Authors: Joby Warrick
“
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.