by Eric Maddox
“Or what?”
“There is a prostitute that Muhammad Ibrahim sometimes visits,” he told me. I could see his reluctance to admit his old boss’s preference for hookers. “Perhaps he is staying there.”
“All right,” I said. “Who else do I need to know about?”
He thought for a moment. He was either trying to remember other names or trying to find a way to avoid revealing them to me. But that option had already been closed out. He knew it and I knew it. He had already given me more than enough information to get him killed by the insurgents. There was no reason to stop now. We were the only ones that could keep him alive.
Basim went on to tell me about a driver who had taken over the job as Muhammad Ibrahim’s chauffeur after Basim had been arrested. “And Muhammad Ibrahim has a younger brother,” he added, almost as an afterthought.
That I knew. There were a total of nine Al-Muslit brothers in that branch of the clan. I had identified them all in the process of putting together the link diagram. “Which one?” I snapped.
“Sulwan,” he replied. “I see him sometimes at the food market.”
“What does he do there?”
“He buys food, mister. Lots of food.” Basim answered as if the information was irrelevant.
“What does he do with it?”
“He loads it in his truck and heads out of town.”
“Where out of town?”
“Over the bridge to the east.”
“Basim, who is Sulwan buying that food for?”
Now it was his eyes that were fixed on me. “Maybe he is buying food for Saddam, mister,” he said.
I had been going at Basim for six hours. We all needed a break. I rushed back to the house to find Kelly and Bam Bam. They needed to know what I had learned as soon as possible. The insurgency network that we’d been painstakingly tracking had suddenly broken wide open. We had to make our move before the window of opportunity closed again.
“Muhammad Ibrahim is running the whole thing,” I told them as we sat down at the dining room table. “The whole insurgency is under his control.”
“All of Tikrit?” Kelly asked in disbelief.
“No,” I replied. “All of Iraq.”
I gave them a moment to absorb the information. While Bam Bam sat calm and collected as usual, Kelly got up and returned a moment later with a copy of our link diagram.
“Okay,” he said, taking out his pen. “Let’s go over this step by step. Who is Muhammad Ibrahim working for?”
“Saddam.”
Once again there was a long silence. “Basim told you that?” Kelly said at last.
“Yeah. He’s got leaders in different regions, but Muhammad Ibrahim’s giving the orders. And paying the bills. Basim used to carry around hundreds of thousands of dollars in the trunk of his car.”
“Who are the men under Muhammad Ibrahim?” Kelly asked, quickly sketching out new squares on the link diagram.
“One of them was Radman,” I said.
“What was his territory?”
“Baghdad, Tikrit, and the west.”
Kelly gave a low whistle. “That’s quite a territory. Who else?”
I glanced at Bam Bam. He was listening intently, but it was hard to read his expression. I was unloading a lot of information that could save a lot of lives. Or turn out to be complete bullshit. It was going to be up to him to act on what I was telling him. “Farris Yasin, Muhammad Ibrahim’s cousin, was in charge of Kirkuk. And there was a guy named Abu Sofian who was running the operation in Samarra. He’s dead now, but Basim is sure they’ve found a replacement.” There were a few other names Basim had given me that I passed along. Kelly assigned them places on the link diagram. When I was done, the three of us sat looking at the new chain of command. Bam Bam still hadn’t said a word.
“So what’s our next move?” Kelly asked.
“I think we need to go after Thamir Al-Asi,” I replied. I knew that Bam Bam had previously turned down a hit on the cement store owner. Being a friend of Muhammad Ibrahim wasn’t grounds enough to arrest him. But I hoped now that things were different. We were getting closer and I could feel the unspoken excitement between the three of us.
“Why Thamir Al-Asi?” Kelly asked. He pointed to the link diagram. “We’ve got all these new targets now.”
“But our main target is still Muhammad Ibrahim,” I reminded him. “And Basim said he sleeps at Thamir’s place.”
“‘Sleeps,’ as in sleeping there now?”
“I don’t think so,” I admitted. “Since Basim was first arrested a month ago he’s lost contact with Muhammad Ibrahim. He’s probably made changes to his daily routine to cover himself.”
“So why are we hitting Thamir’s place?”
“I don’t think Muhammad Ibrahim has many options left, Kelly. Besides, I think Basim may be trying to protect Thamir. He keeps insisting that Muhammad Ibrahim wouldn’t be there anymore. I say we find out for ourselves.” I stopped abruptly, realizing I’d overstepped my bounds. This wasn’t my decision to make. Kelly and I turned to Bam Bam, the only person at the table whose opinion really mattered. I saw something on his face I’d never seen before. A smile. “We’ll hit him, we’ll hit them all,” he said in an unnervingly calm voice. “Anyone else we need to go after?”
I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Bam Bam wasn’t just approving a hit that he had previously rejected. He was letting me know, in his own quiet way, that he trusted what I was telling him, that I had gained his confidence. His decision to arrest Basim had been a huge risk. But it was beginning to pay off. He was ready to take it to the next level.
So was I. I swallowed hard and answered his question. “Well, since you asked,” I said jokingly, “Basim can also take us to Muhammad Ibrahim’s father-in-law. That’s where his wife is staying with their three-month-old baby. He also knows about his old boss’s favorite hooker. He might be hiding at her place. And there’s a driver who took over from Basim after he was arrested. I’d go after all of them.”
Bam Bam thought for a minute. “Forget the father-in-law,” he said. “I don’t want to hear about some stray round killing a baby, especially since we know the baby’s in the house. But if I were on the run, I might hide with a hooker. Besides, he probably thinks we wouldn’t dare hit a woman’s house.” That made sense. As much as possible, coalition forces in Iraq tried to keep women out of danger. We never arrested them or used them as sources. It would have gone against every moral code in the culture and would have been useless anyway. Arab women would never dare speak out against their men.
In the end Bam Bam decided to go after four targets: the locations of Thamir Al-Asi, the hooker, Muhammad Ibrahim’s new driver, and, for good measure, another random Al-Muslit brother whom Basim had talked about during our interrogation. The 4th ID would handle the hits on the brother and the driver. Our team would go after Thamir Al-Asi and the hooker. The raids were set for midnight the following evening.
Chapter 13
AMIR
0045 03DEC2003
It was early morning, December 3 and the simultaneous raids were under way. I went to find Kelly in the communications room to wait for the status reports.
As the minutes ticked by, the tension mounted. There was a lot riding on these hits, not the least of which was the validity of my theory that Muhammad Ibrahim and his cronies were directing the entire insurgency, working directly under Saddam’s command. I needed to bring him in, and the targets that Bam Bam had approved were my best shots at pinning him down. It all depended on where Muhammad Ibrahim decided to sleep that night. If he was in Tikrit, I had a pretty good feeling it would be at one of the locations we had targeted.
Since both the team from the house and the 4th ID’s unit had been thoroughly briefed on where to go and who to look for, it wasn’t deemed necessary for me to go on any of the hits. Instead I would stay back, waiting to begin the interrogations as soon as any detainees were brought in. At the last minute, the 4th ID was a
lso given the mission of raiding a farm to look for another Al-Muslit brother. Bam Bam wanted to cast as wide a net as possible.
At about 0130 words started coming in. Thamir Al-Asi had been at his house along with his two sons. No Muhammad Ibrahim. The Al-Muslit brother had been at home with his wife. No Muhammad Ibrahim. At the farm there had only been hired hands. No Muhammad Ibrahim. At the house of the driver, only the driver’s elderly parents. No Muhammad Ibrahim. And finally, the hooker was at home, sleeping alone. No Muhammad Ibrahim. Five hits. Five dry holes. It was not shaping up to be a good night.
Worse still, each raid was producing exactly what you’d expect to find if you raided the houses of completely innocent people: frightened and bewildered people who had no idea what you were looking for. All we had accomplished was awakening a bunch of innocent bystanders. By early morning it was clear that, unless we came up with another target, the whole night would have been wasted. At that point, Bam Bam made the decision to raid the cement store of Thamir Al-Asi, where Basim had told me that Muhammad Ibrahim often came to play dominoes with his friends. Since it was already daylight and there were likely to be other people in and around the store, he wanted me in on the raid. It would be my job to separate out anyone we might want to talk to from everyone else.
The cement store hit was scheduled for later that morning, so I decided to briefly question Thamir and his sons, who had been detained and brought back to the guesthouse. As much as anything, I wanted to find out what we could expect to uncover at the cement store.
My initial questioning didn’t yield much. Thamir Al-Asi was an old man who seemed completely disoriented by having been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night. But he wasn’t so confused that he didn’t know what to lie about. He insisted that he hadn’t seen Muhammad Ibrahim since the war started in April. I knew better. Both Basim and Abu Drees’s son had put the insurgent leader in Thamir’s house or at the store within the past few weeks. But that was his story and he was sticking to it.
So were his sons. Actually, the younger kid was a college freshman who was on semester break and had come home for a visit. I believed him when he told me he had no clue what I was after. The older son was another story. His name was Amir and he actually worked in the cement store. Not that it made any difference. He swore that he hadn’t seen Muhammad Ibrahim in four months and had never actually talked to him at all. On top of that, I couldn’t get either the old man or his older son to admit to having ever played a game of dominoes with the former bodyguard. I was getting nowhere. I left the Al-Asi family at the guesthouse to think things over and got ready for the hit.
The cement store was no more than three minutes from the front gate. As we drove out, I reflected on the fact that Muhammad Ibrahim had once been sitting with his friends not more than a half mile away from me. I could only hope that something would turn up this time.
It was 0800 when we arrived and a few people were already on the street, doing their morning chores. The shooters went in first, knocking down the front door and swarming into the cramped space. I followed and, taking a look around, saw nothing but stacks of cement sacks and a bag of Iraqi dinars worth about $500. The team moved upstairs where there were a few more shops on the second story. A moment later they came down with a white-haired old man, almost toothless and squinting at the bright light from the broken door.
“We found this guy upstairs,” one of the operators told me. “He says he’s the security guard for this place.” I laughed. It was as much to relieve my frustration as it was at the thought that this old guy could guard anything.
“Who owns this cement store?” I asked and my terp had to shout the question just so the guard could hear it.
“Thamir Al-Asi and Muhammad Ibrahim,” he muttered.
“When was the last time you saw Muhammad Ibrahim?”
“Three days ago.” I had the terp repeat the question, just to make sure I was getting an accurate translation from him.
“Where was he?”
“Here,” the old man answered. “He plays dominoes with his friends.”
“Which friends?”
“I don’t remember their names.”
“Thamir Al-Asi?”
“Yes, of course. He runs the store. I saw him here three days ago.”
“Basim Latif?”
“Who is that?”
“Muhammad Ibrahim’s driver.”
“Yes. He was here three days ago as well.”
“Abu Drees?”
Yes. Three days ago.”
I was beginning to wonder if the old guy knew what he was saying. Everyone I asked him about had been in the cement store three days ago. The only problem was that Abu Drees and Basim Latif had been in our custody for considerably longer. But at the very least, I had something else to go back and confront Thamir Al-Asi and his son with.
It had been an exhausting twelve hours. We had raided virtually every place in Tikrit where Muhammad Ibrahim might have been and came up with nothing. The harder I searched for this guy, the more elusive he became. It had been almost a month now since Radman Ibrahim’s son had given me the names of Muhammad Ibrahim’s three closest friends: Basim Latif, Abu Drees, and Thamir Al-Asi. We now had all three of them in custody and I had interrogated each of them. But we were no closer to our quarry than when we had begun. I was running out of people to question and places to look. I had no other choice but to go back to square one and try to dig out more information from the prisoners. Maybe there was something I missed.
I decided to focus on Thamir Al-Asi’s older son, Amir. He worked in the cement store and had admitted to at least seeing Muhammad Ibrahim there. Maybe there was a chance I could get him to admit something else. It was worth a shot.
After an hour of listening to Amir insisting on his complete innocence, I slowly and carefully explained to him that I basically didn’t care. His father was a close friend of Muhammad Ibrahim. I knew that for certain from the information I’d already gathered. I didn’t need him to either confirm or deny the fact. His father’s house and place of business had already been hit. I showed him the bag of dinars we’d found in the cement store to prove the point. Muhammad Ibrahim hadn’t been at either location. So where was he?
Amir emphatically denied knowing anything about his father’s activities or his connection to Muhammad Ibrahim.
“That’s not the point,” I countered. “You’re in trouble because of what you know. You know things you’re not telling me and you know things I just told you.”
He gave me a puzzled look.
“Amir,” I explained, “I just gave you everything we’ve learned about Muhammad Ibrahim. That’s dangerous knowledge. If I let you go, you could take it back to the bad guys. What I’ve told you makes you valuable to them. I couldn’t let you go free now even if I wanted to. You’ll be staying with us until we find who we’re after.”
“But they won’t look for me,” he cried. “I am nobody.”
“That may be,” I said reasonably. “And maybe your brother is a nobody, too.”
At the mention of his younger brother, the college student Ahmed, Amir stiffened. He obviously wanted to keep him out of trouble. It was a concern I could exploit.
“Your brother seems like a nice kid,” I continued. “He’s probably going to make something of himself. But if I bring him in here and tell him everything I’m telling you, then we’ll have to hang on to him, too. On the other hand, I know he wants to help you and your father any way he can. He’s a good son and a loyal brother. Maybe I should send him out to track down Muhammad Ibrahim on his own. Of course, if the insurgents found out who he was working for, that might make him a liability.”
“He knows nothing,” Amir insisted. “He had been away at school for many months.”
“I believe you,” I replied. “But, as I said, I don’t give a shit. I need Muhammad Ibrahim and I’ll do what it takes to get him. You tell me where he is and I’ll let you and your brother and your father go.
Otherwise, none of you will ever get home again.”
Amir glared at me but kept silent. I sensed that he was a smart and practical kid. He was ready to crack. All he needed was a little more incentive. I had an idea and called for the guard to bring Basim in from the other room where he was being held.
Amir looked shocked to see his father’s old friend walk through the door. I took advantage of the moment and moved quickly. “Basim,” I said, “talk to this fool and tell him to cooperate with me.”
Basim sat down in a chair next to Amir. “What is the problem?” he asked in a calm and measured voice. “Just tell him what he wants to know, Amir.”
“But I don’t know anything,” the kid repeated with a desperate look in his eye. The arrival of Basim had definitely shaken his self-confidence.
With a nod to me, Basim took over the interrogation, as the terp translated their conversation for me. “You are in big trouble, Amir,” he said. “There is no way for you to leave here without telling this man everything he wants to know. I have already told him everything. Now you must do the same.”
Amir’s fear turned to something like relief. He was depending on Basim now to guide him through the process.
“Don’t fuck with me, Amir,” I said, moving in close. I knew he was about to break and I needed to give him one last push. “This is your chance to help your father and your brother. Your only chance.”
He looked at me and Basim and back again. He took a deep breath and let it out. “Mister,” he said, his voice trembling, “they run everything out of my father’s store. All the attacks. My father couldn’t stop them. Muhammad Ibrahim owns the store. He can do as he wishes.”
“So he operates the insurgency from your father’s place?” He nodded numbly. “And who comes to see him at the store?”
“Everyone,” Amir admitted. “His brothers and his cousins.”
“What are their names?”
