More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
To suggest that Saddam Hussein was providing sanctuary to him was contrary to everything that Bakos, the Zarqawi expert, knew to be true. It was like claiming that America’s twenty-second president, Grover Cleveland, had “harbored” Geronimo, the famed Apache chieftain of the frontier West who attacked settlers and Blue Coats from his base along the U.S.-Mexican border.
It was one of the great ironies of the age, Abu Hanieh said. In deciding to use the unsung Zarqawi as an excuse for launching a new front in the war against terrorism, the White House had managed to launch the career of one of the century’s great terrorists.
The moral underpinnings of the White House’s war effort were collapsing like rotten timbers, and aides to the president were working furiously to control the damage.
Saddam Hussein had openly backed violent groups such as the Abu Nidal Organization, in part to shore up his anti-Israel credentials with fellow Arabs.
Iraq’s secular regime persecuted and killed Islamic extremists, and al-Qaeda’s leaders abhorred the Iraqi dictator.
“We had heard of him,” Izbah said. “But there was no relationship.”
For ordinary Iraqis, the killings of innocents outside the embassy reinforced a sense of abandonment, a feeling that the American occupiers cared little about Iraqi self-governance and were unwilling or unable to provide basic security.
Brazilian who headed the United Nations mission in Iraq, was a diplomat’s diplomat, a savvy and experienced peacemaker who could be elegantly charming in five languages. Officially neutral on the war itself, he was the face of the international effort to put Iraq back together after the shooting ended. He was a tireless advocate for Iraqis,
late summer of 2003, as temperatures and tensions soared, the man everyone knew as “Sergio” was the embodiment of dignified calm, as crisp
Loescher regained consciousness to find himself lying upside down with his legs crushed beneath ceiling debris. Vieira de Mello lay buried in rubble a few feet away, but he had managed to reach his cell phone to call for help. As the rescue team burrowed their way toward him, the diplomat slowly bled to death, becoming one of twenty-two people to die in the bombing. It was the deadliest attack ever on a United Nations facility.
Hakim had just finished his sermon and was walking toward his motorcade when a car bomb exploded, followed quickly by a second. The blasts killed at least eighty-five people who had crowded the plaza for a glimpse of the cleric, and wounded more than five hundred. Thousands of worshippers and pilgrims fled the shrine in a panic, trampling over the dying and injured as they rushed the gates. Of Hakim, a man who had embodied the hopes of so many Iraqis as well as Americans, nothing identifiable was found except for a hand bearing the imam’s wedding ring.
“It’s why we were being so cautious,” Bakos said. “We knew there would be push-back, because what we were telling them meant that this was no longer a victory. It was a freaking nightmare.”
Bremer complained that the report’s conclusions were overdrawn and excessively negative, and it was his reaction that prompted the CIA to track down Richer on his vacation.
In effect, he said, two versions of reality were colliding in Iraq: the one witnessed by the agency’s spies, and another that sought to reinforce the message communicated so dramatically by Bush in May on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.
Countless articles and books have documented the Bush administration’s missteps, from the refusal to halt massive looting after the invasion to the wholesale dismantling of the Iraqi military and security structure by Bremer’s CPA.
But Iraqi views hardened after weeks of frenzied looting of everything from government offices to priceless museum artifacts to the rebar on newly constructed buildings, Mike said.
Iraq, they said, was facing an organized resistance movement that sought to overthrow central authority through subversion and armed conflict.
Zarqawi, after months of fighting from the shadows, was gaining confidence as the de-facto leader of a full-blown insurgency in Iraq. His movement, now supported by thousands of embittered Iraqis and sympathetic Islamists from across the Muslim world, would soon pose the greatest single threat to American ambitions in Iraq.
“The fertile soil was Iraq after de-Baathification,” Richer said. “The rain and sunshine were the ineptitude of the provisional authority and U.S. misunderstanding of Iraqis and their culture.
with little appreciation for the cultural richness of a land that had given birth to written language, mathematics, astronomy, and the law.
In Baghdad, Sunnis were being targeted by roving bands of Shiite militiamen.
It was on July 4, as he later remembered, and he showed up unannounced with other tribal leaders, bearing a gift: flowers to commemorate the American holiday.
At one point, the American commander managed to insult his visitors with a comment that seemed to lump together Iraqis and terrorists. One of the sheikhs, angered, accused the Americans of being dupes of Ahmad Chalabi, the exiled Shiite politician who provided the Bush administration with faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction.
he proceeded to the heart of his message: a plan for a coming battle that called for killing Shiites in even greater numbers. Such a campaign, he argued, would simultaneously achieve three objectives: destabilizing Iraq, eliminating a hateful apostasy, and, most important, forcing Sunnis to take up arms in a war that would lead to their liberation—a war that he would ignite—an “awaking of the slumberer and rousing of the sleeper.”
If Bin Laden agreed with Zarqawi’s strategy—“if you adopt it as a program and road, and if you are convinced of the idea of fighting the sects of apostasy”—then Zarqawi was prepared to swear allegiance. “We will be your readied soldiers, working under your banner, complying with your orders,” he said.
Fallujah would become forever associated with the deaths of four American security contractors who were ambushed and then dismembered, dragged through the streets and burned, with their bodies left dangling from a Euphrates River bridge.
Zarqawi had essentially created a three-sided war, with U.S. forces drawing fire from the other two sides at once.
Abdullah met with L. Paul Bremer, the White House–appointed head of Iraq’s provisional government, and urged him to reconsider decisions to disband the Iraqi army and blacklist members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.
Even with the upsurge in terrorist attacks, surely women’s lives had improved since the dictator’s removal, one of the dinner guests suggested. “They’re ten times worse,” the king replied. “When you had a secular regime under Saddam, men and women were pretty much equal.”
“This was supposed to be his ‘shock and awe,’ the thing that would give him a global reputation,” said a Jordanian intelligence official who participated in the agency’s review. “Zarqawi really did want his own name to precede Bin Laden’s. And more than that, he really wanted to hurt the GID.”
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.
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.
The Iraqi city of Ramadi was not yet the “capital of the Islamic state of Iraq,” as Zarqawi’s followers would soon call it. But already, in the early summer of 2004, there was little doubt about who controlled the town.
“He surrounds himself with the scum of Anbar,” Zaydan complained. “The people accept him because they are sheep without a shepherd. But the men close to him are lowlifes, people with no conscience. And they are drawn to Zarqawi because he has a lot of money.”
Omar the Electrician came along, and rose to become the leader of Zarqawi’s brigade in Fallujah.
For the first time, Zarqawi also revealed a conviction regarding his own destiny as a midwife for the new golden age of Islam. He referred to apocalyptic passages in the Hadith describing the end-times struggle that would lead to Islam’s ultimate triumph. According to the ancient prophecies, mankind’s final battle would be fought in northern Syria, near a village called Dabiq. The story echoes early Christian teachings about the epic contest between forces of good and evil at Armageddon. Jihad’s “flames will blaze,” Zarqawi said, “until they consume the Armies of the Cross in Dabiq.”
Maqdisi watched in disapproval as his former protégé killed Muslim men, women, and children who had nothing to do with overthrowing a corrupt leader.
Over the following year, a total of five hundred Islamic scholars and seven international Islamic assemblies would formally endorse what came to be called “the Amman Message.”
Even though Zarqawi might be fighting Americans and Shiites, his chief targets were ultimately the minds of young Muslims he hoped to win to his cause.
the birth of a movement that would cleanse Muslim lands of “every infidel and wicked apostate” and pave the way for a restoration of the Islamic caliphate, it said.
Stop the Iraqi elections.
Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Sunnis had been politically marginalized—and
The United States should not serve as guarantor for a vote that would be seen by a third of the country’s population as illegitimate, the diplomats warned.
In Anbar Province, the participation rate among Sunnis was a mere 2 percent.
Resting on the seat was a laptop computer—Zarqawi’s computer—next to a sack containing a hundred thousand dollars in mixed currencies.
A classic narcissist, Zarqawi truly appeared to see himself as the incarnation of one of the ancient Islamic warriors he so admired.
Zarqawi announced a new military offensive, specifically targeting the Rafidha, or “those who refuse”—a pejorative term for members of the Shiite faith.
One of her brothers had become a midlevel officer with AQI before being killed by U.S. troops in the town of Fallujah. The Americans had also killed a second brother and a brother-in-law. The woman had been distraught over their deaths, and she felt a tug of obligation: according to tribal custom, Sunni Iraqis are obliged to avenge the killings of family members.
“They told me I would be killing Americans,” she complained repeatedly to Abu Haytham. “All I wanted was to avenge the deaths of my brothers.”
Though she had never met Zarqawi, she could not grasp that the leader of AQI had really wanted her to sacrifice her own life to kill mothers and children at a wedding party.
