When your comrades are coming home in pieces, I had always been taught, as an EOD officer, to focus back on the device. Adjust your tactics, disarm the next one. But I was out of the military and could no longer fight my way through, vent my frustration on a physical thing. And Matt’s death cut so close; he was on my list of brothers I couldn’t lose. I felt compelled to do something more, so I turned the tables and asked a different question.
Not what killed Matt, but who.
Who set the bomb on that road? More importantly, who built it, who designed it, who taught the grunts to use it? By 2012, nearly every roadside bomb was tailored for a specific purpose; to know whether Matt’s death was random or the result of a deliberate scheme, I needed to learn more about this builder, designer, teacher. The master tailor.
I opened a new window, searched for recent war news, and discovered that Predators had been busy in Pakistan while I was driving to and from snowy Michigan. Two strikes on successive days had killed fourteen jihadists. Those killed on the second day may have been traveling to the funeral of those killed on the first. The dead included three Arab operatives associated with Al Qaeda. What does “associated” mean? What do they do? Who are these men? In the media they are always “organizers” or “planners.” Anyone can hand out money; who actually engineered the bomb?
Yes, that’s it. Who is the engineer who killed my friend?
It was a question I had never really asked, not with any specificity, and it consumed me.
I reconsidered everything I already knew about this man, including this possibility: could it be one of the same bomb designers, the same old hands from Iraq, the same minds I faced years before?
4 ♦ CAT VS. CAT
WE ALWAYS CALLED HIM THE Bomber, and this is the first part we got wrong. It was useful shorthand, widespread in the media, and so even though we knew it was incorrect, we repeated it anyway. How did the IED get to the donkey path? The Bomber put it there. Why are there six artillery rounds hidden in the courtyard of this mud-walled qalat? This is where the Bomber lives. Who did we just shoot digging on the side of the road? Must be the Bomber.
We in the EOD community understood the imprecision, but the lazy figure of speech persisted, especially in our conversations with the uninitiated infantry and armor commanders who ran our sectors. So words guided thought, and thought guided action, and we spent many years chasing and killing men called the Bomber who were, in fact, no such thing.
The truth is harder and more specific. If the Bomber is the person responsible for an explosive device’s existence, the ultimate guilty party, then mostly we know who the Bomber is not.
The Bomber is not the average foot soldier, the unemployable Afghan with a battered Kalashnikov and a literacy that does not extend beyond the Koran, nor, eventually in 2015, the disaffected middle-class British youth traveling to Syria to join the Islamic State. The gunman is a tool and a trend, not a leader.
The Bomber also is not the man who hides the weapons cache and then places the explosives in the ground. This job is too dangerous, exposed, and menial to be done by someone with the expertise to build the thing. Better to pay a desperate, out-of-work father to do it instead.
The Bomber is not the cell leader organizing the attack. Many of these men are extremely clever, but their cleverness is in camouflage and hiding the device and choosing advantageous terrain, not in the design of the bomb’s firing circuit.
So too the Bomber is not the spotter waiting for an American convoy to approach, or the triggerman with his thumb ready to key the radio to set off the device. Once made, bombs are often placed by gun-toters in the service of an ambush. Despite the stereotype and the historic Western examples to the contrary, in Iraq and Afghanistan the designer of the bomb was almost always not the employer of the bomb. The Unabomber may have fought a one-man war against the American system, but jihadists fight collectively in groups.
The Bomber is not the one wearing the suicide vest. So much education squandered, so many future devices left unbuilt, it makes no sense to blow one’s load on a single binge, no matter how high-profile the target.
The Bomber is not the courier, though such conflation proves tempting. When Hassan Ghul, an Al Qaeda agent, was captured entering Iraq in 2004, he was toting schematic diagrams for IED triggers. This caused quite a stir, but why would the circuit’s designer carry such incriminating physical evidence and risk capture when the plans were also in his head? Ghul was a trusted confidant, but no scientist.
The Bomber may not even be the one mixing the homemade explosives by hand or, occasionally, constructing the devices in a rote assembly line in the basement of a concrete apartment building. Even these men and boys, in the end, are only skilled technicians. They can do, but know not why.
No, the Bomber was none of these people. Behind this manufacture and implementation system and web of insurgency lay a director, the real threat, the learned mind that actually understands how the bomb works and teaches others to build it. The Bomber’s false title glosses over the nuance of the network, but it inadvertently expressed this truth: there was an original ultimate source of these electronic and explosive devices, even if our overgeneralization revealed that we didn’t really know who it was.
Since the Bomber as a name is meaningless, colloquially referring to everyone and no one, I will stop using it here and now.
To establish a new and more precise name, I’ll instead use the tradition of the Arabic-speaking people he comes from, and refer to him by his nom de guerre honorific. Invoking a hadith, a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammed, Al Qaeda prescribed that its operatives should always use an alias of a kunya and hometown. A kunya is a nickname, normally Abu, meaning “Father of,” followed by the name of the oldest son. Among his followers, Osama bin Laden was known as the Sheik, but also as Abu Abdullah. The second half of the alias, the hometown portion, is often mistaken by Westerners for a last name. Al-Asiri, on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, is simply the Syrian. Abu Mansoor al-Amriki, a former commander of al-Shabaab in Somalia and a similar FBI listee, is the Father of Mansoor the American.
But among the mujahideen themselves, the noms de guerre are more than an alias meant to trip up intelligence agencies, and the larger tradition predates Al Qaeda. When an honorific is used, it can supplant an original name and come to completely define a person. Two famous leaders in Chechnya in the 1990s were al-Walid and al-Khattab, the Young Man and the Narrator. Saddam Hussein’s chief chemical weapons specialist, “Chemical Ali,” earned the surname al-Kimyai, or the Chemist. Even Hussein himself, no Al Qaeda operative in search on anonymity, was al-Tikriti, our man from Tikrit. Was there really any question where he would hide and ultimately be found?
To the average Westerner, the names are nothing but strings of similar syllables, but among jihadists and militants, such brevity is the reward for notoriety. We misunderstand that the names are great describers, distant cousins to Red Cloud and Sitting Bull. The names have meaning in a way John or Nancy or Edward or Dorothy no longer do.
So what will we call the bomb builder? This anonymous intellect, the electronic architect and resourceful originator of each new bomb design, the man who killed Matt Schwartz, is al-Muhandis, the Engineer.
Who is this man?
At the start of the war, we had almost no idea. Even now, he is still a shade to those who pursue him. He is a necessary box on an organizational chart, the inevitable solution of an intel analyst’s continuously computed probability equation. His proof of life photo is a burning, bombed-out Humvee. He doesn’t grant interviews. He doesn’t issue fatwas. He doesn’t make promotional videos. He is the true quiet professional, and for good reason. When similar men are caught in the United States—Eric Rudolph, Ramzi Yousef, Terry Nichols, Ted Kaczynski—we send them straight to Supermax. In 1996, a Palestinian bomb designer named Yahya Ayyash briefly became the most wanted man in Israel, until he was killed by security forces. Occasionally, one or two terrorist bomb makers garner wo
rldwide media headlines, not to mention the NSA’s attention, for crafting shoe bombs and underwear bombs for US-bound airplanes. They fail, and meanwhile al-Muhandis simply gathers kills in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria, thousands over the last fifteen years.
Before I began my investigation, I reviewed the little I already knew, every intelligence report, news article, translated Arab novel and short story, memoir of Islamic militants, academic paper, conventional history of the Middle East, and bit of jihadist promotional literature I had ever read, every documentary and YouTube and LiveLeak and Ogrish and Brown Moses video I had ever seen, every conversation I had ever had with intel spooks and wonks, and every bomb of his I had ever dismantled, circuit design I had studied, and employment tactic I had taught. This is what I concluded.
At first, the only thing I knew for sure about the Engineer was how he killed, all of the ways we died at his hand. The war was a chess match, and al-Muhandis always went first. First, he built the bomb. Then we would try to take it apart.
THE WASHINGTON POST says the first IED in Iraq was a car bomb detonated on March 29, 2003. Maybe. It’s hard to tell where these things start. Did it start with the booby-trapped bunkers and oil facilities and military headquarters left by Saddam’s fleeing army? Did it start with the elegant “spider devices” in Afghanistan, radio transmitter/receivers soldered together from scratch? Or in the 1980s, when US agents taught Afghans to build the precursors of those spider devices because the mujahideen were killing Soviet invaders and not us?
Nothing is new under the sun, including IEDs. Ask what makes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan unique, and an incorrect superficial analysis might conclude the IED, the greatest casualty-maker of the last fifteen years. But the IED is just an insurgent’s weapon, not a tactic or strategy in and of itself, and the US military has fought many booby trap–laden counterinsurgencies over the last hundred years, from the bundok Philippines to Vietnam. The IED was not the difference. No, the innovation of this conflict was the method by which the IED was developed, how it was manufactured and emplaced, how quickly it evolved in reaction to our defenses, and, most significantly, the anonymity of the intellect behind the design. The average soldier could not say who they were really fighting.
History can rarely indicate precisely where anything begins, and no one knows where the IED trend leads in the future. But we collected enough data during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to know what happened then, and so while both ends of the “IED Incidents” chart are hazy, we can be fairly certain of the middle.
The evolution and taxonomy of IEDs proceeded thus:
The first IEDs in Iraq were rare, simple, and small. They consisted of common household items, wireless doorbells or garage door openers or transmitters from cheap Chinese radio-controlled cars or electromechanical timers we called washing-machine timers, though their origin was unclear. All these components were used to create separation, to allow the triggerman to be physically removed from his target. There was no sophisticated importation network yet, so the Engineer used what he had.
Those initial roadside bombs worked famously well against unarmored Humvees, and so they didn’t stay rare for long. Yet as late as December of 2004, the Army was still teaching soldiers to run convoys in stripped-down trucks—no doors, no windows, no coverings, no armor—with sandbags in the floorboards and every passenger facing sideways, rifle out, feet dangling, chest plate toward the incoming small arms fire. In theater, soldiers knew better and were welding on every spare bit of sheet metal they could find—“hillbilly armor” we called it—to turn our rolling death traps into, well, something only slightly less than death traps. Still, some of those trucks were driven long past their shelf life; the ones that had never been hit were deemed lucky, and soldiers wouldn’t leave them.
Armor became more plentiful in 2005, as bolt-on kits made flimsy trucks hard. The increase in armor prompted a reaction, and the main explosive charge in IEDs grew larger, more focused, or, though only rarely, both. At the same time, the triggers of IEDs were developing very quickly, though not in response to armor. The countermeasure that forced the IED to blossom into its full potential was our electronic jammer.
Why buy one when you can buy two at twice the price? This apocryphal rule of government spending proved useful: when the military needed a system to counter the Engineer’s devices that operated via radio waves, it already had two sitting on the proverbial shelf. The Army had an older system, called Warlock, originally designed to turn off the sophisticated fuzes of incoming Soviet mortars. The Navy had a newer system, called Channel, developed after the bombing of the USS Cole to stop attacks by small boats in harbors. The Department of Defense bought as many of both as it could, boxed them up and shipped them to Iraq without so much as an instruction manual, and the resulting mix of models and manufacturers was nearly as varied as the IEDs they were shielding against.
The Engineer’s principle design concern, more than target or camouflage or size of blast, is control. How to make sure the bomb goes off neither too early (killing the emplacer) nor too late (killing the wrong target). Wireless doorbells provided sufficient control until the first generation of American jammers drowned out their low end of the radio spectrum. Thus began a race to the top. The Engineer would choose a transmitter/receiver combination just outside of the spectrum of the jammer, and then the latest generation of American equipment would be fielded or tweaked to blot out the threat. This iterative summing process occurred weekly; twenty years of Northern Ireland Troubles IED development swept through Iraq in only three. Every consumer product that contained a switch and an antenna got a turn: toy cars, garage door openers, cordless telephone units, car alarms, handheld mobile radios of various powers, telemetry modules, air cards used in factories to remotely control manufacturing processes, WiFi. There were no mice in this game, only cats.
When cell phones finally appeared in IEDs, as we knew they would once the tower network infrastructure had been laid, a special kind of fear radiated. Cell phones are designed to cut through interference, to latch on to the weakest of signals, to filter out a thousand other cell phone users operating in the same space and still get the message through. Many died before we jammed them right.
The Engineer devised other ways to overcome the jammer—long command-wires, suicide attacks, pressure devices known as “Christmas tree lights”—but in Iraq those options never diverged into the varied art forms achieved by the radio-controlled triggers.
There were other, nontechnical IED development factors at work. After Sunni Al Qaeda affiliates bombed the Shia Al-Askari “Golden Mosque” in February of 2006, an entire violent branch was added to the IED family tree. Now Sunni and Shia, the Engineer and his counterparts in the Iranian Quds Force, killed each other with a lust they had previously saved for Americans. A pocket of pent-up bomb-making creativity was unleashed on the Iraqi police and representative militias of each group, US soldiers often caught in the middle.
So it was that by the end of the Iraq War, only the peak species on each side survived. The variety of the Jurassic had given way to the highly specialized of the Cretaceous. Evolution was done trying interesting combinations and now focused exclusively on effectiveness. The only trucks that remained on the road bore the best jammers and were the most armored, V-hulled MRAPs and Buffalos with front bumper–mounted kick-brooms and the occasional Humvee with multiple layers of bolt-on armor and horned projections on the nose. The only IEDs worth planting were large enough to overturn twenty-ton trucks or pierce armor with molten slugs, and used multiple arming and firing systems to defeat the few weak points in the jamming sequence. At the peak of the worst operations in Sadr City and Baghdad and Samarra and Baqubah, bomb technicians in the toughest trucks would clear a dozen IEDs a day, each one uniquely tailored to kill their vehicle based upon its particular inherent vulnerability. It was a bloodbath. The crescendo had been reached.
Then the meteor struck, a new president was elected, the United States
declared the war over, and we all went home.
Well, some of us went home. The rest went to the war most had forgotten about.
Afghanistan remained a primordial soup. The war there began with rifles and landmines and the occasional suicide vest or car bomb. Following the initial blaze of the 2001 invasion, the fire began to burn itself out, ran low on fuel and dimmed, charcoal glowing red and cooling. The war in Iraq was a clarion call for foreign mujahideen, and the Engineer concentrated his efforts there. Iraq-style IEDs were almost nonexistent. Landmines, yes. Dud-fired rockets and RPGs, yes. Gunfights for sure. “I got more confirmed kills in Afghanistan than IED ops,” was a usual sentiment from those American EOD techs deployed as late as 2007, when the mission was to drive the few roads and get shot at and clear the occasional command wire. At that time there were 25,000 US troops in Afghanistan, a country the size of Texas. Meanwhile, in the real state of Texas, there were nearly 54,000 police officers.
But war itself can be elemental, consumed with its own self-perpetuation, and below the ash the coals never quite extinguished. As Anand Gopal describes in No Good Men Among the Living, in those years the small American force regrew a native insurgency by propping up unpopular government officials and choosing sides in tribal conflicts. That these actions were done in good faith mattered little. By the time the Iraq War wrapped up, American soldiers were quashing a rebellion across southern and eastern Afghanistan.
The Engineer was back, and the IED-lite days were over. Afghanistan lacked the infrastructure—cell phone towers, reliable electricity, highways, domestic manufacturing—to fight a technologically sophisticated IED war. But when the battleground shifted to the steep valleys, winding donkey paths, and hilltops where only helicopters could fly, the Engineer gained the advantage. Al-Muhandis could provide reliable hidden booby traps with local materials. The development of Afghan IEDs accelerated quickly, with as many varieties of pressure plates—devices that function when you step on them—as there had been radio-controlled bombs in Iraq.
All the Ways We Kill and Die Page 6
