by Joby Warrick
“How,” he said aloud, “does someone with a human heart do a thing like this?”
Just two days later came the news that one of the attackers—a woman—had survived and fled. A day after that, Sajida al-Rishawi sat in a chair in front of him.
She would surely know something, tied as she was to such an obviously important and well-planned mission. Where would the terrorists strike next? What plans were unfolding, perhaps at this very hour?
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” the woman would occasionally manage, in a soft mumble. She repeated the line slowly, as though drugged.
Abu Haytham pleaded with her. He threatened. He appealed to her conscience, to religion, to Allah. Hours passed—crucial hours, he feared.
“How brainwashed you are!” he shouted at one point. “Why do you protect the people who put you up to this?”
The woman would never offer a useful syllable, then or in the months to come, after she was convicted and sentenced to die. Yet, already, Abu Haytham knew who was behind the act. All the Mukhabarat’s men knew, even before the culprit boasted of his responsibility in an audio recording made in his own voice. The signatures were all there: The coordinated blasts, all within ten minutes; the deployment of human bombers, each skillfully fitted with a device consisting of military-grade RDX explosive and enough loose metal to ensure maximum carnage. Most telling of all was the choice of targets—ordinary hotels where, on any given evening, Amman’s middle class would pack a rented ballroom in their finest apparel to celebrate a union or mark a milestone. No intelligence operative or general was likely to pass through the lobby of the Radisson at 9:00 p.m. on a weekday night. But scores of Jordanians would be there, clinging to the rituals of normal life in a country bordering a war zone.
Such hallmarks, like the voice on the audio recording, unmistakably belonged to Zarqawi, a man the Mukhabarat knew exceptionally well. He was, at the time of the bombing, the head of a particularly vicious terrorist network called al-Qaeda in Iraq. But the Jordanians had known him back in the days when he was Ahmad the hoodlum, a high school dropout with a reputation as a heavy drinker and a brawler. They had watched him wander off to Afghanistan in the late 1980s to fight the communists, then return as a battle-hardened religious fanatic. After a first try at terrorism, he had vanished into one of Jordan’s darkest prisons. This time he emerged as a battle-hardened religious fanatic who also happened to excel as a leader of men.
Abu Haytham had been among those who tried to alter Zarqawi’s path after prison. He had been the last intelligence officer to meet with him in 1999, before Zarqawi was granted permission to leave the country for good, headed again to Afghanistan and a future that surely—so the Jordanians thought—offered nothing more than futility and a dusty grave.
Then, in the most improbable of events, America intervened. Few beyond the intelligence service had heard of Zarqawi when Washington made him a terrorist superstar, declaring to the world in 2003 that this obscure Jordanian was the link between Iraq’s dictatorship and the plotters behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The claim was wrong, yet, weeks later, when U.S. troops invaded Iraq, the newly famous and well-funded terrorist gained a battleground and a cause and soon thousands of followers. Over three tumultuous years, he intentionally pushed Iraq to the brink of sectarian war by unleashing wave after wave of savage attacks on Shiite civilians in their mosques, bazaars, and schools. He horrified millions with a new form of highly intimate terrorism: the beheading of individual hostages, captured on video and sent around the world, using the Internet’s new power to broadcast directly into people’s homes. Along the way, he lashed out violently at his native Jordan and helped transform America’s lightning victory in Iraq into the costliest U.S. military campaign since Vietnam.
Yet his most significant accomplishment was not apparent until years later. Though some would cast his movement as an al-Qaeda offshoot, Zarqawi was no one’s acolyte. His brand of jihadism was utterly, brutally original. Osama bin Laden had sought to liberate Muslim nations gradually from corrupting Western influences so they could someday unify as a single Islamic theocracy, or caliphate. Zarqawi, by contrast, insisted that he would create his caliphate immediately—right now. He would seek to usher in God’s kingdom on Earth through acts of unthinkable savagery, believing, correctly, that theatrical displays of extreme violence would attract the most hardened jihadists to his cause and frighten everyone else into submission. His strategy shook the region as al-Qaeda never had.
But Zarqawi’s excesses also deepened his adversaries’ resolve. In the immediate aftermath of the hotel bombings, Abu Haytham and other Mukhabarat officers had a simple goal: to eliminate the man who had ordered them. And when they succeeded, in 2006, by providing the United States with intelligence that helped it track Zarqawi to his hideout, the terrorist and his organization appeared finished. Instead, his followers merely retreated, quietly gaining strength in Syria’s lawless provinces until they burst into view in 2013, not as a terrorist group, but as an army.
This time, war-weary America would refuse to help until it was too late. There would be no serious effort to arm the moderate rebels who sought to deny ISIS its safe haven, and no air strikes to harry ISIS’s leadership and supply lines. Twice in a decade, a jihadist wave had threatened to engulf the region. Twice, it seemed to the Jordanians, the American response had been to cut a fresh hole in the lifeboat.
Zarqawi’s successors called themselves by different names before settling on ISIS—or simply the Islamic State. But they continued to refer to Zarqawi as the “mujahid sheikh,” acknowledging the founder who had the audacity to believe he could redraw the maps of the Middle East. And, like Zarqawi, they believed their conquests would not end there.
In the prophetic passages of the Muslim holy texts known as the Hadith, Zarqawi saw his fate foretold. He and his men were the black-clad soldiers of whom the ancient scholars had written: “The black flags will come from the East, led by mighty men, with long hair and beards, their surnames taken from their home towns.” These conquerors would not merely reclaim the ancient Muslim lands. They also would be the instigators of the final cataclysmic struggle ending in the destruction of the West’s great armies, in northern Syria.
“The spark has been lit here in Iraq,” Zarqawi preached, “and its heat will continue to intensify until it burns the Crusader armies in Dabiq.”
The Mukhabarat’s men had heard enough of such talk from Zarqawi back when he was their prisoner. Now the brazen claims were coming from his offspring. Thirty thousand strong, they were waiting just across the border, calling for their sister Sajida.
—
The charade of a prisoner swap ended abruptly on February 3, 2015, the day after Jordan’s king arrived in Washingon for the official visit. For Abdullah II, it was the latest in a series of exhausting journeys in which he repeated the same appeal for help. His tiny country was struggling with two burdens imposed from abroad: a human tide of refugees from Syria—some six hundred thousand so far—and the cost of participating in the allied Western-Arab military campaign against ISIS. The trip was not going particularly well. Members of Congress offered sympathy but not much more; White House officials recited the usual pledges to bolster Jordan’s defenses and struggling economy, but the kind of assistance Abdullah most desperately needed was nowhere in the offing.
The king’s disappointment had long since hardened into resentment. During previous visits, President Obama had declined Jordan’s requests for laser-guided munitions and other advanced hardware that could take out ISIS’s trucks and tanks. On this trip, there was no firm commitment even for a meeting between the two leaders.
Abdullah was in the Capitol, making a pitch to Senator John McCain, the Republican senator and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, when one of the king’s aides interrupted him. The monarch stepped into the corridor and, on the small screen of a smartphone, watched ISIS deliver its final statement on the proposed prisoner s
wap. As video cameras rolled, masked jihadists marched the young Jordanian pilot into a small metal cage that had been doused with fuel. Then they lit a fire and filmed as the airman was burned alive.
By the time Abdullah returned to the meeting, McCain’s aides had seen the video as well. The monarch kept his composure, but McCain could see he was badly shaken.
“Can we do anything more for you?” McCain asked.
“I’m not getting support from your side!” Abdullah finally said. “I’m still getting only gravity bombs, and we’re not even getting resupplied with those. Meanwhile, we’re flying two hundred percent more missions than all the other coalition members combined, apart from the United States.”
The king continued with his scheduled meetings, but he had already made up his mind to return home. He was making arrangements when the White House phoned to offer fifteen minutes with the president. Abdullah accepted.
Inside the Oval Office, Obama offered condolences to the pilot’s family and thanked the king for Jordan’s contributions to the military campaign against ISIS. The administration was doing all it could to be supportive, the president assured the monarch.
“No, sir, you are not,” Abdullah said, firmly. He rattled off a list of weapons and supplies he needed.
“I’ve got three days’ worth of bombs left,” he said, according to an official present during the exchange. “When I get home I’m going to war, and I’m going to use every bomb I’ve got until they’re gone.”
There was one other item of business to attend to before his return. From the airport, Abdullah called his aides in Amman to start the process of carrying out a pair of executions. On Jordan’s death row, there were two inmates who had been convicted of committing murderous acts on orders from Zarqawi. One was an Iraqi man who had been a midlevel operative in Zarqawi’s Iraqi insurgency. The other was Sajida al-Rishawi. Both should be put to death without further delay.
The king foresaw that Western governments would protest the executions as acts of vengeance, even though both inmates had been convicted and sentenced long ago as part of normal court proceedings. But he would not be deterred. As far as he was concerned, the appointment with the hangman had already been delayed too long, he told aides.
“I don’t want to hear a word from anyone,” Abdullah said.
The king was still airborne at 2:00 a.m. Amman time, when the guards arrived to collect Sajida al-Rishawi from her cell. She had declined the customary final meal and ritual bath with which devout Muslims cleanse the physical body in preparation for the afterlife. She donned the red uniform worn exclusively by condemned prisoners on the day of execution, along with the usual hijab for covering her head and face.
She was escorted outside the prison to a waiting van with a military escort for the drive to Swaqa, Jordan’s largest prison, on a desert hill about sixty miles south of the capital. The vehicles arrived just before 4:00 a.m., as a full moon, visible through a light haze, was dipping toward the southwestern horizon.
Her last earthly view, before she was blindfolded, was of a small execution chamber with white walls and a row of tiny windows, and a few tired faces looking up from the witness gallery just below her. An imam prayed as a noose with a heavy metal clasp was secured, and a judge asked if Rishawi cared to convey any last wishes or a final will. She gave no reply.
She likewise made no audible sound as the gallows’ trap opened and she plunged hard into the darkness. It was 5:05 a.m., nearly ninety minutes before sunrise, when the prison doctor checked for a pulse.
“Zarqawi’s woman” was dead, her execution the closing scene in the worst act of terrorism in Jordan’s history. But Zarqawi’s children were pursuing the founder’s far grander ambitions: the end of Jordan and its king, the erasing of international boundaries, and the destruction of the modern states of the Middle East. Then, with black flags raised above Muslim capitals from the Levant to the Persian Gulf, they could begin the great apocalyptic showdown with the West.
BOOK I
THE RISE OF ZARQAWI
1
“What kind of person can command with only his eyes?”
The most notorious of Jordan’s prisons is the old fortress of al-Jafr, known for decades as the place where troublesome men went to be forgotten. It lies outside a Bedouin village of the same name, on a road that marks the outer boundary of human habitation in the country’s fierce southeastern desert. Beyond the prison, the terrain flattens into a basin of baked mud that stretches to the horizon without a hill or rock or stubble of grass. The ancient sea that once stood here evaporated eons ago, leaving an emptiness like a missing limb, a void so unnatural that it stirs feelings of dread among the few travelers who pause for a look. “There’s a terrible loneliness,” wrote filmmaker David Lean, who shot parts of Lawrence of Arabia on the same mudflats in 1962 and pronounced the place “more deserted than any desert I’ve ever seen.” His picture editor, Howard Kent, would describe al-Jafr as, simply, “a warning of what hell is like.”
It was at this spot that British military overseers chose to build an imposing prison with limestone walls and high watchtowers for detainees regarded as too dangerous for ordinary jails. And it was here, years later, that the Jordanians began the practice of quarantining Palestinian militants and other radicals viewed as threats to the state. Hundreds of men, many of them held without formal charge, languished in stifling, vermin-infested cells where they endured temperature extremes, rancid food, and a catalogue of abuses later documented by United Nations investigators. Newly arriving prisoners were routinely beaten until they lost consciousness. Others were flogged with electric cables, burned with lit cigarettes, or hung upside down by means of a stick placed under the knees, a position the guards gleefully called “grilled chicken.” Over time, the monarchy grew weary of the costs of running a prison so isolated from the country’s population and so damaging to its reputation. In 1979, the last of its inmates were transferred to other jails, and al-Jafr was abandoned to the scorpions and its own ghosts.
Years passed, and then, in a sudden shift, the old prison was resurrected. Officials of the Public Security Directorate had grown worried about the behavior of a band of antigovernment zealots in the country’s central Swaqa Prison, and in 1998 they decided to isolate the group to prevent the contagion from spreading. The officials reopened one of al-Jafr’s dusty wings and dispatched an army of workers to sweep out corridors and prepare a large cell where all could be housed together. Twenty-five bunk beds were assembled and stacked in cramped rows, and a new door of latticed steel was bolted across the cell’s entrance, the room’s only opening other than air slits cut into walls at knee level. When the grounds were ready, the department appointed a warden and hired the usual complement of guards, laundrymen, and cooks. The inmates were too few to justify the hiring of a separate prison physician, and so it was that Basel al-Sabha, a recent medical-school graduate assigned by the Health Department to the local village, was pressed into service as the doctor of record for fifty of the most dangerous men in Jordan.
It was an unwelcome assignment for Sabha, a tall twenty-four-year-old with boyish good looks, and he complained bitterly about the posting. Prisons in Jordan were vile places, and this one exceeded all others, at least by reputation. Sabha’s anxiety deepened on his very first day, as the warden, a middle-aged colonel named Ibrahim, sat him down to review a list of safety precautions. When dealing with inmates such as these, the warden cautioned, it was essential to stay on the other side of the bars at all times, even during medical examinations. And Sabha shouldn’t be lulled into thinking that a metal door was protection enough, he warned.
“These people are very dangerous,” Ibrahim said. “Even if they’re not physically dangerous, they have a way of affecting you. Even I have to be careful that they don’t affect me.”
The warden went on to describe the peculiarities of the new arrivals, from their strange dress—most insisted on wearing an Afghanstyle tunic over their jailhouse
uniforms, because tight-fitting prison trousers were regarded as too revealing—to their ability to make converts out of hardened criminals and even prison employees. At Swaqa, so many guards had fallen under their spell that prison officials were forced to limit shifts to ninety minutes in any sector where the inmates might be encountered.
As the tour was ending, the warden repeated his warning about the prisoners. There was one inmate—the sect’s apparent leader—whose seductive powers were extraordinary, he said. He was the one called Maqdisi, a religious scholar and preacher of considerable gifts, capable of infecting and twisting minds like a Muslim Rasputin.
“He is very smart, a walking library of Islamic knowledge,” Ibrahim said. “You will know when you see him. A handsome guy, tall and slim, with light-brown hair and blue eyes. Don’t be fooled.”
Moments later, Basel al-Sabha was being escorted by guards into the prison’s interior, past the watchtowers and armed guards, to the wing where the prisoners were kept. It was well past dark, and a dim light shone feebly through the bars of the doorway as the doctor approached. Drawing closer, he could make out the rows of bunks, followed by a jarring first glimpse of the prisoners themselves.
Forty-eight inmates sat upright on their bunks or prayer rugs, facing the doorway with rapt attention, like military conscripts awaiting inspection. Each wore the same peculiar uniform, a loose-fitting tunic worn over the standard blue prison shirt and trousers, just as the warden had said. All eyes appeared fixed on a figure near the doorway, and Sabha inched forward to see who it was.
At the front of the cell were two men. The first was tall and slender with scholarly glasses and a tangle of light-brown hair protruding from his prayer cap. Sabha guessed that this was the one the warden had called Maqdisi, the cell block’s charismatic leader. Yet it was the second man who appeared to command the room’s attention. He was darker and shorter but powerfully built, with a thick neck and shoulders that might have belonged to a wrestler or gymnast. Sabha, now only feet away, noticed an unusual scar on the man’s right arm: a jagged gash across a patch of ink-stained skin the color of an old bruise. Around the wound the flesh showed the pulls and folds of amateur suturing.
