My Share of the Task

by General Stanley McChrystal

  Back in Balad, I walked from the tarmac across the gravel buffer, silver under the glow of the spotlights, to my office to write another e-mail to Annie. “Just got back from a long helicopter flight to see the guys farthest out, who lost so many recently. Great trip and I am very happy I did it,” I wrote to her. “Some very genuine comments afterwards about how much they appreciate me doing that regularly like I’ve been able to do.” Upon reflection, the note was more upbeat than I felt. But it showed my resolve—and that of my men.

  By now the force knew I had been forward for almost two years and had extended for a third. I was fiercely proud to be associated with the people in TF 714, and leading them had become inseparable from how I thought of myself.

  I had told the men that day what I believed and what had come to be my life: It’s the fight. It’s the fight. It’s the fight.

  | CHAPTER 12 |

  The Hunt

  June 2005–May 2006

  “Good morning,” the president said in a brisk but friendly manner as he took his seat at the head of the conference table.

  On June 29, 2005, the White House Situation Room felt miniature. The principals’ black leather chairs, with high backs and deep seats, felt outsize, and it was difficult to move around due to the tight quarters. The walls’ lacquered wood paneling shined plastic-like under the fluorescent glow. They were undecorated except for a Frisbee-size presidential seal, hung at eye level directly behind the president’s chair, and a digital clock with red LED numbers that clicked away near the ceiling.

  I’d been in a number of Situation Room meetings during my earlier tour on the Joint Staff, but never with all the principals or the president. Big personalities filled the tight space. To the immediate right of the president sat Vice President Cheney, on his other side was Condoleezza Rice, five months into her tenure as secretary of state. Next to her was Secretary Rumsfeld and, to his left, General Richard Myers. As Rumsfeld’s plus-one, my seat was along the wall, behind his. Across from Rumsfeld sat John Snow, secretary of the treasury. National Security Adviser Steve Hadley and Homeland Security Adviser Fran Townsend were also present. Notably absent were any members of the National Security Council staff with the Iraq portfolio. This meeting, like those leading up to it, excluded these Iraq officials, drawing a line between the counterterrorist fight and the war in Iraq. This was a division of labor at odds with my thinking about Al Qaeda’s ascendant role in Iraq.

  Two days earlier I’d been asked to come down to the White House for this session of President Bush’s National Security Council meeting. I was back in the States for a TF 714 commanders’ conference we were holding at Gettysburg, and when the NSC staff caught wind that I was Stateside, they summoned me. Field commanders rarely attended these meetings in person, but the topic, by the president’s request, was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He and his national security team wanted to know, as Secretary Rumsfeld put in his memorandum, “what [was] being done to get him.” As the commander overseeing that hunt, I was to tell them.

  The meeting began and the president directed it at a businesslike clip. John Snow began with an update on his department’s efforts to clamp down on the terrorist funding flowing from Europe and the Middle East. Secretary Rumsfeld followed. After some initial points, he introduced me to the principals around the table.

  “Stan’s going to tell you what we are doing to get Zarqawi,” he said to President Bush.

  Rumsfeld began to stand up to switch seats with me and to take my spot along the wall, but General Myers demurred. Rumsfeld slid left into General Myers’s chair, and I sat down between him and Secretary Rice. It was an awkward shuffle, moving the big chairs around on their wheels. The monitor to my left, in front of the president, turned to the briefing slides, prepared by the Joint Staff and not TF 714. It was the first time I had seen the brief, but it was straightforward and accurate. The president listened intently and looked me in the eye each time I turned from the screen to him. His interjected questions were not cross-examinations, but he was focused and obviously interested in the mechanics of our hunt. After I finished with the brief, he gave me a half nod. “Thanks, Stan.”

  He paused and looked intently at me. “Are you going to get him?”

  I had assumed he’d ask this question. On the early-morning helicopter flight down from Gettysburg, over the green fields of southern Pennsylvania, I had thought about how I would answer. I knew I wasn’t just there to read a brief, or even to draw on my ground knowledge of the operations, fresh from the front. In truth, my being there allowed President Bush to size me up, to look me in the eyes, get a straight answer, and assess whether he thought I could deliver.

  “We will, Mr. President,” I said. “There is no doubt in my mind.”

  There wasn’t. This wasn’t bluster. I saw our force growing, learning, and becoming ever more effective against Zarqawi’s network. And I knew as long as Zarqawi was in Iraq, we would find the leads to him. But in the summer of 2005, after almost two years commanding TF 714, I also appreciated that the mission was larger than one man—he needed to be stopped, but his network had to be destroyed.

  As we neared the end of the allotted time, I talked about some operations and the challenges of capturing targets like Zarqawi.

  “Do you want to kill him, or capture him?” the president asked.

  “I’d like to capture him, Mr. President,” I responded.

  “Why don’t we just kill ’im?” the president said quickly, flatly. Nervous laughter in the room gave way to a few beats of silence. I assumed his comment referred to Zarqawi.

  It was a fair question, neither theatrical nor simplistic. He had been watching American men and women die to stop Zarqawi’s effort to incite civil war and tear down the new Iraqi government. On one level, to risk losing more of our people trying to capture a man who led a psychopathic campaign of violence seemed illogical and almost immoral.

  “Well, Mr. President,” I said, “to be honest, I really want to talk to him. He knows things we want to know.”

  No raid force ever went on a mission under my command with orders not to capture a target if he tried to surrender. We were not death squads. But my calculus was not about Zarqawi’s well-being. I told the president that our nightly operations to gather the intelligence allowed us to understand, and ultimately to dismantle, his network. I felt a living Zarqawi might be a decisive source of intelligence, and that was worth the risks.

  “Yeah, I’ve got it,” he said, nodding. He smiled. “Good point.”

  The meeting concluded. Our mission hadn’t changed, and Zarqawi remained a major part of it. The hunt would require us to be increasingly sophisticated in how we operated. We had to negotiate a difficult, at times contentious, balance between maintaining as much pressure and preventing as many immediate threats as possible by continuing to hammer Zarqawi’s network and conducting deliberate, painstaking target development. I was confident we could do it, but this would be long and bloody.

  I spoke briefly with Secretary Rumsfeld, then headed north to rejoin my commanders at Gettysburg.

  * * *

  When I was a boy, my father, recently returned from combat in Vietnam, brought my brother and me to Gettysburg. At the time, I thought of the confusion and violence that had violated Gettysburg’s serenity a century earlier. July 1, 1863, had been a difficult day of fighting for Union forces, as they resisted Lee’s army, then converging from the north and west. By the early evening, the Union had fallen back through the town to defensive positions on nearby Cemetery Ridge.

  For more than two years the Army of the Potomac had fought hard, and it was maturing into a seasoned force, but success eluded it. Earlier that day, Brigadier General John Buford had led his cavalry division in a brilliant delaying action, buying time for hard-marching infantry units to concentrate. But by nightfall, Confederates pressed aggressively through the town for what appeare
d to be another Lee victory. The next night the Union commanders met in a small farmhouse behind Cemetery Ridge with George Meade, the army’s new commander. They decided to stand and fight a battle that many in the crowded, smoke-filled room thought might decide the war.

  By the summer of 2005, TF 714, like the Army of the Potomac, was a seasoned force, but the situation in Iraq looked grim. And I’d gathered my leaders at Gettysburg to ensure we were united in our strategy for the way ahead.

  On June 25, 2005, I had traveled from Fort Bragg to Austin, Texas, for Bob Horrigan’s funeral. I flew in a military plane with Bennet Sacolick and about forty of Bob’s Green brethren. As we sat in the pews of St. Mary’s Cathedral in downtown Austin that morning, the sound of bagpipes swelling through the stone arches and ceilings, men from Green were arriving in Iraq as part of our surge into the upper reaches of the Euphrates, where Bob had been killed.

  In the early months of 2005, as jihadists heeded bin Laden’s call to seize the opportunity to fight with Zarqawi, in one aspect I began to think of Iraq as the Gettysburg of the war on terror. When John Buford decided to dismount his men and fight the Confederate forces he encountered outside of town, he committed the Union Army to fighting the decisive battle of that war in tiny Gettysburg.

  I saw the evolution of our fight in Iraq against Al Qaeda the same way. Al Qaeda had never planned or desired for Iraq to be the place in which it clashed with and bled the United States. Afghanistan had always been the more appealing country to which to lure the Americans. For our part, America did not invade Iraq in order to fight Al Qaeda. Despite some reports and claims of Saddam’s purported late-in-life connections with bin Laden’s network, any ties were insignificant. No one on either side, except perhaps Zarqawi, wanted or expected Iraq to be the main battleground for the war on terror. But by mid-2005, it was precisely that.

  To win in Iraq, Al Qaeda did not need to destroy our army. It needed only to demonstrate that our success in Iraq was impossible. It needed to show that the thesis of a politically moderate Muslim world, engaged with the West, was invalid, that American power was illusory. We needed to defeat it in what became its self-stated main effort. We also needed to succeed in ours. For us, the war against Al Qaeda could not be won in Iraq. But it could be lost.

  Now in late June, as commanders were gathering in Gettysburg and I prepared to brief the president, we had gotten news from Afghanistan of another loss. Eight men from our 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment had been killed. After a small team of SEALs under a separate command was ambushed in a remote valley, the 160th pilots had taken off from a nearby base, flying the urgent rescue mission. Insurgents shot down one of the Chinook helicopters, carrying eight SEALs. All sixteen men on board died.

  In Gettysburg, several commanders and I gathered in one of the small hotel rooms outfitted by our team as a temporary communications center, drew the curtains, and conducted a video teleconference with the leader of our Afghanistan task force, then-Captain Ed Winters. Ed, also the commander of TF 714’s SEALs, had an impressive ability to drive elite forces in tough situations.

  As we talked on the VTC, Ed was preparing to send members from his task force, which included SEALs, Rangers, Air Force Special Tactics operators, and others, into the valley in an attempt to find survivors or, more likely, recover bodies. He was forward and solidly in control of the situation, and we were thousands of miles away. But in the new way in which we had constructed and operated our network, my command team and I were always in the fight, even at Gettysburg. That night, weather prevented Ed from launching the mission. When they could get to the site two days later, the operators who searched for their comrades had to search intensively through the charred crash site before they were able to account for each of the fallen.

  * * *

  From notes I’d received before the Situation Room meeting, I’d known that President Bush wanted to know about Zarqawi the man and the leader. After a year and a half of hunting Zarqawi, we had studied him closely.

  He was born in 1966 as Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh into the dun, industrial city of Zarqa, northeast of Jordan’s glitzier capital of Amman. Ahmad grew up—along with two older brothers and seven sisters—in one of Zarqa’s drab, boxy concrete apartments. With no parks in the dusty, hardscrabble neighborhood, Zarqawi spent his time playing among the headstones of the cemetery near his apartment.

  He was unremarkable in his youth, but not the dunce some made him out to be. He captained his soccer team and earned Bs in school but suddenly dropped out at age seventeen. He married and got a job sweeping Zarqa’s brown streets but before long was drinking heavily. He used and sold drugs. He earned a reputation for his temper and became known as the Green Man for the tint the ink of his many tattoos gave his skin. During this time he was, by various accounts, either arrested for a case of attempted rape or questioned in relation to it and briefly detained for wounding a man with a knife in a fight.

  Reportedly at the insistence of his mother, Ahmad attended a mosque in Amman recognized for its strict Salafist bent. As with others schooled there, it soon led him to Afghanistan. Only by the time he arrived, in the spring of 1989, he had missed the war: The Soviets had already withdrawn back across the Amu Darya. He instead worked as a correspondent for a Peshawar-based jihadist mouthpiece, traveling around Afghanistan interviewing mujahideen, chronicling their heroic exploits. Drawing up these burnished portraits would surely be useful to him later in fashioning his own persona.

  As the Afghan factions began fighting one another, Ahmad returned to Jordan in 1992. He quickly joined up with a militant group led by Abu Mohammad al-Maqdisi, a rising jihadist ideologue. But after guns and bombs were found hidden in the walls of his house, purportedly for use against Israel, Ahmad was, along with Maqdisi, shipped off to Suwaqah prison in 1994.

  It seems the next five years, which he spent in Jordanian prisons, molded him into the Zarqawi we would later face on the battlefield. Behind bars, he became right-hand man to Maqdisi, who led the fundamentalist faction of prisoners. Under Maqdisi’s wing but in his shadow, Zarqawi became more pious. He memorized the Koran and tried to scrub his skin of tattoos using hydrochloric acid. He also began to lead. He organized prisoners in his cellblock for protests and first practiced violent bullying as a way to keep people in line. He took to lifting homemade weights, building the physical bulk visible later on the grainy videos from Iraq. His brash resistance to the authorities won him the right to wear what he wanted—Afghan robes—and the respect of his followers. As Ahmad became harder, Maqdisi relinquished leadership of the organization to him. By the end of his prison time, Ahmad could, according to a prison doctor, “order his followers to do things just by moving his eyes.”

  Released in March 1999 after the new king of Jordan, Abdullah II, granted a blanket amnesty, Ahmad soon traveled back to Peshawar with his Jordanian wife in tow, then to Afghanistan, where he established his own training camp in Herat in 2000. There he married a second wife and adopted the name Abu Musab, a kunya meaning the father of Musab, from Zarqa. Zarqawi’s Jordanian credentials and connections brought recruits from the Levant, an underrepresented group in Al Qaeda. He maintained a working but informal relationship with bin Laden’s organization, largely mediated by Saif al-Adl, Al Qaeda’s deputy military chief.

  During the invasion to oust the Taliban the following year, Zarqawi escaped the bombing with only a set of broken ribs. With a small band of jihadists, he fled to Iran, and he was then dispatched to lead a contingent of fighters to Iraq. Just before leaving, he visited and said good-bye to Saif al-Adl. Revenge, al-Adl recalled, was on Zarqawi’s mind.

  * * *

  Shortly after the June 29 meeting in the White House, we started following a promising lead to Zarqawi: Mohammad Rabih, also known as Abu Zar. Abu Zar was believed to be a top leader in Al Qaeda in Iraq and was a connection between the network’s component pieces. Al Qaeda in Iraq comprised l
ocalized networks—in Baghdad, in the Fallujah-to-Ramadi corridor, in the western Euphrates, and in Mosul—that used and contested specific areas of terrain through traditional terrorist-insurgent attacks. Overlaying the geographic infrastructure, Zarqawi developed capacity-based networks that specialized in particular functions—foreign fighters, car bombing, and propaganda, among others. Networks rose and fell based on the acuity and energy of their leaders. As a native Iraqi and a key facilitator of the car-bombing operations, Abu Zar was connected to each of the geographic networks—making him a possible line to Zarqawi himself.

  After trying to track Abu Zar down for more than a month, we received surprising news. He was about to be buried in Abu Ghraib city although we had not heard of his death. Skeptical, we decided to “attend” his funeral. It wouldn’t be the first time a target tried to fake his own funeral or spread rumors of his death. With sources watching from the ground, we circled aerial surveillance above, recording the funeral, which I later watched. While we often watched funerals, we never bombed or raided one. In most cases it was a moot point—there were too many civilians present. But even when the attendees were likely only militants, we didn’t. It was important as a force to set limits. So on that hot afternoon, we watched.

  On the recording, men shuffled into neat rows in front of an inelegant plywood coffin, unadorned except for Arabic script painted along the sides. An imam, with a longer beard and headdress, led the men, most in Western-style clothes, through prayers. The rows raised and lowered and then folded their hands in unison, then repeated the gestures. Although we could not distinguish the details on the ground, these funerals typically had a group of women who rocked in ritual mourning. On this day we heard that one was Abu Zar’s mother, her body contorted in pain. The words of the imam and wails of the women weren’t captured on the aerial surveillance recording, but our sources on the ground believed they were genuine.