by Joby Warrick
The helicopters swooped into Yusufiyah at 1:56 p.m., and minutes later the commandos crashed through the door of what they believed was a terrorist safe house. A wall of small-arms fire erupted from inside. One defender, wearing a large suicide belt, rushed the Americans, followed by a second, but both were shot dead before they could blow themselves up. A third would-be bomber detonated prematurely, splattering an interior wall with body parts but injuring no one else. After the shooting stopped, the soldiers found six bodies and rounded up five survivors, one of them wounded. They also seized caches of assault rifles, ammunition, and grenades and, from one room, some homemade videotapes.
The cleanup was still under way when surveillance cameras picked up other vehicles converging on another farmhouse, a few miles up the road. Again the helicopter rotors turned, and again the Delta team stacked around a locked door with blasting charges ready. But this time the occupants gave up without a fight. Twelve Iraqi men were handcuffed and squeezed onto the helicopters for the flight back to Baghdad.
At McChrystal’s operations center, analysts reviewed the day’s takings with bafflement. Task Force 6-26’s counterterrorism experts came up mostly empty in their attempts to find background files on the twelve men arrested in the farmhouse. Yet everything about the Yusufiyah meeting suggested that the group was important. Several of the men were older and were treated by the others with obvious deference. Oddly, out of twelve adult Iraqi men, only one was arrested carrying a cell phone, suggesting the others had been savvy enough to get rid of theirs at the first sign of the approaching commandos.
The Yusufiyah detainees were quickly transferred to McChrystal’s Balad Air Base, where the general tasked his best interrogators and analysts with breaking down their stories. The Americans were already convinced that several of the detainees were Zarqawi network officers of some stature, and these received special focus. Most interesting of all was a thickset former wrestler in his thirties whom McChrystal code-named Mubassir. The man spoke surprisingly good English, and he seemed to delight in making wisecracks and lecturing the Americans in their own language. During his first interrogation, he affected a posh British accent and feigned impatience at having to sit through hours of questioning.
“How long do you think this will be? Because I do need to get back to my family,” Mubassir said, according to McChrystal’s written account. The man claimed he was a video consultant who had been hired by other detainees for a one-day assignment, and he knew nothing about terrorism. As with the others in the group, his initial interrogation yielded nothing useful.
A separate team tore through the physical evidence obtained in the Yusufiyah raid. Here they made a remarkable discovery: on one of the videotapes seized in the first house, investigators found extensive unedited footage of a man in a ninjalike black costume and white sneakers, firing a machine gun from the hip. The significance of the find was soon clear: the occupants of the Yusufiyah house, whoever they were, were senior enough to own the raw outtakes from Zarqawi’s propaganda reel.
McChrystal’s men were getting closer, yet they still had no idea of the location of Zarqawi’s base. They spent hours studying the video outtakes, looking for clues. Some of the scenes were inadvertently comical, showing Zarqawi struggling to figure out how to work the machine gun. After finally emptying his ammo clip, he handed the weapon to an aide, who grabbed it by the barrel and then dropped the gun with a howl of pain. The man appeared to have had no idea that the metal would be scorching-hot. These “blooper” moments would later be publicly released by the Americans in an attempt to undercut Zarqawi’s propaganda image as a savvy street fighter. In a further slap, McChrystal also persuaded White House officials to reduce the reward for Zarqawi’s capture from twenty-five million to five million dollars. The symbolic demotion would do untold damage to Zarqawi’s towering ego, he reasoned.
Still, the Americans were grasping at shadows. In the weeks that followed, they continued searching the region near Yusufiyah, and added several new areas of northern and western Iraq to the priority list, based on an analysis of the terrain that served as the backdrop for the propaganda video. The interrogations of Mubassir and the other Yusufiyah detainees dragged on day after day, producing nothing. In the nearly three-year-old hunt for Zarqawi, the Americans appeared to have hit yet another dry hole.
—
But the searchers had important new allies. The Jordanians were proving to be invaluable partners. Jordanian operatives now working with U.S. special-forces teams excelled at picking up clues that Americans often missed, such as subtle differences in accents that could distinguish local Iraqis from out-of-towners.
Meanwhile, the Mukhabarat’s interrogations of Karbouly and other captured Zarqawi operatives were yielding important insights. Karbouly, from his years as a customs officer, knew the major routes or “rat lines” that Zarqawi used to smuggle supplies and recruits. Two major arteries crossed the Syrian border near al-Qa’im, then ran to Sunni strongholds in the south, in Anbar Province, and northward to the city of Mosul; a third terminated in Baqubah, an ethnically mixed town northeast of Baghdad. Karbouly also knew enough about Zarqawi’s past travel to sketch out a list of towns where the terrorist likely stayed. The Jordanian spy agency forwarded the new findings to the Americans, along with scores of tips ranging from possible Zarqawi sightings to the locations of weapons caches.
Impressed, McChrystal decided to meet personally with some of the Mukhabarat’s team. First the general’s top intelligence aides huddled with Jordanian counterparts at their headquarters in Amman. Then a small entourage led by Ali Bourzak arrived in the middle of the night at McChrystal’s command headquarters at Balad, the first non-British foreigners ever allowed inside the highly sensitive operations center.
“We were just trying to learn everything we could from the only guys who had ever sat down with Zarqawi,” explained one U.S. official involved in the meetings.
At one point, the Americans put up a map of Iraq and asked Bourzak where he believed Zarqawi was hiding. The Mukhabarat official thought for a moment and then rose from his chair.
“He walked up to the map and he put his finger right in the middle of Baqubah Province,” the official recalled.
“If I were Zarqawi, I would be here,” Bourzak said.
The Americans were mystified. Most of Zarqawi’s support base and the bulk of the reported Zarqawi sightings were in the Sunni strongholds of Anbar Province and northern Iraq, between the Syrian border and Mosul. Baqubah, a city of half a million, was a restive mix of Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds, barely sixty miles from the Iranian border.
McChrystal’s team welcomed the input, but the Baqubah theory struck some of the Americans as a wild guess. There had been earlier reports of Zarqawi sightings near Baqubah; none had ever checked out.
“We never discounted it,” the U.S. official said. “We just added it to our calculations.”
Then, in May, another intelligence morsel arrived from Jordan that appeared to offer more immediate promise. At the Balad Air Base, the interrogation of the Iraqi detainee called Mubassir had stalled completely, frustrating the Americans and spurring Mubassir’s hopes that he might soon be released. But now from the Mukhabarat came records of the man’s past travels to Jordan, including several suspicious trips right around the time of the Amman hotel bombings the previous November. There also were hints of possible links between Mubassir and the family of Sajida al-Rishawi, the female suicide bomber whose vest had failed to explode.
None of it directly tied Mubassir to the bomb plot, but the Americans suddenly had a powerful new lever for prying open the Iraqi’s lips. Two of McChrystal’s most gifted interrogators marched into Mubassir’s cell to lay out the new evidence and deliver an ultimatum: Help us, or we’ll be forced to hand you over to the Jordanians for prosecution.
“We’re trying to hold on to you, but if word gets out that you’re tied to this, it could be really bad,” the interrogators said, according to McChrystal’
s notes on the exchange.
Mubassir protested. “I can’t give you anything because I don’t have anything,” he said. But then, just as the two Americans were leaving, he stopped them.
“I have something to tell you,” he said.
—
Mubassir’s new confession took up eight pages of typed notes. The highlight, by far, was a remarkable revelation about Zarqawi that had entirely eluded the Americans until now: the Jordanian had a spiritual adviser, an Iraqi imam called Sheikh Abd al-Rahman, who lived with his young family in Baghdad. And the two met regularly, about once every week to ten days.
For Zarqawi’s hunters, it was the biggest break since the search began nearly three years earlier. If the information was true—and assuming McChrystal’s team could find the right imam—they had just been handed a map to Zarqawi’s hideout. Indeed, Mubassir’s story was so good, some of the senior officers at Balad suspected that the Iraqi was bluffing or even leading them into a trap. The doubts grew after the Americans checked out an address for a Sheikh al-Rahman in Baghdad and found a house in a predominantly Shiite area—certainly the last place anyone would expect to find a Zarqawi confidant.
U.S. and Jordanian officials raced to gather whatever they could on Zarqawi’s supposed father confessor. Drones hovered over the expensive house where the man known as Abd al-Rahman lived, and trailed his silver sedan when he rode around town with his chauffeur. Undercover agents in traditional Arab clothes waited near his mosque to snap secret photos of the young cleric with the close-cropped hair and trim beard. Finally, the images were shared with the Mukhabarat’s new star informant, who cinched the case with a single glance. It was widely known within the terrorist network that Zarqawi had a young spiritual adviser, Karbouly said, but the man was known only by a fake name, a nom de guerre. The cleric in the photographs was the same adviser, the former customs agent said. He was sure of it.
Now came the wait. For two weeks, airborne cameras watched the house and followed the silver sedan on its mundane trips to markets, schools, and social outings. Each morning, the chauffeur waited in front of the house, and each evening, the cleric and his family returned home. At the Balad Air Base, the analysts watched their video screens and wondered if something had gone wrong. Had Rahman been tipped off? Should they simply arrest the cleric and try to get him to talk?
Then, around noon on a stifling hot Wednesday—June 7, 2006—McChrystal’s team watched from their monitors as the sedan made a sudden break from its usual orbit. It meandered through residential neighborhoods and then turned to enter Baghdad’s main freeway, heading to the northeast. On the on-ramp, the car abruptly stopped. Rahman got out of the car and began speaking on his cell phone. A few minutes later, a small blue truck pulled up behind the sedan, and Rahman climbed in. It was a classic car swap, the kind used for decades by spies to throw pursuers off track.
The truck sped through Baghdad’s outer suburbs and then headed north, away from the city, and into open countryside. McChrystal was in his private office in another part of the operations center when one of his aides knocked on the door. Rahman was on the move and heading away from the capital, the general was told. But where to? McChrystal had guessed south, toward Yusufiyah. Instead, to his surprise, the car continued north for thirty miles, then veered east. Rahman’s destination was now unmistakable: he was heading straight toward Baqubah, just as the Mukhabarat’s counterterrorism chief had predicted.
The vehicles occupants made yet another attempt to shake off any pursuers. Just inside Baqubah’s city limits, the truck pulled into a parking lot where a different vehicle—a white pickup with a red stripe—was waiting. Rahman got out to speak to the pickup’s driver; then, for the second time in an hour, he switched vehicles. Soon he and the white pickup were heading north again.
About three miles from town, outside a tiny village called Hibhib, the pickup turned onto a small dirt road lined with thick groves of palm trees, and then proceeded down a driveway leading to a beige two-story house with a carport. The dwelling was all but obscured by a canopy of palms and dense shrubs, and it was protected at ground level by a wall and a metal gate. The Americans watched as the driver spoke to someone inside the compound, who opened the gate to let the truck inside. Rahman climbed out of the passenger seat, and then the driver backed the vehicle down the driveway and drove away.
It was 4:55 p.m., Baghdad time. Every eye in the operations center was now fixed on the grainy image of the small house under the palms. CIA analysts and military operators in the room had been waiting nearly three years for such a moment. Was this really the one?
McChrystal studied the images thoughtfully as one of his deputies replayed the frames of a white pickup entering the driveway. “I’m not going to promise you that’s Zarqawi,” one of McChrystal’s deputies said, as the general recalled afterward. “But whoever we kill is going to be much higher than anybody we’ve killed before.”
As they stared at the screen, a solidly built figure emerged from the building.
“We watched a guy dressed in all black come out and meet [Rahman] and take him in the house,” McChrystal said. “And we watched that same guy, in all black, walk back out. He walked the length of the driveway to the main road and back.”
McChrystal had seen dozens of images of the man he had been pursuing since 2003. The resemblance to the black-clad figure was unmistakable.
“Wow, that’s Zarqawi,” he told his deputy.
“That’s right,” came the reply. “That’s what we think.”
A team of Delta commandos was on standby in Baghdad, forty miles away, and now the command came for them to board their chopper. To the consternation of all, one of their helicopters was having engine trouble. Agonizing minutes passed. What if Zarqawi were suddenly to flee through the palm trees and escape? Could there ever be another opportunity like this?
At that moment, two American F-16 fighter jets were on routine patrol over central Iraq, under a policy that required twenty-four-hour coverage in case U.S. troops needed immediate air support. One of the jets was being refueled and was effectively out of commission, but the other was redirected toward Baqubah. An air-traffic controller read a set of coordinates, and the fighter was soon screaming toward tiny Hibhib, less than five minutes away.
McChrystal hoped the day would end with Zarqawi in his custody. “I really want to capture this guy,” the general remembered thinking as the minutes dragged by. The truth is, no one could say with certainty that the man on the video was Zarqawi. McChrystal reckoned the odds at 80 to 90 percent.
The deputy interrupted his thoughts.
“I don’t think we can wait,” he said. “I’m going to bomb it.”
“All right,” the general said.
It was nearly 6:00 p.m. when the command came over the F-16’s radio: “Drop the bomb.”
The fighter swooped over the house, but, to the surprise of those watching the screens at Balad, the building did not explode. The pilot made a second pass, this time releasing a GBU-12 Paveway, a five-hundred-pound guided bomb. From the center of the F-16’s video screen came a brilliant flash followed by three jets of smoke and dust, one shooting skyward and the others billowing through the palm trees. About a hundred seconds later, a second bomb hit in the same spot.
When the smoke finally cleared, the two-story house with the carport was gone.
—
It took the Delta team another twenty minutes to arrive by helicopter. The commandos raced up the driveway on foot, just in time to see Iraqi police loading a stretcher into an ambulance next to a rubble pile that had been Zarqawi’s hideout.
The Iraqis backed away at the sight of heavily armed American commandos, and soon the soldiers were staring into the bloodied face of the man on the stretcher. He wore a thin beard and dusty black clothes, and he was bleeding from a deep gash on his left cheek. If the soldiers looked closely, they might have noticed an odd scar on his right arm, the legacy of a long-ago surgery to remove a tat
too.
Gravely wounded but alive, Zarqawi opened his eyes to see a ring of American faces looking down at him. Startled, he mumbled something unintelligible and tried to roll off the stretcher to get away, only to be stopped by American hands, some of them tattooed.
Years later, some of the soldiers present at Hibhib would claim that the commandos delivered the final blow, squeezing the life out Zarqawi as he lay on the stretcher. An autopsy found no evidence of it, concluding that Zarqawi had only minutes to live in any case, his lungs and other internal organs having been crushed by the intense pressure wave from the exploding GBU-12 bomb. A medic at the scene noted that Zarqawi’s carotid artery had already collapsed from internal bleeding, and blood seeped from his nose and ears as he wheezed through a few last breaths.
One thing that appears incontrovertible is that Zarqawi was conscious long enough to look into American eyes.
The other certainty is that he died at 7:04 p.m. Iraqi time, as a fading sun cast long shadows over the palm grove that had sheltered him and his tortured dream of a resurgent Islamic state.
—
Major General Stanley McChrystal’s first and only personal encounter with Zarqawi occurred that same evening, in a makeshift morgue in the Balad Air Base’s detainee screening center. Zarqawi’s body was laid out on a table so specialists could run through DNA tests to confirm the Jordanian’s identity.
