi’s men
a decade earlier. Among the fighters posing for photographs was Abu
Wahib al-Dulaimi, the flamboyant, publicity-obsessed ISIS
commander for Anbar Province who had shot the three Syrian truck
drivers on an Anbar highway the previous spring. In one frame, he
grimaces, rifle in hand, next to a burning police car, wearing a black
overcoat and boots like a Western gunslinger. In another, he walks
through one of the captured police stations carrying a stack of files,
like some kind of doomsday office clerk. Iraqis who saw the images
might have noticed the familiar last name: Abu Wahib’s surname
identifies him as a member of the Dulaim tribe, making him a
kinsman to the men who had organized the Fallujah protests.
Enemies before, they were now officially on the same side.
At the White House, President Obama’s security advisers viewed
the same images with dismay. Administration officials quickly
announced plans to speed up the delivery of promised military aid to
the Maliki government, including new Hellfire missiles. Security for
Iraqis was Maliki’s problem now—he had insisted on it—but a
terrorist takeover of an Iraqi city could not be allowed to stand.
To Zaydan, however, as for many other Sunnis, the revolt was
purely an internal affair, one the Americans and the Baghdad
government had completely misread, again.
“This is a tribal revolution,” Ali Hatim al-Suleiman, the leader of
the Dulaim tribe, told the London-based Arabic-language newspaper
Asharq Al-Awsat.
“Iraqi spring,” explained Tariq al-Hashimi, the Sunni politician
and friend of the U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, speaking
from exile in Turkey after Maliki tried to arrest him.
The Sunnis candidly acknowledged that the tribes had handed ISIS
the keys to Anbar Province, but only as a temporary measure. ISIS
was merely providing the additional firepower needed to help Sunnis
assert long-sought independence from Iraq’s abusive central
government, they said. Besides, these jihadists were Sunni patriots,
not the death-obsessed criminals who had run the organization
during Zarqawi’s time.
“They changed,” Zaydan said of the group. “Their leadership
became Iraqi, and their program changed completely. The
government claims that Baghdadi is a terrorist, but he’s not a
terrorist. He’s defending fifteen million Sunnis. He’s leading the
battle against the Persians.”
It was true that Zarqawi also had gotten a pass when he burst into
Anbar Province with his small band of Sunni militants after the U.S.
invasion. Zarqawi also had been a man of the tribe, but a different
tribe. Baghdadi, by contrast, was a true Iraqi, raised in Samarra,
Zaydan noted. He could be controlled.
“He will not dare talk about Sharia here, because he knows the
tribes will not tolerate it,” Zaydan said. “These people learned their
lesson. They won’t try the same things they did last time.”
In fact, ISIS already was moving to settle scores in Anbar
neighborhoods that had welcomed the group’s arrival. Abdalrazzaq
al-Suleiman, a Sunni tribal sheikh and one of Zaydan’s Ramadi
neighbors, happened to be away on business when a truck filled with
black-clad fighters drove up to his farm. The jihadists shot several of
Suleiman’s bodyguards, destroyed his cars, and then leveled his
house with explosive charges. Suleiman’s offense: Eight years earlier
he had been a leader of the Anbar Awakening movement that
cooperated with U.S. troops in driving Zarqawi’s followers out of the
province.
“They stole everything that was in my house before they blew it
up,” said Suleiman, who moved to Jordan for safety. “It was my duty
and honor to work with the Americans as a tribal leader fighting
terrorism. But now it feels like we’ve been abandoned. We were left
in the middle of the road.”
—
On February 11, 2014, two of America’s top intelligence officials
walked into a Senate hearing room to deliver what is traditionally
one of the dreariest presentations of the congressional year: the
catalogue of global woes known as the “Annual Threat Assessment.”
This one would be exceptionally grim. The director of national
intelligence, James Clapper, and the chief of the Defense Intelligence
Agency, General Michael Flynn, outlined emerging perils from a
multitude of sources, including cyber-terrorism, a newly aggressive
Russia, North Korean nuclear ambitions, global pandemics, and a
potential calamitous unraveling of government authority throughout
the Middle East and North Africa. Then, when the topic turned to
Syria and ISIS, Flynn made a startling prediction.
“ISIL probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to
exhibit its strength in 2014,” Flynn said, using the federal
government’s preferred acronym for the terrorist group in his
testimony. Black flags were already flying over Fallujah, he said, and
the takeover of that city would likely be repeated elsewhere,
demonstrating the Islamists’ growing strength and “ability to
concurrently maintain multiple safe havens.”
Flynn used the careful language appropriate to a congressional
hearing, but his private assessment of the situation was even more
dire. He had gone up against the same terrorist organization a
decade earlier, and he understood ISIS’s capabilities better than
most.
A former chief of intelligence for General Stanley McChrystal,
Flynn had helped lead the hunt for Zarqawi in Iraq. He recognized in
ISIS the same familiar ideology and tactics. After the prison breaks
the previous year, he even recognized many of the names.
“These are children of Zarqawi,” Flynn said. “We were able to
capture many of the mid-to-high level commanders in the eighteen
months after Zarqawi’s death. The majority were Iraqis, many of
them former military guys who were put in the prison system.
They’re all out now.”
But ISIS also was clearly learning and adapting, gaining new
capabilities under Baghdadi’s oversight, Flynn explained. Baghdadi
was a more careful planner, and he was willing to be both patient and
strategic in building alliances and support networks. In short, ISIS’s
recent gains in Iraq had been no accident.
“They got better because they saw how they were defeated,” Flynn
said. “Zarqawi was trying to create a civil war immediately to turn
the situation in Iraq to his advantage. But the one big mistake he
made was that he did not gain enough favor with the tribes in Anbar
Province. He stole authority from them and then really abused it,
because he was a vicious guy. This new crowd realizes that and
they’re operating differently.”
Slowly, Baghdadi had repaired relations with the Sunni tribes,
Flynn said, echoing the assessment made by Zaydan and other
tribesmen. The ISIS leader exploited Syria’s uprising to rebuild his
finances while bringing in fresh recruits and a renewed sense of
purpose. And he also had built an organizational structure made up
of subject experts in fields as diverse as housing and transportation
and strategic messaging.
“This current crowd, they are thinking long term,” Flynn said.
“They see this as a generational effort.”
They were also on the move. Intelligence agencies were spotting
unmistakable signs of mobilization for an ISIS offensive. But in
which direction? Toward Baghdad, or Damascus?
U.S. intelligence agencies, watching the preparations under way by
satellites and other remote systems, became convinced that ISIS was
planning a push into the Iraqi heartland, and intended eventually to
attack Baghdad itself. CIA analysts dutifully filed their reports, which
made their way to the director’s office and then to the White House.
Any ISIS force that crossed the border, the reports warned, would
face a weakened Iraqi army that had fought poorly against insurgents
in Fallujah and elsewhere. Just how weakened was hard to tell; after
the last U.S. troops left the country, the Maliki government sharply
curtailed cooperation with U.S. intelligence agencies.
Yet no one imagined the Iraqi meltdown that would occur in the
following weeks, acknowledged a senior intelligence official who
watched the events unfold. “Though U.S. intelligence analysts
provided ample warning about the ISF’s [Iraqi Security Force’s]
troubles,” the official said, “it was difficult for anybody to foresee the
rapid ISF collapse.”
—
ISIS’s grand offensive began with an attack on its leader’s hometown.
Just after midnight on June 5, 2014, raiding parties blew up a police
station south of the city of Samarra, home to generations of
Baghdadi’s al-Badri clan. Then, a few hours later, about 150 fighters
roared into town on pickup trucks mounted with antiaircraft guns.
The jihadists captured Samarra’s main municipal building and the
city’s university, and then began to engage police who moved into
defensive positions around the al-Askari Mosque, the ancient edifice
whose iconic gold dome had been blown up by Zarqawi eight years
earlier. The Iraqi army dispatched reinforcements from Baghdad,
and the invaders soon pulled back, but already the fighting had
spread to a half-dozen other towns along the highway that ran from
Fallujah to the Syrian border.
Meanwhile, the main ISIS column, about fifteen hundred men,
moved into position on the outskirts of Mosul. Protecting the ancient
city and its 1.8 million people was an Iraqi force that on paper
numbered twenty-five thousand. Its real strength was closer to ten
thousand, the operational commander of Mosul’s Nineveh Province
later acknowledged; the rest had dropped out through desertions or
were simply no-show jobs on the police department’s payrolls,
Lieutenant General Mahdi al-Gharawi told Reuters in the battle’s
aftermath. The city’s remaining defenders were ill-supplied, since
much of the defenders’ armor and heavy weapons had been ordered
to the south, to help retake Ramadi and other Anbar Province towns
during the January fighting.
“In my entire battalion we have one machine gun,” a Mosul
battalion commander, Colonel Dhiyab Ahmed al-Assi al-Obeidi, told
the news service. By contrast, when ISIS began pouring into his
district before dawn on June 6, “in each pickup they had one,” he
said.
A first column of invaders raced into the city’s northernmost
Tammoz neighborhood in Humvees and pickup trucks, pouring
machine-gun fire into the Iraqi army’s defensive front line. On cue,
ISIS cells based inside the city also opened up with grenades and
sniper fire. The defenders fell back; within hours, columns of ISIS
trucks had advanced to within a few blocks of the Mosul Hotel,
where Gharawi had set up his command center.
At 4:30 p.m. came the decisive blow. A large water truck packed
with explosives barreled into the hotel, exploding in flames and
killing or injuring many of the Iraqi force’s senior officers.
“The sound shook the whole of Mosul,” said Obeidi, whose leg was
torn open by the blast.
The rest of the army’s defenses collapsed soon after that. By
evening, police and army troops were discarding their uniforms and
fleeing the battlefield in civilian clothes. Those who were caught were
lined up in groups and shot.
By noon on June 10, just four days after the start of the offensive,
the jihadists controlled Mosul’s airport and most of the town’s
central district. They emptied the cash reserves from downtown
banks and stripped an Iraqi military base of millions of dollars’
worth of U.S.-made weapons and equipment. Then they seized
control of Mosul’s main prison, releasing the Sunni inmates and
summarily executing the others—about 670 Shiites, Kurds, and
Christians. By the end of the day, Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city,
was fully under ISIS’s control.
Iraq’s army eventually regrouped and launched a counteroffensive
that stopped ISIS from advancing into Baghdad, even as ISIS
continued to gain ground in other parts of the country. By late June,
the terrorist group’s total land holdings, from western Syria to
central Iraq, was greater than the areas of Israel and Lebanon
combined. The man who presided over this expanse now controlled
more than just real estate. He owned oil wells, refineries, hospitals,
universities, army bases, factories, and banks. Baghdadi’s holdings in
cash and financial instruments alone approached half a billion
dollars, analysts would later confirm.
There was as yet no real government in place. But in a very real
sense, the Islamists now had their state.
—
On July 4, 2014—a Friday, the Muslim day of prayer—Baghdadi
appeared with bodyguards in the prayer hall of Mosul’s Great
Mosque of al-Nuri, famous for its “hunchback” minaret, which bows
inward by several feet from the perpendicular. Local legend holds
that the tower’s crooked shape was caused by the Prophet
Muhammad himself, who passed overhead as he was ascending into
heaven.
Those who attended services that day might have perceived a
similar warping of the temporal order when the Islamic State’s chief
officer walked to the front of the mosque to declare the restoration of
the caliphate. ISIS had made a similar declaration a few days before,
but now Baghdadi was making it official, from the minbar of one of
Mosul’s most sacred sites.
The former Zarqawi disciple had clearly given much thought to his
first public appearance, for he infused each moment with symbolic
gestures sure to be recognized by the devout. Baghdadi wore a black
robe and turban, evoking the dress of Allah’s last prophet on the day
of his final sermon. He climbed the steps of the minbar slowly,
pausing at each one to emulate another of Muhammad’s habits. At
the top, as he waited to begin his sermon, he pulled from his pocket a
miswak, a carved wooden stick used for oral hygiene, and began
cleaning his teeth. Again the act deliberately invited comparison to
Muhammad, who, according to an ancient Hadith saying, advised
followers to “make a regular practice of miswak, for verily it is the
purification for the mouth and a means of the pleasure of the Lord.”
He finally faced the audience to deliver a formal declaration of
victory. The caliphate, sought by the movement’s leaders since
Zarqawi’s time, was at last real.
“As for your mujahedin brothers, Allah has bestowed upon them
the grace of victory and conquest, and enabled them, after many
years of jihad, patience, and fighting the enemies of Allah, and
granted them success and empowered them to achieve their goal,” he
said. “Therefore, they hastened to declare the caliphate and place an
imam, and this is a duty upon the Muslims—a duty that has been lost
for centuries and absent from the reality of the world.”
In the sermon, and in a separate audio address, Baghdadi claimed
to be less than eager to accept what he called “this heavy
responsibility.”
“I was placed as your caretaker, and I am not better than you,” he
said.
Yet he decreed that faithful Muslims throughout the world were to
obey him in all matters, as the head of the Islamic State and the
guarantor of a new order that would soon become accepted reality
for non-Muslims, whether they wished it or not.
“Know that today you are the defenders of the religion and the
guards of the land of Islam,” he said. “You will face tribulation and
epic battles. Verily, the best place for your blood to be spilled is on
the path to liberate the Muslim prisoners imprisoned behind the
walls of the idols.
“So prepare your arms, and supply yourselves with piety.
Persevere in reciting the Koran with comprehension of its meanings
and practice of its teachings,” Baghdadi said. “This is my advice to
you. If you hold to it, you will conquer Rome and own the world.”
His sermon finished, Baghdadi, the self-ordained caliph,
descended the minbar’s steps in the same cautious fashion. He
stopped briefly to pray, then marched out of the mosque with his
bodyguards, preparing to fight, and then, Allah willing, to rule.
—
On the June day when Mosul fell, Abu Haytham sat in his office,
fielding calls from harried deputies struggling to keep abreast of the
events. In the corner, a small television with the sound muted
replayed images of victorious ISIS fighters in an endless loop. Some
waved and grinned from the backs of pickup trucks; others walked
through Mosul’s main thoroughfares, past shuttered storefronts and
burning police vehicles. Black banners fluttered from car antennas
and makeshift flagpoles.
No one had foreseen such a rapid collapse of Iraq’s army, even
here, at a spy agency that prided itself on avoiding surprises. As he
stole glances at the silent screen, Abu Haytham’s eyes were
bloodshot, and his big hands vigorously worked a set of prayer beads.
This had been a stunningly quick turn of events. Yet the trajectory
had been apparent for some time.
“Unfortunately, from the beginning, there has been this potential,”
he said wearily.
He was a brigadier now, a senior officer in the counterterrorism
division, where he had spent nearly three decades. Always a serious
man, Abu Haytham had grown more somber with age, reflecting the
heavier burdens he shouldered. His tidy office was free of adornment
except for an ornate copy of the Koran and a photograph of a much
younger version of himself, flashing a rare grin and shaking hands
with the country’s king. An extra suit hung by the door for the days
when the workload prevented him from making it home at all.
There were many such days now. The Mukhabarat had been on
high alert since the beginning of the Syrian uprising, when the
security service had played cat-and-mouse with arms smugglers and
jihadi recruits trying to slip across the border. Now the jihadis
themselves controlled the border posts on the other side. Jordan
remained mostly quiet, for the moment, but there were worrying
signs. In the southern town of Ma’an, an Islamist hotbed not far from
the abandoned al-Jafr Prison, vandals sometimes spray-painted ISIS
slogans on buildings or left black flags planted in the town square.
There were no such displays in Amman, where the unraveling of the
neighboring states was viewed with increasing dread.
Some Iraqis, particularly the descendants of the East Bank tribes,
such as Zaydan al-Jabiri, had been willing to cut a deal with ISIS in
order to free themselves from repressive Shiite rule. But the Islamists
who seized control of Fallujah and Mosul turned out to be every bit
as brutal as their Raqqa counterparts. Captured Iraqi soldiers were
paraded before cameras and then gunned down in open pits.
Suspected apostates were murdered in the streets, and priceless
Babylonian artifacts—a source of cultural pride for generations of
Iraqis—were smashed into powder. Such acts were welcomed by
small numbers of religious conservatives whose views aligned with
those of the Islamists. But among the Iraqis who had welcomed the
Islamist guns, few were interested in Islamist rule. Now it was too
late to rescind the invitation.
Abu Haytham, himself a son of the tribe, understood the
resentments of Iraq’s Sunnis. And he was struck by how effectively
ISIS exploited them.
“There’s a snowball effect here,” he said. “It begins with so many
people being dissatisfied because they’re not represented within their
government.”
Daesh, or ISIS, “knew exactly how to make use of these feelings, to
benefit itself,” he said. “It has been going on now for twelve years,
since the very beginning of the Iraq conflict, in 2003.”
And not just in Iraq. Already, self-proclaimed ISIS “wilayats,” or
provinces, had announced themselves in countries beyond the
group’s birthplace. Soon there would be new chapters in Saudi
Arabia, Libya, Algeria, Nigeria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. In
each case, the Islamists promised freedom from tyrannical regimes
and the creation of a just society, ordered according to godly
principles. What they delivered instead was an armed dictatorship
defined by corruption, cruelty, and death.
There was nothing the Mukhabarat could do now to reverse that
history, or alter the many mistakes and missteps that had led to this
day. All that remained for the Jordanians was to strengthen their
own defenses against a virulent strain that jumped the country’s
borders years ago.
“Look how fruitful they have been,” Abu Haythan said, gesturing at
the images on the screen. “We worked so hard to stop them. They
sometimes get sick, but they never die.”
EPILOGUE
The spark that set Arab passions ablaze was lit not in Iraq, as Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi had supposed, but in a rubble-strewn lot in
eastern Syria. It happened on the cool, hazy morning of January 3,
2015, behind a bombed-out building in Raqqa, where the Islamic
State’s media unit had set up video cameras and a small metal cage.
At least two dozen extras in identical masks and uniforms took
their places, some forming a gauntlet and others pretending to
guard. Finally, the video’s featured player was led in. Muath al-
Kasasbeh, twenty-six, the Jordanian fighter pilot, now in a loose
orange tunic and pants, his hands unshackled, walked unescorted
through the mist-shrouded set as though wandering through his own
dream.
The first image of al-Kasasbeh since his capture on December 24
depicted a young man whose face was swollen and bruised, evidence
of a beating that had taken place sometime after he was seized.
Before being led onto the film set, he was made to sit before a camera
to tell his own story, or the parts of it that ISIS had wanted him to
tell.
“I am First Lieutenant Muath Safi Yusef al-Kasasbeh, Jordanian,
from Karak,” he began, “an officer in the Royal Jordanian Air Force.”
Al-Kasasbeh’s recorded account of his December 24 mission
mostly followed the actual events. An F-16 pilot with nearly three
years of experience, the Jordanian had been assigned to hit ISIS
targets inside a grid of coordinates that included the city of Raqqa.
His plane was part of an armada of Arab and Western aircraft that
had been bombing ISIS since September 2014, when President
Barack Obama launched an expanded air campaign in an attempt to
drive the terrorist group from its safe havens in Iraq and Syria.
Obama had ordered U.S. warplanes and drones into Iraq a few weeks
earlier to halt an ISIS advance that threatened Iraq’s Mosul Dam and
the Kurdish capital, Erbil. Then he announced a broader coalition
that included aircraft from Jordan and five other Arab states,
including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. “This
counterterrorism campaign will be waged through a steady,
relentless effort to take out [ISIS] wherever they exist,” Obama said
in a televised speech.
Al-Kasasbeh’s December 24 flight had been just another routine
bombing run in the service of this collective mission. The pilot was
closing in on his target, and had just nosed his fighter downward,
when his wingman spotted flames coming from the rear of his
aircraft. At almost the same instant, his cockpit display warned of
engine failure, and the jet began to yaw off course. He yanked on the
ejection handle and was blasted from the cockpit as the F-16
plummeted toward the Euphrates River.
“I bailed out, and fell in the river,” he said in the videotaped
interview.
There was no time for his fellow soldiers to attempt a rescue. Al-
Kasasbeh was still struggling to free himself from the ejection seat
when he was seized by a burly man with a black beard and knit cap.
“I am now a prisoner of the mujahideen,” he said.
ISIS wasted little time in exploiting its good fortune. Within nine
days of the crash—and around the time the haggling over a possible
prisoner exchange was getting under way—the group’s media unit
had roughed out a plan for the execution video they would make.
They found a suitable location on the edge of Raqqa, a few hundred
feet from the river, and they managed to secure a cage, a cube of thin
metal bars with an open floor the size of a large blanket. The crew set
up multiple cameras on tripods and parked a backhoe nearby with a
load of sand and rock. By the morning of January 3, everything was
ready.
The video was to be a professional production, far superior to the
jerky, homemade offerings from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi years earlier.
The final version includes a long, slickly produced preamble with
computer-generated graphics and a series of clips showing Jordan’s
King Abdullah II giving speeches and shaking hands with Obama. A
graphic animation depicts an F-16 jet breaking into pieces, which
then magically reassemble themselves into the Arabic script for the
video’s title, helpfully translated into awkward English: Healing the
Believer’s Chests.
The core of the propaganda film is a montage of video images of
the captured pilot juxtaposed with bodies of children and other
presumed bombing victims. A camera follows al-Kasasbeh as he
walks slowly along a row of masked ISIS fighters, his breath visible in
the January air. Then, suddenly, he is inside the cage, his head
bowed as though in prayer. The pilot’s orange tunic, dry in earlier
scenes, is now soaked with fuel.
A masked soldier—a subtitle identifies him as the leader of an ISIS
unit that had been bombed in one of the coalition’s air strikes—lights
a long torch and touches it to a trail of powder leading through the
metal bars. In seconds, al-Kasasbeh is engulfed in flames. He jumps
and flails, but there is no escape. At last he clasps both arms around
his face and sinks to his knees, all but obscured by the fire. Moments
later, his darkened form topples over, just before the backhoe
crushes the cage and pilot inside with a load of broken concrete and
dirt.
As a final flourish, the camera zooms in on a blackened hand
visible amid the rubble. Then, in the closing frames, where the film
credits normally run, the video shows photographs and names of
other Jordanian pilots and announces a bounty in gold coins for
anyone who finds and kills one of them.
“So—good tidings,” the narrator says, “to whoever supports his
religion and achieves a kill that will liberate him from hellfire.”
The grisly work was over by midmorning, except for the weeks of
studio editing needed to prepare the video for public release. Later
that day, and on nearly every day that followed, ISIS continued to
dangle the possibility of al-Kasasbeh’s release, if only the Jordanians
were willing to cut a deal.
—
It was not the first time ISIS had attempted to shock the world with
its savagery. Four months before al-Kasasbeh’s capture, the
videotaped beheading of kidnapped photojournalist James Foley
outraged Western governments and drove American support for a
military response against the group. Foley’s murder was quickly
followed by the killings of a Time magazine reporter, Steven Sotloff;
a former U.S. Army Ranger, Peter Kassig; and the British aid workers
David Haines and Alan Henning. Dozens of others would share their
fate, including captured Syrian and Lebanese soldiers, Kurdish
women, Iraqi videographers, and Japanese nationals. Libyan
jihadists who claimed allegiance to ISIS recorded the executions of
Christians in groups of twenty or more at a time.
Yet it was the death of the young pilot that sparked a change
among ordinary Arabs. From Jordan’s cosmopolitan capital to the
conservative Wahabi villages of Saudi Arabia came howls of
condemnation and rage. The beheading of prisoners, brutal though it
was, was specifically countenanced by the Koran and regularly
practiced by the Saudi government as an official means of execution.
But with the burning of a human being—and, in this case, a
practicing Sunni Muslim—the Islamic State had broken an ancient
taboo.
“Only God punishes by fire,” Salman al-Odah, the venerated Saudi
scholar and curator of the popular Web site Islam Today, said in a
Twitter posting. “Burning is an abominable crime rejected by Islamic
law regardless of its causes.”
Abdul Aziz al-Shaykh, the Saudi grand mufti, the country’s top
cleric and a jurist empowered to settle matters of law by religious
fatwa, said simply that ISIS was not Muslim: “They are enemies of
Islam.”
But the most striking repudiation of ISIS came from a man whose
teachings were long considered to be part of the radical fringe. Abu
Muhammad al-Maqdisi, the jihadist scholar who had been Zarqawi’s
personal mentor when the two were in prison, had grown
increasingly critical of Zarqawi’s offspring as they marauded across
Syria and western Iraq. Maqdisi, still regarded by Islamists as one of
the movement’s founders and pioneering theorists, had broken with
Zarqawi over the killing of Shiite innocents. Now he had begun
lodging similar protests with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi over his
butchering of aid workers such as Britain’s Alan Henning, killed
while in Syria on a mission to ease suffering.
“Henning worked with a charitable organization led by Muslims,”
Maqdisi noted in an open letter posted on his Web site. “Is it
reasonable that his reward is to be kidnapped and slaughtered?”
Maqdisi had lived in Jordan continuously since he and Zarqawi
parted ways after the prison amnesty in 1999. Though he had spent
much of that time in the Mukhabarat’s detention center, he had
continued to express his views on the issues of the day in open letters
and Web postings. Some Islamists would question whether Maqdisi’s
opinions were truly his own, or part of a script forced on him by the
Mukhabarat. But on at least one point, Maqdisi was fully consistent,
both in his writings and in private conversations with journalists and
friends: the killing of ordinary Muslims, whether religious pilgrims
or Sunni pilots captured in battle, was contrary to Islam.
Indeed, after al-Kasasbeh was captured, Maqdisi offered his
services as an intermediary, seeking to facilitate the exchange of the
pilot for Sajida al-Rishawi, the failed suicide bomber and death-row
prisoner. At one point in early 2015, he exchanged messages with a
man believed to be Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, Baghdadi’s personal
spokesman.
“I am concentrating now on trying to reach a deal that is of
legitimate interest to you,” Maqdisi said to Adnani in one of the
exchanges, later circulated on social-media accounts. If ISIS released
the pilot, Maqdisi said to Adnani, they could save the life of a “jihadi
sister” and prevent further damage to the group’s reputation among
Arabs.
ISIS’s response was to release the video of the pilot’s execution,
carried out a full month earlier. Maqdisi was furious.
“They lied to me, and swore solemn oaths,” he told the Jordanian
broadcaster Roya TV. “Then it became clear to me that they had
already killed the pilot.”
The break was now complete. Maqdisi, in the interview, proceeded
with a sweeping condemnation of the movement he had helped to
create. Alluding to his former pupil, Zarqawi, he denounced the
errant strain that “began this tradition of slaughter.”
“They do not understand conquests and victories except with
slaughtering and killing,” he said. “They slaughter many of their
opponents and they display it in front of television screens, until the
people are shocked and say, ‘Is this what Islam is?’ And we are forced
to defend Islam and make clear that this is not from Islam.”
Maqdisi was at home in Amman when he uttered the words;
Jordan’s government had released him from jail months earlier as
part of an undeclared truce between the monarchy and the cleric who
had once advocated the regime’s overthrow. On February 4, 2015,
the same day on which Rishawi was executed at Swaqa Prison,
Jordan’s state prosecutor formally dropped all pending charges
against Maqdisi. For the first time since his arrest with Zarqawi more
than two decades earlier, Maqdisi’s slate with the monarchy was
clean.
Prominent Muslim clerics and scholars had condemned previous
acts of terrorism, including the September 11, 2001, attacks on New
York and Washington. But the criticisms this time came with an
explicit acknowledgment, at the highest levels of the Arab world’s
political and religious institutions, that such statements were no
longer enough.
On January 1, 2015, a week after the Jordanian pilot’s capture,
Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi stood before a gathering of
Sunni Islam’s top religious authorities to call for an Islamic
reformation—a “revolution” that would reclaim the ancient religion
from fundamentalists and radicals who had perverted its central
message. The violence committed by groups such as ISIS and al-
Qaeda were but symptoms of a larger crisis that Muslims themselves
must address, he said.
“We must take a long, hard look at the situation we are in,” al-Sisi
told the gathering at Cairo’s al-Azhar University, the intellectual
center of Sunni Islam for more than a thousand years and the
institution that sets the standard for mainstream Muslims on
questions of theology and religious practice. “It is inconceivable that
the ideology we sanctify could make our entire nation a source of
concern, danger, killing and destruction all over the world.”
The problem, al-Sisi said, was not with Islam’s core beliefs but
with the “ideology—the body of ideas and texts that we have
sanctified over the course of centuries, to the point that challenging
them has become very difficult.”
The president drew applause from the room when he turned to
address the university’s spiritual leader directly—al-Azhar’s grand
imam, Ahmed el-Tayeb—calling on him to “revolutionize our
religion.”
“You bear responsibility before Allah,” al-Sisi said. “The world in
its entirety awaits your words. Because the Islamic nation is being
torn apart, destroyed, and is heading to perdition. We ourselves are
bringing it to perdition.”
Weeks later, after ISIS released the video of the pilot’s execution,
the grand imam delivered one of the harshest condemnations by a
prominent cleric. ISIS was not merely un-Islamic, he said; they were
“Satanic.” Al-Azhar would later carry out its own crackdown on
extremist clerics, removing imams who condoned violence.
Yet it was clear that the banishing of a few imams would not
diminish the Islamic State’s allure. Among ISIS’s thousands of
volunteers are young men whose motivation derives less from
theology than from a desire to fight authoritarian Arab regimes such
as al-Sisi’s. Rami Khouri, a Lebanese journalist and researcher who
has chronicled the rise and fall of Islamist movements over four
decades, noted that Zarqawi’s intense hatreds were shaped more by
prison than by any sermon or religious treatise.
“The radicalization of many of the actors who created al-Qaeda
and then ISIS happened in Arab jails,” Khouri said. “The
combination of American jets and Arab jails was the critical fulcrum
around which al-Qaeda and ISIS could germinate.”
—
The king had left Washington vowing that he was “going to war,” and
he did just that. Even before the royal plane landed in Amman,
waves of coalition fighter jets crossed into Syria in what officials
would later describe as the largest assault on ISIS positions since the
campaign began. The planes struck training camps, barracks, and
weapons depots, killing more than fifty militants, an after-action
assessment confirmed.
After touching down in Jordan, King Abdullah headed straight
into a meeting of his national security staff to plan the next phase. TV
cameras were allowed into the room to film the monarch, in a
traditional checkered keffiyeh in addition to his tailored suit, vowing
to exact revenge for the pilot’s death.
“We are waging this war to protect our faith, values and
humanitarian principles,” he said. As for ISIS—“these criminals,” he
called them—“they will be hit hard at the very center of their
strongholds.”
Outside, he was greeted by an extraordinary sight: thousands of
Jordanians lining the streets to cheer the king’s motorcade. These
were young crowds, very different from the bands of middle-aged
and older males who usually turn out for pro-government rallies, and
many of them lingered on the streets late in the evening, lighting
candles and carrying hand-lettered signs. Amman’s mosques and
Christian churches convened prayer services in the pilot’s memory.
More planes left their bases that day, and Jordanians cheered
them as well. As a small country that now faced a terrorist army on
two of its borders, Jordan had often downplayed its role in the anti-
ISIS coalition, hoping to avoid inciting an attack on the kingdom
itself. Now formerly restricted military bases allowed photographers
to film airmen painting messages on the munitions they were about
to drop. “Islam has nothing to do with ISIS,” read one note, scrawled
on the side of one of the bombs the air force would use in the attack.
The Defense Ministry itself, nearly always silent about military
missions, publicly announced the new bombing campaign with a
statement that bristled with defiance. With only a few planes, and
despite a heavy reliance on outsiders for everything from ordnance to
fuel, the entire country was banding together, “sacrificing everything
to defend the true values of Islam,” the Jordanian Armed Forces
said.
“This is the beginning,” the statement read. “You will know who
the Jordanians are!”
The second bombing wave was under way as Abdullah left Amman
for the southern town of Karak, home to the al-Kasasbeh clan for
generations. Another large crowd assembled to greet the motorcade
as it climbed the steep road leading to the nearby village of Ay, where
the king would join family members in mourning the pilot’s death.
Outside the family’s house, Abdullah embraced the pilot’s elderly
father, and the two turned to walk together. They clasped hands,
moving at the head of a long entourage, both wearing the distinctive
red-and-white keffiyehs that, to Jordanians, symbolize both the
ninety-three-year-old monarchy and tribal traditions far older than
the country called Jordan, older even than Islam itself.
As they walked, four Jordanian fighter jets appeared on the
horizon, returning from a bombing run north of the border. They
streaked past the pilot’s house in formation, then turned westward in
a wide arc, past the town of Karak, with its crumbling Crusader
castle, and over the ancient highway once used by Ikhwan horsemen
riding in from the east to murder and pillage. The jets scraped the
edges of Zarqa, the industrial town where a troubled youth named
Ahmad had grown into a dangerous radical who called himself
Zarqawi. Then they landed at the newly bustling Mwaffaq Air Base,
where jets from a half-dozen countries, most of them Muslim, were
being armed and fueled for strikes against the Islamic State.
The next morning, with fresh bombs attached to their wings, they
would head north to attack again.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The idea for this book about the origins of ISIS began taking shape
before there was a terrorist organization called by that name. It arose
in part from a long interest in Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose
personal story became more intriguing to me as I gathered material
for my earlier book, The Triple Agent. Later, while covering the Arab
Spring uprisings of 2011 for The Washington Post, I watched with
growing interest as Zarqawi’s terrorist movement—presumed by
many experts to be finished—began to assert itself in Syria’s civil
war. No one foresaw how the remnants of the old al-Qaeda in Iraq
would become a powerful army with territorial claims covering
hundreds of square miles. But as far back as early 2012, a few
American and Middle Eastern officials were seeing the contours of a
global terrorist threat in the making, and some candidly shared their
views in private conversations. It is with these individuals—several of
whom cannot be named as sources in these pages—that my debt of
gratitude begins. This book could not have been written without the
assistance of this small group of friends from the intelligence,
executive, and diplomatic spheres who, over two years of reporting,
generously and patiently shared their knowledge, insights,
suggestions, and expertise.
I also am particularly indebted to former U.S. Representative Jane
Harman and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
for providing critical support for this undertaking. My Wilson Center
fellowship afforded me the freedom to report and write without
distraction, in the company of gifted writers and inspiring thinkers
from around the world. In addition to Representative Harman, I am
particularly grateful to Haleh Esfandiari, Robert Litwak, Aaron
David Miller, David and Marina Ottaway, former fellow Robin
Wright, Andrew Selee, Arlyn Charles, and an extraordinarily
resourceful research staff. I also am thankful for the able assistance
of intern Craig Browne, an accomplished and energetic Middle East
scholar whose knowledge, hard work, and language skills proved to
be immensely valuable.
Among the more than two hundred sources interviewed for this
book, several were exceptionally generous with their time and
knowledge. I am particularly grateful to Nada Bakos, who took time
from writing her own memoir to share her recollections, as well as
Robert Richer, Michael Hayden, Robert S. Ford, Mouaz Moustafa,
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Leon E. Panetta,
Jeremy Bash, Michael Morell, Lawrence Wilkerson, Bruce Riedel,
William McCants, Juan Zarate, Bruce Hoffman, Hasan Abu Hanieh,
Joas Wagemaker, Marwan Muasher, Kael Weston, James
McLaughlin, Sam Faddis, Frederic C. Hof, Zaydan al-Jabiri,
Hudhaifa Azzam, James Jeffrey, Abdalrazzaq al-Suleiman, Jonathan
Greenhill, Samih Battikhi, Andrew Tabler, Jeffrey White, Abu Mutaz,
and Abdullah Abu Roman. Among the many who cannot be
identified by name are numerous current and former officials of the
Jordanian government and intelligence services, as well as current
and former U.S. officials who offered assistance with the
understanding that their names and agency affiliations would not be
revealed. Critical help in supplying jihadist video and audio material,
along with English translations, came from Steven Stalinsky of the
Middle East Media Research Institute, and Rita Katz, co-founder of
the SITE Intelligence Group. I am indebted to Jean-Charles Brisard
for sharing his archives from his excellent 2005 book, Zarqawi: The
New Face of al-Qaeda.
I could not have attempted this book without the generous support
of my employer, The Washington Post, and so many Post colleagues
and friends. I am especially indebted to Marty Baron, Cameron Barr,
Kevin Merida, and Peter Finn for their kindness in allowing me to
pursue this project. I also am particularly grateful to Jason Ukman,
Julie Tate, Souad Mekhennet, Taylor Luck, David Hoffman, Mary
Beth Sheridan, William Booth, Doug Frantz, David Ignatius, Kathryn
Weymouth, Donald Graham, Greg Miller, Ellen Nakashima, Adam
Goldman, Anne Gearan, Karen DeYoung, Craig Whitlock, Greg Jaffe,
Liz Sly, Doug Jehl, Karin Brulliard, Jeff Leen, Scott Wilson, Carol
Morello, Anne Kornblut, Walter Pincus, Rajiv Chandrasekaran,
Laurie McGinley, Kathryn Tolbert, Juliet Eilperin, Chris Mooney,
Darryl Fears, and Steven Mufson.
A very special thanks goes to Ranya Kadri, one of Jordan’s
journalistic treasures and an amazingly resourceful colleague,
translator, fixer, and occasional cook and hotelier during my Middle
East travels.
I am ever grateful to my literary agent, Gail Ross, for her
suggestions, faith, and canny advice, and to the entire staff of the
Ross-Yoon Literary Agency for logistical support. I’m indebted as
well to the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, including Daniel
Meyer, Nora Reichard, Michael Goldsmith, Bill Thomas, and Amelia
Zalcman. And I’m profoundly thankful for the assistance of my
remarkably talented editor, Kris Puopolo, who saw potential in my
vague idea for a book about a rising terrorist movement most
Americans in early 2013 had barely heard of. Any successes in these
pages are a tribute to her strong ideas, peerless editing skills, and
seemingly boundless patience.
I was helped immensely throughout this effort by the support and
encouragement of a number of friends and family members,
especially Paul Scicchitano, James Rosen, Connie Kondravy, Shyam
Madiraju, Gene and Denise Jordan, Will Jordan, Ed and Gena
Fisher, B. H. Warrick, and my parents, Rev. Eugene and Barbara
Warrick. Finally and most importantly, I would like to express my
love and gratitude to my children, Victoria and Andrew, for
tolerating the many absences, deferred vacations, and my general
distractedness, and to my wife, Maryanne, a full partner in this
enterprise who cheerfully served as an unpaid researcher, editor, and
sounding board as well as an indispensable source of strength and
steadiness throughout a challenging two years.
It’s good to be home.
NOTES
Prologue
“When will I be going home”: Researcher interview with Hussein al-Masri,
government-appointed lawyer for Rishawi.
If she cried or prayed: Author interview with a Jordanian official knowledgeable
about Rishawi’s prison time and the final days leading up to her execution.
from the pilot’s own cell phone: Author interview with a senior Jordanian official
directly knowledgeable about the prisoner exchange negotiations.
He could remember every detail: Author interview with a senior intelligence
captain involved in the investigation. A second Jordanian official confirmed
key details of the account.
“The black flags will come from the East”: The prophecy comes from the
collection of ancient texts known as the Hadith, specifically from “Kitab al-
Fitan,” or “Trials and Fierce Battles,” associated with Nu’aym Ibn Hamaad in
Islam’s second generation. For a discussion of the passage in English, see
http://www.islamweb.net/emainpage/index.php?page=showfatwa
&Option=FatwaId&Id=101399.
“The spark has been lit”: “Al-Zarqawi’s Message to the Fighters of Jihad in Iraq
on September 11, 2004,” Middle East Media Research Institute, Sept. 15, 2004,
http://www.memri.org/report/en/print1219.htm.
hardened into resentment: Author interviews with two senior Middle Eastern
officials familiar with the king’s views.
“Can we do anything more for you?”: Author interviews with Sen. John McCain
and a senior Middle Eastern official knowledgeable about the exchange.
Chapter 1
“There’s a terrible loneliness”: Quoted in Steven Caton, Lawrence of Arabia: A
Film’s Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
“a warning of what hell is like”: Cole Coonce, Infinity over Zero: Meditations on
Maximum Velocity (Famoso, Calif.: KeroseneBomb Publishing, 2002).
documented by United Nations investigators: See Manfred Nowak, “Report of
the Special Rapporteur on Torture,” UN General Assembly Human Rights
Council, 2007.
pressed into service as the doctor: Author interview with the physician Sabha,
who narrated his encounter with Zarqawi and the other inmates in al-Jafr.
“His radical conclusion”: Author interview with Hasan Abu Hanieh.
“He is very tough”: Author interview with Jordanian journalist Abdullah Abu
Roman, who spent time in prison with both men.
chiseled through weight lifting: Jean-Charles Brisard, The New Face of Al-
Qaeda (New York: Other Press, 2005), p. 49.
“We have come to die!”: Joas Wagemakers, “A Terrorist Organization That
Never Was: The Jordanian ‘Bay’at al-Imam’ Group,” Middle East Journal, Jan.
2014.
al-takfiris—“the excommunicators”: For more about the takfiri ideology, see
https://www.ctc.usma.edu/v2/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Vol1Iss7-
Art61.pdf.
“God willing, King Hussein will pardon you”: Abu Qadama Salih al-Hami,
“Knights of the Unfulfilled Duty: Zarqawi and the Afghan Jihad” (n.p., 2007).
“Oh, sister, how much you have suffered”: Will McCants, “Letter from Balqa
Jail,” Jihadica: Documenting the Global Jihad, June 22, 2008,
http://www.jihadica.com/letter-from-balqa-jail.
“He was not a fighter who lived between the bullets”: Wagemakers, “Terrorist
Organization That Never Was.”
called themselves Ikhwan: For a detailed accounting of the Ikhwan movement
and its relations with the House of Saud, see Robert Lacey, The Kingdom:
Arabia and the House of Sa’ud (New York: Avon, 1983).
Chapter 2
“I want to see you”: Abdullah, King of Jordan, Our Last Best Chance: The
Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril (New York: Viking, 2011).
“A cold sensation”: Ibid.
“We would soon be thrust into the spotlight”: Ibid.
They stood for hours: Ahmad Khatib, “Jordanians Line Amman’s Streets to Bid
Farewell,” Jordan Times, Feb. 9, 1999.
“This is God’s judgment”: Francesca Ciriaci, “Abdullah Proclaimed King,”
Jordan Times, Feb. 8, 1999.
“Out of habit, I looked around”: Abdullah, Our Last Best Chance.
Hussein survived at least eighteen assassination attempts: Avi Shlaim, Lion of
Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2008).
“I didn’t know helicopters could”: “King Hussein of Jordan,” ABC News
Nightline, originally broadcast Feb. 7, 1999.
“I have no idea how”: Abdullah, Our Last Best Chance.
“I’m no angel”: Ibid.
“the backbone of the country”: “Muslim Brotherhood Meets King,” Jordan
Times, March 19, 1999.
“Your Majesty, we are with you”: Ibid.
“Jordan is on the threshold”: Tareq Ayyoub, “The Amnesty Law: Complicated
and Incomplete,” Jordan Times, March 29, 1999.
Many months would pass: Abdullah, Our Last Best Chance.
“Why didn’t someone check?”: Author interview with an official present at the
time.
“Our friend has come back”: Author interview with Dr. Sabha.
Chapter 3
“I didn’t do anything!”: Author interview with two senior officials present at the
events.
“Gun!” one of the officers shouted: Ibid.
“He just spouted ideology”: Author interview with Samih Battikhi.
troubled since childhood: For more on Zarqawi’s family and childhood, see
Jean-Charles Brisard, Zarqawi: The New Face of Al-Qaeda (New York: Other
Press, 2005).
Zarqawi’s great love remained his mother: Ibid.
“He wasn’t that smart”: Betsy Pisik, “Mother Denies Suspect Is a Terrorist,”
Washington Times, Feb. 24, 2003.
“We all knew who he was”: Author interview with Hudhaifa Azzam.
“Zarqawi was crying”: Abu Qadama Salih al-Hami, “Knights of the Unfulfilled
Duty: Zarqawi and the Afghan Jihad.”
“God granted the Muslim mujahidin”: Quoted in Fu’ad Husayn, Al-Zarqawi:
The Second Generation of al-Qaeda (n.p., 2006).
He read books about early Islamic heroes: Ibid.
“We printed out some of my books”: Quoted in ibid.
“He wanted everything to be done quickly”: Quoted in ibid.
“Your penalties only strengthen our faith”: Jean-Charles Brisard, The New Face
of Al-Qaeda (New York: Other Press, 2005).
A third officer who took a particular interest: Author interview with Abu Mutaz.
Chapter 4
“The time for training is over”: Ali H. Soufan, The Black Banners: The Inside
Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).
“Rob, I have to tell you something”: Author interview with Robert Richer.
“Despite everything that happened”: Author interview with senior Jordanian
official.
“In a nutshell, Abu Musab:” Quoted in Fu’ad Husayn, Al-Zarqawi: The Second
Generation of al-Qaeda (n.p., 2006).
“Iraq will be the forthcoming battle”: Ibid.
Chapter 5
“I am where I want to be”: Marcella Bombardieri and Jana Benscoter, “Slain
Envoy Had Boston Ties on Aid Mission; Foley Was ‘Doing What I Want to
Do,’ ” Boston Globe, Oct. 29, 2002.
Foley crumbled to the pavement: Author interview with two senior Jordanian
officials directly involved in the events.
“I kept wondering, ‘What can I do?’ ”: Author interview with Nada Bakos.
“appear based on hearsay”: CIA, “CTC Iraqi Support for Terrorism,”
unpublished report, CTC 2003-1000/HS, Jan. 29, 2003.
“simply one of the best”: Author interview with a former senior U.S. intelligence
official.
“I asked tough questions”: Richard B. Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and
Political Memoir (New York: Threshold Editions, 2011).
Chapter 6
Charles “Sam” Faddis knew: Author interview with Charles Faddis.
“They used to force women”: “Under the Microscope,” Al-Jazeera TV, Doha, July
1, 2004.
“Look, if we can produce solid intelligence”: Author interview with Charles
Faddis and descriptions in his book: Mike Tucker and Charles Faddis,
Operation Hotel California: The Clandestine War Inside Iraq (Guilford,
Conn.: Lyons Press, 2009).
“It’s big enough to be an invasion”: Stanley A. McChrystal, My Share of the
Task: A Memoir (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2013).
“He was able to forge ties”: George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm: My Years
at the CIA (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007).
White House officials were reluctant: Peter Baker, Days of Fire: Bush and
Cheney in the White House (New York: Doubleday, 2013).
“We are considering it”: Riad Kahwaji, “Jordan and U.S. Discuss Possible Patriot
Deployments,” Marine Corps Times, Feb. 10, 2003.
“fixated on Iraq”: Abdullah, King of Jordan, Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit
of Peace in a Time of Peril (New York: Viking, 2011).
“But I was certain of one thing”: Ibid.
Chapter 7
“Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network”: For Colin Powell’s Feb. 5, 2003,
speech to the United Nations Security Council, see
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/nation/transcripts/powelltext_020503.html.
She continued watching: Author interview with Nada Bakos.
“This is bullshit!”: Author interview with Samih Battikhi.
“We were sick about it”: Author interview with Abu Mutaz.
“With that speech”: Author interview with Hasan Abu Hanieh.
Chapter 8
She tried the question: Author interview with Nada Bakos; a second U.S. official
familiar with the events confirmed her account.
“We had invaded”: Author interview with Nada Bakos.
sent the van’s front section spiraling: Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Car Bomb Kills 11
in Baghdad,” Washington Post Foreign Service, Aug. 8, 2003.
“We may see more of this”: Michael R. Gordon, “Terror Group Seen As Back
Inside Iraq,” New York Times, Aug. 10, 2003.
“We’ve made good progress”: E. A. Torriero, “Embassy Attack May Have Tie to
Al Qaeda,” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 9, 2003.
“Remnants of the regime”: Jim Henderson, “Democracy Is Not Easy,
Condoleezza Rice Tells Journalists in Dallas,” Houston Chronicle, Aug. 8,
2003.
“The presence of coalition forces”: D’Arcy Doran, “UN Employees’ Fears Grew
As Security Deteriorated in Baghdad,” Associated Press, Aug. 28, 2003.
“The explosion went off”: Gil Loescher interview with Jeremy Paxman, BBC
News, broadcast Dec. 18, 2003. For entire interview, go to
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/3330885.stm.
“They want to fight us there”: George W. Bush press conference, Aug. 23, 2003,
Crawford, Texas. Excerpts available at http://www.usembassy-israel.
org.il/publish/press/2003/august/082304.html.
“Allah was merciful today”: Author interview with a senior U.S. official familiar
with the investigation.
“We should join efforts”: “Ayatollah Hakim’s Last Sermon,” BBC News online,
Aug. 30, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3193341.stm.
“Baghdad is bustling with commerce”: Tom Infield, “U.S. General: Hezbollah
Linked to Iraq Bombings,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 6, 2003.
“brilliant strategy”: Author interview with Bruce Riedel.
Chapter 9
“It’s factual”: Author interview with Robert Richer.
“Right before the invasion”: Author interview with a former senior U.S. official
present during the events.
“The ease with which the insurgents”: Quoted in James Risen, State of War: The
Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (New York: Free Press,
2006).
“So you guys think”: Author interviews with two officials present.
no evidence of bullet damage: “Violent Response: The U.S. Army in Al-Falluja,”
Human Rights Watch, 2003, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/iraqfalluja.
“We went to them”: Author interview with Zaydan al-Jabiri.
Chapter 10
“Even if our bodies”: “Zarqawi Letter” to Osama bin Laden, U.S. Department of
State, Feb. 2004, http://2001-2009.state.gov/p/nea/rls/31694.htm.
“I was likely standing less than a block”: Stanley A. McChrystal, My Share of the
Task: A Memoir (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2013).
“It was pure, unadulterated hatred”: Author interview with Stanley A.
McChrystal.
“before Iraq became truly hellish”: McChrystal, My Share of the Task.
“I would anticipate”: “Major Combat Operations Over in Iraq,” PBS News-Hour,
April 14, 2003, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/military-jan-june03-
battles_04-14.
“What is that?”: Author interview with McChrystal.
“We fundamentally do not understand”: McChrystal, My Share of the Task.
“The level of organization”: Quoted in Brian Knowlton, “U.S. Blames Iraq
Attacks on Jordanian-Born Sunni Militant,” New York Times, March 3, 2004.
“Why,” she shrieked: Vivienne Walt, “Over 150 Killed in Iraq Blasts,” Boston
Globe, March 3, 2004.
Chapter 11
The man he selected for the mission: Author interview with two senior
Jordanian officials present during the events.
“They’re using middlemen”: Author interview with Abu Mutaz.
“By the time we found them”: Ibid.
“The men in the Caprice”: “Al Qaeda Plans Terrorist Attack in Chemical
Weapons Against Jordan,” Petra News Agency, April 27, 2004. (Full text of
confession, unsigned.)
“unforeseen negative consequences”: Abdullah, King of Jordan, Our Last Best
Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril (New York: Viking, 2011).
“Yes, there was a plot”: Jamie Holguinap, “Terrorist: Wish We Had That Bomb,”
Associated Press, April 16, 2004.
Chapter 12
“Nation of Islam, great news!”: Nicholas Berg beheading. video transcript
archived by University of Georgia Islamic Studies Department,
http://islam.uga.edu/zarqawi.html.
“I am reasonably confident”: Nicholas Berg letter, Tom’s Photography, Jan. 4,
2004, http://www.nickberg.org/berg/
Email_from_Berg/Entries/2004/1/4_Bergs_Email_from_Iraq.html.
“He went where no one else did”: Michael Powell and Michelle Garcia, “In a
Pennsylvania Town, Friends Recall the Pranks and the Promise,” Washington
Post, May 14, 2004.
“No one could figure out”: Author interview with Nada Bakos.
“Their intention is to shake our will”: “President Bush Condemns Brutal
Execution of Nicholas Berg,” May 12, 2004, http://georgewbushwhitehouse.
archives.gov/news/releases/2004/05/text/20040512-2.html.
“If you had your thumb”: David E. Sanger and Richard W. Stevenson, “Bush
Supporters Are Split on How to Pursue Iraq Plan,” New York Times, May 13,
2004.
“Zarqawi jumped the shark”: Author interview with Nada Bakos.
Chapter 13
“Not a good sign”: Author interview with Robert S. Ford.
“He spent his entire career”: Author interview with Ronald Neumann.
“Insurgents and foreign fighters”: “USEB 154: 1st Marine Expeditionary Force
Discusses Situation in Al Anbar Province,” Public Library of US Diplomacy,
July 23, 2004,
https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/04BAGHDAD235_a.html.
“He surrounds himself with the scum”: Author interview with Zaydan al-Jabiri.
“swore he’d never personally beheaded”: Hannah Allum, “Fallujah’s Real Boss:
Omar the Electrician,” Knight Ridder Newspapers, June 25, 2004.
“This is a call for help from the depths”: “Al-Zarqawi’s Message to the Fighters of
Jihad in Iraq on September 11, 2004,” Middle East Media Research Institute,
Sept. 15, 2004, http://www.memri.org/report/en/print1219.htm.
the most “deadly weapons we have”: Muhammad Abu Rumman and Hassan Abu
Hanieh, The “Islamic Solution” in Jordan: Islamists, the State, and the
Ventures of Democracy and Security (Amman, Jordan: Friedrich-Ebert-
Stiftung Jordan & Iraq, 2013).
“I hear and monitor the chaos”: Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, “Support and
Advice, Hopes and Pains,” open letter, July 2004, translation provided by
MEMRI, http://www.memri.org/report/en/print1473.htm.
“We denounce and condemn extremism”: For the entire “Amman Message”
statement, see “The Official Website of the Amman Message,”
www.ammanmessage.com.
“The ability of a few extremists”: Abdullah, King of Jordan, Our Last Best
Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril (New York: Viking, 2011).
“It should be known”: Bin Laden’s Dec. 15, 2004, statement quoted in “Bin
Laden’s Tape: Key Excerpts,” BBC News, Dec. 27, 2004.
“great joy to the people of Islam”: Jeffrey Pool, “Zarqawi’s Pledge of Allegiance
to Al-Qaeda: From Mu’Asker Al-Battar, Issue 21,” Terrorism Monitor, vol. 2,
no. 24 (Dec. 15, 2004), http://www.jamestown.org/single/?
tx_ttnews[tt_news]=27305#.VUdYf5N0v64.
Chapter 14
“An apostasy against Allah”: Jeffrey Pool, “Zarqawi’s Pledge of Allegiance to Al-
Qaeda: From Mu’Asker Al-Battar, Issue 21,” Terrorism Monitor, vol. 2, no. 24
(Dec. 15, 2004), http://www.jamestown.org/single/?
tx_ttnewsltt_news]=27305#.VUdYf5N0v64.
“Local government is in a state of crisis”: State Department, “Governor in
Trouble-Ridden Anbar Province Held Hostage,” cable, Aug. 3, 2004, retrieved
from https://cablegatesearch.wikileaks.org/search.php?
q=governor+in+trouble-ridden+anbar&qo=0&qc=0&qto=2010-02-28.
“We’re not going to put candidates”: Author interview with Robert S. Ford.
“We are satisfied”: “Iraqi Vice-President on Tackling ‘Security Chaos,’ Coalition
Pullout, Government,” Al-Jazeera TV, April 29, 2006.
the drone picked up the deputy’s car: Author interview with a former senior U.S.
official familiar with the events.
“Just wreck!”: Author interview with Nada Bakos.
“There was a PowerPoint briefing”: Author interview with a former senior U.S.
official familiar with the events.
“The mujahed movement must avoid”: Letter from Ayman al-Zawahiri to Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, translation provided by Combating Terrorism Center at
West Point, https://www.ctc.usma.edu/v2/wp-
content/uploads/2013/10/Zawahiris-Letter-to-Zarqawi-Translation.pdf.
“He does not and should not”: Zarqawi, “Zarqawi Clarifies Issues Raised by
Sheikh Maqdisi,” open letter, July 21, 2005, retrieved from
http://thesis.haverford.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle
/10066/4760/ZAR20050712.pdf?sequence=3.
“The al-Qaeda Organization”: “Al-Zarqawi Declares War on Iraqi Shia,” Al-
Jazeera, Sept. 14, 2005, http://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2005/
09/200849143727698709.html.
It took place on the morning of June 29, 2005: Author interviews with two
senior U.S. officials present at the event.
“Are you going to get him?”: Stanley A. McChrystal, My Share of the Task: A
Memoir (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2013).
“By design, often the first time”: Author interview with Stanley A. McChrystal.
“If we could apply relentless body blows”: McChrystal, My Share of the Task.
“That was a screw-up”: Author interview with a senior U.S. official present
during the event.
Chapter 15
“He put one on me, and wore the other”: “Full Text of Iraqi Woman’s
Confession,” Associated Press, Nov. 13, 2005,
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/10027725/#.VUdcKZN0v64.
listened quietly: Author interview with senior Jordanian official.
“Everyone got the call”: Author interview with Jordanian intelligence officer.
“This was a criminal cruel act”: Malmoud al-Abed and Mohammad Ghazal,
“Thousands Rally in Unity Against Terror,” Jordan Times, Nov. 12, 2005.
“We’re going on the offensive”: Abdullah, King of Jordan, Our Last Best Chance:
The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril (New York: Viking, 2011).
“This is our 9/11”: Author interview with Robert Richer.
“People who would have never worked”: Author interview with a senior
Jordanian official familiar with the investigation.
“Our brothers knew their targets”: “Al-Zarqawi Purportedly Says Wedding
Wasn’t Targeted,” Associated Press, Nov. 18, 2005.
“Let us not merely be people of killing”: Letter from Atiyah Abd al-Rahman to
Abu Musab al-Zaraqawi, late 2005, translation provided by the Combating
Terrorism Center at West Point, https://www.ctc.usma.edu/v2/wp-
content/uploads/2013/10/Atiyahs-Letter-to-Zarqawi-Translation.pdf.
“In Iraq, time is now beginning”: “Text of a Document Found in Zarqawi’s Safe
House,” Associated Press, June 6, 2006.
“In public and private”: State Department, “Sectarian Nerves on Edge After
Samarra Shrine Explosion,” cable, Feb. 23, 2006, retrieved from
https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06STATE29555_a.html.
“lit the match”: Peter Baker, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House
(New York: Doubleday, 2013).
Every scene conveyed: Video excerpts can be seen at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0apnoVf8Y.
“my treasured nation”: Rusty Shackleford, Ph.D., “Zarqawi Video (with
Subtitles) [Updated: Transcripts],” e Jawa Report, April 26, 2006,
http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/173861.php.
“there were some mistakes made”: Edward Wong and John F. Burns, “Iraqi Rift
Grows After Discovery of Prison,” New York Times, Nov. 17, 2005.
Chapter 16
“He seemed almost relieved”: Author interview with a senior Jordanian official
familiar with the events.
“We were just trying”: Author interview with senior U.S. official present at the
meeting.
“We’re trying to hold on to you”: Stanley A. McChrystal, My Share of the Task: A
Memoir (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2013).
“We watched a guy dressed in all black come out”: Author interview with Stanley
A. McChrystal.
An autopsy found no evidence: Final Autopsy Report, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, June 8, 2006.
“Why didn’t we think of that”: Author interview with Rep. Steny Hoyer; see also
Peter Baker, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House (New York:
Doubleday, 2013).
“I was happy”: Author interview with Nada Bakos.
“I long had this mental image”: Author interview with Abu Haytham.
“Your end is close”: Author interview with Zaydan al-Jabiri.
Chapter 17
small army of men: Author interview with two U.S. officials familiar with the
events.
“If they get through that door”: Ibid.
disliked the sight of blood: Joan Juliet Buck, “Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the
Desert,” Vogue, Feb. 25, 2011.
“My judgment is that Syria will move”: “John Kerry Praises Syria in 2011
Speech,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace speech, March 2011.
For entire speech, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHMiLIZ_iwQ.
“The last country in the world”: Author interview with Robert S. Ford.
twenty-seven interrogation centers: “Torture Archipelago: Arbitrary Arrests,
Torture, and Enforced Disappearances in Syria’s Underground Prisons Since
March 2011,” Human Rights Watch, July 3, 2012, retrieved from
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2012/07/03/torture-archipelago-0.
“The country’s problems were being exacerbated”: Author interview with
Frederic C. Hof.
“The presence of the U.S. ambassador”: “Syria Says US ‘Interfering’ As
Ambassador Visits Hama,” BBC News, July 8, 2011.
“President Assad is not indispensable”: “Clinton Says Syria’s Assad ‘Not
Indispensable’,” Voice of America, July 10, 2011, http://www.voanews.com
/content/clinton-says-syrias-assad-not-indispensable—
125382213/142106.html.
“He has not led”: Macon Philips, “President Obama: ‘The Future of Syria Must
Be Determined by Its People, but President Bashar al-Assad Is Standing in
Their Way,’ ” White House Blog, Aug. 18, 2011,
https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/08/18/president-obama-future-syria-
must-be-determined-its-people-president-bashar-al-assad.
“very disgusted by the behavior”: Author interview with Benjamin Rhodes.
“This kind of ideology lurks in dark corners”: “Syria Speech by Bashar al-Assad,”
June 20, 2011, http://www.al-bab.com/arab
/docs/syria/bashar_assad_speech_110620.htm.
Chapter 18
Now he would appeal to Assad directly: Author interview with two senior
officials familiar with the events.
“There are only a handful of true al-Qaeda types”: Author interview with a senior
official familiar with the events.
“Where is this Islamic state”: Cole Bunzel, “From Paper State to Caliphate: The
Ideology of the Islamic State,” Brookings Institute, Brookings Project on U.S.
Relations with the Islamic World, March 2015.
“Here in your midst”: Wikimedia Foundation, Foreign Affairs Committee, The
ISIS Threat: The Rise of the Islamic State and Their Dangerous Potential
(Google eBook, Sept. 25, 2014).
astonishing array of electronic sleuthing tools: Author interviews with three U.S.
officials who participated in these events at the time.
“near-strategic defeat”: Joby Warrick, “U.S. Cites Big Gains Against Al-Qaeda,”
Washington Post, May 30, 2008.
“We didn’t become like them”: Author interview with a senior U.S. official who
helped oversee the operations.
“long, gloomy night and dark days”: Steven Lee Myers, “New Qaeda ‘War
Minister’ Warns of ‘Days Colored in Blood,’ ” New York Times, May 14, 2010.
Chapter 19
“There were not more than seven or eight of us”: “Al-Jazeera Interview with Abu
Mohamed Golani, the Head of al-Nusra in Syria,” Dec. 18, 2013, retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8uTGdun5Fg.
“It was to be the face of the organization”: Author interview with a senior U.S.
official familiar with intelligence profiles on Baghdadi.
“He always had religious”: Janine di Giovanni, “Who Is ISIS Leader Abu Bakr al-
Baghdadi?,” Newsweek, Dec. 8, 2014.
“promoting of virtue and preventing of vice”: Pieter van Nostaeyen, “The
Biography of Sheikh Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, Amir of the Islamic State in Iraq
and Al-Sham,” World Press, July 2013,
https://pietervanostaeyen.wordpress.com/2013/07/15/abu-bakr-al-baghdadi-
a-short-biography-of-the-isis-sheikh.
“It actually feels like you’re in a microwave”: Lt. Commander Vasilios Tasikas,
“The Battlefield Inside the Wire,” Military Review, Sept.–Oct. 2009.
“Extremists mingled with moderates”: Ibid.
“Deal with America and its allies”: Paul Vale, “Islamic State’s Al-Baghdadi Says
Group Will Fight to ‘Last Soldier,’ ” Associated Press, Nov. 13, 2014.
“Zarqawi was closer than a brother”: Ruth Sherlock, “How a Talented Footballer
Became World’s Most Wanted Man,” Telegraph [London], Nov. 11, 2014.
Khlifawi urged Baghdadi to accept: Matthew Barber, “New ISIS Leaks Reveal
Particulars of al-Qaeda Strategy,” from “Syria Comment” blog of the University
of Oklahoma’s Center for Middle East Studies, Jan. 12, 2014.
“He cloaked himself”: Author interview with senior U.S. official.
“We have crossed the boundaries”: “The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria Shall
Remain,” audio message posted June 6, 2013; translation provided by the
Middle East Media Research Institute.
“There was a sense that this thing”: Author interview with a senior U.S. official
present during the debates.
“It was that slow car crash”: Author interview with Mouaz Moustafa.
“All the different sects were there”: Author interview with Noura al-Ameer.
Chapter 20
“We hereby bring the Islamic nation”: Video posting, “New Jihad Group in Syria
Announces Its Establishment,” Middle East Media Research Institute, Jan. 24,
2012.
“We said from the beginning, this is terrorism”: Quoted in Alexandra Zavis and
Katie Paul, “Syria Capital Hit by Massive Bombings,” Los Angeles Times, Dec.
24, 2011.
“Give your money to the ones who will spend it on jihad”: David D. Kirkpatrick,
“Qatar’s Support of Islamists Alienates Allies Near and Far,” New York Times,
Sept. 7, 2014.
“It’s anyone’s game”: Author interview with a senior Middle Eastern diplomat.
“In their view, it’s Assad”: Author interview with a senior Middle Eastern
intelligence official.
“This is not abstract”: Author’s confidential interview with a senior aide to King
Abdullah II.
“We thought going with the Americans”: Adam Entous, “Covert CIA Mission to
Arm Syrian Rebels Goes Awry,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 26, 2015.
“Where are these revolutions going to stop?”: Author interview with senior
official familiar with the exchange.
“I have my red lines”: Ibid.
“I didn’t think they were going to kill me”: Author interview with Robert S. Ford.
“The regime was losing control”: Ibid.
“The intelligence, frankly, was very worrisome”: Author interview with Leon E.
Panetta. See also Leon E. Panetta, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in
War and Peace (New York: Penguin Press, 2014).
“every option appears worse than the next”: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hard
Choices (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).
“We’re outside the game”: Author interview with Panetta.
“He was willing to consider options”: Author interview with Benjamin Rhodes.
“I think, candidly, that a lot of people”: Ibid.
“But all of these steps were Band-Aids”: Clinton, Hard Choices.
“We know how to do this”: Author interview with Panetta.
Chapter 21
“You’re Shiites, right?”: “Who Is the ISIL Iraqi Terrorist Who Executed the
Three Syrian Truckers in Syrian–Iraqi border in 2013?,” Liveleak.com,
retrieved March 2015. More at http://www.liveleak.com/view?
i=8d1_1398584978#mjwHKBEOjIWYc8Ou.99.
He told a story: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, “Give Good News to the Believers: The
Declaration of the Islamic State in Iraq and Al-Sham,” audio speech, World
Press, April 2013, retrieved from
https://azelin.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/shaykh-abc5ab-bakr-al-
e1b8a5ussaync4ab-al-qurayshc4ab-al-baghdc481dc4ab-
e2809cannouncement-of-the-islamic-state-of-iraq-and-al-shc481m22-en.pdf.
“Al-Nusra Front’s banner will remain”: “Jabhat Al-Nusra Leader Abu
Muhammad al-Joulani Pledges Allegiance to Al-Zawahiri,” audio message,
posted April 10, 2013; translation provided by the Middle East Media Research
Institute.
“Muslim blood is off-limits”: “Al-Qaeda Chief Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Letter to the
Leaders of the Two Jihadi Groups,” April 2014, retrieved from
https://archive.org/stream/710588-translation-of-ayman-al-zawahiris-
letter/710588-translation-of-ayman-al-zawahiris-letter_djvu.txt.
“I prefer the command of Allah”: Baghdadi statement as translated by Middle
East Media Research Institute, Jihad and Terrorism Threat Monitor (blog),
June 16, 2013.
freed more than five hundred inmates: Mushreq Abbas, “Al-Qaeda Militants
Raid Iraq’s Abu Ghraib, Taji Prisons,” Al Monitor, July 2013.
“These were the hardest days”: Author interview with Abu Ibrahim al-Raqqawi.
For his blog, see Abu Ibrahim al-Raqqawi, “Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered
Silently,” http://www.raqqa-sl.com/en; retrieved April 2015.
“Some are boys younger than sixteen”: Author interview with al-Raqqawi.
“What’s that [video] game called”: “British Jihadi Compares Syria War to Call of
Duty,” BBC News, June 13, 2014.
“I’m here to represent the Islamic State”: Author interview with Mouaz
Moustafa.
“Am I supposed to throw pizzas”: Author interview with congressional official
present at the meeting.
“We need to have a game-changing action”: Chris Wallace, “Sen. McCain Talks
US Action in Syria,” Fox News, May 5, 2013.
“something that the civilized world has recognized”: President Barack Obama
news conference, May 16, 2013, White House; retrieved from
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/16/joint-press-
conference-president-obama-and-prime-minister-erdogan-turkey.
“Increase the assistance”: Author interview with Robert S. Ford.
McCain questioned Ford’s grasp: Syria Hearing Before the Committee on
Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Office, Oct. 31, 2013).
Chapter 22
“The ones who are leading now were thieves”: Author interview with Zaydan al-
Jabiri.
“This is a tribal revolution”: Hamza Mustafa, “There Is a ‘Tribal Revolution’ in
Iraq: Anbar Tribal Chief,” Asharq Al-Awsat, June 17, 2014.
“They stole everything”: Author interview with Abdalrazzaq al-Suleiman.
“ISIL probably will attempt to take territory”: Transcript, Lt. Gen. Michael T.
Flynn, director, DIA, Statement Before Senate Armed Services Committee,
Feb. 11, 2014.
“These are children of Zarqawi”: Author interview with Michael Flynn.
“In my entire battalion”: Ned Parker, Isabel Coles, and Raheem Salman, “Special
Report: How Mosul Fell,” Reuters, Oct. 14, 2014.
“As for your mujahedin brothers”: “English Subtitles of Full Sermon by ISIS’s
Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, Caliph of the ‘Islamic State,’ ” transcript, YouTube.com,
July 2014, retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxJSm7XwxqA.
“Unfortunately, from the beginning”: Author interview with a senior Jordanian
official.
“There’s a snowball effect”: Ibid.
Epilogue
“I am First Lieutenant Muath Safi Yusef al-Kasasbeh”: “ISIS Burns Hostage
Alive: Raw Video,” Fox News, Feb. 3, 2015.
“This counterterrorism campaign”: President Barack Obama, “Statement by the
President on ISIL,” retrieved from https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-
office/2014/09/10/statement-president-isil-1.
“Only God punishes by fire”: Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars,
“Muslims Condemn ISIS Killing of Jordanian Pilot,” The Islamists Are Coming
(blog), Feb. 5, 2015.
“Henning worked with a charitable organization”: “Jihadi Ideologue Calls for
Freeing British Hostage,” Associated Press, Sept. 20, 2014.
“I am concentrating now on trying”: “Daesh Releases New Audio Recording of
Pilot Negotiation Attempts,” Al-Bawaba News, Feb. 18, 2015.
“They lied to me”: Maqdisi interview with Jordan’s Roya TV, Feb. 6, 2015,
translation provided by Middle East Media Research Institute at
http://www.memri.org/clip_transcript/en/4767.htm.
“The radicalization of many of the actors”: Rami Khouri, “ISIS Is About the Arab
Past, Not the Future,” lecture, May 11, 2015, at Woodrow Wilson Center for
International Scholars.
“We are waging this war”: Suleiman al-Khalidi, “Jordanian King Vows
‘Relentless’ War on Islamic State’s Own Ground,” Reuters, Feb. 4, 2015.
“Islam has nothing to do with ISIS”: Ranya Kadri and Anne Barnard, “Jordan,
Unabashed, Announces Latest Bombing Raid on ISIS Targets,” New York
Times, Feb. 5, 2015.
“This is the beginning”: William Booth and Taylor Luck, “Jordan Rages Against
Islamic State As Military Vows to Expand Airstrikes,” Washington Post, Feb. 6,
2015.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joby Warrick has been a reporter for The Washington Post since
1996. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, and the
author of The Triple Agent.
A young Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh—the future Zarqawi—poses with his
mother and a younger sibling in an undated family photo. (Hashemite
Kingdom of Jordan)
Zarqawi as he appeared around the time he left Jordan for Afghanistan in
1989 to join the mujahideen. (Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan)
A foiled terrorist plot landed Zarqawi in a Jordanian prison in 1994, but he
was released in a general amnesty in 1999, around the time this photo was
taken. (Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan)
A young Prince Abdullah in army uniform presents a gift of cermonial
daggers to his father, Jordan’s King Hussein. (Royal Hashemite Court)
Jordan’s king and Queen Rania pose for an official portrait in 2010. (Royal
Hashemite Court)
King Abdullah II meets with President George W. Bush at the White
House a month after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Though
relations are cordial, Abdullah warns that the coming U.S. invasion of Iraq
would open a Pandora’s box in the region. (White House photo; Courtesy
of George W. Bush Presidential Library)
The United Nations Iraq headquarters lies in ruins after a devastating
suicide bombing that kills the mission chief and twenty-two others. The
August 2003 attack is among the first linked to Zarqawi. (Defense
Department photo)
Zarqawi, masked, stands behind seated American hostage Nick Berg, a
Pennsylvania businessman captured in Iraq in 2004. The videotaped
beheading of Berg becomes Zarqawi’s signature act, and the first of many
such executions. (SITE Intelligence Group)
Zarqawi cradles a light machine gun for a publicity video in 2006. Despite
widespread revulsion over his brutal tactics, Zarqawi’s reputation for
fearlessness draws thousands of Islamist volunteers to Iraq. (SITE
Intelligence Group)
Nada Bakos, pictured here in 2014, was the CIA’s chief “targeter” for
Zarqawi during the early years of the Iraq war. (Courtesy of Nada Bakos)
Diplomat Robert S. Ford tried to encourage Iraqi Sunni politicians to run
for office despite threats from Zarqawi. Later, as U.S. ambassador to Syria,
he sounded the alarm about the growing presence of Islamists among the
country’s rebel militias. (State Department photo)
General Stanley McChrystal inspects troops during a 2010 ceremony. As
commander of U.S. special forces in Iraq, McChrystal helped devise the
strategy that led to Zarqawi’s death in 2006 and the near destruction of his
organization in the years that followed. (Defense Department photo)
Would-be terrorist Sajida al-Rishawi displays the suicide vest that failed to
explode during Zarqawi’s 2005 attack on Western hotels in the Jordanian
capital. (The Jordan Times)
Soldiers searching through rubble of Zarqawi’s safe house after the
building is flattened by a U.S. fighter jet. (Defense Department photo)
Zarqawi was pulled alive from the rubble of his safe house but died
minutes later from blast injuries, surrounded by U.S. troops. His body,
pictured here, was taken to a U.S. military base so his identity could be
confirmed. (Defense Department photo)
Huge crowds protest against the Bashar al-Assad regime in Hama, Syria,
in July 2011. Intervention by U.S. diplomats delayed, but did not prevent,
a bloody assault by government security forces. (Shaam News Network)
Future ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is photographed at the U.S.
military detainee facility Camp Bucca in February 2004. (Defense
Department photo)
ISIS soldiers march through the streets of Raqqa, the western Syrian city
captured by the terrorist group and claimed as its capital in 2013. (SITE
Intelligence Group)
ISIS leader Baghdadi proclaims himself leader of Islamic caliphate at the
Great Mosque of al-Nuri in the Iraqi city of Mosul. (SITE Intelligence
Group)
ISIS terrorizes captured Iraqi and Syrian cities with public executions,
from beheadings to crucifixions, such as this one in Raqqa’s main square.
(SITE Intelligence Group)
A convoy of ISIS vehicles crosses the Iraqi desert in early 2014. With
crucial support from sympathetic Iraqi Sunnis, the terrorist group is easily
able to capture Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, and much of Anbar
Province. (SITE Intelligence Group)
ISIS propaganda video shows captured Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh
before he is burned alive on video. (SITE Intelligence Group)
King Abullah II embraces the father of slain pilot al-Kasasbeh outside the
family home in southern Jordan. (Royal Hashemite Court)
Jordanian fighter jets return home from a bombing mission in Syria after
Jordan’s monarchy vows revenge for the execution of its captured pilot.
“They will be hit hard,” the king declares. (Jordanian Armed Forces photo)