The Targeter

by Nada Bakos

  Moments later, just before 7:00 a.m. on February 22, a massive explosion rocked the mosque’s golden dome. Six seconds later, a second explosion fully sheared off the top half of the iconic landmark and left in its place an ominous nest of twisted rebar and a cascade of rubble that spilled over the building’s blue tile wall into the courtyard below. Everything around it was covered in gray dust. The security guards fled, never to be heard from again. No one else was hurt—a trend that, sadly, would not continue.

  The moment I heard about it, there was no doubt in my mind who was responsible; I knew the bombing was just the sort of audacious strike al Qaida central would have deplored. The attack was straight from Zarqawi’s playbook—an escalation of small-scale sectarian attacks that had already created a kind of cultural powder keg in Iraq. Blowing apart one of the world’s holiest Shia sites was such a deliberately provocative religious attack that I wondered if the Quds Force, the notorious special operations forces unit from Iran, Iraq’s predominantly Shia neighbor, might even come after Zarqawi.

  They did not. However, calling the mosque bombing “our 9/11,” the aggrieved Shia population finally went in search of its pound of flesh—and far more. Thousands of armed Shias flooded into Baghdad on flatbed trucks, joining up with simmering militias there, creating an energy that soon boiled over. The largest of those militias—the self-proclaimed Mahdi Army—began carrying out the gruesome torture, often involving power drills, of Sunni insurgents they managed to capture. Meanwhile, in one similar incident in the southeastern corner of the country, gunmen wearing Iraqi police uniforms seized a dozen Sunni men from a jail in Basra, dragged them from detention, and promptly executed them. Over the following two days, my team got reports from the ground about more than 150 Sunni mosques being torched or strafed with bullets and ten imams being killed. By the end of the week, we estimated that roughly one thousand Iraqis were dead from the violence sparked by the al-Askari bombing.

  Conditions continued to deteriorate when the largest Iraqi sects fully turned on each other. In what history now recognizes as a pivotal moment in postwar Iraq, Sunni-Shia violence overshadowed the damage previously done by the Sunni insurgency. Some 2.7 million people would be displaced inside Iraq by the end of the year, and two million more would flee for refuge in neighboring countries. Farmers and shopkeepers were driven to join militias and take up arms in the fleeting hope of securing their own safety. US forces found themselves in the position of being a kind of third armed faction in Iraq, never quite sure when to intervene and completely befuddled by their new role in a conflict that had properly descended into malevolent chaos. Against the fiercest urging by al Qaida’s top command to avoid killing other Muslims, by early 2006 Zarqawi had his civil war.

  As newlyweds, Roger and I had already moved into a comfortable rhythm of daily mundane routines, coupled with long hours at work for both of us. The frenetic pace of my job seemed normal.

  As conflict raged in the streets of Iraq that February, something equally important was unfolding inside the command center at the central Iraq air base.

  A new crop of interrogators—officially air force criminal investigators, though they simply referred to themselves as gators—had arrived after a condensed six-week training program at Fort Huachuca, in Sierra Vista, Arizona. The new team was joining a small team of holdover gators and was greeted by two valuable detainees waiting for them inside the “gator pit.”

  The detainees were different from others awaiting interrogation, however. They hadn’t fought with firearms. They carried holy books.

  Along with its visible military presence, AQI’s functioning in Iraq required a quieter but still necessary religious presence in the country. As civil society there crumbled soon after the US invasion, clerics held increased sway over a population searching for order and stability. Much as Zarqawi found comfort and direction in radical Islam while in prison years earlier, the same could be said of impressionable young Iraqis in 2006. AQI’s influence in mosques in Iraq was a modest one, but given that there was a fraying pipeline to foreign fighters, those houses of worship became an ever-more-important recruiting ground. By 2006, imams who agreed to preach in favor of Sunni extremism were increasingly valuable to the terror network.

  Early that year, a pair of imams—Abu Zaydan and Abu Ali—were grabbed during SOF raids of AQI meetings near Yusufiya. Over a few weeks of interrogations, it became clear that they had only recently, and even reluctantly, joined AQI in hopes the Sunni network would protect their families from roving Shia militias.

  They confessed that their contributions were mostly limited to encouraging new recruits to join Zarqawi’s cause. Of more interest to interrogators, however, was their task of granting final blessings to the AQI bombers suiting up for suicide missions. That meant the imams held a loftier rank within the organization than those base-level killers, even if they didn’t directly oversee the foot soldiers. We’d spent years picking apart AQI’s operations-side hierarchy; now there was hope that combing the religious side of the network might offer us a straighter shot to the top.

  Even if that didn’t pan out, their task of offering final blessings meant that these imams in custody knew of meeting spots frequented by key players within the organization. Soon enough, both Abu Zaydan and Abu Ali pinpointed a handful of farmhouses and safe houses in Yusufiya as locations of weapons stockpiles and video studios where bombers filmed their final testimonials.

  That information was immediately passed along to special operators. For weeks, no activity was detected at those safe houses—until just after 1:00 a.m. one night in mid-April, when a blue truck and a white sedan pulled up outside one of the farmhouses. Within minutes, SOF launched into what we came to know as Operation Larchwood 4. Cross-referencing known individuals at the farmhouse, we understood their target to be a local commander known as Abu Sayyif, a media specialist in the nearby Abu Ghraib regional cell who mostly spent his days posting recruitment videos on the Internet.

  The task force boarded the helicopters for the quick flight from Baghdad. Some of the personnel carried chemical lights to mark the landing zones; others packed explosives to breach locked doors. A smaller helicopter flew behind in support, as did a giant AC-130 Spectre gunship high above. In addition, they were joined by a small support group that would supply extra firepower if necessary.

  Soon the four SOF assault teams arrived at the target and hopped off their helicopters at the end of a wide orchard that stretched north from the farmhouse. The teams quickly made their way through the darkness southwest along the grove of date palms and around the back of the farmhouse. There they split into two units, to simultaneously prosecute the assault from the southern and eastern sides. Two team members, sent ahead as spotters, spied a carport on the southeast corner of the building. An open door there led into the house. At just after 2:00 a.m., everything seemed quiet.

  The spotters hurried back to their teams to report the good news. Little did they realize how much their luck was about to change.

  One team swept silently back to the carport, past a parked automobile there, and into the darkened hallway.

  Pop-pop-pop: a sudden volley of shots came from inside the house.

  Three soldiers were hit and scrambled to retreat back out through the carport. The wounded collapsed behind a sand berm at the end of the driveway, their teammates ripping open medical kits to treat them. From the second floor, a new shooter strafed the sand berm with gunfire. Then an explosion rang out nearby as another militant hurled grenades from the roof.

  From high above, the AC-130 had eyes on the action and could have sprayed the entire house with a storm of 20mm rounds from its Gatling-style cannons. But the mission was to capture whoever was inside the farmhouse, not bury them inside it. Instead the men of the task force threw their own grenades back and maneuvered themselves to reenter the house.

  Moving through the carport a second time, two more coalition soldiers were hit—one shot, another wounded by a grena
de fragment. But this time they shot back, killing an enemy gunman in the corridor. Back at the air base’s command center, explosions from the firefight temporarily blinded the pixelated video feeds from the orbiting surveillance aircraft.

  One of those platforms proved its worth, however, catching sight of a man running from the rear of the house, then taking cover behind a nearby parked car. The soldiers were alerted to his position and cut him down before he could detonate his suicide vest.

  Inside the darkened farmhouse, the bloodied coalition soldiers began clearing rooms. In one they happened upon another militant and shot him dead. In another room, they found women and children cowering in fear and guided them to a corner for their safety. More shots were fired as the task force secured the rest of the house—and then it was time to deal with the extremist who’d been hurling grenades.

  One soldier crept up the darkened stairway toward the roof, rifle at the ready. Just as he approached the doorway to the outside, the combatant unleashed one final attack and detonated a suicide vest he was wearing, packed with C-4. The shock waves blasted the soldier back down the stairs, though he was able to get to his feet and hobble away to shelter. The militant, on the other hand, was completely dismembered by the explosion; his head was later discovered among debris on the other side of the roof. With the shooting finally done, five jihadists were dead. Five coalition soldiers had been wounded.

  Downstairs, task force members were collecting videocassettes, computers, and anything they could find of intelligence value. My team would get our hands on those soon enough. The task force cuffed five people, including Abu Sayyif, a doughy English speaker who appeared to be in his midthirties, and four others whose identities weren’t yet known. They were led out to the waiting helicopters. Before leaving, soldiers gathered up four AK-47 assault rifles—along with a weapon they never expected to find at that farmhouse: a rifle generally carried by members of the coalition units within the United Kingdom Special Forces.

  As soon as the task force arrived back at the air base, the task force’s forensic teams dug into the computers gathered from the bloody raid. There they found videos of Zarqawi proselytizing and one of him, dressed in all black, wielding a hulking machine gun during scattershot target practice in the desert.

  Beyond the updated images of Zarqawi we could add to our wall, those computers held footage of something even more curious. In one video, Zarqawi was seen casually sitting cross-legged on a mat, next to a rifle leaning against the wall to his right. Far from the AK-47s I’d become accustomed to seeing in mujahideen clips, this black assault rifle appeared to be a Diemaco C8 carbine with a massive optical sight, a matte-green thirty-round magazine plugged into the system, and even a 40mm grenade launcher mounted beneath the barrel. I recognized it as a United Kingdom Special Forces weapon—the exact same gun that had been recovered in Yusufiya. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

  Was Zarqawi supposed to be at the farmhouse? I wondered. Could he have left before the task force arrived? Did we really just miss him again?

  CHAPTER 14

  Perpetual End of the Road

  Back at the air base, the gators immediately began taking runs at Abu Sayyif, the known detainee from Yusufiya. All five of the men captured at the farmhouse were insisting that they were gathered there for a wedding, yet there was no sign of a bride, and for what was supposedly a celebration, there were a conspicuous number of men wearing suicide vests.

  Obviously, the story was bogus—but what exactly were they doing there? Were they filming final testimonials for an upcoming attack? If so, the number of vests packed with C-4 augured a massive plot. What was their target?

  Or, approaching the question from a different angle, what if those men weren’t bombers at all but rather a security team? Who were these other detainees to warrant that kind of protection? How did that square with finding Zarqawi’s gun in the farmhouse with them?

  It took a few days, but Abu Sayyif finally broke. The balding Iraqi required no interpreter, mostly mumbling answers to the questions posed by his gators in a soft English accent. He was not, he admitted, the videographer for some make-believe nuptials. He was a pediatrician by trade. Desperation—for his own safety and for his mother’s in the face of Shia brigades—drove him to Zarqawi’s network. Handling local media operations was also a chance to make money at a time when civil unrest had made working at his medical practice unsafe. He had no true allegiance to al Qaida, and the few days he spent in custody at Balad—much less the prospect of years of incarceration at Abu Ghraib or, worse, a death sentence from the Iraqi government—loosened him up enough to make him say that one of the other detainees, identified as Mubassir, was his boss. At which point all eyes focused on Mubassir—who was even more certainly not the simple cameraman he claimed to be. And time was of the essence.

  Ten days after the arrests in Yusufiya, Al Qaida in Iraq did something I puzzled over at the time: they released what became an infamous video of Zarqawi wearing a black bandana, his trademark ammunition vest atop a black shirt, and black pants. It was an edited-down version of the video footage I’d watched after it was captured in the Yusufiya farmhouse.

  In the video, Zarqawi is seen standing in a landscape barren and beige except for a few hearty patches of scrubby brush. His arms are wrapped around a massive M249 squad automatic weapon, a machine gun that comes with a foldout bipod at the front and fires more than a dozen rounds per second. In the video, Zarqawi levels the weapon at an unseen target off to the right of the frame and sprays a barrage of bullets. He appears stocky but sturdy; it was the first time I could ever remember him daring to show his face.

  When the video was released, I was unsure if Zarqawi had simply gotten sloppy. Perhaps it was bravado that led to this public display of machismo, or maybe he felt that a public demonstration was necessary to reassert his alpha status among Sunni insurgents feeling the heat of the coalition crackdown. Even more irksome to intelligence officers was the possibility that Zarqawi knew exactly what had been found at the farmhouse and decided to release the material before we could. Some in the intelligence community saw it as Zarqawi taunting us, bragging about slipping through our fingers again in Yusufiya. I worried more about the hunt ahead. If Zarqawi really knew what we knew and was recalibrating accordingly, acting on whatever intelligence could be gleaned from the men in the farmhouse became that much more urgent.

  The interrogators got back to work. They sensed that Mubassir held the key.

  As all this unfolded behind the scenes, the Pentagon publicly responded to Zarqawi’s latest video in an unprecedented way. It released outtakes from the filming recovered in Yusufiya, played for reporters at a weekly press briefing in the Green Zone in early May. I thought it a bizarre and even somewhat petty move on the part of the Defense Department—but I couldn’t blame them for having the primal urge to prick holes in Zarqawi’s mystique. I laughed, too, the first time I saw the outtakes.

  “What you saw on the Internet was what he wanted the world to see,” Major General Rick Lynch, the American military spokesman, said at the briefing. “‘Look at me, I’m a capable leader of a capable organization—and we are indeed declaring war against democracy inside of Iraq, and we’re going to establish an Islamic caliphate.’” Lynch was openly mocking Zarqawi.

  In the version of the video shown at the press briefing, Zarqawi is seen striding purposefully across the barren landscape from left to right. The zoom jerks in, going from a full-body shot of the Jordanian to an image of just his torso, in the center of the frame, with his forearms bulging around the machine gun.

  Thump-thump! the weapon barks.

  Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump!

  Click.

  Zarqawi cocks his head like a confused puppy and stares down at the trigger, which has stopped responding. Off camera, someone shouts in Arabic, “Go help the sheikh,” and another man dressed entirely in black scampers in from the left side of the frame and sheepishly fiddles with the machine gun
for his boss.

  Thump-thump! the weapon barks again; then Zarqawi unleashes the fully automatic hail of bullets he publicized to the world.

  The follies didn’t end there. Later in the video shown at the briefing, Zarqawi hands the machine gun to a subordinate and begins marching back to a white pickup truck with a feathery red swoop painted on the side. Zarqawi’s white New Balance sneakers are prominently visible below his tribal-chic jihadist wardrobe. The first subordinate hands the machine gun to another—who unwittingly grabs the weapon by its scalding-hot barrel and drops it.

  Zarqawi and his men looked amateurish—as indeed they could be. I knew Zarqawi had an ego and was practically obsessed with his stature in the insurgent community. Poking the bear was clearly the latest tactic in the Pentagon’s unfolding “information operations” campaign in Iraq, the friendlier-sounding modern incarnation of age-old psychological warfare. If those outtakes truly did cast doubt on Zarqawi’s ability to lead, or make it seem like his jihad was a lost cause, perhaps a few Iraqis would choose to avoid his group and some good could come from releasing the unedited video. Still, if the goal was to prick holes in Zarqawi’s overinflated aura, I cringed a bit at the military’s word choice.

  “Why he’s their leader, I don’t know,” Lynch concluded at the press conference. “It’s just a matter of time before we take him out.”

  The military was convinced that the endgame had begun. Interrogators had begun tightening the noose on Zarqawi’s network. Meanwhile, my team at the Agency was tracking a new lead of its own, this one a product of the collaborative groundwork I’d helped lay with other governments’ intelligence units.