Eventually the men carried the coffin through narrow, rutted streets to a nearby cemetery. They set the coffin in the dirt, next to a deep slit in the ground. Men carefully passed the limp body, wrapped head to toe in white linen, down to men standing in the hole, who laid it on its right side, holding it in place as the first shovelfuls of dirt fell over their shoes and covered the white shroud. They climbed out, and the hole was filled in. With the back of the shovel and then their hands, they smoothed the dark mound of dirt, and one of our main lines to Zarqawi ran cold.
Days later, the month ended with a gross demonstration of our failure to stop Al Qaeda in Iraq. On August 31, in northern Baghdad, hundreds of thousands of Shiite pilgrims made their way toward Imam Musa Kadhim shrine. The streets along their route had been blocked off for protection, and the roads swelled with the crowds moving under colorful banners and chants. Eventually, the crowd bottlenecked on Aimma Bridge, leading across the Tigris toward the shrine on the other side. At 10:00 A.M., with the bridge choked with people, shouts emerged from within the crowd of a suicide bomber. Earlier that morning, the crowd had heard explosions from the mortars Sunni insurgents fired at the shrine. The rumors transformed the shuffling procession into a stampede. In the rush, the Iraqis—especially the weakest of foot, the women and children—were crushed to death under the feet of others. As the crowd surged, others suffocated when squeezed against the cement blast barriers lining the route to protect from suicide bombings. Some leaped or were pushed off the bridge, only to hit the sloping concrete banks fifty feet below. Some drowned. Without a fuse even lit, 953 Iraqis died, and nearly that many were injured.
To many people, the noise of violence across Iraq was growing to such a pitch that one day’s atrocities and explosions didn’t stand out from the next. But I remember this day well. So much of a devolving Iraq was wrapped up in the tragedy of that afternoon. Reports that evening were of a surreal death toll, of hospital hallways choked with bodies, of sectarian paranoia tragically entrenched. Back in the States, news of the stampede on the Baghdad bridge ran at the bottoms of newspaper front pages, underneath stark images from Hurricane Katrina’s deadly toll and news that President Bush was dispatching thirty thousand national guard troops to the South.
* * *
The deadly stampede that hot August day fell into the middle of a roiling internal argument among the jihadist community over Zarqawi’s campaign in Iraq, particularly his emphasis on killing Shia civilians. The same energetic, ruthless, stubborn program that had catapulted Zarqawi to his position of leadership now brought him into conflict with serious jihadist thinkers and leaders.
On June 28, as I was in Gettysburg preparing for the meeting with President Bush’s national security team, Abu Mohammad al-Maqdisi, Zarqawi’s former mentor, was released from prison in Jordan. The Jordanian government likely hoped Maqdisi, out in public, might injure the magnetism of Zarqawi. Since their time together in prison, their trajectories had risen in relative parity: While the murderous Zarqawi was the most notorious practitioner of jihad, Maqdisi was its most influential ideologue.
Maqdisi’s writing had soured on Zarqawi in Iraq recently. He complained that the default use of suicide bombing, even when other means were available, had made Iraq a “crematory” for young pious Muslims. He explicitly condemned the widespread attacks on Shia civilians, writing that Zarqawi misunderstood the concept of takfir—or excommunication. Unlike their heretical imams, he said, ordinary Shia civilians, who “only know how to pray and fast and do not know the details of [the Shia] sect,” were not so different from Sunnis that they could be wiped out like another race. Now out of prison, when he appeared on Al Jazeera on July 5, Maqdisi protested that “Six months ago, every day we read in the newspapers and saw on television dozens of killed Iraqi civilians, women and children, while barely one or two of the American occupiers were killed.”
Compelled to respond, Zarqawi flung aside his old mentor, casting him as a queasy theologian with an academic view of jihad, while Zarqawi was on the front lines of a messy war against a Shia who wanted to “liquidate” the Sunnis.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second-in-command of Al Qaeda, may well have watched this back-and-forth—in which Zarqawi invoked Zawahiri’s earlier calls of support—as he composed his own letter to Zarqawi, dated a few days later on July 9.
The fifteen-page letter, which the U.S. government obtained that summer and released publicly in October, began with fulsome if perfunctory praise. But after stoking Zarqawi’s ego, Zawahiri cautiously prodded his “political angle” in Iraq, reminding Abu Musab that “the strongest weapon which the mujahideen enjoy—after the help and granting of success by God—is popular support from the Muslim masses in Iraq, and the surrounding Muslim countries.” At issue was the targeting of Shia. In hushed tones, Zawahiri assured Zarqawi the Shia would one day get their comeuppance. But at that critical moment, “many of your Muslim admirers among the common folk are wondering about your attacks on the Shia.” He urged Zarqawi to tone it down, to stop inciting so much wanton carnage, and to turn his attention to the more urgent target: “Expel the Americans from Iraq.”
Zarqawi never answered Zawahiri directly, but later that summer he weighed in on the Shia question. Al Qaeda in Iraq, he announced in a speech posted to Al Qaeda’s “Jihad Media Battalion” website on September 14, “has decided to declare a total war against the . . . Shi’ites throughout Iraq, wherever they may be.” “Beware,” he warned. “By Allah, we will not treat you with compassion, and you will have no mercy from us.” That same day, Baghdad shuddered with twelve separate bombings, including a van bomb in the Shiite neighborhood of Khadamiya that exploded near a crowd of poor Shiites waiting in line for day labor, killing 114 of them. Six hundred Iraqis were wounded in that day’s blasts.
Zarqawi’s ability to deflect these attempts to rein him in reflected his growth as both a commander and an ideologue. Zarqawi’s campaign, as Maqdisi portrayed it, looked less like one designed to restore the caliphate and more like nihilistic revenge on a wide scale. But to many entering Iraq, that mattered little: Unlike the generation before, these less ideological, more violent volunteers were less concerned with the creation of an Islamic society than with drawing blood in the name of Islam.
While Zarqawi largely deflected this outside criticism, he soon made a critical mistake. On the evening of Wednesday, November 9, 2005, coordinated explosions rocked three hotels in Amman, Jordan. The deadliest attack came inside the Radisson, which Zarqawi had tried to blow up six years earlier during millennium celebrations. That night an Iraqi from Anbar, who had driven across the border four days earlier with three other members of AQI, made his way into a wedding reception in the Philadelphia Ballroom, mingling quietly with the partygoers. Shortly after 8:50 P.M., he detonated a belt he wore under his clothes, the RDX explosives sending a hail of ball bearings through unsuspecting guests. More would have died, but the attacker’s wife, also wearing a suicide vest, was unable to set hers off and ran out of the room moments earlier. Two other suicide bombers exploded themselves elsewhere in Amman nearly simultaneously, one inside the lobby of the Grand Hyatt and another just outside the Days Inn. In total, more than 60 people died from the blasts, and 115 were wounded. At the Radisson, bodies were wheeled frantically out of the fume-filled lobby on hotel luggage carts.
The Jordanians quickly suspected Zarqawi, and indeed Al Qaeda in Iraq claimed responsibility for the attack the next day. It was worrying proof of his ability, gestating over years, to strike outside Iraq and to establish his part of Al Qaeda as a regional power. In April 2004, Zarqawi had aspired to use chemical agents against Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate headquarters, the office of the prime minister, and the U.S. embassy in Amman. The Jordanians estimated that such attacks could have resulted in horrific civilian casualties in and around those buildings. A mix of talent, ruthlessness, growing mystique, and unprincipled ambition enabled him to
lead both a national insurgency inside Iraq and a transnational terrorist network, leveraging his connections throughout Jordan, Iraq, and Syria. His long-harbored ambitions to compete with the top echelons of Al Qaeda were not delusional.
I was disgusted when I heard the news of the November 9 attacks. But they had perverse value for our mission. They unequivocally demonstrated Zarqawi’s growing ability to prosecute targets outside Iraq, but it was obvious to me that he had overreached. A few Jordanians blamed the United States and Israel, but most reacted defiantly against Zarqawi. On Friday, thousands of Jordanians protested in the street, and Zarqawi’s hometown mosque forbade Salafists from praying there. He had miscalculated.
Al Qaeda in Iraq responded with a flurry of statements, until finally Zarqawi himself released an audiotape on November 18 explaining the attack. The man who had in the months before defiantly defended his targeting of Muslims in public spats with top Al Qaeda leaders and thinkers now struck a very different tone, defensive and almost apologetic. “The report [which claimed] that the brother who carried out the martyrdom operation exploded himself among the celebrants at a wedding feast is nothing but a lie,” he claimed, saying they died when explosions aimed at other targets brought the ceiling down in the banquet room. “[I]t was an unintended accident.”
* * *
On December 15, 2005, Iraq held a third round of elections—to vote in the first permanent parliament—but they neither stabilized nor unified Iraq. Against the rising din of Sunni-Shia violence, the votes perpetuated the sectarian slide of the country. But amid so many deaths, we soon got word of a curious resurrection.
On January 6, 2006, one of our liaison officers reported that Iraqi forces had captured a man they believed was Abu Zar. If true, he was not dead after all, and given his importance, we were anxious to interrogate him ourselves. Working through Department of Defense procedures, we arranged for him to be transferred from Iraqi custody to our control. Soon, Abu Zar was flown to Balad and escorted the short distance from the flight line to the task force screening facility, which was now a truly professional operation. It had taken eighteen months of relentless focus, leadership, and attention at all levels of our task force to make it so.
Sixteen years earlier, while I was studying at the Naval War College in Rhode Island, one of my instructors had related a conversation he’d had with an Israeli officer. When asked what to do first when faced with an insurgent or terrorist threat, the Israeli officer said firmly, “Build a big jail. You’re going to need it.” The Israeli’s wry answer came from experience.
As the Israeli had implied and Abu Zar would soon reconfirm, detainee intelligence was vital. HUMINT, or human intelligence, along with several other collection disciplines like SIGINT (signals intelligence) and IMINT (imagery intelligence), formed the spectrum of ways we could gather information and understanding of a situation, a population, or most often the enemy. HUMINT involves on-the-ground human sources, from patrols that speak to local villagers to spies. One of the most important of these has always been prisoners, or detainees. Detainees can explain the meaning of what we see from other intelligence sources and can let us step into the mechanics, mindset, and weaknesses of the enemy organization. Detainees, whether they talk out of fear, because they think it’s pointless not to, or because their egos can be manipulated and played, can reveal not just what the enemy thinks but how he thinks and why he fights.
Detainee operations were as difficult and sensitive as they were vital. The resources required and the complexities and risks associated with them caused most organizations to avoid such duty. Some who called loudest for better intelligence on Al Qaeda were happy to have someone else to “bell the cat.”
So it was a thankless but necessary task that selected agencies and military units took on in the aftermath of 9/11. And they were unprepared for it. Beyond the legal and diplomatic complexities, the United States had not institutionalized the policies or devoted the resources required to professionalize detention operations. Trained interrogators were woefully few. Essential language skills in Arabic, Dari, and Pashto were almost nonexistent, and other relevant expertise and experience were largely unavailable to the forces that needed them. Well-intentioned but unqualified people struggled to perform a dauntingly complex task, with predictable results. When I took TF 714 in the fall of 2003, more than two years into the fight, little had changed.
I was one of the leaders who lacked experience in detainee custody and exploitation. I had studied history and understood the theory but had never done anything remotely like running a prison. My peers and subordinates were similarly positioned. I was clear on the legal and moral imperatives, but they were just a foundation on which to build enough expertise to command TF 714’s detainee operations. We dealt with the limited but complex population of Al Qaeda–related detainees that had the highest likelihood of providing critical intelligence. From the beginning, the importance and sensitivity of the mission was clear.
It began the day I assumed command of TF 714. Lyle Koenig, the air force brigadier general then commanding our task force in Iraq, called me from Baghdad to welcome me to the command. After pleasantries, he stated flatly, “Sir, we need to close the screening facility we’re operating at our base at BIAP. We don’t have the expertise or experience to do this correctly.”
I asked him for options, but we agreed that in the near term, none were evident. We concluded that I would visit the facility on my forthcoming trip to the theater and determine a way ahead.
When I visited the building we used at the Baghdad Airport to screen new captures about a week later, I was unimpressed with both the facility and our ability to staff it. It was housed in a one-story building that the task force had modified internally to contain holding cells, several interrogation booths, and a common work area for analysts and interrogators. The holding cells were constructed of wood and were clean and functional. But the overall facility was cramped and had old linoleum floors and white ceramic tiles crumbling off the walls. On the positive side, it was a short distance from the Joint Operations Center, making it easy for key staff and the commander to provide frequent personal oversight, which I knew was crucial.
Most dangerous, the facility was not manned with the right expertise. That day I met two or three interrogators and a couple of interpreters. They seemed dedicated to getting it right but lacked the requisite experience or manpower. As important as detainee handling and interrogation were to any effort like ours, we were not yet up to the task. We were not obtaining the necessary intelligence, and we had not yet implemented the right facilities and controls to handle detainees properly.
“This is our Achilles’ heel,” I told the task force staff. “If we don’t do this right, we’ll be taken off the battlefield.” I knew that mistreating detainees would discredit us.
Changes began almost immediately, competing for attention and resources with daily operations and a range of other initiatives vital to our effort. In December we held Saddam Hussein in our small screening facility at BIAP in the first weeks after his capture, but at that time we were still only partway through the necessary process of developing a truly professional capability.
The importance was reinforced when, on April 28, 2004, three weeks after we’d focused our commanders’ conference in Bagram on the complexities and sensitivity of counterinsurgency operations, particularly detainees, CBS News broadcast images taken by Americans working at Abu Ghraib prison, in the city of the same name west of Baghdad. Pictures from the guards’ digital cameras clearly showed American soldiers abusing Iraqis. On a personal level I was sickened by the images of arrogant superiority. In a nation we sought to liberate from an oppressive dictator, we seemed to mirror all we opposed.
The pictures sent shock waves through units deployed in both Iraq and Afghanistan. My force was disgusted by the soldiers’ stunning and immature depravity, and we immediately felt effects of th
e misconduct, even though we had no connection with Abu Ghraib. The more important effect was Abu Ghraib’s impact on America’s perception in the world.
Abu Ghraib represented a devastating setback for America’s effort in Iraq. Simultaneously undermining U.S. domestic confidence in the way in which America was operating, and creating or reinforcing negative perceptions worldwide of American values, it fueled violence that would soon worsen dramatically.
I knew that our task force was vulnerable to misperceptions. Some reported that our screening operations constituted “black” prisons in which commanders ordered the mistreatment of detainees. That wasn’t the case before I assumed command and wasn’t true under my command nor under my successors. But creating the right facilities and building our expertise took time and meant addressing buildings, standards, leadership, and most important, the mindset of the force. Abu Ghraib demonstrated what can happen when even a well-intentioned army attempts to conduct sensitive operations, like the handling of detainees, without the preparation and resources required to do it correctly.
By the summer of 2004, the new screening facility was clearly the most important building constructed during our critical move to Balad. It was clean and sterile, with cells, offices, and interrogation booths inside a building with aluminum paneling, glossed cement floors, and high ceilings. Only a few months after its initial construction, we doubled it in size while maintaining the same capacity. At its highest levels, the facility contained only a small number of captures.
We made the facility as internally transparent as possible. Interrogations were monitored, and inspections conducted regularly. We hosted partner representatives from the FBI, conventional military units, and other agencies, and distributed interrogation reports to their headquarters. We established ways for partners from the United States or other countries to watch selected interrogations. This allowed experts on particular topics, or even on certain personalities, to judge detainee responses. This transparency meant that screening a capture, like Abu Zar, in our facility leveraged expertise and intelligence from across the spectrum of groups doing counterterrorism.
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