Black Flags

by Joby Warrick

  Minutes earlier, McChrystal had ordered a series of raids throughout the country in an effort to preempt possible retaliatory strikes by Zarqawi’s AQI followers. He was still in the operations center when one of his men came up to him with word that Zarqawi’s body had arrived.

  He walked to the detainee facility to find the corpse laid out on a poncho. One of the Delta team operators, an army Ranger whom McChrystal knew well, was standing guard. A trickle of blood was drying below a gash on Zarqawi’s left cheek, but otherwise the body showed no signs of serious trauma. McChrystal studied the face for a moment.

  “He looks just like Zarqawi,” he said, “like out of a poster.” He turned to the Ranger.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “It’s him,” the Ranger said.

  —

  Zarqawi’s death was not formally announced for another day, but the news was already being toasted in Washington, from the White House to the Pentagon to the CIA’s leafy campus along the Potomac.

  Bush’s initial reaction was subdued. Just minutes before the news arrived from Baghdad, the president had been meeting at the White House with several members of Congress from both political parties. Illinois Republican representative Ray LaHood, a staunch supporter of the Iraq war, offered a word of unsolicited advice: “We really got to get rid of Zarqawi,” he said.

  Bush chuckled quietly, and Representative Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, leaned over to make a private joke at LaHood’s expense. “Why didn’t we think of that?” Hoyer whispered.

  The first report of Zarqawi’s possible death came minutes later, at 3:45 p.m. EDT, but the confirmation was delayed for another five hours. Members of Bush’s national security team reacted ecstatically, but Bush could barely muster a smile.

  “I don’t know how to take good news anymore,” he said.

  The CIA officer Nada Bakos was traveling when the news broke. Just a few months earlier, the spy agency’s top Zarqawi expert had returned to Washington for good, after angling for a new assignment that had nothing to do with the Jordanian. Now thirty-six, she had been the longest-serving member of the agency’s Zarqawi team, and she felt frustrated and more than ready for a change. She had met a man she liked—someone far removed from the intelligence world—and they had recently gotten married. Their low-key wedding took place on an evening after work, and Bakos, overwhelmed by the daily demands of her job, showed up late for the ceremony.

  She was with her new CIA colleagues on June 7 when the call came from a Langley friend that Zarqawi was finally dead. She remembered feeling slightly numb. What was the proper way to react to such news?

  “I was happy,” she remembered afterward. “But I guess I was disappointed that I wasn’t with people who understood what it meant.”

  In Jordan, celebrations in the capital were counterbalanced by scenes of ugly protest in the terrorist’s hometown of Zarqa, where some locals had begun reasserting their support for the town’s most famous son in the weeks before his death. Near the family homestead, relatives and local Islamists erected a tent and announced a “martyrdom” celebration, lauding Zarqawi in television interviews before police arrived to shut the revelers down.

  Abu Haytham, the Mukhabarat counterterrorism deputy who would soon rise to become the department head, expressed annoyance at the outburst but refused to let it darken his mood.

  “I long had this mental image of Zarqawi bragging,” he said, remembering his early encounters with the terrorist. “He always said that someday he would find a way to hurt us, to do something that would cut to the heart. To me, that was the hotel bombing—the image of those two little girls. Now, this is justice served.”

  But there was not justice in Iraq, not yet. Zaydan al-Jabiri, the rancher and tribal sheikh from Ramadi, watched the news of Zarqawi’s death with indifference. The Jordanian might be gone, but the foul strain he had helped to unleash was stronger than ever, Zaydan told friends. Zarqawi’s foreign-led terrorist network had morphed into something more insidious and homegrown. There were scores of Iraqi jihadists standing ready to take up Zarqawi’s mantle.

  In some parts of Anbar Province, the tribes were beginning to reclaim their rightful place, pushing aside the jihadists with threats and sometimes with arms. Zaydan would join them, eventually helping launch a movement that Americans called the “Anbar Awakening.” It was an all-Sunni force that proved capable of driving the Zarqawists out of the streets and back into underground cells, at least for a time.

  But for now, with Zarqawi dead, there were scores to settle with neighbors and relatives who had chosen the wrong side. One of them was Zaydan’s very own cousin, the man who a year earlier had asked Zaydan to swear allegiance to the Jordanian criminal who aspired to be Iraq’s leader.

  “I told him, in our last meeting: ‘Your end is close,’ ” Zaydan said. “We don’t want to lose members of the tribe, but the crimes these people committed are too big for forgiveness.”

  Days later, the cousin was found shot to death.

  “We killed him. My tribe killed him,” he said. “It was treason, and he was killed, the way that we kill.”

  BOOK III

  ISIS

  17

  “The people want to topple the regime!”

  The trouble arrived in buses. Embassy officers spotted at least four of them, all big ones, such as the tour companies use, chartered by God-knows-who and packed with sweaty, agitated men armed with poles and sticks. The small caravan rolled into Damascus’s posh al-Afif district at midmorning and parked a block away from the American diplomatic mission to discharge its jeering contents: a made-to-order Syrian mob.

  Robert S. Ford, now the U.S. ambassador to Syria, stared from a chancery window at the sudden throng outside the embassy gates. Throughout this morning—July 11, 2011, four months into Syria’s “Arab Spring” uprising—there had been reports of a similar gathering at the French mission, five blocks away. Now they were here, a small army of men in civilian clothes, with more arriving by car and on foot. Some were young with military-style haircuts; others had the paunches of middle age and scruffy beards and carried professionally printed portraits of Syria’s autocratic president, Bashar al-Assad. An organizer wearing an ID card on a lanyard barked orders, while a handful of police officers stood idly in clusters farther up the block. From his top-floor perch, Ford watched as the street darkened with bodies like the thickening clouds of a summer storm. These were the regime’s goons, without a doubt, and their presence here was anything but spontaneous. Ford ordered his staff behind thick walls and waited to see how far Assad would go.

  For a time, it was just the usual chants and a few rotten melons lobbed over the gates. The attack, when it came, unfolded with surprising speed. First came the louder thumps and bangs of rocks striking the chancery walls and bouncing off shatterproof glass. Then a dozen men were being hoisted over the embassy’s cement-and-steel fence, the one the contractor had called unscalable. Now intruders were running across the embassy grounds, shouting at one another, pounding on doors and windows, looking for weaknesses. Some of them clambered up a brickwork façade to the chancery roof, where satellite dishes and radio antennas were kept. Soon they were beating on the metal rooftop door that was the only remaining barrier between the protesters and the frightened embassy workers inside.

  Ford stood near the battered door with two marines, both young recruits in their twenties assigned to the embassy’s security force. The guards fingered their rifles as Ford mentally prepared himself for what might happen if the door burst open. Where were the Syrian police?

  The awful banging continued, and Ford could now see the intruders’ feet through a gap in the doorframe. One of the marines spoke:

  “If they get through that door, we’re shooting.”

  Ford thought quickly. Assad must have intended only to scare, not to harm. But why was he letting his goons get this far?

  “No. You are not shooting,” he insisted. “If they get through
the door, you tell them to stop. If they see your guns and they charge anyway, then you may fire.”

  More banging. The wait continued, giving Ford ample time to second-guess himself. Surely the protesters would back away in the face of guards with rifles, he thought. Or would they?

  Perhaps more than any other American, Ford understood the temperament of the autocrat who would have had to sign off on any decision to unleash mobs on two Western embassies. Assad was usually smart enough to avoid a needless provocation, but he also was famously short-tempered and vindictive. Ford had personally witnessed one of the president’s mood swings, and the experience had made a lasting impression. An angry Assad could be unpredictable, and right now Assad was furious—at him. The assault could be called off at any moment, or the door could suddenly fly open to whatever combination of aggression and zealotry stood on the other side. In the broiling hot midsummer of Syria’s civilian uprising, almost any outcome seemed plausible.

  The pounding grew louder. The marines waited, rifles pointed at the door.

  —

  For a time, it seemed that the Arab Spring contagion might bypass Syria altogether. By mid-March 2011, tyrants and their security forces had been routed in Tunisia and Egypt, and others were falling in Libya and Yemen. But Syria was different. The country’s economic and political elite lined up solidly behind the ruling Assad family, and the government’s officially secularist policies and brutal secret police kept ethnic and sectarian tensions bottled up. As protests erupted in capitals from North Africa to the Persian Gulf, the tumult in Damascus’s ancient passageways was limited mostly to the honking taxis and the cries of street vendors in the souks downtown.

  The president himself was hardly the type to inspire protests. Mild-mannered by the standards of Middle Eastern autocrats—including his ruthless father, former president Hafez al-Assad—Syria’s forty-five-year-old leader once had ambitions to be a physician. He studied in London as a young man and chose ophthalmology as his specialty, because he disliked the sight of blood. But his plans for a career in medicine derailed when his older brother, Bassel, died in a car accident, thrusting the tall, soft-spoken Bashar onto the leadership track. The death of Hafez in 2000 fueled hopes for political reform in Syria, and the new president at first seemed up for the challenge. Bashar al-Assad liberalized the country’s economic policies and loosened restrictions on the Internet during his first months in office. More dramatically, he closed the country’s infamous Mezzeh penitentiary, and declared an amnesty that released hundreds of political prisoners, including members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood organization.

  U.S. officials watched the developments closely, sensing potential in the young Western-educated leader. What if Syria—so accustomed to playing the part of agitator and rogue—could be persuaded to take a more constructive role in the region? It was a distant hope, at best. Syria under Bashar al-Assad remained a chief supplier of arms and cash to Lebanon’s Hezbollah militants, and a conduit for jihadists headed for Iraq. Damascus also possessed one of the world’s largest stockpiles of illegal chemical weapons, including deadly sarin gas. And yet there were hopeful signs. Assad’s security forces sometimes cooperated with the United States on counterterrorism cases, and the country’s intelligence service occasionally made a show of arresting terrorist recruits at the airport and border crossings. Moreover, Syria’s first family cultivated a public image that suggested a desire for closer ties to the West. Unlike his father, who preferred lectures and insults when entertaining Western guests, the younger Assad could hold a finely nuanced conversation on regional politics in flawless English. His wife, the elegantly beautiful Asma, was a British-raised economist who wore Christian Louboutin heels and promoted women’s rights and educational reform. Massachusetts senator John F. Kerry, the future U.S. secretary of state, was among a parade of American officials to pass through Damascus and pronounce Assad to be someone the U.S. government could work with.

  “My judgment is that Syria will move; Syria will change, as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States and the West and the economic opportunity that comes with it,” Kerry, then the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, said after a 2009 visit.

  By late 2010, the Obama administration was ready for a bold step: it would appoint a U.S. ambassador to Syria for the first time since 2005, when relations between the countries hit a new low over alleged Syrian support for terrorism. To fill such an important post, the White House settled on a candidate with an impressive record for managing Middle East crises: Robert Ford.

  The appointment had legions of doubters. So many senators opposed the notion of upgraded diplomatic relations with Syria that the White House dared not risk subjecting its candidate to the usual confirmation hearing. Instead, President Obama waited until Congress adjourned for the Christmas recess to name Ford as the fourteenth U.S. ambassador to Syria on December 29, 2010.

  The president’s choice for the job had misgivings of his own. Ford’s distinguished service in Iraq had earned him his first ambassadorship in 2006, as the chief U.S. diplomat to Algeria, but two years had passed, and he was eligible for a new assignment. Ford considered Tunisia and Bahrain, both regarded as interesting but quiet postings. Syria, by contrast, was a notoriously brutal police state that openly supported anti-Israel militants. The job description there would consist of delivering regular scoldings to the regime over its support for terrorism.

  “I don’t want to go to Syria,” Ford told his boss. “All I’ll be doing is fighting with the Assad government all the time.”

  But he went. Just three weeks after his appointment, Ford was on his way to Damascus. A week after that, he was presenting his letters of credence to Assad in the presidential palace.

  At the ceremonial meeting in Assad’s hilltop residence, Ford watched the Syrian leader carefully for clues about the personality behind the charcoal suit. Seated in a powder-blue chair in a reception hall, Assad was affable and charming, showing no trace of the condescension so common among the region’s palace-bred autocrats. He was tall and narrow-shouldered, with pale-blue eyes, and a trim mustache offsetting a weak chin; he spoke with the quiet self-assurance of a man who had grown into middle age without having to raise his voice. The meeting was going pleasantly enough until Ford gently broached the subject of the State Department’s most recent report on human rights, with its lengthy catalogue of Syrian abuses, including official repression, torture, and murder. No sooner were the words uttered than the host’s entire countenance changed. The volume never varied, but Assad was enraged.

  “The last country in the world that I’m going to take advice from is the United States,” he said in a low snarl. “Not on human rights. Not after what you’ve done in Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and Afghanistan.”

  Ford listened politely, summoning up as much diplomatic reserve as he could.

  “Mr. President, the issues you just raised are perfectly legitimate,” he said. “We should have to explain ourselves. But we’re going to raise our concerns with you, too. And if we’re going to make any progress on this bilateral relationship, we’re going to have to have frank discussions about it.”

  Historic events would ensure that no such discussions would take place. Within two weeks of the meeting, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was driven out of office. Four days after that, Libyan security forces fired into a crowd of protesters in Benghazi, setting off a civil war that would topple the Libyan leader, Muammar Qaddafi. In early March, rioters clashed with police in the capitals of Yemen and Bahrain. And at last Syria, having seemed impervious to sparks from the revolutions south of its borders, caught fire in the span of a single turbulent week. On March 18, violent protests broke out in the southern city of Dara’a after police arrested and tortured local teens for writing antigovernment graffiti. On March 20, a mob torched Baath Party buildings in Dara’a, and police fired back with live ammunition, killing fifteen. On March 25, huge crowds poured into the streets there and in other
cities, from Hama and Homs in the west to Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, in the north. The House of Assad, so brutally efficient at keeping the peace at home, faced its worst domestic crisis in three decades, and the window for fruitful diplomatic engagement with the United States, its longtime adversary, slammed shut.

  In Washington, State Department officials, scrambling to stay atop a half-dozen simultaneous meltdowns in the world’s most turbulent region, watched to see which path Syria’s uprising would take. Would Assad implement political reforms to try to stay ahead of the protesters, as the sovereigns of Jordan and Morocco had done? Would he share the fate of Egypt’s Mubarak, jettisoned by his own generals in a bid to preserve peace and their own skins?

  Syria’s president quickly made his choice clear. From the beginning, Assad signaled a resolve to avoid the concessions that, in the minds of many of Syria’s elite, had directly precipitated the fall of Mubarak in Egypt. There would be no serious effort to accommodate protesters’ demands for political and economic reforms. Instead, Assad would seek to bludgeon, gas, and shoot his way out of the crisis. In the first week alone, at least seventy protesters were killed, and hundreds of others were thrown into makeshift holding cells. The international watchdog Human Rights Watch later confirmed reports of twenty-seven interrogation centers set up by Syrian intelligence, where detainees were beaten with clubs, whips, and cables and given electric shocks. Yet the protests continued to grow.

  The suffering by ordinary Syrians was, in the view of many U.S. officials, not only tragic but also wholly avoidable, if Assad were a more capable leader. Syria’s biggest problems in 2011 appeared to be mostly economic: high unemployment, worsened by a prolonged drought that had sent rural villagers into the cities looking for work. The country’s myriad ethnic and sectarian divisions had mostly been subdued after decades of secular Baathist rule. Many of the early protesters in Aleppo and Hama were angry not at Assad per se but at corruption within the president’s inner circle. Frederic C. Hof, a former army expert on the Middle East who was appointed as special envoy to the region in 2009, wondered in the early weeks if Assad might still try to buy himself some goodwill by reining in some of his more extravagant relatives and dealing leniently with those protesting police brutality.