My Share of the Task (33 page)

It seems the next five years, which he
spent in Jordanian prisons, molded him into the Zarqawi we would later face on the battlefield. Behind bars, he became right-hand man to Maqdisi, who led the fundamentalist faction of prisoners. Under Maqdisi's wing but in his shadow, Zarqawi became more pious. He memorized the Koran and tried to scrub his skin of tattoos
using hydrochloric acid. He also began to lead. He organized prisoners in his cellblock for protests and first practiced violent bullying as a way to
keep people in line. He took to lifting
homemade weights, building the physical bulk visible later on the grainy videos from Iraq. His brash resistance to the authorities won him the right to wear what he wanted—Afghan robes—and the
respect of his followers. As Ahmad became harder, Maqdisi relinquished leadership of the organization to him. By the end of his prison time, Ahmad could, according to a prison doctor, “order his followers to do things
just by moving his eyes.”

Released in March 1999 after the new king of Jordan, Abdullah II, granted a blanket amnesty, Ahmad soon traveled back to Peshawar with his
Jordanian wife in tow, then to Afghanistan, where he established his own training camp
in Herat in 2000. There he
married a second wife and adopted the name Abu Musab, a
kunya
meaning the father of Musab, from Zarqa. Zarqawi's Jordanian credentials and connections brought recruits from the Levant, an underrepresented group in Al Qaeda. He maintained a working but
informal relationship with bin Laden's organization, largely mediated by Saif al-Adl, Al Qaeda's deputy military chief.

During the invasion to oust the Taliban the following year, Zarqawi escaped the bombing with only
a set of broken ribs. With a small band of jihadists, he fled to Iran, and he was then dispatched to lead a contingent of fighters to Iraq. Just before leaving, he visited and said good-bye to Saif al-Adl. Revenge, al-Adl recalled,
was on Zarqawi's mind.

*   *   *

S
hortly after the June 29 meeting in the White House, we started following a promising lead to Zarqawi: Mohammad Rabih, also known as Abu Zar. Abu Zar was believed to be a top leader in Al Qaeda in Iraq and was a connection between the network's component pieces. Al Qaeda in Iraq comprised localized networks—in Baghdad, in the Fallujah-to-Ramadi corridor, in the western Euphrates, and in Mosul—that used and contested specific areas of terrain through traditional terrorist-insurgent attacks. Overlaying the geographic infrastructure, Zarqawi developed capacity-based networks that specialized in particular functions—foreign fighters, car bombing, and propaganda, among others. Networks rose and fell based on the acuity and energy of their leaders. As a native Iraqi and a key facilitator of the car-bombing operations, Abu Zar was connected to each of the geographic networks—making him a possible
line to Zarqawi himself.

After trying to track Abu Zar down for more than a month, we received surprising news. He was about to be buried in Abu Ghraib city although we had not heard of his death. Skeptical, we decided to “attend” his funeral. It wouldn't be the first time a target tried to fake his own funeral or spread rumors of his death. With sources watching from the ground, we circled aerial surveillance above, recording the funeral, which I later watched. While we often watched funerals, we never bombed or raided one. In most cases it was a moot point—there were too many civilians present. But even when the attendees were likely only militants, we didn't. It was important as a force to set limits. So on that hot afternoon, we watched.

On the recording, men shuffled into neat rows in front of an inelegant plywood coffin, unadorned except for Arabic script painted along the sides. An imam, with a longer beard and headdress, led the men, most in Western-style clothes, through prayers. The rows raised and lowered and then folded their hands in unison, then repeated the gestures. Although we could not distinguish the details on the ground, these funerals typically had a group of women who rocked in ritual mourning. On this day we heard that one was Abu Zar's mother, her body contorted in pain. The words of the imam and wails of the women weren't captured on the aerial surveillance recording, but our sources on the ground believed they were genuine.

Eventually the men carried the coffin through narrow, rutted streets to a nearby cemetery. They set the coffin in the dirt, next to a deep slit in the ground. Men carefully passed the limp body, wrapped head to toe in white linen, down to men standing in the hole, who laid it on its right side, holding it in place as the first shovelfuls of dirt fell over their shoes and covered the white shroud. They climbed out, and the hole was filled in. With the back of the shovel and then their hands, they smoothed the dark mound of dirt, and one of our main lines to Zarqawi ran cold.

Days later, the month ended with a gross demonstration of our failure to stop Al Qaeda in Iraq. On August 31, in northern Baghdad, hundreds of thousands of Shiite pilgrims made their way toward Imam Musa Kadhim shrine. The streets along their route had been blocked off for protection, and the roads swelled with the crowds moving under colorful banners and chants. Eventually, the crowd bottlenecked on Aimma Bridge, leading across the Tigris toward the
shrine on the other side. At 10:00
A.M.
, with the bridge choked with people, shouts emerged from within the crowd of a suicide bomber. Earlier that morning, the crowd had heard explosions from the mortars Sunni insurgents fired at the shrine. The rumors transformed the shuffling procession into a stampede. In the rush, the Iraqis—especially the weakest of foot, the women and children—were crushed to death under the feet of others. As the crowd surged, others suffocated when squeezed against the cement blast barriers lining the route to protect from suicide bombings. Some leaped or were pushed off the bridge, only to hit the sloping concrete banks fifty feet below.
Some drowned. Without a fuse even lit, 953 Iraqis died, and nearly
that many were injured.

To many people, the noise of violence across Iraq was growing to such a pitch that one day's atrocities and explosions didn't stand out from the next. But I remember this day well. So much of a devolving Iraq was wrapped up in the tragedy of that afternoon. Reports that evening were of a surreal death toll, of hospital hallways choked with bodies,
of sectarian paranoia
tragically entrenched. Back in the States, news of the stampede on the Baghdad bridge ran at the bottoms of newspaper front pages, underneath stark images from Hurricane Katrina's deadly toll and news that President Bush was dispatching thirty thousand national guard troops to the South.

*   *   *

T
he deadly stampede that hot August day fell into the middle of a roiling internal argument among the jihadist community over Zarqawi's campaign in Iraq, particularly his emphasis on killing Shia civilians. The same energetic, ruthless, stubborn program that had catapulted Zarqawi to his position of leadership now brought him into conflict with serious jihadist thinkers and leaders.

On June 28, as I was in Gettysburg preparing for the meeting with President Bush's national security team, Abu Mohammad al-Maqdisi, Zarqawi's former mentor, was
released from prison in Jordan. The Jordanian government likely hoped Maqdisi, out in public, might injure the magnetism of Zarqawi. Since their time together in prison, their trajectories had risen in relative parity: While the murderous Zarqawi was the most notorious practitioner of jihad, Maqdisi was
its most influential ideologue.

Maqdisi's writing had soured on Zarqawi in Iraq recently. He complained that the default use of suicide bombing, even when other means were available, had
made Iraq a “crematory” for young pious Muslims. He explicitly condemned the widespread attacks on Shia civilians, writing that Zarqawi misunderstood the concept of
takfir
—or excommunication. Unlike their heretical imams, he said, ordinary Shia civilians, who “only know how to pray and fast and do not know the details of [the Shia] sect,” were not so different from Sunnis that they could be
wiped out like another race. Now out of prison, when he appeared on Al Jazeera on July 5, Maqdisi protested that “
Six months ago, every day we read in the newspapers and saw on television dozens of killed Iraqi civilians, women and children, while barely one or two of the American occupiers were killed.”

Compelled to respond, Zarqawi flung aside his old mentor, casting him as a queasy theologian with an academic view of jihad, while Zarqawi was on the front lines of a messy war against a Shia who wanted to “
liquidate” the Sunnis.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second-in-command of Al Qaeda, may well have watched this back-and-forth—in which Zarqawi invoked Zawahiri's earlier calls of support—as he composed his own letter to Zarqawi, dated a few
days later on July 9.

The fifteen-page letter, which the U.S. government obtained that summer and released publicly in October, began with
fulsome if perfunctory praise. But after stoking Zarqawi's ego, Zawahiri cautiously prodded his “political angle” in Iraq, reminding Abu Musab that “
the strongest weapon which the mujahideen enjoy—after the help and granting of success by God—is popular support from the Muslim masses in Iraq, and the surrounding Muslim countries.” At issue was the targeting of Shia. In hushed tones, Zawahiri assured Zarqawi the Shia would one day get their comeuppance. But at that critical moment, “many of your Muslim admirers among the common folk are wondering about your attacks on the Shia.” He urged Zarqawi to tone it down, to stop inciting so much wanton carnage, and to turn his attention to the more urgent target: “
Expel the Americans from Iraq.”

Zarqawi never answered Zawahiri directly, but later that summer he weighed in on the Shia question. Al Qaeda in Iraq, he announced in a speech posted to Al Qaeda's “Jihad Media Battalion”
website on September 14, “has
decided to declare a total war against the . . . Shi'ites throughout Iraq, wherever they may be.” “Beware,” he warned. “By Allah, we will not treat you with compassion, and you will have no mercy from us.” That same day, Baghdad shuddered with twelve separate bombings, including a van bomb in the Shiite neighborhood of Khadamiya that exploded near a crowd of poor Shiites waiting in line for day labor, killing 114 of them. Six hundred Iraqis were
wounded in that day's blasts.

Zarqawi's ability to deflect these attempts to rein him in reflected his growth as both a commander and an ideologue. Zarqawi's campaign, as Maqdisi portrayed it, looked less like one designed to restore the caliphate and more like
nihilistic revenge on a wide scale. But to many entering Iraq, that mattered little: Unlike the generation before, these less ideological, more violent volunteers were less concerned with the creation of an Islamic society than with drawing blood in the name of Islam.

While Zarqawi largely deflected this outside criticism, he soon made a critical mistake. On the evening of Wednesday, November 9, 2005, coordinated explosions rocked
three hotels in Amman, Jordan.
The deadliest attack came inside the Radisson, which Zarqawi had tried to blow up six years earlier during millennium celebrations. That night
an Iraqi from Anbar, who had driven across the border four days earlier with three other members of AQI, made his way into a wedding reception in the Philadelphia Ballroom,
mingling quietly with the partygoers. Shortly after 8:50
P.M.
, he detonated a belt he wore under his clothes, the RDX explosives sending a hail of ball bearings through unsuspecting guests. More would have died, but the attacker's wife, also wearing a suicide vest, was
unable to set hers off and ran out of the room moments earlier. Two other suicide bombers exploded themselves elsewhere in Amman nearly simultaneously, one inside the lobby of the Grand Hyatt and another just outside the Days Inn. In total, more than 60 people died from the blasts, and 115 were wounded. At the Radisson, bodies were wheeled frantically out of the fume-filled lobby
on hotel luggage carts.

The Jordanians quickly suspected Zarqawi, and indeed Al Qaeda in Iraq
claimed responsibility for the attack the next day. It was worrying proof of his ability, gestating over years, to strike outside Iraq and to establish his part of Al Qaeda as a regional power. In April 2004, Zarqawi had aspired to use chemical agents against Jordan's General Intelligence Directorate headquarters, the office of the prime minister, and the U.S. embassy in Amman. The Jordanians estimated that such attacks could have resulted in horrific civilian casualties
in and around those buildings. A mix of talent, ruthlessness, growing mystique, and unprincipled ambition enabled him to lead both a national insurgency inside Iraq and a transnational terrorist network, leveraging his connections
throughout Jordan, Iraq, and Syria. His long-harbored ambitions to compete with the top echelons of Al Qaeda were not delusional.

I was disgusted when I heard the news of the November 9 attacks. But they had perverse value for our mission. They unequivocally demonstrated Zarqawi's growing ability to prosecute targets outside Iraq, but it was obvious to me that he had overreached. A few Jordanians blamed the United States and Israel, but most reacted defiantly against Zarqawi. On Friday, thousands of Jordanians protested in the street, and Zarqawi's hometown mosque
forbade Salafists from praying there. He had miscalculated.

Al Qaeda in Iraq responded with a flurry of statements, until finally Zarqawi himself released an audiotape on November 18 explaining the attack. The man who had in the months before defiantly defended his targeting of Muslims in public spats with top Al Qaeda leaders and thinkers now struck a very different tone, defensive and almost apologetic. “The report [which claimed] that the brother who carried out the martyrdom operation exploded himself among the celebrants at a wedding feast is nothing but a lie,” he claimed, saying they died when explosions aimed at other targets brought the ceiling down in the banquet room. “[I]t
was an unintended accident.”