Authors: Joby Warrick
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.