Initially there was little doubt as to who planned the strike against the Americans, who had, after all, been attacked at gunpoint by a gang of armed guerrillas on a main city street and then incinerated, their vehicles set ablaze, while a big chanting crowd stood back and hurled rocks into the flames.
Thereafter things became particularly unattractive. Two charred corpses were tied to cars and dragged through the streets. Body parts were pulled off and hung from telephone wires. Two incinerated bodies were hauled up onto the old bridge and left dangling from the rafters.
All of this seemed somewhat beyond the pale, even for the savagely anti-American al-Zarqawi. And even if it were within the pale, these actions certainly represented a new and grim semitribal low for the apparent successor to Osama bin Laden.
And there was a planned tribal madness to the attack. The Americans all worked for the private security corporation Blackwater and were helping to safely transport supplies for a catering company. But there were more than 150 Iraqis shouting and chanting at the old bridge as the mutilated bodies swung in the light desert breeze: Long live Islam ... Allahu Akbar [God is great]!
One town official mentioned, unhelpfully, that this would be the fate of all Americans who entered Fallujah. And for several hours the crowd grew and grew, still chanting anti-American slogans. It took the sudden and thunderous howl of a US fighter-bomber, screaming in low from out of the southeastern desert, to finally scatter and disperse them.
And, of course, these four frenzied murders seemed to bear all the hallmarks of the work of al-Zarqawi. Although he was not yet a confirmed member of bin Laden’s inner councils, he very soon would be and, indeed, later that year would be proclaimed “Emir of al-Qaeda in the Country of Two Rivers.”
But al-Zarqawi required no formal title in order to stand at the pinnacle of al-Qaeda’s anointed rogue’s gallery. His paramilitary training camp in Afghanistan was revered among all jihadists. In Iraq, however, he became famous for a vast series of bombings—roadside, suicide, and targeted IED blasts. He both planned and carried out hostage executions and beheadings. He masterminded the brutal assassination of the senior US diplomat Lawrence Foley right outside Foley’s home in Amman.
Al-Zarqawi was the scourge of the Jordanian security forces, who only just foiled his monstrous plan to slam chemical weapons into the US Embassy, the prime minister’s office, and the headquarters (HQ) of Jordanian intelligence. When Jordan’s G-men came crashing into the terrorist HQ they seized twenty tons of chemicals, including blistering agents, nerve gas, and sacks containing lethal poisons. In addition to a further five tons of high explosive, there were three trucks with heavy-duty iron plows that had been designed to ram through security barriers in front of the target buildings.
Al-Zarqawi—not for the first time—was subsequently sentenced in absentia to death. He was still on the loose, and a few short weeks after the outrage on the old bridge, he showed up, masked, on an al-Qaeda video, cold-bloodedly beheading an American civilian, Nicholas Berg, with a jagged tribal knife.
Everyone in authority knew this was not the only public beheading of an American that al-Zarqawi had carried out; indeed, his pitiless bloodlust appeared to raise the eyebrows of even the icy jihadist monarch, Osama bin Laden himself. In March 2004 US officials credited al-Zarqawi with over seven hundred killings in Iraq, the majority with bombs.
For more than fourteen years the militant Jordanian seemed to prefer to operate his own private terrorist army, which he named al-Tawhid wal-Jihad. There were times when he worked alongside al-Qaeda, but bin Laden was wary of him, troubled that the pure brutality of Zarqawi’s methods would do their cause no good and may infuriate the tough Republican president in the White House even further.
Knocking down New York’s World Trade Center with a smoothly orchestrated twenty-first-century suicide air attack was one thing, but bin Laden expressed concern over cleaving off a civilian’s head with a bread knife on television. Thus, he never allowed a formal partnership between his al-Qaeda councils and al-Tawhid wal-Jihad’s bloodstained leader, the most wanted man in both Jordon and Iraq.
In turn, al-Zarqawi was not in any way certain that bin Laden and his Taliban cohorts possessed sufficient fervor to carry out a holy war to the bitter end. His plan was simple: he and his “warriors” would carry on killing US and Western military and civilians until the whole lot of them went home, leaving the Middle East forever. Along this route, he intended to destroy the government of Jordan as part of a strategic master plan, and while at it, at the same time, take Israel off the face of the earth.
For al-Zarqawi, there was no compromise, nor room for maneuver. He possessed the psychopath’s messianic belief that there was no other point of view worth listening to except his own. And from the first moment he entered talks with bin Laden, there was dissent and disagreement, differences of opinion both operationally and in terms of doctrine. And the reasons for this were obvious.
Osama bin Laden was a man of religion, a slightly crazed zealot, who believed from his sandals to his turban that the Prophet Muhammad fought in his corner and that all of his actions were justified. Never did al-Qaeda’s founder make any kind of speech without invoking the will of Allah and affirming that there was no other God but Allah and that He alone would guide them on the path to righteous victory over the Great Satan.
Al-Zarqawi, however, used Islam essentially as a public relations aid, justifying the most heinous murders by mentioning that the Prophet had approved of the whole exercise and that in the end his troops, every one of them, would cross the bridge into paradise and into the arms of Allah ... DEATH TO THE INFIDEL!
Despite accepting large sums of money from al-Qaeda, principally to run his training camp, for several years he refused to take an oath of allegiance to bin Laden. Indeed, when the American bodies were strung from the Fallujah bridge, the Jordanian had not yet taken that oath and would not for another seven months.
And even when he did, the two men were never close because of fundamental differences. Bin Laden’s objectives were large scale and planned over the course of many months. Al-Zarqawi was too much of a mad dog for the elusive Islamist cleric.
Thus, when the savage events on the bridge first came to light, the CIA immediately assumed they were masterminded and, probably, executed by the mad dog himself. And so the CIA sent the word out immediately that they wanted the crazed jihadist murderer hunted down and brought in, dead or alive.
By this time al-Tawhid wal-Jihad had morphed into al-Qaeda in Iraq, but despite intercepting letters and communiqués of obvious disagreement between bin Laden and al-Zarqawi, the American intel operatives made no distinctions. According to the United States, they were all al-Qaeda, all terrorists and ruthless killers. And this time they had gone too far, way beyond the boundaries of known guerrilla warfare.
The Americans threw a steel wall around the city of Fallujah and prepared for a surge by the US Marines that would last for six weeks, during which hundreds of Iraqi insurgents died. But while the city shook and shuddered to the thunder of artillery and pounding infantry boots through the sandy streets, stealthy CIA agents were uncovering a brand new possibility: al-Zarqawi was nowhere near Anbar Province at the time of the killings, and yet another rising al-Qaeda commander, a man whose methods made al-Zarqawi seem a paragon of restraint, had perpetrated the crimes.
The new field commander was an Iraqi of the blood, born in the city of Fallujah itself, a native son of the old desert trading post and a fanatical killer whose fevered addiction to random murder was becoming a modern fable, even within Arab communities in which violence and brutality had been a way of life for thousands of years.
His name was Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi. His business was jihadist terror against the citizens and military personnel of the United States and their allies. In Al-Isawi’s world there were no holds barred; each “mission” was conducted without a grain of mercy toward anyone. Betrayal in any form always resulted in instant repris
als, with the murder of the suspect’s family.
Wives, children, and the elderly were massacred on a routine basis. No desert outlaw, in all the long history of Fallujah’s blood-spattered and violent history, had ever been more feared by his own people. He was sheltered, protected, and guarded even by those who trembled at the mention of his name.
Al-Isawi had successfully petrified the populace into becoming his unwilling helpers while also remaining deep in the shadows. He was feared as no other Iraqi commander since Yusuf Saladin, the ferocious Kurdish warrior who captured Jerusalem in 1187. Saladin, however, was famous for never turning his fury upon civilians. Al-Isawi had no such scruples.
His reputation had spread widely on the strange bush telegraph of Iraq, and US manhunts for the man were invariably met with blank stares. The Americans, however—particularly the Marines and the Navy SEALs—were not remotely afraid of Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi. They were simply unable to find the sonofabitch.
And the entire hunt jumped up about seven notches when the CIA disclosed that the March 31, 2004, murders of the US security men were simply too gruesome to be the work of al-Zarqawi, who had never, even in his most chilling acts of slaughter, resorted to tribal butchery and exhibitionism on this scale.
The burned corpses on the old bridge at Fallujah had brought a new dimension to terrorism in Iraq. And for the first time US and coalition forces were searching Iraq for someone other than al-Zarqawi—a different killer, someone even more deranged.
And they would need to be extra vigilant. Like the US Special Forces in the Middle East, Al-Isawi worked mostly after dark, and as one SEAL commander stated it: “This bastard will slit your throat before you have time to clear it. But we should bear in mind our brother, Scott Helvenston, a former SEAL instructor, whose body swung from that bridge. We need to track down this Al-Isawi, and do it quickly.”
He was right about that. Within hours of the four murders an IED blew up, killing five US soldiers. CIA agents believed this new and local killer had struck again.
The immediate aftermath, conducted during the first week of April 2004, was a heavy-handed US response, with the Marines taking on the insurgents in a five-day battle that saw six hundred Iraqis killed and more than twelve hundred injured. Fighting in the area near the bridge was so fierce that both the Fallujah and Jordanian hospitals were closed. Slowly the city calmed down.
But the insurgents regrouped and attacked again. There was little doubt among the Americans that this new al-Qaeda commander was a tough-minded and dangerous enemy. And for the first time they discovered he did have a quasi-religious side to his character. Marines found several major arms caches hidden in a couple of local mosques—heavy machine guns, AK-47s, several tons of high explosive, RPGs, and improvised homemade bombs.
At this time the name Al-Isawi was being freely mentioned. And, as ever, there was a cruel and sinister edge to any conversation that involved him—reports of civilians being used as human shields and firing on the American troops from inside schools, mosques, and even temporary hospitals.
Local people were forced to help the insurgents build roadblocks; others were barricaded inside their homes. And Al-Isawi’s men, as they turned certain city streets into armed fortresses, even roughly ejected some less lucky civilians.
As the month wore on, the situation worsened, despite US efforts to offer terms to surrendering insurgents. In one spectacular air strike US fighter pilots hit a flatbed truck and a following vehicle, both of which exploded continuously for about twenty minutes, shaking the entire area. The Iraqis fled, charging across the street into the shelter of a fortified house.
But the American pilot came screaming in low and fast for a second time, and he hit the house with a missile that blew it to smithereens. More accurately, the building blew itself to smithereens, as it contained literally tons of high explosive.
And this was just the start. All through the year, from the very moment the American bodies were strung up on the bridge, the city of Fallujah, riddled as it was by Sunni insurgents, rallied to the shadowy battle cry of Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi.
It was now common knowledge that he had been directly responsible for the murders and was equally certain that the infuriated American military was going after him. By the end of 2004 the “City of Mosques” (Fallujah had almost two hundred of them) was wasted. The civilian death toll was virtually uncountable, though Iraqis claimed it was “several thousand.” More than eight hundred US troops also died fighting in Iraq that year.
It was an infamous year, sparked by an atrocity, and it concluded with a grand desert city in ruins, virtually wiped off the map. For Al-Isawi, however, the battle for Fallujah had put him well and truly on the map. In the coming years the old warlord al-Zarqawi would be forever looking over his shoulder at the rise of the newly titled “Butcher of Fallujah” as he moved ever forward on his blood-soaked journey to the peak of al-Qaeda command.
All of the above was written with the help of hindsight. But at the time things were not quite so clear-cut, and many CIA agents believed that al-Zarqawi was still at the root of all the evil in the benighted desert stronghold. But back in Langley, Virginia, deep in the “crime laboratories” where events were examined slowly, in infinitesimal detail, analysts definitely believed that the grotesque events at the Fallujah bridge were the work of someone else.
It was the pure public exhibitionism that steered CIA thinking away from al-Zarqawi. Because showing off was not his style. He would strike hard, causing total mayhem, mass death, and injury. And then, often several days or even weeks later, there would be a quiet news leak to Al Jazeera, the Arab television network based in Qatar, that the bombing had been the work of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
He had, in the past, hooded and somewhat anonymously, permitted himself a personal television appearance prior to publicly beheading a prisoner. But these events were always in pursuit of a gain for al-Qaeda, such as a reprieve for the prisoner in return for the release of captured bin Laden disciples.
But this public uproar on the Fallujah bridge, demonstrating the barbarity of the terrorist organization, did not ring true to al-Zarqawi’s mind-set. The analysts at Langley believed it was out of character. Particularly because television crews turned up at the bridge right on time to film the crowd kicking and stamping one of the bodies. That was not al-Zarqawi’s style; he saw himself as too serious to waste time boasting.
They drew the inevitable conclusion: there was a new man on the block in Fallujah, a fiend in desert robes. And as 2004 lurched bloodily forward, he was causing pandemonium in the city.
Al-Isawi had personally started on the rubble-strewn streets the worst close-combat fighting of the entire war. Because for a few weeks in the immediate aftermath of the hangings, the US Army removed the gloves and operated under shoot-to-kill orders against anyone standing outside their own private home with an AK-47 or rocket-propelled grenades.
This had the effect of driving the weapons of the Sunni resistance underground. The result was the formation of a tribal hotbed, a kind of Sunni Citadel, determined to fight to the last man. There were wild crowd-control confrontations and endless murders and bombings. The most violent area in all of Iraq was suddenly the blasted side streets of Fallujah, where the demented Sunni killer Al-Isawi had assumed a loose and terrifying control.
But no one, anywhere, had ever reported seeing the man. If they had mentioned such a sighting, their life would not have been worth four Iraqi dinars, and because at the time it took about four thousand of these to buy one US dollar, that would have been a tragically inexpensive life. Al-Isawi habitually took no prisoners. He fixed his own exchange rate down the sixteen-inch barrel of his Kalashnikov rifle.
He was wanted for murder all over the country. But chasing him was to chase the shadows of the desert. In the summer of 2004 the US military was already seeking a ghost. After each new uproar in the city of Fallujah, the SEAL briefings were edged with frustration.
This is
a summary of a midsummer briefing by the commander of SEAL Team 4:
Gentlemen, for us there’s nothing so difficult as searching for the unknown. But right now, the way it’s been for God knows how long, we have only a name for this bastard Isawi. There’s no more doubt that he strung up the bodies on the bridge, matter of fact he seems proud of that. But we’ve never been able to grab him, never been able even to see the sonofabitch. Right now we don’t even have a friggin’ photograph.
By July 2004 Fallujah was once more in chaos. The insurgents had refused to hand over both their heavy weapons or Al-Isawi in return for a US ceasefire in the city. And despite close US air support, the city fell back under Sunni terrorist control.
But by November the Americans had had enough. They unleashed a full-blooded attack on Fallujah, and this resulted in the fiercest urban combat of the entire war. The US Marines overran the city, darn near flattening it in the process. They got everything and everyone except Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi.
And then the new year came, 2005, and again there was this uneasy standoff. Attacks continued all through the spring and summer, and on August I a car-bomb ambush killed six US Marine snipers in the city of Haditha, a Sunni farming town on the Euphrates. In Langley Al-Isawi was suspected of moving his headquarters temporarily some 140 miles upriver. Suspicions grew even more so when a massive roadside bomb two days later detonated in Haditha, killing fourteen Marines plus their interpreter.
Another blast occurred in the same area on November 19, when a huge IED constructed of artillery shells and explosive-packed propane tanks blew up from under the asphalt, hurling a Marine Humvee into the air, splitting it clean in half, and killing the driver instantly. The rest of the Marines then reported they came under fire from civilian houses, and they immediately responded.
In the end, after a volley of machine gunfire and an exploding grenade, twenty-four apparently unarmed civilians lay dead. And it was six long years before the several Marines charged with assault and murder were ultimately cleared. None of them went to jail. Their defense attorney was Haytham Faraj, a former US Marine officer.
Honor and Betrayal : The Untold Story of the Navy Seals Who Captured the Butcher of Fallujah -and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured (9780306823091) Page 2