If those eight hundred troops had been sent in and bin Laden was captured or killed back in 2001, it is possible the United States would never have invaded Iraq. Perhaps the defense establishment, the Iraq war lobby, and the neocons around the president would have been satisfied that Washington got its revenge after 9/11 and had something to show for it, bin Laden’s head. Instead, toppling the Taliban and sending al-Qaeda into hiding was a quick, mostly covert, and cheap affair. Washington had little to point to and tell the American people that 9/11 had been avenged. Ousting the Taliban should have been the end of the Global War on Terrorism, known by the ugly acronym GWOT, but the United States couldn’t walk away from the blackjack table. Aside from Bush’s personal, family preoccupation with Iraq, the generals at the Pentagon hadn’t got their piece of the action. Afghanistan, at least at first, had been so easy and quick, many assumed Iraq would be just as simple, with far greater rewards. Iraq would be a real war, with troops in uniform, where officers could win medals and command men in battle, far different from the CIA-led mission that tossed out the Taliban in the blink of an eye. Even though the Iraq war would prove to be a failure, its proponents were right about a few things. How many generals did the American public know before 9/11? After the war, how many became presidential advisors, special envoys, lobbyists, consultants for arms manufacturers, and analysts for oil companies and hedge funds? So the United States went into Iraq, expanded its military operation in Afghanistan, rotated 2 million troops through the war zones, left seven thousand Americans dead, fifty-two thousand wounded, a million US veterans filing for some form of disability, caused the deaths of two hundred thousand Muslims—perhaps many more, depending on the estimate—spent a few trillion dollars, and created some choice real estate for hyperviolent extremists.
When the inspectors could not find WMDs, Iraq’s alleged ties with al-Qaeda took on greater importance as a justification for military action. Then the American proconsul, Paul “Jerry” Bremer, dissolved the Iraqi army and gave Shiites control of the country for the first time in fourteen centuries, stripping the minority Sunnis of their self-respect, stoking their sectarian rage, and sending them into the arms of Sunni extremists.
Al-Qaeda flocked to Iraq like moths to a flame, making the claims of the Bush administration a self-fulfilling prophecy. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a protégé of bin Laden’s, turned Iraq into a sectarian killing field.
I watched all this unfold while covering the aftermath of the invasion. The Sunni-Shiite civil war ushered in a level of brutality that was unrivaled even in a region known for bloody excess. To the dismay of al-Qaeda leaders holed up in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Zarqawi made Shiites the primary enemy, not Americans. And he understood how to use the Internet to spread the pornography of violence, digitally recruiting young Sunni men with visions of martyrdom and the solace of dark-eyed virgins in the afterlife.
Bin Laden never did this because he had neither the means nor the inclination. Bin Laden mostly released audio messages and the occasional low-quality video. But the United States had helpfully wired Iraq so everyone could use a cell phone—and, as an unintended consequence, get access to Zarqawi’s gruesome videos. Which is why, in the historical accounting, Zarqawi and not bin Laden may be viewed as the transformative figure in Islamist terrorism. An American airstrike killed him in 2006, but he had by then created the template for ISIS. ISIS evolved over time, first as al-Qaeda in Iraq and then striking out on its own.
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THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION KEPT CLAIMING that the war in Iraq was making American cities and towns safer. Fighting terrorism became the main rationale for the war after WMDs weren’t found and the “seeds of democracy” didn’t seem to be sprouting. I can’t remember how many times I heard the president, US diplomats in Baghdad, and American troops quote the phrase: “fight them [the terrorists] over there [in Iraq], so we won’t have to fight them over here [in the United States].” It became almost a religious mantra, defense by constant offense. Kill the monsters in their lair before they could come to the United States and kill us. US troops were told they were in Iraq to keep the terrorists from blowing up shopping malls back home and therefore saw most Iraqis as potential enemies, which complicated the fact that they were also told to build communities and win hearts and minds. In reality, by occupying Iraq for years and by reopening old religious wounds and upsetting the old order, the US invasion was making a terrorist attack in the United States more likely than it would have been otherwise. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and wasn’t a nest full of terrorists. By being “over there” we were making terrorists want to come “over here.” At least that’s what I suspected as the war dragged into its fourth year. I traveled to several countries to find out if the war in Iraq was feeding terrorism or, as the administration claimed, was keeping it at bay. Zarqa, a Jordanian city just across from the Iraqi border, was my first stop. It was al-Qaeda’s principal stronghold in Jordan and the birthplace of Zarqawi. Rarely visited by uniformed police, Zarqa was a place where Sunni hard-liners barely concealed their activities.
I arranged an interview with a low-level al-Qaeda-in-Iraq operative called Abu Zaal, who sold songbirds from his pet shop. A dwarf of a man, bent by his hunched back, he launched a harangue against the United States with the villainous glee of a character in a James Bond movie. But his tone turned deadly serious when he talked about fighting for al-Qaeda in Baghdad, Fallujah, and Ramadi: “America is dirtier than the devil because they kill Muslims. There is going to be a day when all Muslims become al-Qaeda.” In the meantime, he wanted to kill American soldiers. And Iranian soldiers. And Shiites, whatever their nationality. As for me, I was just an average American guy he was proud and happy to talk to. He was living in a great historic moment and reveled in what he was doing. He had punched his jihadist ticket. He was bubbling with the kind of energy I saw among many Sunnis during that period.
My next stop was Amman, to interview Abdullah al-Mujahir, who had been one of Zarqawi’s henchmen. I would not have chanced a meeting with him in Zarqa; it would have been too dangerous. Abu Zaal was more of a fixer, a low-level logistics man. Al-Mujahir, as he called himself, was a stone-cold killer. In later years he probably would have ended up in ISIS, happily setting people on fire. The interview was set up by NBC’s fixer in Amman and took place in a private home. As I look back, I’m thankful I met Mujahir in Jordan in 2007. If I encountered him in Syria in 2015, he probably would have been standing behind me with a knife at my throat.
He arrived (and left) with his face mostly covered, taking care not to be spotted by Jordan’s efficient intelligence service. Thickly set, he was forty or so, but his weather-beaten face—I could see around his eyes—made him look older. I was particularly interested in him because I had heard that he’d produced a number of al-Qaeda’s beheading videos. Tapping his laptop with gnarled fingers, he brought up some of the videos on the screen. Not only was he the producer, he was also an actor. He claimed to have participated in attacks.
He showed me how easy it was to make the videos. Point and shoot, and edit with the same software that you’d use to record your family sitting in front of the fireplace on Christmas morning. “The slaughter videos,” he said, “are meant to show that we can kill who we want, whenever we want—and to terrify American soldiers who don’t want to die this way.”
Mujahir said he was unconcerned about having his videos tracked by US and other foreign intelligence agencies. “There are so many different ways to avoid them,” he said, declining to be specific. In any event, he said, the Muslim warriors occupied the moral high ground: “Our death sends us to heaven; your death sends you to hell.”
His companion that day was a barefoot man named Jaffar, who looked to be in his early twenties. He had seen “his brothers” fighting in the Palestinian territories and Iraq and decided he wanted to be a mujahid, a career choice supported by his family. He was, to be blunt, a moron. He was also a dreamer (“I will be married to maidens in Paradise”)
and had been thoroughly brainwashed. I asked Mujahir, in Jaffar’s earshot, what Jaffar could possibly do since he didn’t have any training and didn’t seem very bright. “He will most likely be a suicide bomber,” Mujahir said. “He could drive a car or wear a suicide belt. He won’t be wasted.” If Jaffar was disturbed by his expendability, he didn’t show it.
My next stop was Tripoli, in northern Lebanon, to meet with Sheikh Bilal Baroudi, who had recognized early on that the conflict in Iraq was creating hundreds of video clips and photographs that could be useful in the jihad. If they were in the movie business, Mujahir would be running a movie studio and Bilal would be overseeing Netflix. While the two were pursuing the same end, they couldn’t have been more different. In contrast to the grizzled fighter Mujahir, Bilal was so smooth that he could have been poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He was a dandy. He kissed both my cheeks. He was well perfumed. He was friendly, jolly, and charismatic. He gave me tea.
Bilal and I talked in his basement media center where he was training young men to use jihadist websites and chat rooms without being traced or entrapped by foreign intelligence services. “The jihad has become open to everyone,” he said. “Someone from Turkmenistan can come to a camp in Lebanon to fight. But at the same time, it is a weak point because [the Internet] causes young men to get excited about things without preparing, and then they are easily caught.”
Images of Abu Ghraib prison, where the US Army tortured and abused detainees, and the Haditha killings of twenty-four unarmed Iraqis by US Marines, were immensely powerful propaganda. But al-Qaeda in Iraq figured out that the Internet could be more than a recruiting tool. Militants no longer needed to travel to Afghanistan or Pakistan for training. They could simply stay at home and train online. But as Bilal pointed out, digital training requires special caution: “There are many sites that claim to show how to make a bomb, but many of them are put up by intelligence services just fishing for young people.”
After visiting Jordan and Lebanon it was already clear the Iraq war was both attracting Islamic extremists and radicalizing the new recruits. US troops, it seemed to me, were creating more enemies than they were killing.
To get another look at Sunnis who went to Iraq to join the al-Qaeda resistance, I went to Ain al-Hilweh, the largest—and probably most dangerous—Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. I found it revealing, and disturbing, that Palestinians were leaving the camp to fight in Iraq, their long grievances with Israel morphing into a hatred of the US presence in Iraq. It wasn’t that their anger had shifted away from Israel—they still hated Israel—but there was little they could do to attack Israel, which tightly controls its borders. They could, however, go to Iraq to join the fight to defend Muslim pride, specifically Sunni pride—and through it their own pride. I thought it was dangerous that Palestinians and other aggrieved groups were finding a common cause in the Iraq war. If a Muslim was oppressed in Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt by his own oppressive US-backed government, but couldn’t express his anger, US troops in Iraq were an inviting and open path to vengeance, redemption, and if you believe the rhetoric, to Paradise. In the Internet age, Iraq was becoming a jihad meme, a trending topic for millions of Muslims angry for his or her own reasons.
It was even more predictable than the way al-Qaeda was created. Al-Qaeda was founded when jihadists were used and then abandoned by Muslim governments and the CIA, until they eventually found a home in Afghanistan under the Taliban. This time, a new breed of Islamists was being created because of the Iraq war and Sunni humiliation. I feared the consequences would be worse, and this new crop of extremists was forming under our eyes.
Established in 1948, when roughly seven hundred thousand Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes after Israel declared itself an independent Jewish state, Ain al-Hilweh was crammed with seventy thousand people.
The camp was seething with anger, mostly at Israel but also at the United States, Israel’s patron. The refugees also resented the Arab states for not doing anything about the camps and not integrating them into their societies—a policy designed to keep the Palestinian “cause” alive. In short, the refugees hated everybody, and because Ain al-Hilweh was a tinderbox of splinter groups—Marxists, socialists, Palestinian nationalists, the PLO, Islamists, and countless groups that have died out everywhere else on the planet—they often hated one another.
So it was no surprise that militant leaders in the camp claimed to have sent at least fifty suicide bombers to Iraq, among the most from any single location in the world. I went to Ain al-Hilweh primarily to interview Munir Hadad, who was reputedly recruiting young people to fight in Iraq. A news outlet in Lebanon had called the camp the “zone of unlaw,” and once I was inside, it was easy to see why. Our team would be safe in Munir’s section, but getting there was a hair-raising affair. Every street seemed to be controlled by a different gang, with checkpoints between sections of the camp. Men walked around with rifles slung over their shoulders. Islamists with long beards rode motorcycles and gave us hard stares. Even the Lebanese Army steered clear of Ain al-Hilweh.
“You see mujahideen who are volunteering and going to Iraq by themselves,” Munir said. “Iraq is the closest place they can go and fight Americans.” He said they were aroused by the American “massacres” of Iraqis: “When they see these massacres on television, they cannot handle it. Violence creates violence. Terrorism creates terrorism.”
One of the mujahideen was Asid Jabr, thirty-six, an unemployed security guard and father of four. As he walked down an alleyway to meet us, he carried a semiautomatic rifle. A gaggle of children skipped in front of him. He cleaned his gun as he explained why he was going to Iraq. “Our duty is to fight the occupation in any Arab country. God has given us the right to fight whether it is in Palestine or Iraq.
Fear goes with the job when you’re covering this part of the world, and you depend on a sixth sense to make sure you go when the going is good. “We’re leaving the camp,” I said on my broadcast sign-off. “We noticed we were being followed. Men riding motorcycles who weren’t affiliated with our contact were circling, watching us. We’ve decided to just pack it in and leave right now.”
The more I traveled, the more it became clear that the fighting in Iraq was impacting the entire region, and not for the better. I went to Syria to gauge its effects, as reflected both in attitudes toward the United States and in tangible social consequences. Iraq and Syria share a long border drawn by the European powers after World War I. Despite their interwoven histories, the two countries have had long periods of disagreeable relations since their partition. But at the time of my arrival—four years before the onset of the Syrian civil war—the Syrians were sympathetic to their neighbor, holding the US government responsible for the bloodshed in Iraq.
The people I spoke with took pains to distinguish the American people from President Bush and his policies. When Bush called for a “crusade” against terrorism in the week after 9/11, the word passed almost without notice in the United States, but it struck a deep historical chord in the Middle East, where a thousand years of history vibrate in the collective memory.
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THE WORD CRUSADE TRANSLATES IN Arabic as harb salibiya, or a “war of the cross,” a reference to the seven major European incursions sanctioned by popes, kings, and princes for several centuries beginning at the end of the eleventh century. The object of these military campaigns was to gain control of the holy places in or near Jerusalem, save Byzantium, the Christian Roman Empire founded by Constantine, and destroy the Muslim infidels. They were clashes of civilizations long before political scientists started using the phrase. Many in the Muslim world believe the Crusades have never ended, and Bush’s comments after 9/11 only reinforced their thinking. As I would hear over and over, from Zarqa to Lebanon and now in Syria, “The US war on terror is a war against Islam.”
Another source of anger in Syria was the flood of Iraqi refugees, most of them poor. (Rich refugees tended to go to Jordan.)
The social and moral consequences of the influx were visible in neon on the outskirts of Damascus. What had been desert was now a strip packed with dozens of sleazy nightclubs, each featuring fifty to a hundred young girls, almost all of them Iraqi refugees forced into the sex trade to support their families.
The owner of a place called the Lighthouse let us film inside his club because he thought it would be good advertising. The girls were barely pubescent (and some clearly weren’t), and they wore belly-dancing costumes covered with sequins. They didn’t strip and danced only occasionally. Mostly they marched around the stage like prisoners in a small exercise yard. They were displaying their wares for a few dozen men from Syria, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.
This was not the kind of prostitution bazaar you’d find in Moscow or in the lap-dancing emporiums in America. The Lighthouse was not a place for transactions. The men didn’t offer the girls money to come home with them for the night. If a customer was interested in a girl, he would talk to her father or uncle or male guardian. They would haggle over price and terms the next day. If a deal was struck, the girl would become the man’s sexual property for a week, a month, six months, or for as long as he was interested.
When a young Iraqi man watched his sister pimped out by his dad, the effect was grimly predictable. As likely as not, he would quickly be radicalized and eager to join the mujahideen. So the cycle of violence took yet another turn. Iraqis driven out of their country because of the fighting returned to their country to fight. The cycle of violence was a challenge for many countries in the region. A Sunni state might turn a blind eye to its nationals aiding the Sunni cause in Iraq, but the return home of battle-hardened veterans promised nothing but trouble.
And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East Page 12