Authors: Joby Warrick
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.