My Share of the Task

by General Stanley McChrystal

  Foreign fighters had fought in more than a dozen conflicts since bin Laden and his fellow volunteers had first become “Afghan-Arabs” in the 1980s. Iraq was the latest and, we believed, quickly becoming the largest battlefield destination for what the jihadists called the “Caravan of Martyrs.” Most were young men who considered themselves jihadists. Few came to Iraq with dreams of restoring the caliphate there. Rather, most left their homes in North Africa, Saudi Arabia, the Levant, Central Asia, and Europe roused by a more visceral sense of Muslim duty. Like the generation before them who flocked to Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Bosnia, many came fired by righteous indignation of real or perceived injustices committed by the West against their Muslim brothers and sisters.

  I was in Afghanistan with Mike Flynn when I learned about the attack, and our loss, later that evening. Mike had been doing a superb job making our network smart about the growing threat. But as the event that day reinforced, we needed to get smarter, faster. We needed to scale our network to combat the tide of young Muslim men funneling into Iraq.

  * * *

  Although the war in Iraq was becoming international, TF 16 was not. Our operative was killed in Mosul, but the explosion was a product of a network that extended far beyond Iraq’s borders. Increasingly, its supply lines of material, money, recruiters, handlers, and, most important, volunteers, stretched to Riyadh and Aleppo, Tunis and Hamburg. But this periphery of AQI remained vague to us. To uncover and then dismantle these outer rings would require that our network overlay theirs. This meant finding creative ways to employ the international reach of other agencies and units, usually existing local security forces, like the police. To coordinate our effort to tie this together, we decided to replicate the proven model of JIATF-East in Bagram by creating a parallel structure in Balad. While JIATF-East focused on locating senior Al Qaeda leaders in Central Asia, the mission of the Balad-based JIATF-West was to reverse engineer the problem we were seeing in Iraq.

  I knew the success of JIATF-West, like so many of the new teams and units we created, would hinge on effective leadership. So I called two men whom I had known since they were young soldiers, Tom D. and Tres H., into the Operations Center in our Bagram compound. T.T. and I had carefully selected each man for the task. Tres was an intelligence professional, but his real gift was getting people to do things and then feel particularly good about having done them. He could, as necessary, alternate between being animated, stern, demanding, and consoling. He had been a private in my Ranger company from 1986 to 1987; now, almost twenty years later, I was sending him as an experienced major to work a difficult assignment. He would be deputy to Tom D., who had been a Ranger captain when I commanded the regiment, which he had left to join Green. Tom D.’s wry, irreverent humor formed a veneer over his dogged leadership skills, which he later used to great effect in command of a Green squadron in Iraq. T.T. and I judged that together, Tom D. and Tres could corral, convince, coerce, and inspire a motley group of military and civilian analysts to gel into a team. Within a couple of hours of receiving their new mission, they had computers and gear quickly packed and had joined Mike and me on the plane for Iraq.

  A biting, wintry desert wind swept Balad when we arrived in the early morning the day after the mess-hall bombing. December turned the ubiquitous dust, powderlike during the scorching summer, into a soupy, adhesive mud, and we walked carefully to avoid it as we returned to our hangar. At daybreak, Tom D. and Tres moved into two empty white corrugated metal trailers and began to set up shop. That day the trailers had no chairs, tables, or computers. JIATF-West had only Tom D. and Tres. But within weeks, analysts from the CIA, FBI, NSA, NGA, and DIA were working inside. The trailers quickly became a critical piston of our war machine, now moving in wider concentric movements.

  TF 714’s demonstrated battlefield effectiveness made us increasingly legitimate in the counterterrorism community. By affiliation, the JIATF grew in prestige. Its own weekly VTC began with a modest audience but soon included chiefs of station from across the Middle East, deputy directors, and three dozen agencies. Because we did not hesitate to share operational details with them, D.C.-based analysts knew that a weekend in their office doing work for “the task force” might lead to an arrest in the back alleys of a casbah. Deploying forward to serve in a JIATF became sought-after duty.

  The JIATF’s essential products were information-rich, five-page targeting folders on key enemy operatives. Each included exhaustive background on the target, his activities, and often enough specific location and pattern-of-life information for a host nation to capture him.

  A key to doing so was the web of liaisons whom we had seeded across the region and who worked with U.S. country teams to ensure that local authorities saw the JIATF’s communiqué so they could make an arrest. I learned early on that our influence in the embassies and agencies we were wooing often depended on the simple charisma, integrity, and competence of our liaisons. So I carefully selected the professionals we placed there, routinely diverting world-class commandos or peerless intelligence professionals to serve as liaisons, despite the impact on our operations. The trust they had earned toiling away by themselves in isolated embassies—far from their tight-knit units and the comparative glory of the fight—was vital.

  * * *

  Our concern about the strategic threat that the refreshment of foreign fighters posed had been building in the months prior to the December mess-hall bombing and the inception of JIATF-West. Beginning that fall, I met with the leaders of TF 714 and TF 16 in a series of two- and three-hour-long sessions. In front of maps and whiteboards, we discussed the evidence and potential ways to combat the problem. Bennet Sacolick, the Green commander, had returned to the States to oversee the unit there, leaving Colonel John Christian in charge of TF 16. “Big John,” as Graeme Lamb later warmly called him, was indeed that. With cropped whitish hair and a big, sculptural face, he looked like a bust of a Hellenistic soldier. He was articulate and persuasive, speaking in a distinctive baritone and cleanly enunciating the last syllables of his sentences. He had been commander of TF 16 during Big Ben and throughout the previous summer had gone back and forth with the Marines’ intelligence shops, who disagreed that there was a significant “Al Qaeda problem” in Anbar.

  John was a perceptive leader who often saw and understood trends before hindsight put them in relief for the rest of us. He had been deploying to Iraq since the summer of 2003 and before then had been a military adviser in the Philippines with Wayne Barefoot. There, the two had followed Islamic extremist groups like Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah, elements with regional and national agendas but aspirations toward Al Qaeda’s sophistication. Their experience watching these groups as they networked, cohered, and grew helped Wayne and John divine some of Al Qaeda in Iraq’s more opaque patterns.

  During these sessions, we tried to do more than parse calculations of foreign fighters. We questioned our underlying assumptions about the insurgency—its strategy, depth, and leaders—that led us to see what we thought we were seeing. These debates inevitably turned to discussions about Zarqawi and what the influx of foreign volunteers revealed about his proficiency as a manager: AQI’s swift fielding of these volunteers required mature processes. The increased number of volunteers implied they believed Zarqawi’s was a winning team, while the strict deployment of suicide bombers against select targets revealed an ability to design and execute a strategy with discipline. That Zarqawi could keep this regional network glued spoke to his pull as a leader.

  Zarqawi’s charisma was the topic of one of the more memorable of these sessions that fall, when we sat down with raw transcripts eavesdropped from a broadcast he had made. He began with a lengthy preamble. For minutes, Zarqawi enthusiastically praised each of his cells in Iraq.

  “To the brave lions of Samarra,” he said, “you strike fear in the hearts of the invaders. . . . And to sons of the sword in Diyala Province . . . To the vanguard in Tikrit . . .” />
  After a while, John Christian cut in. “He does it by township,” he said, reluctantly impressed. What could be more powerful to a struggling group of jihadists in some dusty basement than to have Zarqawi himself praise their outfit on a broadcast that would soon rocket around the world on the Internet?

  “This guy is the real deal,” John said. “He understands what he’s doing.” I agreed. The speech confirmed the image we had stitched together of Zarqawi as a leader. Recovered videos showed him circulating the battlefield, motivating his disparate frontline cells. Firsthand reports of his visits described him as exceedingly quiet and gracious yet visibly confident enough to be inspiring. To the awe of his followers, Zarqawi personally went on missions, donning disguises to get past American checkpoints.

  Zarqawi’s reputation as a battlefield commander was the foundation for his mystique. That jihadist mystique—a potent mix of violence and real charisma, perfumed by thick propaganda efforts—was wafting outside of Iraq’s borders. As it did, he became the face of the insurgency. Without that personification and his celebrity, the otherwise anonymous Iraqi resistance groups would have had a harder time pulling in foreign volunteers.

  At the time, we believed between 100 and 150 jihadists were entering Iraq every month, but that calculation, based on a combination of assessments, was less than scientific. Against the Coalition’s estimate that the Sunni insurgency comprised between 12,000 and 20,000 men of varying levels of enthusiasm and expertise, this might have appeared small. But I believed their impact on the violence was disproportionately large. The leadership of Al Qaeda in Iraq remained heavily foreign, replenished by outsiders who were sometimes experienced operatives with personal and ideological connections to Al Qaeda’s regional network. At the lower end of the spectrum, the younger, harsher, and more enthusiastic jihadists infused energy into the insurgency. Without competing commitments like jobs or families, these foreign volunteers had nothing to do but fight full time. Unlike aggrieved Iraqis, they had no indigenous stake in the future of Iraq. So a functioning electric grid or more jobs or even greater political concessions for Iraq’s Sunnis would not convince them to lay down arms. They came to hurt and kill Americans.

  Most critical was the steady resupply of suicide bombers. If even a fraction of the hundred men crossing the borders were willing to blow themselves up on suicide missions—and documents TF 714 later captured and released showed the majority crossed the border with that stated intention—they could do great harm. Through increasingly seismic car bombs that left whole city blocks charred and relentlessly decimated Iraqi police and army recruits, a single suicide bomber could exact a disproportionate toll.

  As we studied the problem, we found the enemy network had a frighteningly efficient system to recruit, intake, move, and employ foreign fighters. We were most amazed by cases where, in a year or less, they could reach a young man with no prior history of violence, pluck him from his daily life, get him into Iraq, and convince him to strap a suicide vest across his torso or torch off a car bomb in a crowded, daylight market. Although each person volunteered for individual reasons, we began to see a template emerge.

  For many, the journey began in the glow of a computer screen, watching slick propaganda videos posted to the Internet. Carefully constructed montages, overlaid with hymnal chanting or righteous sermons, played on the man’s guilt and anger, while propagandists challenged his sense of manhood with stories of Iraqi women raped by Americans. But often, slick videos were superfluous: In my experience, we found that nearly every first-time jihadist claimed Abu Ghraib had first jolted him to action. Ginned up, he started to hang around a local mosque. There, a spotter picked him out, detecting in him the same fidgety, adolescent yearning he’d seen in dozens of other young men. The spotter befriended him and soon introduced him to a wider group of men. These guys, the recruit found, also liked to discuss the American war in Iraq and the jihad. They met regularly at the mosque to listen to the smooth, airtight lessons of their mentor or cleric.

  Soon the young man began to grow a beard and wear different clothes. He started praying five times a day. It felt good to have the rigid discipline, the direction, and to think of himself as a hard man. In many ways he appeared no different from hundreds of millions of devout, peaceful Muslims. But the ideas he imbibed were narrow and potent. For some in the group with guilt over a wayward youth, jihad offered redemption, as it had for Zarqawi, who had ruined his adolescence with drugs and gangs. Soon the young man had no friends outside this circle. If the recruiter introduced the young recruits to a jihadist just back from Iraq, they would envy the older, prouder bearing of this veteran. One day, the young man came to the mosque and found that a handful of regulars were absent. It had been their turn. Violent jihad became not just a pillar of the particular faith preached to the young man’s group. It was now compulsory as a source of esteem in his enclosed world. With a companion, or a maybe a few friends from the mosque, the young man decided to set out for Iraq.

  We found that most jihadists entered Iraq through Syria. Using their own savings or money from a wealthy sponsor, they typically flew into Damascus with little more than a gym bag of clothing. From the airport they were split up and rapidly put into what we called ratlines that moved them through safe houses in Syria. Usually passed between single recruiters, not teams, the jihadists moved up to Aleppo, then gradually down the Euphrates through Dayr az-Zawr to the Syrian side of the border, just across from the industrial town of Al Qaim, Iraq. After nightfall, a taxi deposited them at crossing points thirty miles up and down around Al Qaim, and they crossed the final few hundred yards on foot.

  Once in Iraq, handlers whisked them to safe houses and confiscated nearly everything. They took volunteers’ donations to Zarqawi’s organization—sometimes only a handful of bills, but usually hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. AQI kept meticulous records during this intake. The questionnaire we later recovered revealed the enemy had a serious, sophisticated managerial concern with the integrity and breadth of its network. Because its ratlines in Syria tended to rely on paid criminal smugglers, not true believers, AQI asked jihadists what fees the handlers had extracted and how well they had been treated. To plumb potential partners, AQI had recruits list which other “mujahideen supporters” they knew and how strong their relationships were.

  At these early way stations, the handlers sorted the jihadists. Nationalities appeared in spurts and cycles, though Saudis were the largest, most consistent contingent. Men with visible smarts or a science background might go to Mosul to help make bombs. But handlers would be most anxious to gather those who volunteered to be suicide bombers or peel away those who appeared vulnerable enough to be turned into them.

  Inside Iraq, potential suicide bombers were normally handled like rounds of ammunition, moved from safe house basement to safe house basement. Expedited down the pipeline, they were sequestered from outside contact and constantly indoctrinated—all to prevent them from changing their mind. By design, often the first time a suicide bomber saw Iraqis in the flesh was in the moments just before he killed them.

  Attacks were carefully orchestrated. The operative who was to film the 2000 attack on the USS Cole overslept. Zarqawi brooked no such risks. On nearly every suicide bombing, a car with a videographer trailed behind. To safeguard against last-minute hesitation, the follow-on car or a lookout on the street often controlled detonation. In some cases the driver—like the Saudi behind the wheel of a fuel truck that exploded in Baghdad on Christmas Eve that year—did not know his was a suicide mission. But, at least early in the war, most went willingly. In many of the videos filmed on the day of an attack, the men appeared almost ecstatic.

  Periodically, we had information that young men were planning to martyr themselves. The messages they left behind were chilling harbingers of attacks we often could not prevent. There was no humanity or humor in anything surrounding a young person willing to blow himse
lf up to kill innocents. But I had to smile when I saw one message to a mother and read her stern response: “Stop this foolishness now and get your rear end home and back to work.” I hoped the young man complied. There was no way to know.

  * * *

  During the last week of November 2004, as the second battle of Fallujah waned, I invited General Casey and key members of his Multi-National Force–Iraq (MNF-I) staff to our compound at Balad to discuss our concerns over the foreign-fighter flow.

  Although I had a good relationship with George Casey, I was glad that he brought his operations officer, Major General Eldon Bargewell. I’d known Eldon since we were captains at Fort Benning. A highly decorated Vietnam veteran, Eldon and I had worked together many times in later years during his service both in Green and on the TF 714 staff. Eldon was unfailingly helpful in smoothing tensions between MNF-I and TF 714. The setup of our two headquarters invited friction: Although we fought in Iraq, TF 714 answered to CENTCOM, not to MNF-I. Meanwhile, the ground-holding commanders’ occasional annoyance with TF 714—over disruptive targeting missions in their domain or our greater share of resources—all percolated up to MNF-I headquarters. By being there, Eldon could translate our mission and culture to those he served with on the conventional side.

  In the long meeting, Mike Flynn and some of our best minds, like Wayne Barefoot, laid out the case for the threat this foreign flow presented. I was disappointed at how much our read on the enemy differed from that of some of Casey’s key staff. One senior officer on the MNF-I team openly doubted our assessment of AQI’s central role in the insurgency.