Authors: Joby Warrick
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.