by Joby Warrick
On November 10, the CIA’s Baghdad station chief sat down again to describe the unraveling security situation in a formal report to headquarters. The images Gerry Meyer sketched this time were even more dire. The insurgency he described was not only real, it was winning. The terrorists, with help from Baathist allies, were well supplied and appeared capable of moving freely, with little fear of either American troops or the hastily reconstituted but ineffective local police departments. In the eyes of ordinary Iraqis they appeared to be powerful and “largely unchallenged,” he wrote, eroding any lingering hope that American military might be able to stabilize the country.
“The ease with which the insurgents move and exist…is bolstering their self-confidence further,” Meyer wrote, according to a version of the “aardwolf” obtained by American journalists soon after it was transmitted to Langley. As for the terrorists’ supporters—disaffected Sunni Muslims and former officers of Saddam Hussein’s security establishment—they had been handed a perfect opportunity to regroup, the station chief said. “The continued sense of isolation in the Sunni heartland, the complete dissolution of the army and other institutions of security, rigid de-Baathification, and the lack of economic opportunities or political direction gave these regime elements the confidence they needed to repair their networks and reestablish themselves,” the report said.
Meyer’s brutal candor caused some of his colleagues to fear for his job, and, sure enough, the new report infuriated senior Bush aides, prompting accusations that the CIA was trying to undermine the president politically, with an election year just getting under way.
On November 11—the Veterans Day holiday for government employees—the White House convened a second meeting to kick around Meyer’s latest report and its implications. Robert Richer was again summoned, this time in person, along with CIA director George Tenet and his top deputy, John McLaughlin, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and other national security aides. The president began the meeting with a blunt question to the CIA contingent.
“So you guys think this is an insurgency?” he asked.
McLaughlin began a prepared briefing framed around the question “Who is the enemy?” But when he used the word “insurgent,” a skeptical Rumsfeld interrupted.
“Define ‘insurgency,’ ” he demanded.
McLaughlin and other CIA officials began ticking off a list of components of a classic insurgency from a standard Pentagon field manual. Iraq, they said, was facing an organized resistance movement that sought to overthrow central authority through subversion and armed conflict. They described the collusion between domestic opponents and foreign terrorists and highlighted what was known about the movement’s leadership, tactics, and weapons. According to one participant, the Defense Department’s representatives were unmoved.
“The military wasn’t interested in hearing this,” the official recalled years later. “They were hoping they were done with the war, and they didn’t go in for any talk about insurgencies.”
Bush, by contrast, was thoughtfully quiet. His parting comment as the meeting ended suggested that he had accepted the turn of events in Iraq, even if he wasn’t ready to talk about it publicly.
“I don’t want any commentary,” he said.
One month later, the White House enjoyed a brief respite from the tide of grim news with the announcement of the capture of Saddam Hussein during a December 13, 2003, raid on a remote farmhouse near his hometown of Tikrit. But the former dictator’s arrest brought no relief from the now daily attacks on coalition troops and Iraqi civilians. Zarqawi, after months of fighting from the shadows, was gaining confidence as the de-facto leader of a full-blown insurgency in Iraq. His movement, now supported by thousands of embittered Iraqis and sympathetic Islamists from across the Muslim world, would soon pose the greatest single threat to American ambitions in Iraq.
Gerry Meyer, the man who had warned of the growing insurgency in two CIA reports, did not survive in his post as Baghdad station chief long enough to see the uprising come to full flower. Within weeks of his November 10 report, he was relieved of command and ordered back to Washington.
For years afterward, when CIA officials would dissect the mistakes of the war’s early months, some would marvel at the improbable confluences that enabled Zarqawi to achieve so much so quickly. Like a seed stirred up by a vile wind, the Jordanian had landed at precisely the right time in a patch of soil that had been perfectly prepared to enable him to take root.
“The fertile soil was Iraq after de-Baathification,” Richer said. “The rain and sunshine were the ineptitude of the provisional authority and U.S. misunderstanding of Iraqis and their culture.
“All of that,” he said, “allowed Zarqawi to blossom and grow.”
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The lushest swath of Iraqi soil for sprouting an insurgency turned out to be a band of dusty towns and villages north and west of the capital. Within the boundaries of the region that became known as the Sunni Triangle, anxiousness about the American invasion turned quickly to resentment and then, for some, to open hostility.
Zaydan al-Jabiri, a tribal leader with a large sheep ranch near Ramadi, vividly remembered the day he lost faith in the Americans as liberators, or even as an improvement on Saddam Hussein’s police state. It was April 28, 2003, nearly three weeks after Baghdad fell, and three days before U.S. president George W. Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech. The forty-year-old sheikh had been watching closely for clues about how the occupation forces would manage commerce—prolonged curfews and travel restrictions could be disastrous for a man who traded in wool and fresh mutton. Like many in his Dulaim tribe, he had been willing to give the newcomers a chance. Then came the event that changed everything.
Until that day, a Monday, Zaydan had seen little of the Americans invaders. The columns of tanks with their coffee-stain desert camouflage had deliberately avoided the provincial cities during the early phases of the campaign, but now they were backtracking, clearing out any lingering resistance and consolidating their lines. On April 23, soldiers from the Eighty-second Airborne Division and Third Armored Calvary Regiment had rolled into the nearby city of Fallujah and set up camp inside government buildings and a school. On the evening of April 28, a crowd of about two hundred protesters defied a citywide curfew and gathered outside the school building, chanting and yelling at U.S. paratroopers inside. The Americans would later say that some in the crowd had brandished weapons, and shots were fired. In any case, the GIs opened up with a volley that killed seventeen demonstrators and wounded seventy. Investigators from Human Rights Watch later found no evidence of bullet damage to the school where the troops were staying. Iraqis were outraged, but Zaydan was among the tribal officials who counseled restraint. “We tried with all our might not to create problems with the Americans,” he would say years later. After gathering informally to discuss a solution, the heads of the major clans from central Anbar Province picked emissaries to meet with the U.S. commanders in Fallujah.
“We went to them and we said, ‘We are tribes, and we can have a tribal solution: you pay diyya—blood money,’ ” Zaydan recalled. “ ‘These [victims] had families, some had kids. Pay the families money to guarantee their future, so their kids won’t be part of the resistance.’ ”
The reply came days later. Yes, the United States was willing to compensate the victims’ families. The rate was set at three thousand dollars for each dead Iraqi.
Zaydan was furious. “Three thousand dollars? That’s what you pay to replace one of your police dogs!” he fumed.
“After that, we realized that the Americans had no good intentions,” he said.
It was the first of a series of unhappy encounters for Zaydan, a man who might have seemed a likely ally to any army that toppled Saddam Hussein. He had been barely thirty years old when members of his tribal family decided to back a coup attempt, organized by an Iraqi air force general from a prominent Anbar clan, against the dictator. When the plot was discovered, Sadd
am rounded up and executed more than 150 army officers and detained more than a thousand other Iraqi Sunnis, including Zaydan and one of his brothers. Zaydan, condemned to die with the others, was granted clemency at the last minute, in a general pardon intended to repair relations with the powerful Sunni tribes that had long helped Saddam stay in power.
Yet, even after the death sentence, and despite his deep antipathy for many of the dictator’s policies, Zaydan settled into an odd ambivalence toward the Iraqi leader. He admired Saddam’s toughness. He privately cheered his fearless defiance of the West, which for many Sunnis evoked a glorious past when Iraq was part of a mighty empire, and Baghdad was a global center of science and learning. For all their technology, the Americans were arrogant upstarts, with little appreciation for the cultural richness of a land that had given birth to written language, mathematics, astronomy, and the law. Iraq was not a mere product of lines drawn on a colonial map, whose value lay in the oil buried beneath its sands. It was a country of tribes that traced their lineage to the beginning of civilization itself.
“The Americans and their media made us imagine that Iraq would never be Iraq until Saddam Hussein went away,” Zaydan said. “Iraq is seven thousand years old. America is only two hundred years old. It’s like comparing a Mercedes to a Hyundai.”
Still, Zaydan saw little point in opposing the American invasion, even after the killings in Fallujah, just forty miles from his ranch. “We’re not an army,” he said, “and we didn’t want to look like we were defending the regime.” But as the occupation neared its first anniversary, his concerns about U.S. intentions multiplied. It was clear to Zaydan’s mind that the Americans intended to stay indefinitely. Worse, they had stripped power from Iraq’s long-dominant Sunni tribes and handed it over to Shiites, leaders Zaydan viewed as “thieves and bandits” whose true allegiance lay with Iran. In Baghdad, Sunnis were being targeted by roving bands of Shiite militiamen. Zaydan watched with conflicted emotions as other members of his tribe formed secret cells, initially for self-defense but later to engage in hit-and-run attacks against American troops. Stories began to circulate about a mysterious Jordanian who paid hard cash to any Iraqis who joined his movement. Zaydan would never swear allegiance to the jihadist who called himself Zarqawi. But others in the Dulaim clan did.
The sheikh tried to meet once more with American military commanders in Fallujah. It was on July 4, as he later remembered, and he showed up unannounced with other tribal leaders, bearing a gift: flowers to commemorate the American holiday. The marine officer who met with the Iraqis struck Zaydan as agitated and suspicious, perhaps with good reason: Iraqi leaders generally visited the base to make a request, usually for compensation for some kind of injury or damage. Years afterward, Zaydan could not recall the reason for the meeting, but he still remembered the argument that ensued.
At one point, the American commander managed to insult his visitors with a comment that seemed to lump together Iraqis and terrorists. One of the sheikhs, angered, accused the Americans of being dupes of Ahmad Chalabi, the exiled Shiite politician who provided the Bush administration with faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction.
“We know you were deceived by Chalabi into coming to Iraq!” one of the sheikhs declared.
Zaydan tried to smooth things over, but it was clear that the meeting was over. More insults followed, and one of the Iraqis banged the table loudly.
As he got up to leave, Zaydan was struck by the impossible gulf between the man in the camouflage and the Iraqis in their tribal dress. Even when they used the same vocabulary, somehow the words were not the same.
As the Iraqis were leaving, Zaydan managed a parting word to the marine commander.
“You’ll never be able to stay in Iraq,” he said.
A conflagration had begun, Zaydan saw, and he would do nothing to stand in its way.
“This,” he said later, “is when the real battle started.”
10
“Revolting is exactly what we want”
In January 2004, some ten months after his arrival in Baghdad, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi sat at a keyboard to compose a letter to Osama bin Laden. It had been two years since his departure from Afghanistan, and almost four years since the al-Qaeda founder had refused to meet him in person at his Kandahar compound. But now Zarqawi was ready to offer a truce.
He opened with a sentimental flourish.
“Even if our bodies are far apart, the distance between our hearts is close,” he wrote to the author of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
A lot had happened since their last communication, and Zarqawi felt compelled to account for his time in Iraq, as though Bin Laden had somehow missed the news of the insurgency. The situation in Iraq was different from anything the two commanders had experienced in Afghanistan, he said, both in good ways (Iraqis spoke Arabic) and bad (awful terrain, with few hiding places). Zarqawi maintained that he was making good progress in the campaign he had started, and he hoped that Bin Laden might be willing to help. But first he would offer a jihadist’s view of the battlefield and a sketch of the major combatants, including his own small army.
He started with the Americans. For all their firepower, he said, they were “the most cowardly of God’s creatures,” uninterested in a real fight and preferring to remain on their bases. But they’d be gone soon enough, he predicted, leaving the country and the war to others.
As for Iraqi’s Sunni minority—the group most likely to be sympathetic to his cause—Zarqawi was equally scornful. The Sunnis were leaderless and divided, “more wretched than orphans at the tables of the depraved,” he said. Even the Iraqi soldiers who joined the jihadists lacked real experience in fighting and preferred lobbing grenades or firing occasional mortar rounds to confronting the enemy directly.
“The Iraqi brothers still prefer safety and returning to the arms of their wives, where nothing frightens them,” Zarqawi wrote. “Sometimes the groups have boasted among themselves that not one of them has been killed or captured. We have told them in our many sessions with them that safety and victory are incompatible, that the tree of triumph and empowerment cannot grow tall and lofty without blood and defiance of death.”
Turning to the country’s Shiite majority, Zarqawi launched into a bile-spewing screed that continued for pages.
“The insurmountable obstacle, the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy, and the penetrating venom,” he wrote, straining with his metaphors. He dismissed Iraq’s majority religion as worse than paganism, having “nothing in common with Islam except in the way that Jews have something in common with Christians under the banner of the People of the Book.” Shiites had designs on destroying the Sunni faith, and they had craftily allied themselves with the U.S. occupiers.
“They have been a sect of treachery and betrayal throughout history and throughout the ages,” Zarqawi declared.
Bin Laden was an odd choice to receive such a rant. Though Sunni himself, the al-Qaeda founder saw himself as a unifier of Muslims and had never expressed interest in attacking Shiite innocents. In fact, he had condemned it, as Zarqawi doubtlessly already knew. Perhaps the Jordanian believed he could change Bin Laden’s mind, for he proceeded to the heart of his message: a plan for a coming battle that called for killing Shiites in even greater numbers. Such a campaign, he argued, would simultaneously achieve three objectives: destabilizing Iraq, eliminating a hateful apostasy, and, most important, forcing Sunnis to take up arms in a war that would lead to their liberation—a war that he would ignite—an “awaking of the slumberer and rousing of the sleeper.”
The solution that we see, and God the Exalted knows better, is for us to drag the Shi’a into the battle because this is the only way to prolong the fighting between us and the infidels….The only solution is for us to strike the religious, military, and other cadres among the Shi’a with blow after blow until they bend to the Sunnis. Someone may say that, in this matter, we are being hasty and rash and le
ading the [Islamic] nation into a battle for which it is not ready, a battle that will be revolting and in which blood will be spilled. This is exactly what we want.
Now Zarqawi had a favor to ask: His organization, though small, had been behind nearly all the major terrorist attacks in Iraq, excluding the far-northern cities—twenty-five strikes in all, according to his count. But he could accomplish much more with al-Qaeda’s official endorsement and global resources, he argued. “All that we hope is that we will be the spearhead, the enabling vanguard, and the bridge on which the Islamic nation crosses over to the victory that is promised,” he wrote. If Bin Laden agreed with Zarqawi’s strategy—“if you adopt it as a program and road, and if you are convinced of the idea of fighting the sects of apostasy”—then Zarqawi was prepared to swear allegiance. “We will be your readied soldiers, working under your banner, complying with your orders,” he said.
If the alliance was not to be, there would be no hard feelings, Zarqawi assured Bin Laden. But either way, the al-Qaeda leader would be hearing from him. Very soon, he said, he would step out of the shadows and publicly announce himself to the world.
“We have been waiting until we have enough weight on the ground,” he said. Now, at last, “the decisive moment approaches.”
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On a chilly February night a few weeks after Zarqawi composed his letter, Brigadier General Stanley McChrystal rested on the staircase of a darkened townhouse in Fallujah, in the violent heartland of the Iraqi insurgency, listening to his soldiers as they swept from room to room, searching for fighters and hidden weapons caches. At that very moment, the object of his search also waited in darkness, straining to interpret sounds: the low rumble of idling diesel engines, the banging of metal against wood, the shouts in American English, the barking dogs, the crunch of heavy boots against glass.
By sheer luck, the commander of U.S. special forces in Iraq had delivered a team of commandos to the very housing block where Iraq’s most dangerous terrorist had lain sleeping. The two men were less than 150 feet apart, separated only by a couple of thin concrete walls and the blackness of a city that had been mostly without electricity since the U.S. invasion nearly a year before.
