Black Flags

by Joby Warrick

  —

  So fierce was the outcry over the bombings that Zarqawi felt compelled to offer excuses. In the weeks that followed, he staged a remarkable retreat from the swaggering, supremely confident persona so familiar to millions of people around the globe.

  Stung by the protests in his hometown, Zarqawi tried at first to claim a media distortion, as he did after the failed chemical plot. Just hours after acknowledging responsibility for the blasts, he issued a second audiotaped message, claiming that the dead wedding guests had been collateral damage from an attack on foreign intelligence operatives elsewhere in the hotel. Any Muslim deaths were due to an “unintended accident,” Zarqawi said, resulting perhaps from falling debris from the real attack elsewhere in the building, or even from a separate bomb planted by the Americans themselves.

  “Our brothers knew their targets with great precision,” he said. “God knows we chose these hotels only after more than two months of close observation showed that these hotels had become headquarters for the Israeli and American intelligence.”

  But not even al-Qaeda was buying it. In July, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy had gently reprimanded Zarqawi for his gratuitous use of violence. Now arrived a much sharper rebuke from one of Bin Laden’s closest advisers. Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a Libyan who had been a close ally of the al-Qaeda founder for two decades, ordered Zarqawi to stop defiling al-Qaeda’s image among Muslims. He scolded the Jordanian for acting without permission in the case of the “recent operation of the hotels in Amman.” From now on, he said, Zarqawi should seek approval for any major operation.

  “Let us not merely be people of killing, slaughter, blood, cursing, insult, and harshness,” Atiyah wrote. “Let us put everything in perspective. Let our mercy overcome our anger.”

  A veteran of Algeria’s grisly civil war between radical Islamists and the state, Atiyah cautioned Zarqawi against mistakes that had brought down other jihadist movements that alienated themselves from local populations. “They destroyed themselves with their own hands, with their lack of reason. Delusions. Their ignoring of people. Their alienation of them through oppression, deviance and severity, coupled with a lack of kindness, sympathy and friendliness,” he wrote. “Their enemy did not defeat them, but rather, they defeated themselves, and were consumed and fell.”

  For once, Zarqawi made no efforts to defend his actions. In January, two months after the Amman bombings, Zarqawi announced that he was giving himself a kind of demotion. Al-Qaeda in Iraq would have new Iraqi leadership and broader Iraqi representation as part of a new organization that called itself the Mujahideen Shura Council. Zarqawi would take a less prominent role as a strategic adviser, a move intended “to dismiss all the differences and disagreements,” according to a statement issued by the new group in January 2006.

  Zarqawi appeared to experience a rare moment of self-doubt. In a memo written after the Amman attacks, he refers to the group’s predicament as “this current bleak situation” and acknowledges that things would likely worsen.

  “In Iraq, time is now beginning to be of service to the American forces and harmful to the resistance,” Zarqawi wrote in this memo, later found in one of his safe houses. He described Iraq’s growing national army as “an enormous shield protecting the American forces,” and he lamented the toll from the mass arrests of his fighters and disruptions in the money supply from abroad. He began thinking aloud about unconventional ways to knock the Americans off balance and restore AQI’s momentum. What if the United States could be somehow drawn into a war with Iran? he wondered. Well aware of the intelligence debacles behind the U.S. decision to invade Iraq, Zarqawi mused about his chances of planting false evidence that could provoke U.S. fury against Tehran. Perhaps he could launch a terrorist attack against the West and plant evidence that would implicate Shiite agents backed by Iran. Or maybe he could disseminate “bogus messages about confessions showing that Iran is in possession of weapons of mass destruction,” he wrote.

  Perhaps Zarqawi understood the improbabilities of pulling off such a scheme, as there is no evidence that he ever tried. There were more practical steps that he could take to improve his chances against the Americans, and he listed them as well. One was to try even harder to incite sectarian conflict: between Shiites and Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, Shiites and just about everyone.

  The last step listed on the memo was an admonishment that had the feel of a self-directed critique.

  “Avoid mistakes that will blemish the image of the resistance,” Zarqawi wrote.

  —

  Then, suddenly, he was back.

  After weeks of relative quiet, Zarqawi prepared an attack that would eclipse, at least temporarily, his blunder in Amman. His plan showed ambition, strategic cunning, and a theatrical flair rarely seen in Iraq’s meat-grinder insurgency. More than anything Zarqawi had done to this point, this act would extinguish the American administration’s hopes for an orderly end to the war.

  Before dawn on February 22, 2006, five armed men in military uniforms walked into the courtyard of the thousand-year-old al-Askari Mosque, a revered shrine in the heart of the ancient Iraqi city of Samarra. The morning was moderately cool, and a crescent moon, penetrating through thin clouds, reflected off the mosque’s iconic gold dome, one of the most celebrated structures in all of Shiite Islam. Moving quietly, the gunmen managed to subdue the mosque’s guards and proceeded to plant explosive charges along the mosque’s roofline.

  At 6:44 a.m., two huge blasts shook the city awake. Residents poured into the street to see a rubble pile where the dome had stood. An entire outer wall had collapsed, and the dome cratered inward, leaving a concrete stump and a tangle of twisted rebar.

  The bombs themselves injured no one—there would be no accusations this time that Zarqawi had murdered innocent Muslims. But destruction of the shrine touched off waves of killings and reprisal killings as rival bands of Shiites and Sunnis shot and hacked their way through the town, sometimes wiping out entire blocks. Days later, the body count at the city morgue had surpassed thirteen hundred, and the entire country appeared to be teetering. At the U.S. Embassy, the diplomat Robert Ford’s office convened a series of urgent meetings with Iraq’s political and religious leaders, pleading for calm. A confidential memo dispatched to the White House that evening bore the ominous heading “Sectarian Nerves on Edge.”

  “In public and private our contacts are speaking with genuine concern about the possibility of civil war,” the memo read.

  Bush administration officials quickly concluded that Zarqawi was to blame, and they watched in growing dismay as the toll from sectarian killings grew to surpass anything the Jordanian might have accomplished with explosive powder and shrapnel. Senior White House officials came to view the Samarra bombing as one of the tipping points of the war. Some credited Zarqawi for having “lit the match” that set the nation’s sectarian tensions fully ablaze.

  Bush took the news of the Samarra massacres particularly hard.

  “I don’t think anything disturbed him more than the sectarian violence that occurred in the wake of the Samarra mosque bombing,” Peter Baker quoted John Negroponte, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, as saying of the president. “I think it looked to him like the whole game was going down the drain. He was really bothered by that.”

  From then onward, Negroponte said, when Bush’s aides would brief him about the events in Iraq, “it was almost as though he was pleading with us not to give him any more bad news.”

  Zarqawi, on the other hand, was exultant. In the Samarra bombing’s aftermath, he celebrated his success by doing something he had studiously avoided until now: he commissioned a photo session.

  The Jordanian had made a number of resolutions during the weeks following the Amman debacle, and one of them was to improve his media game. Zarqawi had practically pioneered the use of Internet violence as a weapon and a recruiting tool, and he had personally starred in the Nicholas Berg execution video, though his face had been concealed by a mask
. He now concluded that he, Zarqawi, should play the lead part in al-Qaeda in Iraq’s public rebranding. He would no longer be the masked “sheikh of the slaughterers,” nor would he consent to being filmed reading long sermons from behind a desk, in the fashion of Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. Instead, Zarqawi would project himself as a kind of jihadist action figure.

  The new video was shot over several days during the weeks following the Samarra bombing, and was edited and mixed to give the final product a professional gloss. The content would be all Zarqawi: Zarqawi meeting with his military council; Zarqawi studying a map; Zarqawi walking with other fighters through the desert; Zarqawi blasting away with a light machine gun.

  Every scene conveyed the image of an outlaw warrior in his prime. In al-Qaeda’s videos, Bin Laden sometimes sat next to his gun, or posed awkwardly while firing a few shots from a Kalashnikov, a gaunt, turbaned figure with a gray beard surrounded by much younger men. By contrast, Zarqawi moved with the confidence and vigor of a man who relished a fight. He dressed fully in black, from his beard and gangsterlike skullcap to his ninja’s black pants and tunic. The only color contrast came from the green ammo pouch strapped to his chest and his jarringly white Made in the USA New Balance sneakers.

  His narration bristled with the old Zarqawi swagger, but with fewer taunts and insults, other than the usual rhetorical blasts against the “crusader” army and its allies. Instead, he addressed Iraqis as “my treasured nation” and spoke in a poetic cadence.

  “Your enemy is uncovered, by the will of Allah, weakened, unprotected, and broken in pieces,” he said. “Do not give him a chance to take its breath, continue your stabbings one after the other. O flag holders, stand.”

  There was little need for bluster; the sectarian fire that Zarqawi had tried to ignite was sweeping through Iraqi provinces on its own momentum. Within days of the hotel bombs in Amman, U.S. soldiers in Baghdad discovered a secret underground prison where Shiite police officers systematically beat and tortured Sunni detainees. Inside the converted bomb shelter, the soldiers found nearly two hundred malnourished Sunni men, many of whom later described a daily regimen of beatings and electric shocks.

  The bunker was located less than a block from the residence of Iraq’s Shiite interior minister, Falah al-Naqib, who would later acknowledge that “there were some mistakes made.” The discovery offered proof that the random sectarian attacks initiated by Zarqawi had prompted organized campaigns in response, supported in some cases by institutions of the Iraqi government. Even jihadists who questioned Zarqawi’s war against the Shiites began to believe that the Jordanian’s strategy was succeeding.

  16

  “Your end is close”

  The border towns along Iraq’s western frontier were already considered Zarqawi country in the early months of 2006. But, more practically, they were the domain of another man: an Iraqi customs officer who kept a self-interested eye on the stream of commerce flowing from Jordan and Syria into Iraq’s western desert.

  Zaid al-Karbouly nominally worked for the state, but he had long been in the pay of al-Qaeda in Iraq, a client who offered a far better salary, and other perks besides. Over time, Karbouly had been rewarded with ever-higher positions of authority within the terrorist organization, as befitted a man who regularly delivered intelligence on incoming shipments available for plunder. Sometimes he would perform shakedowns on his own.

  Karbouly’s stature in Zarqawi’s criminal network and his reputation for personal avarice inevitably drew the attention of Jordanian spies who worked the border towns. So it was that, amid the soaring interest in Zarqawi following the Amman bombings, the Mukhabarat set a trap for the man who was known in the border towns as Zarqawi’s personal customs agent.

  It was now spring, five months since the hotel bombings, and fears inside Jordan of a second wave of Zarqawi-led violence had mostly ebbed. Extraordinary new restrictions were now in place throughout the country, from tighter controls at the border crossings to the concrete barriers and metal detectors that appeared overnight outside every major hotel and government facility. Still, the country was awash in Iraqi refugees, as well as visitors who crossed the border for medical treatment or to purchase Western goods that were hard to find in Iraq. One of the regulars was Karbouly, who was known to enjoy spending his illicit takings in Jordan’s shopping malls and boutique stores. The Mukhabarat’s officers simply waited for him to cross and, at the right moment, whisked him away. Soon he was in the spy agency’s notorious holding cell, feeling the impatient stares of two of its top interrogators: Captain Abu Haytham and his boss, Ali Bourzak, the Red Devil.

  Karbouly talked. Eventually, he even agreed to make a confession on videotape, admitting to a string of crimes including the shooting of a Jordanian truck driver during a shakedown and the kidnapping of two Moroccans who were turned over to Zarqawi’s men for ransom. But the Jordanians were far more interested in what Karbouly could tell them about the network itself, and on that subject the details came surprisingly easily. It was as though Karbouly had been eager for a chance to unburden himself.

  “He seemed almost relieved,” said a former senior intelligence official who closely followed the case. “He didn’t turn himself in. But once we had him, it was clear that he wanted out of that world.”

  Assured that the Jordanians would protect him, “he just started spewing,” the official said. Suddenly the agency’s interrogators were filling notebooks with rare insider accounts of AQI’s command structure and tactics. One of Karbouly’s jobs, according to the former senior intelligence official, was to oversee incoming supplies for Zarqawi’s bomb factories—a job that gave him broad familiarity with terrorist cells around the country.

  “He wasn’t a bomb maker, but he understood how to get the material to the right places so it all came together,” the official said, “He was sort of like a project manager.”

  Abu Haytham had spent time with dozens of men on the fringes of the Zarqawi network, and he recognized Karbouly’s type. A Sunni tribesman from the Iraqi border town of al-Qa’im, he was in his early forties, much older than the typical foreign radical who crossed into Iraq to perform jihad. Though sympathetic to Zarqawi’s cause and adamantly opposed to the U.S. occupation, he was also a career bureaucrat who looked out for himself and knew how to adapt to changing currents. Yet, somehow, a flicker of conscience had survived under the tough exterior. Karbouly was congenitally corrupt and inured to the daily violence around him, but he found himself gagging on Zarqawi’s cruel excesses. The hotel bombings had been the worst, but there were other examples as well, including acts that Karbouly himself had witnessed.

  Abu Haytham was puzzled. Killing innocents was Zarqawi’s specialty, he noted. How could Karbouly avoid it? But the man was emphatic. The slaughtering of innocents was wrong. It was un-Islamic.

  As the Mukhabarat continued probing, a story emerged about the Jordanian truck driver Karbouly had killed. The trucker had been stopped just inside the Iraqi border with a trailer filled with goods that, according to the cargo manifest, were intended for one of the American bases farther south. Drivers who were caught carrying such supplies were often executed as a way to discourage others. From Zarqawi’s men came orders to kill this one.

  Karbouly still remembered the man’s name—Khalid—and the fear in his voice after he was handcuffed and blindfolded.

  “He said, ‘What will you do?’ I said, ‘I will kill you,’ ” Karbouly said in his confession. “He started to beg me: ‘Please, do not kill me,’ and so I said, ‘I must kill you.’ ”

  “He kept on begging me, and I pulled my personal pistol and said to him, ‘Say your prayers,’ ” Karbouly said. “He said them as he was begging.”

  Karbouly shot the driver twice in the head and left the body, along with the man’s passport and papers, next to the road. As an afterthought, he took his victim’s cell phone with him.

  When the trucker’s phone rang a short while afterward, Karbouly refl
exively answered. It was the dead man’s brother. The customs agent made up an awkward story and said Khalid was fine, then hung up.

  Moments later, looking at the phone still in his hand, he began scrolling through the personal files where the driver kept photos. He stopped on an image of four young girls, clearly Khalid’s daughters.

  “I had a kind of reaction,” he said.

  After that, each death that he witnessed felt like a reopened wound. In the second year of the insurgency, when Zarqawi had declared war on Shiites, Karbouly was at first sympathetic, having been incensed by stories of ethnic cleansing in Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad and Basra. But now it was too much. Once, he had watched the grisly spectacle of a Shiite captive being beheaded by a gang of Zarqawi’s thugs, for no discernible reason other than the fact that he was Shiite.

  As the bodies piled up, Karbouly began to see clearly who Zarqawi was, and what Iraq was becoming.

  “We didn’t know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites until Zarqawi came,” he said. “Now, every day, there is a killing.”

  By his own accounting, Karbouly was a peripheral player in the terrorist group: a sergeant, perhaps, not a general. But for the Jordanians, the arrest of a midlevel Zarqawi soldier—and a talkative one—was a breakthrough. Soon Karbouly was generating volumes of detailed reports about Zarqawi’s operations in the border towns through which the group’s supply lines passed. He knew dozens of other operatives like himself, and he knew the names of more senior commanders, including some who were high enough in the organization to take orders from Zarqawi’s carefully guarded inner circle.

  Karbouly did not know the location of Zarqawi’s safe house. But with his help, the Jordanians were coming closer than they had ever been.

  —

  Throughout the spring of 2006, U.S. reconnaissance aircraft kept an unusually close watch on an Iraqi village called Yusufiyah, a cluster of bungalows and small farms built along a Euphrates River irrigation canal just south of Baghdad. The surrounding region had long been regarded as a staging ground for insurgent attacks on the capital. But in early April, an informant fingered the town as an occasional venue for high-level AQI meetings. Sure enough, on the morning of April 8, a drone assigned to Major General Stanley McChrystal’s Task Force 6-26 caught sight of an unusual convoy of vehicles entering the town. Within two hours, an assault team of elite army Delta Force operators was on its way.