Authors: Joby Warrick
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.