by Joby Warrick
Again the family pressed for answers, and again the U.S. Embassy sent out queries to detention centers and military posts. But there was not a scrap of news about Berg all that week, or the next.
Finally, on May 8, a military patrol spotted an object hanging from a highway overpass. Pulling closer, they were horrified to see a human torso in loose orange clothing, dangling from a rope, with its hands and feet bound. Beneath the corpse, on a bloodstained blanket, was the severed head of a young white man with a scruffy sandy-blond beard.
Nicholas Berg had been found.
—
Two days later, the video containing one of the Iraq war’s most disturbingly iconic images began streaking across the Internet. Bakos had no desire to see it, but in the end she forced herself. The viewing took place in a CIA conference room with two other analysts present.
On the screen was Berg, trussed and seated on the ground in his orange jumpsuit, his expression blank. Five hooded men in black stood behind him against a light-colored wall, and the man in the middle was reading from a script. She knew the voice and recognized the familiar stocky build, even with the mask. It was Zarqawi.
Bakos noted the orange jumpsuit, so familiar to anyone following the still-unfolding scandal over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American military guards. Zarqawi had never been accused of subtlety or sophistication in his few previous attempts at public statements. Was he sending a message to Muslims, inviting them to witness an act of symbolic revenge for the humiliation of inmates at Iraq’s most notorious prison?
He was.
“Is there any excuse left to sit idly by?” the man with the script was saying. “How can a free Muslim sleep soundly while Islam is being slaughtered, its honor bleeding and the images of shame in the news of the satanic abuse of the Muslim men and women in the prison of Abu Ghraib. Where is your zeal and where is the anger?”
The screed continued for several minutes, with more appeals to Muslim pride and numerous Koranic references, including a nod to the Prophet Muhammad as “our example, and a good role model,” for having ordered the beheadings of prisoners after a revolt by Jewish merchants in the city of Badr. Then, addressing the U.S. president directly, he delivered a warning:
Hard days are coming to you. You and your soldiers are going to regret the day that you stepped foot in Iraq and dared to violate the Muslims….We say to you, the dignity of the Muslim men and women in the prison of Abu Ghraib and others will be redeemed by blood and souls. You will see nothing from us except corpse after corpse and casket after casket of those slaughtered in this fashion.
With that, Zarqawi then pulled a long knife from a sheath and pounced on Berg who, tied as he was, toppled onto his side. As the other men held the prisoner, Zarqawi grabbed Berg’s hair with one hand and with the other began to cut at his throat. There was a brief, terrible scream, and then a frenzy of movement as the other hooded men held Berg’s legs and shoulders while Zarqawi continued to struggle with his grisly task. More seconds passed of thrusting and sawing, as the camera wobbled and jerked. And still more seconds.
Bakos felt the nausea starting to build.
“Just get it over with,” she found herself thinking. But it wasn’t stopping.
Bakos finally excused herself and left. “There’s no utility in watching this,” she thought.
She missed only the final frames, in which one of Zarqawi’s companions, a tall figure in a white hood, lifted the head, now free of its body, and held it aloft like a trophy, then set it gently on the victim’s back.
—
Zarqawi’s message to the world was five minutes and thirty-seven seconds of grainy video shot with a shaky, handheld camera, depicting an almost unimaginable act of cruelty. It was an instant global hit.
Countless thousands of computers downloaded the images, from North America to South Asia and across the Middle East. Some viewers cried out in disgust. Others reacted with sadness, despair, or rage. But they watched.
To ensure proper credit for the deed portrayed, the video helpfully included a title: “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi shown slaughtering an American.” The man who had longed to eclipse Osama bin Laden as the Islamist world’s daring man of action had done just that, at least for the time being.
Other terrorists had beheaded their victims. Two years earlier, the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl had been murdered by al-Qaeda operatives in a similarly public fashion. But Pearl was a seasoned journalist who had traveled to Pakistan looking for a story about al-Qaeda. Nick Berg was targeted and killed simply because he was an American. And the video of his execution hit at the very time when millions of Americans were connecting to broadband, and when support for the Iraq war was plummeting.
Even the White House, which earlier in the month had been promoting business opportunities in Iraq, was forced to confront Zarqawi’s brutal deed.
“Their intention is to shake our will. Their intention is to shake our confidence,” President Bush said, speaking to journalists in Washington about the terrorist act witnessed by so many Americans, in such excruciatingly intimate detail. He defended progress in Iraq but declined to take reporters’ questions.
Other U.S. politicians, including some in the president’s Republican Party, could sense the shift in the public’s mood, even before opinion polls confirmed it. The Abu Ghraib scandal had, for many, ripped away the last tattered remnants of moral rectitude underpinning America’s war with Iraq. The popular image of a high-tech U.S. military machine delivering shock and awe to Iraqi forces had also been tarnished, replaced by video clips on the nightly news of IED attacks and flag-draped coffins. And now Americans were witnessing in their living rooms a new kind of savagery.
“If you had your thumb on the pulse of America, that pulse beat changed when Americans heard about the beheading of Nick Berg,” Representative Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican, told The New York Times in an interview. “It jolted everybody’s memory again about why we were there in Iraq and who we’re dealing with.”
But whom, exactly, were the Americans dealing with? To many viewers, the men in the video were al-Qaeda, one black hood indistinguishable from another. Three days after the release of the video, another message seemed designed to answer the question.
On May 13, 2004, jihadist Web sites posted a message announcing a new terrorist organization that called itself “al-Tawhid wal-Jihad,” or Unity and Jihad. It was to be a kind of Islamist super-group: a merger of smaller factions of Iraqi insurgents and foreign fighters under a single umbrella, with Zarqawi as leader. The statement referred impressively to a “decisive historic turning point.”
“This merger is a strength for the people of Islam, and blazing flames for the enemies of God, where they shall burn until the retrieval of the stolen rights, and the establishment of God’s religion on the Earth,” the message read. “It is a ticket and an inducement for the groups and sects to rush for the fulfillment of this legitimate duty and factual necessity. We give our word [to] the Islamic Nation that we shall not betray or retreat, and we shall keep our promise until we reach either one of two aspired outcomes: victory or martyrdom.”
The communiqué listed two co-leaders, with Zarqawi—the “sheikh”—taking top billing. Just over three months earlier, in a letter to Bin Laden, Zarqawi had asked for a partnership with al-Qaeda and said that, in any event, the world would soon be hearing from him. That moment had arrived. With the release of the Berg video and the announcement of a pan-insurgent group with himself at the helm, Zarqawi had staked out a spot at the forefront of the global jihadist movement. No longer was he merely the leader of a particularly violent terrorist faction in Iraq. He was now a rival to Bin Laden himself as the terrorist that the West feared and young Islamists most wanted to emulate. Yes, Bin Laden had his videos, too: the Saudi appeared in his golden robes and dye-blackened beard, delivering ponderous sermons from behind a desk. Zarqawi’s showed a vital, charismatic young man in ninja garb, killing an American with his own hands.
CIA analysts studying the video and communiqué wondered if the young Jordanian had overreached. Zarqawi was an upstart who lacked formal education and had never been regarded as having the vision or brainpower to run a large organization. He also lacked the kind of institutional support that had helped make Bin Laden successful, including backing from recognized Islamic scholars whose fatwas gave spiritual cover to such violent deeds as killing unarmed civilians or employing suicide tactics. Zarqawi sought no such approvals, and he had taken upon himself the responsibility of deciding how jihad against U.S. forces would be waged.
Nada Bakos wondered if Zarqawi’s main achievement had been to elevate himself as a priority target, and not just for the Americans.
“Zarqawi jumped the shark,” she mused afterward. “Even al-Qaeda tried to abide by principles, using its theologians to interpret Sharia law. But Zarqawi interprets the law however he wants. He creates his own rules, like a cult,” she said. “He is becoming the megachurch.”
There would be a backlash, surely. The high priests of al-Qaeda and the other established jihadist networks would not look favorably on such exuberantly heterodox behavior, especially when it offended the sensibilities of the wealthy and pious Arabs who supplied the organization with most of its cash.
But many ordinary Muslim men lined up to join Zarqawi’s swelling congregation. In Iraq and elsewhere, admirers had begun to refer to the Jordanian by a new nickname that had come into use in the days after the Berg video first aired.
Bin Laden would remain the respected figurehead, the man who years ago had fought the Soviets and planned the attacks on New York and Washington. But Zarqawi was now hailed as the “sheikh of the slaughterers,” a terrorist for a brutal new age when broadcasting butchery on the Internet would be used as a tactic to win support among hardened jihadists and to sow fear among everyone else.
13
“It’s hopeless there”
On June 23, 2004, diplomat Robert S. Ford tossed his bags onto an armored airport bus and took his place for the final leg of a journey he had tried to avoid. In twenty-five minutes he would be in the Green Zone again, navigating its mazes of blast walls and trailer villages, breathing in the city’s hot, sweaty air with its accents of diesel fuel and rotting garbage. Six months after swearing off Baghdad for good, he was back, just in time to see the country’s fortunes careen sharply toward the worst.
Signs of Iraq’s unraveling lay scattered along the airport road. Barriers and checkpoints now dotted the ten-mile highway in a vain attempt to stop the daily shootings and bombings along what U.S. soldiers dubbed “Route Irish” and Iraqis called “Death Street.” A year earlier, getting from the airport to the international district had been as simple as catching a shuttle. Now a ride into town meant booking a secure taxi, outfitted with armed escorts and bulletproof glass, that might cost as much as a thousand dollars per trip. Or, for a senior member of the U.S. diplomatic corps, it meant a seat on the steel-plated embassy van that raced between the terminal and the Green Zone at terrifying speed.
“Not a good sign,” Ford thought to himself.
By every measure, Iraq was a more sinister place, especially for Americans. Though Ford, at forty-six, was one of the State Department’s top Arabists, his light brown hair and blue eyes marked him as a Westerner. During his last assignment in Iraq, Ford had been held at gunpoint for two hours by a group of Shiite militiamen. This stint, he suspected, would be even more eventful.
Ford’s earlier tour had been his own idea. Weeks after the fall of Baghdad, the State Department had issued an urgent appeal for Arabic-speaking volunteers to help the struggling U.S.-led interim government. Ford was then a veteran Middle East diplomat with near-flawless language skills and a comfortable post as the number two official at the U.S. Embassy in Bahrain. Like many of his colleagues, he had been dubious about the Bush administration’s Iraq adventure. Still, the need appeared genuine. He raised his hand, and soon afterward he was boarding a military transport to Iraq, arriving in August 2003 in a capital city still reeling from the UN headquarters bombing that killed Sergio Vieira de Mello. His first assignment landed him in the Shiite holy city of Najaf as a diplomatic liaison to a contingent of U.S. marines in charge of securing the town. But the marines he met were mostly interested in getting out of Iraq as quickly as possible, and local leaders were caught up in a bloody feud between rival Shiite militias the Americans were seeking to disarm.
The encounter with the Shiite militiamen occurred in his first week on the job. Ford had a habit of plunging headlong into challenges, and in Najaf he set out at once to meet community leaders and build relationships away from the marine base. One Saturday afternoon, as he was meeting with one of the city’s prominent clerics, a group of twenty-five militiamen burst into the house with guns drawn and clustered around Ford and a marine major who had accompanied him on the visit. The gunmen grabbed a young Iraqi translator and dragged him outside, where they savagely punched and kicked him.
Ford grasped for the only weapon available to him: a bluff. He pulled within a few inches of the man who seemed to be in charge.
“I’m Robert Ford, the coalition’s representative here from Baghdad,” he began in Arabic. “I have a meeting with your militia leader at midnight tonight. You can tell him I’m going to be late because you’re holding me.”
It worked. The Americans were released, and the militants scurried to their vehicles, first releasing the Iraqi translator, whose injuries were severe enough to warrant hospitalization. Minutes later, Ford, undaunted, was pressing his marine escort to call on the militia group’s commander immediately to try to leverage the episode into an agreement on disarming.
The marine glared at Ford, this hyperenergetic diplomat with an apparent death wish.
“Goddamn nut!” he swore. The Americans returned to their base.
Ford’s attempts at bridge building resumed the very next day, but the disappointments and frustrations piled up quickly. Months later, when he was formally asked to return to Iraq for a second stint, it wasn’t the physical danger that compelled him to say no. Nor was it the awful weather, the Spartan living conditions, the freezing-cold showers, or the impossibly complex, constantly shifting nature of Iraq’s sectarian and tribal rifts. It was the sense of waste and futility that hovered over nearly every endeavor like a toxic cloud.
“Oh, no, no, no, no. I already volunteered for Iraq once, and I don’t want to go back,” Ford told his boss over the telephone when the new request came. “It’s hopeless there. It’s not a serious effort. I want nothing to do with it.”
And yet back he went. Back to the Green Zone, with all its surreal contrasts: the palaces and palm-lined swimming pools, and the dreary barracks, with walls of sandbags that offered scant protection from the mortar shells that fell randomly from the sky, like exploding lawn darts flung by a giant. Back, despite his wife’s anger and his own personal misgivings about losing another chunk of his life—and possibly more—to what was surely a hopeless cause. Back, because he felt he had no choice.
“You can’t say no unless you quit,” he said afterward. “And we didn’t have enough money to quit.”
In fact, Ford’s transfer orders had come from the very top of the State Department. The newly appointed U.S. ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, had asked Secretary of State Colin Powell to appoint Ford to the prestigious post of political counselor in the U.S. Embassy. Though relatively junior for such an assignment, Ford had won admiration at Foggy Bottom for his internal memos and e-mails candidly assessing the Iraq war’s impact on the region. He had also earned admiration from colleagues for his bravery after years of unflinching service in some of the Middle East’s roughest neighborhoods. A former Peace Corps volunteer conversant in five languages, he spent most of his professional life in provincial towns from the Moroccan interior to coastal Turkey, working like a journalist to gain local knowledge and build a source network. Nothing seemed to intimidate him, friends remember
ed.
“He spent his entire career in dangerous places,” Robert Neumann, the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, said of Ford. “He’s not someone who stays in the [embassy], but someone who gets out and develops a very broad range of contacts. If you constantly have to feel totally safe, you’re basically useless in those jobs.”
This time, Ford’s role would be different. The Bush administration, sensing its Iraq experiment slipping out of control, had moved to expedite the installation of an interim Iraqi government that would quickly assume primary responsibility for securing the country and organizing elections. The insurgency that U.S. officials had been so slow to acknowledge was now an indisputable fact, and the costs—financial, political, and human—were soaring. With a U.S. presidential election looming, Ford later recalled, “there was a drive, full speed ahead, to turn over sovereignty to the Iraqis and get us out.”
To that end, the Coalition Provisional Authority would go out of business to make way for an Iraqi interim government headed by a new interim prime minister named Iyad al-Allawi. The transition officially occurred on June 28, 2004, less than a week after Ford arrived in the country. The Americans pledged to stick around only until Iraq was strong enough to stand on its own. How long would that take? Months, surely; perhaps even a year? No one knew. The Sunni towns north and west of Baghdad were sliding rapidly into lawlessness, and parts of Fallujah and Ramadi were effectively controlled by insurgents, some of them foreigners who had traveled to Iraq for jihad. The new Iraqi leadership and its U.S. backers desperately needed Sunni allies: respected, credible Sunnis who could help pacify the region and lead the Sunni tribes through a democratic transition that included elections and a unity government that shared power equally among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds.
One of Ford’s assignments was to identify such allies and try to win them over. In his first month on the job, he traveled to Fallujah and arranged meetings with U.S. military commanders and Arab diplomats to get a sense of the task ahead of him. It was worse than he imagined. In Fallujah, the capital of the insurgency and traditionally the most rebellious city in Iraq, townspeople were in no mood to negotiate. The marines picked off occasional targets from their base on the outskirts of town, but most of the city remained a “denied area” to Americans in the weeks after the killing of the four American security contractors, officers told Ford.