The white pickup drove northwest out of Baqubah five kilometers to a small town identified as Hibhib, where it got off the main road. It passed through the sparse streets and continued onto a single-lane dirt frontage road, running alongside a narrow concrete irrigation canal half full of turquoise water. Dense groves of palm trees, with thick shrubs and undergrowth, extended back a few hundred meters from the track on the passenger’s side. In the early-evening light, the groves were dark and shadowy. The truck approached a boxy two-story house tucked among the trees, sitting half a dozen car lengths back from the road at the end of a driveway. It had a carport under the front edge of the second floor. Only the beige facade of the house was fully visible, as the rear part of the building disappeared into the shadows and palm trunks that surrounded it.
At 4:55 P.M., the truck turned right off the frontage road and stopped halfway up the driveway, in front of a closed gate. While Abd al-Rahman stayed in the passenger seat, the driver got out and went to the driveway gate. A figure emerged from under the carport roof and walked down the driveway to meet him. After a short exchange, the second man went back to the house and then came back and opened the gate. Back in his white pickup, the driver pulled through the open gate and parked in the carport. Our team saw Abd al-Rahman get out and enter the house. The white truck reversed out of the driveway and went back the way it had come. As they watched this down in Baghdad, Tom D. turned to J.C. “What do you think, J.?”
“I have no reason to tell you not to hit it,” J.C. answered.
“I’m not going to promise you that’s Zarqawi,” J.C. said, pointing to the screen. “But whoever we kill is going to be much higher than anybody we’ve ever killed before. So I’m saying, absolutely—whack it.” Inside, he felt, would be al-Masri, Zarqawi—or both.
Tom D. told his operators at Baghdad to go. Steve came into our SAR up in Balad. “We’re launching Tom D.’s boys.” Down at Baghdad, the troop of Green operators suited up and waited for the helicopters to land in the front yard of their villa safe house.
Steve came in a few minutes later. “Sir, you’ve got to see this.”
We brought up the video feed on the screens in front of our U-shaped desk. Mike Flynn and Kurt Fuller were next to me. The video replayed Abd al-Rahman’s arrival and the white truck’s departure. Then he played a scene that had just occurred. On the video, a figure emerged from the shadow of the veranda and walked down the driveway. As he got into the sunlight, we could see more clearly. He looked heavy and was dressed head to toe in black. He walked past the gate and continued to the end of the driveway, where it met the frontage road going back to Hibhib. He stood, looked left up the road, looked right, and walked back to the house.
“That’s AMZ,” I said, turning to Steve standing by the doorway.
“Yes, sir. We’re going to bomb it,” he said.
Steve remembers my reaction being one of irritation—I’d hoped to get Zarqawi alive. I remember calmly telling him to do what he had to do. Having worked so closely with Steve, I’m confident his recollection is more accurate. We’d always planned to capture Zarqawi for his obvious intelligence value, but not at the risk of his escape. To give up that possibility was a difficult decision that had to be made quickly in response to the situation as it was developing, and Steve had the experience and authority to make the call. I’d made a point of, and we’d been very successful, trusting subordinates to use their best judgment. This time should be no different. I did not interfere.
There was good reason to strike. As Tom D. and his operators recognized, a ground raid would be difficult, with a high probability of failure. The house did not appear to be a formidable defensive position, but as we’d learned in the Western Euphrates River valley fight, appearances could be deceiving. More important, palm trees surrounded the house, and the closest bald patch of ground to land our assault helicopters was a quarter mile away. To do a direct assault, because the trees were so tall, the assault force would have had to fast-rope ninety or a hundred feet down, a towering, dangerous distance—and one that would require the helos to float, in daylight, over the house. Doing a fast-rope would be asking to get a helicopter shot down. Most troubling, anyone inside the house could easily slip out the back, disappearing into the thick vegetation and groves. We likely wouldn’t even see it happening.
Mike Flynn, Kurt Fuller, and I came out from our office into the TF 16 JOC. We took our spots on the bench at the back of the JOC room. As I had on hundreds of nights in the past two and a half years, I sat quietly and watched.
The JOC in front of us was in pained, tense anticipation. In order to secure the site and arrest anyone who escaped the blast, we wanted Tom D.’s operators to land just after the explosion. So Steve was waiting on them to be airborne and nearby before having the F-16 engage. Unbeknownst to many of us in Balad, as the troop down in Baghdad was first kitted up and loaded into the two helos taking off from in front of their villa, one of the engines wouldn’t start. Tom D. and his team were stunned. This was unheard of for 160th helicopters. They sent for another helicopter, but it would be thirty tense minutes before it arrived from Balad.
As they watched the house on the screens, many in the JOC played over in their minds the worst-case scenario: They imagined seeing Abd al-Rahman and the Man in Black, spooked by the sounds in the busy sky overhead, dart from the house, disappearing into the foliage. They scoured the edges of the house, looking for movement under the carport or around the house’s stucco walls. For now, it was quiet. The only movements on the screen were made by the tall palm trees, their top fronds rustling slightly, casting dark shadows across the house.
As we imagined what was happening inside the boxy, two-story house, we knew that if Zarqawi was there, he was not alone. His family—including perhaps both of his wives and their children—often stayed with him and would be killed in the strike.
Steve decided they couldn’t wait for the Baghdad troop to be nearby. He called down to Tom D. at Baghdad. Through the receiver pressed to Tom D.’s ear, J.C. could hear Steve’s go-ahead.
“Blow that motherfucker up.”
Tom D. set it in motion. “Get the first helo airborne; the other one will catch up,” he ordered. He turned to his joint tactical air controller (JTAC). “Go ahead and execute. Drop the bomb.” The JTAC relayed the order to two already airborne F-16s on a normal combat patrol flown to provide near-immediate response to emerging requirements, like bombing a target. But the answer came back that only one of the two F-16s was available. The second was on the tanker, refueling midflight, and would be delayed fifteen minutes.
It was now after 6:00 P.M., and Tom D. shook his head. Weeks of patient, persistent focus had gotten them here, and the final operation now seemed to be running off the rails. “We don’t have fifteen minutes.” He told them to send the one that was free. The lone F-16 canted and roared through the clouds toward Baqubah.
“You are cleared to engage,” the JTAC relayed, and the JOC waited. The jets were in a three-minute hold.
A minute passed. Two minutes out.
One minute.
The jet was within miles, and the residents of Hibhib would soon hear its engines crackle through the sky overhead.
At 6:11 P.M., it came in on a dive, rushed over the house, and peeled up. Tom D. and the JOC watched the screen. There was no explosion. The house was still there. The F-16 had screamed low over the house’s roof but left it unscathed. They called the F-16. The JTAC’s earlier bomb command had been improperly worded, they were told, so the F-16 hadn’t released its munitions. Tom D. couldn’t believe it. They looked to the screen, waiting to see Abd al-Rahman and the Man in Black flee into the palms.
They prepped the F-16 with the right command, and it circled back around.
At 6:12 P.M., a laser-guided, five-hundred-pound GBU-12 bomb traveling nine hundred feet per second hit the house. The explosion fl
ashed, turning our screens in the JOC white for a split second, as smoke and dust burst up and out laterally in three columns, like the prongs of a toy jack. The F-16 circled again, and a minute and thirty-six seconds later, using GPS coordinates, a GBU-38 hit the same spot.
Thick billows of smoke streamed diagonally up from the house and frontage road, thinning over the tops of the palm grove.
“Tom D.’s boys are eighteen minutes out,” said someone.
* * *
At 6:40 P.M., the skis of the Little Birds skidded into the dirt of a clearing four hundred meters from the house’s driveway. Before the helicopters rocked forward and settled, the teams had bounded off. Leading them was Major Jason,* a physics-Ph.D.-turned-soldier who had been a Ranger first lieutenant for me years earlier. As the operators burst through the brown curtain of dust kicked up by the rotors, they moved quickly up the frontage road. Up ahead, parked in the driveway leading from the road to the crater, the operators saw an Iraqi ambulance. As they neared, they saw a group of Iraqis in police uniforms. A few of them were at the back of the ambulance, struggling to lift a stretcher into the trunk.
The Iraqi policemen turned to see our teams approaching in fast, coordinated movements, as if on rails. Very quickly the Americans had fanned out and claimed the geometry of the scene. With rifles poised, they yelled at the Iraqis. Step away from the vehicle! An Iraqi police lieutenant, standing separate from his men, eyed our operators. He put his palm on the pistol at his hip. Put your arms up! Our Green team moved closer with steady shuffle steps. The Iraqi lieutenant paused, then slowly lifted his hands to match the men around him, already holding their arms up around their ears. The operators swarmed in and took their weapons.
They quickly went around to the back of the ambulance and saw a gurney halfway out of the ambulance’s swing doors. On top was a heavyset man in black clothes. They pulled the stretcher out and set it down into the dirt.
“Do you know who this is?” an operator asked one of the policemen.
“We do not know the Jordanian,” the Iraqi said. That was unlikely. He was the only person at the scene they were evacuating.
Our medic leaned over the Man in Black, who was alive, but barely. Under the medic’s forefingers, Zarqawi’s carotid artery was deflated. His breathing was shallow, and blood seeped out of his nose and ears. The pressure caused by the blast waves had cascaded through the concrete walls of the house and pulsed through his chest cavity, bursting vessels and air sacs in his lungs. Behind the kneeling medic, members from the rest of the troop methodically searched the crater for evidence. Five other bodies were in the rubble, including Abd al-Rahman, another man, two women, and a young girl.
The medic continued to work on Zarqawi. When he cleared his airway, Zarqawi gurgled blood. The damage was fatal. Twenty-four minutes after the Green team had descended, under an orange evening sun and the long shadows of palm trees extending across the crater, beneath the clenched faces of the operators standing over him, Zarqawi’s lungs failed. At 7:04 P.M., our medic called it. Zarqawi was dead.
* * *
Not long after, the ground team arrived at Balad, along with the bodies of Abd al-Rahman and Zarqawi, so we could definitely confirm their identities. I did not meet the operators on the tarmac when they touched down outside our hangar. I told Steve to let me know when he had a free moment, and we would go over together to the screening facility, where they would place the bodies. He nodded. Around us, the JOC was still electric. On-screen, we were still tracking the three vehicles that had shuttled Abd al-Rahman to the house. Ground teams were launching shortly, in Little Birds and Black Hawks, to interdict the vehicles. They would soon appear on-screen, swooping in behind the cars and cutting them off.
“We need to pull the trigger on the other targets,” Steve said. By plan, making a movement on Abd al-Rahman was the trigger to take down the fourteen other sites in Baghdad, Arcadia 1 through 14, that had become targets based on Abd al-Rahman’s suspicious activity. In addition, teams would interdict the vehicles that had ferried Abd al-Rahman to the safehouse. TF 16 was activating its strike teams from around the country so we could hit the targets within twenty-four hours, before Zarqawi’s network heard about the strike and scattered. The machine was about to hit a fever pitch, and the JOC buckled down.
I returned to the SAR and continued to work until Steve came by and we walked over together with Mike Flynn. The low sun darkened the compound’s dun walls and pathways and turned the dust-choked horizon and stray clouds orange.
At the screening facility, they had placed the bodies of Abd al-Rahman and Zarqawi in one of the exploitation rooms. Two guards outside the door let Steve and me in. Inside, Zarqawi and Abd al-Rahman had been laid on separate tarps spread on the cement floor. The room was empty except for two other operators. I walked over to the edge of the tarp and looked down. Killed by overpressure, Zarqawi’s skin was unbroken. Even in death he looked stunningly like the figure we had seen weeks earlier in a propaganda video—soft and ashen.
It had been two and a half years since that first night in Fallujah, when we thought he leaped out the window. It seemed a long time ago. Since then, the war had twice ripped through that city. Zarqawi had gone from an important but stock jihadist operative slipping through our fingers to the most feared, active, deadly, and controversial Al Qaeda leader. We were only a few meters from my command center, and even closer to the small wooden hut where my command sergeant major and I had lived for most of the past two years—working toward this moment.
I looked at one of the operators, Luke,* kneeling on the other side of the body. I watched him as he quietly examined equipment captured in the operation. His chiseled face was drawn tight in focus as he sifted the material, his fingers smudging the film of dust on the phones and computers. His curly hair was still damp and matted with sweat—he had been a member of the assault force that had gone out to Hibhib and brought back the body. I had first served with him a decade earlier, when he was a staff sergeant squad leader in the Rangers. He was now about thirty-eight and a sergeant major in Green with almost five years of combat experience since 9/11. In a few hours, he would go back out into the night for another raid.
As our eyes met and we exchanged nods of recognition, respect, and friendship, I thought about what he saw when he looked at me. I’d been a forty-year-old Ranger battalion commander when we’d first met at Fort Lewis. I had technically still been a one-star general when I had joined him and his comrades in this fight in October 2003. Now, two months short of my fifty-second birthday, I wore the three stars of a lieutenant general and commanded a deployed force that had grown from a few hundred to many thousands on multiple continents, backed up by an even bigger structure in the United States. What had been impressive but rudimentary was now a relentless counterterrorist machine. In a honeycomb of rooms adjacent to the room in which I stood, teams of analysts pored through material recovered from the house in which Zarqawi was killed. In the hangar next door, screens were showing the first of the raids going out against the Arcadia targets. Similar processes were under way in ten different nodes worldwide.
I looked back at the body. Seeing him as a man, I couldn’t exult in his death. Nor did I wring my hands. I took satisfaction, standing there, knowing that this work, our work, was necessary. Tonight, it had moved us closer to being finished.
“What do you think, Luke?” I asked the operator.
“Oh, that’s him, sir,” he said.
I nodded.
With Steve, I returned to my office to phone George Casey. I had called him prior to the strike, and he now knew we were waiting on the FBI to run the fingerprints back in the States. Until it did, we could not definitively say it was Zarqawi. But we’d shared this fight together for two years and I told him what I thought.
“Sir, I’ve seen the body, and I think it’s him.”
“How sure are you?” he asked.
“I’m sure, sir,” I said, my voice cracking from fatigue or emotion.
Elsewhere in the screening facility, Amy, Paul, and Jack gathered outside Mubassir’s room. They had agreed they would do this part together. They entered, closed the door, and told Mubassir about the strike. The information he had provided, they said, was correct. Zarqawi had been killed. What about Abd al-Rahman, his friend? Mubassir asked. They told Mubassir and stayed with him in the room as he sobbed.
In the early morning, as we waited for the FBI to call, I sat down with Mike and Kurt and Jody at our horseshoe desk in the SAR. The farewell ceremony for Bill McRaven had been planned for that evening at Fort Bragg. After three years as one of its assistant commanding generals, Bill was preparing to move on to become the commander of all special operations forces in Europe. But tonight he was at Fort Bragg, where they were holding a dinner for him. As we often did for ceremonies we couldn’t attend, we cued up our VTC cameras so we could participate from afar. A projector screen at the front of the auditorium at Bragg showed us from the front, sitting at our horseshoe desk. From our side, we could see a wide angle of the room, with rows of tables and people. After scanning the figures, I saw Annie, sitting toward the front. In the public venue, I didn’t try to speak to her, but I caught myself staring.
No one in the audience knew about the strike. Annie watched on the screen as every few minutes someone walked behind our chairs, leaned down, and whispered in my ear. Each time they said, still nothing back from the FBI. We grinned as teams at various outposts, connected by VTC, performed skits, and friends and colleagues in the auditorium at Bragg gave toasts as part of Bill’s farewell. A few minutes after 3:30 A.M., a member of the task force staff walked briskly over and leaned in.
“FBI’s come back, sir,” he told me, “It’s a match. PID.” This was the abbreviation for positive identification.
As the audience watched one of the skits, Annie saw me get up and walk out of the frame. I went a few paces to my office and called George Casey again. The FBI had confirmed it, I told him. The man lying in our screening facility was Zarqawi.
My Share of the Task Page 35