In Afghanistan, Zarqawi set up a training camp in the western part of the country near the city of Herat, by the Iranian border, a small affair for a group of his mostly Jordanian followers. Saif al-Adel, one of al-Qaeda’s Egyptian military commanders, remembers that when the al-Qaeda leadership first met with Zarqawi in Kandahar in 1999 he did not seem sophisticated: “A sturdy man who was not really very good at words. He expressed himself spontaneously and briefly.” Adel says that the al-Qaeda leadership did not seek Zarqawi’s allegiance and, for his own part, Zarqawi maintained his independence from al-Qaeda.
When the war against the Taliban began in the winter of 2001, Zarqawi rushed to defend Kandahar, where he narrowly escaped being killed in an American bombing raid, ending up with some broken ribs when a ceiling collapsed in on him. After the fall of the Taliban, Zarqawi fled to Iran, where the Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—then living in exile there—provided fleeing al-Qaeda militants with apartments. Zarqawi and his fellow Jordanians then opted to move to Iraq, where their complexions and accents would enable them to integrate into Iraqi society easily and where they anticipated that there would be some kind of American invasion. Unlike the Arab volunteers who were drawn to the 1980s jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan only years after the conflict had begun, foreign fighters such as Zarqawi started to arrive in Kurdish Iraq in 2002, months before the American invasion.
Zarqawi traveled to northern Iraq with around two dozen fighters and met with Mullah Krekar, the leader of the Kurdish militant group Ansar al-Islam, sometime in mid-2002. They agreed to conduct operations against American targets. Zarqawi’s initial Iraq operation was limited to Kurdistan, part of the no-fly zone established by the United States in northern Iraq that was outside Saddam Hussein’s control.
After the American invasion, Zarqawi’s group quickly moved to make Iraq a no-go area for the international community, sabotaging efforts to put the country back on its feet. On August 19, 2003, Zarqawi’s men bombed the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, killing twenty-two, including Sergio de Mello, the head of the UN mission in Iraq. A month later the UN pulled out, which precipitated the withdrawal of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and Oxfam, a leading British relief organization. Also in August, Zarqawi’s group bombed the Jordanian embassy, killing at least seventeen. On November 12, it attacked an Italian police barracks in southern Iraq, a bombing in which twenty-five died. These attacks all helped to scare off countries and companies considering getting involved in the reconstruction of Iraq.
Zarqawi also made a quite original if sickening contribution to the conduct of the insurgency and to warfare in general. The Jordanian terrorist seemed to have intuitively understood that Iraq was the first open-source war. Based on this intuitive understanding, Zarqawi’s group routinely videotaped its operations, including kidnappings, executions, IED attacks, and suicide bombings for immediate posting to the Web. Zarqawi’s revolution was not only televised but also promptly uploaded to the Internet for almost real-time global distribution. His rise to become the most feared leader of the Iraqi insurgency benefited considerably from the fact that around the same time broadband Internet access was becoming more available, ensuring that these bandwidth-consuming videos had a wide distribution. If Vietnam had been the first television war, and the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s armies had been the first cable news war, Iraq was the first Web war.
It was in part his skill as a Web propagandist that turned Zarqawi from a division B commander in Iraq to the most feared leader of the insurgency. Zarqawi’s videotape of the beheading of twenty-six-year-old American businessman Nicholas Berg was posted on the Web on May 11, 2004. The videotape of the murder, titled “Sheikh Abu Musab Al Zarqawi Slays an American Infidel,” was viewed millions of times.
On the tape Berg is shown sitting in front of five armed, hooded men and is dressed in an orange jumpsuit to mimic the clothes worn by the detainees at the American prison camp at Guantánamo. Berg made a final statement: “My name is Nicholas Berg. My father is Michael. My mother’s name is Susan. I have a brother and a sister, David and Sarah. I live in West Chester near Philadelphia.” It was almost certainly Zarqawi who then wielded the machete-like knife that cut off his American captive’s head. Given the extreme anti-Semitism of al-Qaeda, it does not seem a coincidence that the group’s Iraqi affiliate’s first beheading victim was a Jewish-American, reenacting almost to the letter al-Qaeda’s videotaped execution of the Jewish-American journalist Daniel Pearl two years earlier.
The beheading specifically videotaped for Web distribution became something of a Zarqawi signature. He made it a commonplace event of his kidnappings in Iraq, which included two other Americans, Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley, the Englishman Kenneth Bigley, and other victims from South Korea, Bulgaria, and Turkey. Those kidnapping-murders recorded for video distribution on the Internet of course further dissuaded the international community from getting involved in Iraq.
But Zarqawi’s special demonic genius was to launch Iraq down the road to civil war. In early 2004, the U.S. military intercepted a letter from Zarqawi to bin Laden in which he proposed provoking a civil war between Sunnis and Shia. This was something in which bin Laden had shown little interest in the past, partly because since 2002, senior al-Qaeda leaders had been living under some form of arrest in largely Shia Iran, including one of his own sons, Saad bin Laden. (It is also not impossible that bin Laden’s beloved Syrian mother is herself an Alawite, as that Shia sect is concentrated in Latakia, Syria, the region she hails from.)
In the letter Zarqawi argued that the Shia, whom he described variously as snakes and scorpions, were “the key to change. … If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger.” Zarqawi explained that without a civil war, Iraqi Sunnis sympathetic to al-Qaeda would continue to prefer “the arms of their wives” to engaging in jihad.
Zarqawi’s strategy was to hit the Shia so that they would in turn strike the Sunnis, so precipitating a vicious circle of violence in which al-Qaeda would be cast as the protector of the Sunnis against the wrath of the Shia. It was a strategy that worked all too well, provoking first sectarian conflict in Iraq and later civil war. On August 29, 2003, Zarqawi’s father-in law drove a massive truck bomb outside a Shia mosque in Najaf, killing around a hundred, including Ayatollah Baqir al-Hakim, one of the most important spiritual leaders of the Shia. Al-Qaeda in Iraq also regularly attacked Shia religious processions, shrines, and clerics. The tipping point in the slide toward full-blown civil war was al-Qaeda’s February 2006 attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra, which is arguably the most important Shia shrine in the world.
One of the seeming triumphs of the post-invasion period was the election of the new Iraqi government on January 30, 2005. That election received extensive coverage from networks around the world, which broadcast pictures of excited Iraqis showing off their ink-stained purple fingers, indicating that they had voted in Iraq’s first election in decades. But the election turned out to be effectively a census of the adult Shia population of Iraq because Iraqis voted almost entirely on sectarian lines and Sunnis boycotted the voting; in Anbar province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency, only two thousand people voted.
The election was, in fact, a disaster, serving to further deepen the sectarian divide in the country. The new Iraqi government was, in all but name, a Shia government, and key departments, such as the Ministry of the Interior, which controls the country’s internal security, quickly became populated by Shia death squads.
The center of the Sunni insurgency was Fallujah, a small city in Anbar province forty miles west of Baghdad. On April 28, 2003, soldiers of the 82nd Airborne had shot into a crowd of demonstrators in the city, killing seventeen. Resistance to the American occupation gathered strength and Fallujah increasingly attracted Sunni insurgent groups, including al-Qaeda. On March 31, 2004, Fallujah became
a household name in the States when SUVs carrying four American security contractors from Blackwater USA ran into an ambush. They were killed, their bodies set on fire, and two were strung up from a bridge over the Euphrates River.
In retaliation, U.S. Marines were ordered to launch a major operation to retake Fallujah, which they did, killing hundreds of insurgents and Iraqi civilians, an operation halted by Bremer on April 9 as the widespread coverage of the assault brought considerable pressure from Iraqi leaders to stop the bloodshed. The resulting cease-fire seemed to be a victory for the insurgents, who had generally avoided set-piece battles with the better-trained and equipped U.S. military.
Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the commanding general in Iraq, remembers that Fallujah was a turning point. “To say that the Fallujah offensive angered the Sunni Muslims of Iraq would be a gross understatement. Up to that point many had been still on the fence and were working with us to create a more stable government.” After the first battle for Fallujah, Sunnis, who make up around a fifth of the Iraqi population, concluded—if they hadn’t done so already—that they were going to be marginalized in the new Iraq. Sanchez recalls that the “Sunni triangle exploded in violence” with attacks in Baghdad, around Mosul in the north, in central Iraq along the Euphrates River, and around Karbala in the south.
The Marines went back into Fallujah on November 7, 2004. By now it was controlled by thousands of jihadist insurgents. In the heaviest urban combat the Marines had seen since the battle of Hue in Vietnam, they fought block to block, largely pacifying the city within a couple of weeks. But retaking Fallujah came at a tremendous cost; thousands of the city’s buildings were destroyed and hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants fled, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other members of al-Qaeda. Thirty-five U.S. troops had died. But Sunni insurgents would never again challenge the U.S. military to a battle on the scale of Fallujah.
Early in the war, Bush spoke to reporters at the White House and remarked of the insurgents in Iraq, “Bring ’em on.” Unfortunately, thousands of militants from around the Muslim world took him up on that offer. As other rationales for the Iraq War evaporated—WMD, peace between Israel and the Palestinians, a democratic domino effect around the Middle East—the administration and some in the U.S. military started trying to make a virtue of the fact that foreign jihadists were flocking to the Iraq conflict, leaning on the so-called “flypaper” theory that terrorists would be drawn to Iraq like bugs to a strip, only to be killed or captured there. General Sanchez told CNN that Iraq “is what I would call a terrorist magnet … and that will prevent the American people from having to go through attacks back in the United States.” Similarly, Bush asserted at a campaign event in Colorado in 2004, “We are fighting these terrorists with our military in Afghanistan and Iraq and beyond so we do not have to face them in the streets of our own cities.”
Art Keller, a CIA officer stationed in the tribal areas of Pakistan in 2006, points out that the Iraqi “flypaper” didn’t prove to be particularly sticky: “People were going from the Afghan/Pakistan border to Iraq to learn the tactics and then came back. Seems like the reverse of the way the War on Terror was supposed to work.”
Of course, before the war the administration could not have sold the American public on the idea that American men and women in uniform were deploying to Iraq to act as bait for the al-Qaeda terrorists who would flood into the country. And the flypaper theory was based on the comforting, but false, premise that there was a finite group of terrorists that could be attracted to one place and killed. In fact, as the administration’s own 2006 National Intelligence Estimate explained, “The Iraq War has become the cause célèbre for jihadists … and is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives.”
The most prominent of that new generation was, of course, the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Although the Bush administration tended to gloss over the fact, al-Qaeda only formally established itself in Iraq a year and a half after the U.S. invasion. On October 17, 2004, Zarqawi issued an online statement pledging allegiance to bin Laden. Zarqawi’s pledge was fulsome: “By God, O sheikh of the mujahideen, if you bid us plunge into the ocean, we would follow you. If you ordered it so, we would obey.” And so, nearly two years after Bush administration officials had first argued that Zarqawi was part of al-Qaeda, the Jordanian terrorist finally got around to swearing allegiance to bin Laden. Three months later the al-Qaeda leader responded warmly to Zarqawi in an audiotape that aired on Al Jazeera: “It should be known that the Mujahid brother Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is the Amir [prince] of the al-Qaeda organisation in the Land of the Two Rivers [Iraq].”
Despite his oath of allegiance, Zarqawi did not act as if he were under al-Qaeda’s control. Ayman al-Zawahiri sent a letter to an associate of Zarqawi’s, which was intercepted by U.S. forces in Iraq in July 2005, urging him to exercise more restraint in his campaign against the Shia: “Many of your Muslim admirers amongst the common folk are wondering about your attacks on the Shia.” Zawahiri also gently advocated an end to Zarqawi’s televised executions: “Among the things which the feelings of the Muslim population who love and support you will never find palatable are the scenes of slaughtering the hostages.” This was all excellent advice that Zarqawi largely ignored, continuing to attack the Shia without restraint and brutalizing Sunnis who did not conform to al-Qaeda’s Talibanesque social policies.
In 2006 the CIA estimated that there were thirteen hundred foreign fighters on the battlefield in Iraq, almost all of whom were attached to al-Qaeda. Made up largely of foreigners at its inception in 2004, the Agency estimated that three years later Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was largely Iraqi. Those estimates suggest that at the height of its power, AQI fielded no more than several thousand fighters. But AQI punched well above its relatively small weight because of its predilection for extreme violence and the fact that it was the group that supplied most of the suicide attackers in Iraq.
By April 2008 suicide attacks had killed more than ten thousand Iraqis. And more suicide attacks were conducted in Iraq between 2003 and 2007 than had taken place in every other country of the world combined since 1981. While Iraqis made up the great bulk of the insurgents, a number of studies showed that the suicide attackers in Iraq were generally foreigners. The U.S. military assessed that AQI’s foreign recruits were responsible for up to 90 percent of the suicide attacks in Iraq. Similarly, Mohammed Hafez, the author of the authoritative study Suicide Bombers in Iraq, found that of the 139 “known” suicide bombers in Iraq, fifty-three were from Saudi Arabia and only eighteen were Iraqi, while the rest came from other Arab countries and even Europe. And the Israeli academic Reuven Paz found that of the 154 fighters identified as “martyrs” in Iraq on jihadist forums, 61 percent were Saudi, and the rest were from a variety of other Middle Eastern countries. The most extensive suicide campaign in modern history was conducted in Iraq largely by foreigners animated by the deeply held religious belief that they had to liberate a Muslim land from the “infidel” occupiers.
Those findings were broadly confirmed in October 2007 by the discovery of a trove of al-Qaeda documents by the U.S. military in Sinjar, close to the Syrian border. They documented foreign fighters who had traveled to Iraq since August 2006. Of the 606 foreign fighters whose biographies were detailed in the documents, 41 percent of them were Saudi, 19 percent were Libyan, and smaller percentages from other Middle Eastern countries made up the rest of the total. Of the 389 fighters who designated their “work,” more than half wrote that they intended to be suicide bombers. Those bombers saw themselves as acting on behalf of the umma, the global community of Muslim believers, a supranational concept that doesn’t recognize national boundaries. The suicide attackers who often attacked Shia shrines and religious processions in Iraq were motivated by vicious anti-Shiism that was also obviously religious in character.
In short, the suicide attackers in Iraq were as far from being nationalists as it’s possible to imagine, paying their own way to travel
to Iraq, a country that most of them had never previously visited, to commit suicide. The only explanation for their suicidal missions was the rationale that the foreign volunteers themselves offered—that they were doing this for Islam and a one-way ticket to Paradise. In the Sinjar documents, for instance, a “martyr’s will” made no mention of Iraq at all and simply said instead, “Make my burial gathering as my wedding party.”
Not content with whipping up mayhem only in Iraq, al-Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate also exported its terror campaign. On November 9, 2005, the group launched simultaneous suicide bombings at three American hotels in the Jordanian capital of Amman—the Radisson, Hyatt, and Days Inn—killing sixty. Most of the victims were Jordanians attending a wedding party and the attack provoked a wave of revulsion against Zarqawi in his birthplace. His hometown of Zarqa issued a formal condemnation of its most infamous son and tens of thousands of Jordanians took to the streets in protest, an early indication of how counterproductive Zarqawi’s tactics were becoming. Even Zarqawi felt it necessary to defend the bombings, releasing an audiotape two days after the attacks claiming that the hotels were targeted because they were frequented by Israeli spies.
At the height of its power, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, like its parent organization, was a highly bureaucratized group. AQI asked its non-Iraqi recruits to fill out application forms that asked for their countries and cities of origin; real names; aliases; date of birth; who their jihadist “coordinator” was; how they were referred to al-Qaeda in the first place; their occupation; how they had entered the country from Syria (the usual transit point for foreign fighters arriving in Iraq); who in Syria had facilitated their travel; an assessment of how they had been treated there; what cash and ID cards they had with them when they arrived in Iraq; any relevant knowledge—such as computer skills—they might have; and whether they were volunteering to be fighters or suicide attackers.
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