Black Flags

by Joby Warrick

  “I was likely standing less than a block from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” McChrystal acknowledged afterward.

  It had been just another in an endless string of raids that winter, targeting an insurgency that even the most optimistic in Washington could no longer deny. The Pentagon had established teams of special-forces operators with responsibility for rooting out cells of the local and foreign fighters behind Iraq’s worsening violence. The man now in charge of the mission was widely regarded as a soldier’s soldier, the kind who occasionally went along on dangerous midnight raids in hostile territory. Now forty-nine, McChrystal had himself been one of the army’s elite soldiers, a member of the storied Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment, known for its “further, faster, harder” credo and a history of achievement stretching from Normandy’s beaches to the Battle of Mogadishu, depicted in the book and film Black Hawk Down. A distance runner known for his legendary self-discipline—he regularly ran seven to eight miles a day, ate a single meal, and slept no more than four hours a night—McChrystal had landed the job as chief of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, barely four months earlier. Now he was channeling his prodigious energy into the search for the terrorist gaining renown among Iraqi Sunnis as the fiercest foe of the American occupation.

  On this night, the plan called for a perilous house-to-house search in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in all of Iraq. In just over a month, Fallujah would become forever associated with the deaths of four American security contractors who were ambushed and then dismembered, dragged through the streets and burned, with their bodies left dangling from a Euphrates River bridge. But for now the night’s destination was just another GPS coordinate on McChrystal’s battle map, a location that had been flagged by military intelligence and needed to be checked and crossed off the list. The general strapped on his pistol and climbed into a Humvee with the others in the team, intending not to fight but to observe.

  This was to be no stealth raid. Rather than swooping into the village by helicopter, McChrystal and his team made the journey from Baghdad in a convoy of Humvees and armored trucks, lumbering noisily along on unlit streets and then to the Highway 1 expressway that heads west toward Jordan and Syria. They rode for an hour on nearly empty freeway, pulling off at the point where the desert gives way to the flat roofs and scrawny palms of Fallujah’s outer suburbs. Finding the first target house in the dark, the Delta Force soldiers tossed flash-bang grenades through the door and blitzed from room to room with wordless precision.

  McChrystal stepped through the doorway of one house as a weapon search was under way. The lights were on here, so the commander flipped up his night-vision goggles and watched as his soldiers interrogated a group of Iraqi men who had been rousted from sleep. In the next room were the women and children, most of them sitting up on futons swaddled in blankets to ward off the cold. The children looked up at the lanky American with obvious curiosity. But in the eyes of the women he saw something else—an intensity of emotion that would stick with him for years.

  “It was pure, unadulterated hatred,” McChrystal said.

  This was the first time McChrystal had lingered inside an occupied house as his men worked through it. There would be many such encounters to come, and they left an indelible impression. Once, during a raid in Ramadi, the GIs rounded up several men from a suspected safe house and forced them to lie facedown on the concrete with their hands behind their heads. From inside the house appeared a small boy of about four years. Seeing his father lying on the ground, the boy walked between the rows of prostrate men and, without a word, lay down next to his father, placing his tiny hands behind his head.

  “We’re still thinking of ourselves as liberators,” McChrystal said afterward. “But you’ve got these big guys—huge, in their body armor—carrying weapons, turning over mattresses. We weren’t trashing furniture. We weren’t tossing the place. But you can imagine someone coming into your house, with your wife and kids there, and going through your drawers. I remember thinking, ‘What if this was my house?’ It’s a memory you would keep with you forever.” The searchers finished their work, and the crashing and shouting moved farther down the block.

  As the commando teams progressed to the next house, a solidly built figure in dark clothes slid open a second-floor window and dropped into the dark alley below. Picking himself up, he felt his way to a back street and vanished, perhaps heading north over the railroad tracks, or hiding in the shadows to wait the Americans out. Only later, after finding his cast-off belongings, did the Americans learn how close they had come to capturing Zarqawi.

  It was an opportunity missed, one that might have altered the history of the war. It would be more than a year before American troops would again come this close.

  Zarqawi’s escape was disappointing to the new special-forces commander, even though he and other American generals had not yet imagined how destructive the Jordanian would become. Later, in his memoir, McChrystal recalled his first Fallujah mission as a relatively tranquil time, “before Iraq became truly hellish as it turned into a civil war.”

  “The bloody consequences of our failure were not immediately apparent,” he wrote. “On that night, Zarqawi was not yet Iraq’s bane.”

  Yet McChrystal could see the contours of battles to come. In the eyes of an Iraqi family, he had glimpsed the raw emotion that Zarqawi—or someone like him—could exploit in raising money and volunteers. The raids on civilian houses, though necessary, were only deepening the rage that many Iraqis felt after months of blackouts, sewage overflows, and chronic job shortages, all of it “producing fury, most understandably directed at us,” he wrote.

  “With calculated barbarism, Zarqawi was already at work exploiting our failures, making us look powerless or sinister, or both,” McChrystal said. “His disappearance into the dark that night was troubling, but I was consumed with this Iraqi family. Watching them watch us, I realized this fight was going to be long and tough.”

  —

  But to begin such a fight, McChrystal had to build a force equal to the task of rooting out an insurgent network hidden across a province the size of New York State. Not since Vietnam had an American army faced a challenge like this one, and the army and marine units spread across Iraq in early 2004 were nowhere near prepared.

  McChrystal was himself learning the job on the fly. In his rapid ascent through the ranks, he had gained a reputation as something of a troubleshooter, an innovative thinker who excelled at spotting dysfunction within an organization and was never shy about shaking things up.

  Born into an army family—his father was a major general, and all five of his siblings either served or married into the military—McChrystal had been a brilliant underachiever as a youth, earning admission to West Point but also racking up a hundred demerits for drinking and insubordination. His decision to enter Special Forces School had seemed at best a detour for an officer looking to climb the promotional ladder. But McChrystal repeatedly impressed his superiors with his extraordinary drive and his penchant for challenging the status quo. His self-discipline—and an insistence on high standards for those under his command—earned him a nickname that would stick: the Pope.

  McChrystal was promoted to brigadier general a few months before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and he briefly helped direct the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan before being tapped as vice director of operations for the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. When the Iraq war began, he was chosen to do the daily televised briefings from the Pentagon for the news media. He stood at the podium on April 14, 2003, when the Pentagon formally announced the Iraqi government’s capitulation. “I would anticipate that the major combat engagements are over,” he said.

  Just six months later, he was in Iraq, commanding a hybrid force of elite commandos and intelligence officers in a military campaign that was only getting started. Indeed, as McChrystal and his team made their first visits to key command posts over the late fall and winter, the entire countr
y appeared to be slipping into disarray. Even in Mosul, the ethnically divided northern city once championed as a model for effective U.S.-led reconstruction, the army’s grasp of security was weakening. The city had been seized and occupied by 101st Airborne Division troops under the command of then Major General David Petraeus, who moved quickly to reopen government facilities and schools, rebuild the local security force, and repair infrastructure. But soon after Petraeus turned over the city to a smaller American garrison in January 2004, insurgents moved in. Gunmen even shot down one of the helicopters in McChrystal’s entourage during one of his visits to the region.

  So much had gone wrong, so quickly. Yet, as he settled into his first headquarters at the Baghdad International Airport, McChrystal was startled by the near absence of any organized strategy for the kind of war the Americans suddenly found themselves fighting. Even the special-forces unit created to battle the insurgency—most commonly dubbed “Task Force 6-26” but assigned other names as the war continued—lacked basic procedures for handling intelligence collected from the battlefield or gleaned from informants.

  Some of the lapses were jaw-dropping. One day, as McChrystal was visiting a holding facility for new detainees, he passed by a small office that had become the drop-off point for evidence collected during raids. In the room was a waist-high pile of documents, notebooks, computers, cell phones, and other detritus, much of it shoved into trash bags or empty sandbags and never examined.

  “What is that?” McChrystal asked an aide.

  “That stuff was sent down here with detainees,” came the reply.

  “Well, that’s raw intelligence,” the general said. “What are we doing with it?”

  “When the interpreters have free time, we have them come in here and look through it,” the aide said.

  McChrystal was furious.

  “It was unbelievable,” he said, recalling his reaction. “Of course, the interpreters didn’t have free time. And they wouldn’t know what they were looking for. So this stuff was just sitting there, literally like ripe fruit rotting.”

  A few months into the job, McChrystal decided to gather his JSOC commanders from Iraq and Afghanistan for a two-day conference to talk about the unfolding insurgencies in both countries. He issued reading assignments—including Modern Warfare, the 1961 French classic treatise on counterinsurgency—and arranged for a screening of The Battle of Algiers, a fictionalized but historically accurate 1966 portrayal of the French army’s bloody efforts to subdue Algeria’s National Liberation Front insurgency in the 1950s. After the film ended, he prompted a debate about two troubling themes. The first was the use of torture, and how it ultimately undermined France’s position, tactically and morally. The other was what McChrystal described as the French army’s cluelessness about Algerian culture, including why the insurgency’s message held such potency for so many of the country’s ordinary citizens. The similarities to the current conflict were strikingly obvious, but McChrystal gestured toward a wall to drive home the point.

  “We fundamentally do not understand,” he said, “what is going on outside the wire.”

  Equally striking to McChrystal was the fact that Zarqawi, a foreigner, had managed to build such an impressive network after less than a year in the country. Clearly, the Jordanian was getting help from Iraqis. But he also was displaying undeniable skill as an organizer and a strategist.

  Zarqawi’s own intelligence-collection ability was remarkably effective, judging from his ability to strike many miles from his presumed base. His personal security showed surprising sophistication, including a knack for flying just below the Americans’ electronic surveillance nets. Operationally, he was audacious yet careful, picking relatively easy targets and powerful but simple bomb designs. Most impressive of all was his ability to think strategically: Zarqawi was not merely seeking to wage war. He was changing the battlefield itself, using terrorism as a brutal forge for creating new enemies and allies as it suited his purposes. Just now, it suited Zarqawi to stir hatred between Iraq’s Sunnis and Shiites.

  This sectarian resentment was woven into the country’s fabric, a legacy of massacres and pogroms that dated back to Islam’s founding generation. And yet, particularly in the later decades of the twentieth century, Iraqis had come to share a common national identity and a uniquely Iraqi sense of patriotism, one that had been made stronger by an eight-year war against Iran’s Shiite-led theocracy. Before Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, Sunnis and Shiites mingled easily in Iraqi schools and universities and often lived side by side in mixed neighborhoods. Now, thanks in large measure to Zarqawi, the country was segregating itself into armed enclaves. Soon the nights belonged to Shiite and Sunni gangs who carried out reprisal killings and dumped mutilated bodies in alleyways and irrigation canals.

  “Zarqawi aimed to get Iraqis to see each other as he saw them,” McChrystal wrote. “And to him they were not countrymen or colleagues or neighbors or in-laws or classmates. They were either fellow believers or an enemy to be feared and, in that fear, extinguished.”

  While Zarqawi hoped to create problems for Iraq’s interim leadership and American occupiers, the sectarian violence he instigated quickly developed its own momentum. Shiite self-defense militias, some of them just as vicious as Zarqawi’s thugs, seized control of entire neighborhoods and waged running duels with U.S. troops as well as rival Sunnis. Some, like the Badr Brigade, turned to Iran’s security service, the Revolutionary Guard, for weapons, training, and money. In short order, Tehran, seeing an opportunity to bedevil America—a bitter foe since the 1979 revolution that brought the Shiite Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power, and had even armed Saddam in his war with Iran—was running its own proxy armies inside Iraq. Soon the country’s highways were seeded with sophisticated, Iranian-designed IEDs, specially engineered to penetrate the shells of American Humvees.

  Zarqawi had essentially created a three-sided war, with U.S. forces drawing fire from the other two sides at once. His embrace of “revolting” violence, so passionately described in his letter to Bin Laden, had been distilled into a book, titled The Management of Savagery. The volume, which began circulating on jihadist Web sites in early 2004, urged unflinching cruelty in order to achieve the Islamists’ ultimate objectives.

  “If we are not violent in our jihad and if softness seizes us, that will be a major factor in the loss of the element of strength,” writes the book’s author, an al-Qaeda theorist who called himself Abu Bakr Naji. “Dragging the masses into the battle requires more actions which will inflame opposition and which will make people enter into the battle, willing or unwilling.

  “We must make this battle very violent,” he said, “such that death is a heartbeat away.”

  —

  Less than two weeks after his letter to Bin Laden, Zarqawi’s bomb makers prepared to deliver another such blow, an attack on Shiite civilians far bloodier than any since the start of the war.

  On March 2, 2004, millions of Shiites around the world would commemorate the martyrdom of one of the religion’s great icons, Husayn Ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, on the holy day known as the Day of Ashura. For Iraqi Shiites, the date was especially meaningful as the first observance of the holiday since the toppling of Saddam Hussein and his government’s policy of strict controls on religious pilgrimages.

  By midmorning, huge crowds—unofficial estimates topped a million people, including tens of thousands of visiting Iranians—swarmed Shiite religious shrines in Baghdad and in Karbala, the city in central Iraq where Husayn Ibn Ali was said to have been killed. Among the pilgrims in both cities were several young men who quietly worked their way through the throng, wearing heavy vests concealed under their coats. At 10:00 a.m., near-simultaneous explosions ripped through the crowds, hurling shrapnel and body parts. As the panicked crowds began to flee, mortar shells fired from several blocks away fell into the courtyard, killing dozens more. Investigators later confirmed a dozen explosions and nearly seven hundred casualties, includin
g nearly 180 dead.

  This time, U.S. officials quickly pointed to Zarqawi as the likely culprit. In less than twenty-four hours, the top U.S. military commander in the Middle East, General John Abizaid, told a congressional panel that he possessed “intelligence that links Zarqawi” to the Ashura bombings.

  “The level of organization and the desire to cause casualties among innocent worshippers is a clear hallmark of the Zarqawi network,” Abizaid testified on March 3.

  Many Iraqis looked elsewhere for blame. The country’s leading Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, condemned the American occupiers for allowing the collapse of security in a country that, despite its problems, had been mostly stable. Others were convinced that the Americans themselves were behind the massacre, refusing to believe that Muslims could commit such atrocities.

  Some lashed out at journalists, who, for many, represented the closest tangible symbol of the West. Near Baghdad’s bomb-damaged Imam Musa al-Khadam shrine, an Iraqi woman, draped from head to toe in a black abaya, trailed a pair of American reporters, screaming insults.

  “Why,” she shrieked, “have you Americans done this to us?”

  Barely a year had passed since Zarqawi arrived in central Iraq, armed with only a few weapons, some cash, and his own ambitions. His stated goals were to isolate and harass the American occupiers and ignite conflict between Iraq’s Shiite and Sunni communities. He had managed to achieve both, and, what’s more, Iraqis had come to blame the Americans for the violence that he himself had sparked.

  As he had hoped, Iraq was sliding into chaos, and Zarqawi would soon unveil new tactics to deepen the misery in the country and horrify the Western world. But first he had unfinished business to resolve. He had not forgotten his first object of loathing—Jordan.