by Joby Warrick
“Insurgents and foreign fighters largely operate without constraint within the city,” read a classified State Department cable describing Ford’s meeting with the marines. “Coalition forces are still seeking to disrupt insurgents and foreign jihadists with surgical strikes against Abu Musab al Zarqawi–related targets within the town in order to prevent Fallujah from operating as a safe-haven for extremists.”
A Jordanian diplomat with extensive contacts within the Sunni tribes described the situation as all but hopeless. Sunnis remained bitterly opposed to the American presence in Iraq, and though some were conflicted about the presence of foreign insurgents, others welcomed them as a bulwark against persecution by Shiite militias seeking to settle scores after decades of Sunni rule. Out of desperation, some tribal elders had even taken up the idea of restoring the Iraqi monarchy that had been overthrown in the 1958 coup, the Jordanian said.
“Sunnis are hostile, divided, leaderless, and unable to envision a political solution acceptable to others,” the diplomat told Ford, according to a cable that bore eerie echoes of Zarqawi’s own analysis of the country’s Sunni minority.
There was still another obstacle, much harder to gauge from diplomatic interviews. Somewhere in the western desert, Zarqawi was also making his own plans for Iraqi’s Sunni heartland. He, too, was gathering intelligence, recruiting allies, and laying the groundwork for future governance, though his vision differed from the Americans’ in every conceivable way.
Ford’s decades of diplomatic experience had shown that political solutions existed for almost every conflict. Eventually, even Sunnis and Shiites would weary of killings and destruction and grope toward a solution that would allow the sides to peacefully coexist as Iraqis. But Zarqawi was no Iraqi, and he had no interest in coexisting. Zarqawi’s objective was to raze and tear down, leaving a scorched terrain too depleted to support the return of a secular country called Iraq.
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The Iraqi city of Ramadi was not yet the “capital of the Islamic state of Iraq,” as Zarqawi’s followers would soon call it. But already, in the early summer of 2004, there was little doubt about who controlled the town.
A sprawl of low-rise concrete buildings and palm trees on the Euphrates River an hour west of Baghdad, Ramadi had the post-apocalyptic feel of a city that had been a free-fire zone between powerful armies. Decapitated buildings lined an abandoned market street strewn with broken concrete and shattered glass. People and cars darted and weaved as though pursued by invisible assailants. From behind walls of sandbags and Hesco barriers on the city’s outskirts, the local U.S military commanders proclaimed Ramadi to be under U.S. control. In reality, the Americans’ jurisdiction extended only to their bases and outposts and the range of their heavy machine guns. Marine patrols into the city’s neighborhoods invariably sent insurgents scurrying through the alleys like cockroaches.
Zaydan al-Jabiri watched them run, and said nothing. The rancher and Sunni tribal leader who had once tried to mediate disputes between Iraqis and Americans had long since given up on peacemaking. It wasn’t merely a frustrating occupation; it was dangerous. One of the sheikh’s oldest friends, a physics professor at Anbar University, had taken a risk by agreeing to meet with visiting Coalition Provisional Authority officials to talk about ways to control the spasms of violence that had turned so much of Ramadi into rubble. The day after the meeting, the professor was pulled from his car at an intersection and shot dead in the middle of the street.
In many more instances, death was frighteningly random. In the weeks after sixteen U.S. marines had been killed in a series of ambushes around the city, the Americans were in a vengeful mood. Firefights erupted daily in residential neighborhoods, and bullets tore through bedrooms where families slept. Checkpoint sentries reflexively shot at motorists who approached too quickly or failed to heed warnings shouted at them in English. In the desert outside Ramadi, forty-five Iraqis had died when American warplanes stuck a building that U.S. officials insisted was an insurgent safe house. Iraqis said the jets mistakenly struck a wedding celebration. Amateur video showed bodies of women as well as children and infants.
Outraged and humiliated, Ramadi’s Sunnis initially welcomed the resistance fighters, including the foreign Islamists who poured into the city promising to drive away the invaders. Compared with the local insurgents, the Islamists were organized, disciplined, and fearless. But it was soon clear that their plans included more than fighting Americans. The foreigners commandeered houses and forcibly collected “taxes” and supplies from shopkeepers. Declaring themselves in charge, they rolled into residential neighborhoods armed with heavy weapons and a harsh moral code that banned drinking, smoking, female education, and Western fashion and hairstyles. One Ramadi man defiantly lit a cigarette in front of such an Islamist patrol and was shot dead on the spot.
Businesses suffered as well, despite the insurgents’ crude attempts at establishing courts and maintaining essential services. It was quickly clear that the rebels had neither aptitude for nor interest in running anything. Their checkpoints and roadside bombs made transportation a high-risk enterprise, even when the cargo consisted, as in Zaydan’s case, of cows and sheep. In town, the hallmarks of modern civilized life slipped away, one by one: garbage collection, phone service, electricity. Shopkeepers who tried to stay open found themselves subjected to arbitrary and occasionally bizarre regulations. In some neighborhoods, grocers were threatened with punishment if they displayed cucumbers and tomatoes in the same stall. The jihadists maintained that the vegetables resembled male and female body parts and should not be permitted to mingle.
Despite the hardships, some merchants chose to back the Islamists anyway, hoping at least to enjoy a measure of protection. Zaydan demurred. The presence of foreign troops in his city irritated him. Yet he was equally resentful of what he saw as the Islamists’ impertinence in challenging the traditional authority of the tribes. He was appalled by the Islamists’ tactics and disdainful of their thuggish, swaggering behavior. He complained to friends about the personality cult that seemed to be developing around the Jordanian named Zarqawi, the black-clad phantom whose exploits were already legendary in some of the city’s neighborhoods.
“He surrounds himself with the scum of Anbar,” Zaydan complained. “The people accept him because they are sheep without a shepherd. But the men close to him are lowlifes, people with no conscience. And they are drawn to Zarqawi because he has a lot of money.”
Zarqawi himself was rarely seen in the town, but his Iraqi deputies quickly earned notoriety as colorful butchers. Most famous was a religious zealot called Omar the Electrician, a stocky tradesman with chipped teeth who, in his twenties, had shot a police officer in Saddam Hussein’s government in an act of revenge over the killing of a relative. He sought refuge with Ansar al-Islam, the Islamist group that had sheltered Zarqawi in Iraq’s northeastern mountains. When Zarqawi entered Baghdad, Omar the Electrician came along, and rose to become the leader of Zarqawi’s brigade in Fallujah. His band became among the most notorious in Iraq, staging hit-and-run attacks on American patrols and running kidnapping-for-ransom operations to raise money. Hostages who couldn’t pay up were killed, though not by Omar himself. He “swore he’d never personally beheaded a hostage,” one of his comrades told journalists. “He said he chose men who don’t have hearts to do the actual killing.”
Zarqawi eventually began to solicit pledges of support—bay’at, a loyalty oath—from Anbar tribal leaders and elders. In the summer of 2004, word was passed to Zaydan through a cousin that Zarqawi was looking for a declaration of allegiance from him. The question was relayed over coffee, the first of two occasions when Zaydan would receive such a request. “Will you publicly pledge your support to Zarqawi?” the cousin asked.
How to respond? Inside, Zaydan was furious. The arrogance of this foreigner—this criminal—who dared to presume that he could assert authority over tribal traditions that had held sway for centuries! For all he knew, Zarqawi wa
s an American agent, sent by Washington to stir unrest so the Westerners and Iranians could have an excuse to destroy Iraq utterly and divide the spoils among themselves.
But even Zaydan dared not utter such opinions aloud. He chose to deflect the question, for now.
“Who is Zarqawi?” he shrugged. “I never met him.”
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In July 2004, the Bush administration announced that it had increased the reward for information leading to Zarqawi’s capture, from ten million to twenty-five million dollars—identical to the bounty offered for Bin Laden’s head.
Zarqawi celebrated his rise in the most-wanted rankings with a video, posted to jihadist Web sites. In it, he was introduced under his new favorite moniker—“the sheikh of the slaughterers”—and his voice boomed with confidence. He talked about famous Muslim warriors such as Musa Ibn Nusayr, a hero of the Islamic conquest of Spain, implying his own place in the chain of great men. Then he made an impassioned plea for Muslims from across Iraq and around the world to join him.
“This is a call for help from the depths, to the lions in Baghdad and al-Anbar, and to the heroes in Diyala and Samarra, and to the tigers in Mosul and the north: Prepare for battle,” he said.
His intended audience by now knew exactly the kind of battle he meant. Since Berg’s savage murder, Islamist media were awash in Zarqawi-inspired gore. The Jordanian’s men carried out dozens of executions, many of them videotaped, including the beheadings of a Bulgarian truck driver, a South Korean translator, and an Egyptian contractor. Scores of others would follow, including Americans, Britons, Japanese, Austrians, and Italians. Lebanese kidnapping victims who were freed through ransom told stories of torture and unimaginable cruelty in makeshift prisons; of poor immigrant laborers who lacked money for ransom being killed slowly with electric drills; of other victims being held down while their tongues were hacked out. Young foreign-born Islamists who answered Zarqawi’s call to jihad most often ended in suicide-bomber school. Some would be called upon to sacrifice their own lives to destroy targets with no discernible gain other than to kill a few innocent Iraqis who happened to be in the wrong place.
In recruiting volunteers for suicide bombings, Zarqawi was knowingly defying a Koranic commandment that strictly forbids Muslims from taking their own lives. Some Islamic scholars have held that military suicide missions might be permitted under extreme circumstances, and jihadists have argued for decades over exactly where the lines fall. Zarqawi seized on a small loophole in Islamic law and stretched it to absurd proportions, using hand-picked clerics to sanction the use of “martyrdom operations” for any purpose that suited him. The result was a torrent of suicide attacks unrivaled in the history of the jihadist movement, scholars later concluded.
As Zarqawi himself later wrote, such operations were the most “deadly weapons we have in our possession: weapons with which we can inflict the deepest wound upon our enemy.” He added, somewhat cynically: “All of this is notwithstanding the fact that these kinds of operations are of little effort for us; they are uncomplicated and are the least costly for us.”
In the videotape appealing for new recruits, Zarqawi offered the usual platitudes about heavenly rewards. More appealing, perhaps, was his invitation to be part of a movement that transcended history itself. The liberation of Muslim lands was a worthy goal, but it was only the start. Zarqawi promised nothing short of a reshaping of the global order. “You shall overcome America, by Allah. You shall overcome America, though it may be after a while,” he said. “It shall remain a mole of shame on the cheek of time.”
For the first time, Zarqawi also revealed a conviction regarding his own destiny as a midwife for the new golden age of Islam. He referred to apocalyptic passages in the Hadith describing the end-times struggle that would lead to Islam’s ultimate triumph. According to the ancient prophecies, mankind’s final battle would be fought in northern Syria, near a village called Dabiq. The story echoes early Christian teachings about the epic contest between forces of good and evil at Armageddon.
Jihad’s “flames will blaze,” Zarqawi said, “until they consume the Armies of the Cross in Dabiq.”
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The claim was audacious. Around the world, other Islamist leaders and religious scholars argued furiously about Zarqawi.
Among his harshest critics were a number of fellow jihadists, including some who knew Zarqawi well. One of the sharpest rebukes came from the terrorist leader’s old cellmate and mentor from Jordan, the man who was first to recognize Zarqawi’s leadership potential within al-Jafr Prison. Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi had been in and out of detention during the years when Zarqawi was away, and the differences that emerged between the friends during their last weeks in jail had widened in the years since. Now Maqdisi watched in disapproval as his former protégé killed Muslim men, women, and children who had nothing to do with overthrowing a corrupt leader.
“I hear and monitor the chaos that rages today in Iraq, by means of which they seek to blemish the Jihad and its honorable image by blowing up cars, planting bombs in the roads, and firing mortars in the streets, markets, and other places where Muslims congregate,” Maqdisi wrote in a letter he posted on his personal Web site, assuming—accurately—that Zarqawi would see it. “The hands of the Jihad fighters must remain clean, so as not to be sullied with the blood of those whom it is forbidden to harm, even if they are rebellious sinners.”
Maqdisi had no qualms about using violence, but he was a stickler for the rules, as he understood them. Zarqawi, the pupil, had somehow missed some of the nuances.
“An example of this,” he wrote, “is when the fighter crosses the lines of Sharia by abducting or killing a Muslim for non-Sharia reasons—such as claiming he worked for the infidels when the work doesn’t reach the level of giving aid to the infidels.”
And there was another thing: suicide bombing. Islam forbids it, he declared, except in rare cases where there are no other means of waging the struggle. Zarqawi’s men had compounded the sin by using suicide bombers to kill the innocent, he said. That the intended victims were Shiites was no excuse.
“Even if our Sunni brothers in Iraq have many justifications, this does not justify blowing up mosques,” Maqdisi said. “Permitting the [spilling of] blood of the Shiites is a mistake in which Jihad fighters had best not become entangled.”
A religious backlash to Zarqawism stirred among mainstream Muslims as well. The most significant repudiation of Zarqawi’s ideology came from his native country, organized by the man whose amnesty decree in 1999 had inadvertently given Zarqawi his chance.
In 2002, King Abdullah II had been scolded by American officials for warning that an invasion of Iraq would “open Pandora’s box,” and he was taking no pleasure in seeing his predictions coming true. Sickened by the bombings and beheadings carried out in Allah’s name, the monarch began a series of private meetings with religious scholars to talk about a way to draw a line between Islam, the ancient faith, and the hateful takfiri creed used by Zarqawi to justify the killing of those he regarded as apostates.
It was no easy assignment. Unlike Shiites or Roman Catholics, Sunni Muslims lack a centralized religious hierarchy that settles theological debates. Muftis, Sunni clerics of a certain rank, can issue religious edicts called fatwas, but any two can disagree wildly on the same topic: what is a damnable sin to one scholar may be regarded as permissible or even obligatory behavior to another. Since his arrival in Iraq, Zarqawi had become a master at exploiting the contradictions in the system, surrounding himself with like-minded clerics who issued fatwas to condone suicide bombings and the killing of Muslim innocents, actions that would be regarded as anti-Islamic under almost any reasonable interpretation of Koranic texts.
The best antidote, Abdullah felt, was a strong denunciation that carried the moral weight of all branches of Islam, everywhere in the world. It must be a statement of clarity and universality, equally acceptable to mainstream Sunnis and Shiites from Cairo to Kabul, and from Tehran to
Timbuktu. To begin the task, Abdullah deputized one of his cousins, a Cambridge-educated Islamic scholar named Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad, and pulled together the country’s top clerics and religious experts to draft a declaration that sought to address three key questions:
Who is a Muslim? Who is empowered to issue fatwas? And under what circumstances can one Muslim brand another as an apostate?
On November 9, 2004, the king took a seat next to Jordanian Chief Justice Iz al-Din al-Tamimi as the judge read a short declaration that Abdullah hoped would serve as the template for Muslim rejection of takfiri beliefs.
“We denounce and condemn extremism, radicalism and fanaticism today, just as our forefathers tirelessly denounced and opposed them throughout Islamic history,” al-Tamimi read. “On religious and moral grounds, we denounce the contemporary concept of terrorism that is associated with wrongful practices, whatever their form may be. Such acts are represented by aggression against human life in an oppressive form that transgresses the rulings of God.”
The statement drew little notice in the West. In Washington, the news media and political establishment were busily dissecting President George W. Bush’s narrow reelection victory over his Democratic rival, John F. Kerry, the previous week. Within thirty-six hours of the declaration, the spotlight would shift to France, where the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat would die while receiving treatment for the flu, sending much of the Arab world into spasms of mourning.
