Black Flags (36 page)

But the battlefield was changing. Violence-weary Sunni tribes, banding together into militias that called themselves “Sons of Iraq,” were beginning to drive foreign jihadists from their villages, sometimes killing them. President George W. Bush’s troop surge of 2007 had flooded the country with thousands of fresh combat soldiers. Most important, America’s highly successful “fusion cells”—the antiterrorism teams of U.S. intelligence and special-forces operatives—had taken the pursuit of Islamist militants to a lethal new level. The cities of the Sunni Triangle that had served as a sanctuary and operating base for Zarqawi were rapidly becoming hostile and even dangerous to his followers, day and night.

At the U.S. special-forces base at Balad, the same formula General McChrystal had used to track and kill Zarqawi was yielding fresh successes each day, and often multiple times a day. The effort continued at a steadily rising tempo through 2008, when McChrystal received his fourth general’s star and a promotion to Joint Staff Chief. His replacement, Vice Admiral William McRaven, kept the same policies in place until U.S. combat operations in Iraq officially ended in 2010.

The daily search started with an astonishing array of electronic
sleuthing tools, capable of sweeping up every mobile-phone call, e-mail, and text message sent by anyone, anywhere in Iraq. When someone dialed a number that matched a phone in Balad’s growing terrorist database, technical teams went to work, tracking the caller’s location and movements. U.S. drones and airplanes served as mobile cell towers that could tap directly into calls made from suspicious phones. Airborne surveillance cameras gave U.S. spies enhanced capabilities to trail suspicious cars and trucks.

Equally impressive were the teams of SEALs and Delta operators who set out nightly to kick in the doors of terrorists whose hideouts had been discovered in the previous day’s surveillance. By the fourth year of the war, the commandos’ tactics had been honed to a fine edge, so that small units of a half-dozen men could carry out multiple raids on a single night. “Joseph,” a retired operator who participated in scores of such missions, recalled how the intensity of the fight changed in the months after Zarqawi’s death, when the Pentagon authorized an all-out effort to destroy what was left of the Jordanian’s terrorist network.

“In 2007, we took the gloves off,” said Joseph, who agreed to an interview on the condition that his real name not be revealed. “We were going out on missions and targeting al-Qaeda as hard as we could. Kill-capture missions, not capture-kill. We were handing them their ass, killing al-Qaeda every night.”

The workday began at sundown, just as the surveillance teams were coming off their shifts. “We’d have dinner for breakfast,” Joseph said. “Then we’d get a brief and we’d go out on a mission. We’d hit a target, going in with [silencers] and night vision, and there would be a gunfight, almost every night. We’d do our own interrogations and develop our own lines of intelligence. And, based on what we found, we’d immediately go after the next thing. And we would do it every single day.”

The tactics worked on multiple levels. The accelerated tempo of the nightly operations kept the terrorists off balance, unable to coordinate or plan sophisticated attacks. The raids also produced torrents of fresh intelligence, including insights into the recruitment and training of suicide bombers. The ones Joseph interrogated included teens
who had been subjected to heavy indoctrination by imams, and others who just seemed mentally unstable or slow-witted and gullible—“just as dumb as the day is long,” he remembered.

Most important, the commandos had found a way to get under the terrorists’ skin. The insurgents were no longer the deadliest, most unpredictable force in Iraq. Now it was their turn to be afraid, and exposed. The truth, as Joseph and his comrades discovered, was that the Islamic State’s fighters were skilled butchers, but lousy soldiers.

“They’re only good at terrorizing people who aren’t armed,” he said. “They think they’re good, but when we would wake them up in the middle of the night, they would crap their pants.”

The skirmishes inside the darkened houses were silent and short, often three minutes or less. Those who wisely surrendered found themselves surrounded by bearded, heavily muscled Westerners wearing dark clothes, armed with futuristic-looking weapons, and accompanied by ferocious attack dogs. In Iraqi villages, the story spread of “ninjas with lions” who would burst into town and then vanish again. During the interrogations that followed, Joseph would sometimes seek to perpetuate the legend.

“You’ve dealt with Americans before?” he would ask.

“Yes,” the handcuffed detainee would typically reply.

“Did they look like us?”

“No.”

“There’s a reason for that,” he would say. “I’m here for you. I’m the devil.”

The results were soon apparent, and not just in the numbers of killed and captured insurgents. In a single year, from 2007 to 2008, the number of GI casualties dropped from 904 to 314, and then dropped by half again the following year. Iraqi civilian deaths from suicide bombs fell from nearly thirty-nine hundred in 2007 to fewer than seventeen hundred in 2008, the start of a steep decline that would continue through the end of the decade.

The combined effort—the surveillance, the troop surge, the Sunni revolt, and most especially the raids—so weakened Zarqawi’s organization that Michael V. Hayden, the CIA director, declared the organization in 2008 to be in “
near-strategic defeat.” The jihadists who had held sway over Iraq for nearly four years were not completely
eliminated, but at last the Americans had discovered a formula for keeping them bottled up.

“
We didn’t become like them,” said an officer who supervised fusion cells as the program was starting to click. “We became what they were afraid of: shadows of the night.”

Everyone understood that the pressure could not be sustained indefinitely. The direct costs of invading, occupying, rebuilding, and stabilizing Iraq had drained more than a trillion dollars from the U.S. Treasury, with indirect costs adding another trillion to the taxpayers’ tab. A large majority of Americans no longer supported the war, and the Iraqis themselves were anxious to see U.S. combat forces leave the country. The U.S. troop withdrawal began in late 2007, and the last convoy of soldiers to exit the country would roll across the Iraq-Kuwait border on December 18, 2011, ending a deployment that cost nearly forty-five hundred American lives and left more than thirty-two thousand wounded. By the most conservative estimates, the Iraqi civilian death toll was twenty times higher.

The departing Americans were leaving to the Iraqis the task of managing their own security. It would have been a difficult challenge even for a country without Iraq’s history of explosive tensions along sectarian and ethnic divides. And, indeed, by almost every measure, the early efforts to create a stable Iraqi society fell short. Sunni distrust of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki exploded into open revolt in 2007, following the arrests of prominent Sunni politicians and the dismissals of Sunni commanders in the Iraqi army and security agencies. The following year, the Shiite-led government took steps to disband the Sons of Iraq militias that had helped drive out foreign Islamists, saying it would not tolerate the existence of private militias in the country. Shiite militias, meanwhile, were tolerated and—many Sunnis believed—officially encouraged.

U.S. forces offered the government significant help on the way out. In 2008 and 2010, the Americans delivered a pair of powerful blows against the Islamic State of Iraq, both aimed directly at the group’s reconstituted leadership. The first, in October 2008, was a commando strike on a terrorist base located inside Syrian territory, a few miles from the Iraqi border. In a covert operation approved by George W. Bush, special-forces teams in helicopters destroyed the
base and killed a man U.S. officials identified as Abu al-Ghadiya, the Syrian dentist and early disciple of Zarqawi who ran the main supply lines for money and recruits. Then, eighteen months later, American and Iraqi forces jointly attacked a desert hideout near the Iraqi city of Tikrit, just as a meeting of the terrorist group’s senior leadership was under way. The Iraqi government jubilantly displayed photos of two corpses pulled from the building’s rubble, confirming the deaths of Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the top two commanders of the Islamic State of Iraq since Zarqawi’s death.

The insurgents later acknowledged the deaths of “two knights [who] have dismounted to join the group of martyrs.” The message also promised certain revenge: a “
long, gloomy night and dark days colored in blood.” Yet the Islamic State’s ability to inflict serious harm on Iraq’s government—even a weak, divided Iraqi government—was seriously in doubt.

The jihadists’ new chief, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was a man of soaring ambitions, but in late 2011, well into his second year as leader, his boasts were as empty as the group’s coffers. The Islamic State of Iraq lacked resources, fighters, and sanctuary. And, perhaps most critically, it lacked a cause—a single big idea with which it could rally its depleted forces and draw other Muslims into the fold.

Soon, within the chaos of revolutionary Syria, it would find all four.

19

“This is the state for which Zarqawi paved the way”

In the sixth month of Syria’s uprising, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was ready to make a move. He tapped one of his most trusted deputies, a native Syrian and a veteran from the Zarqawi days, to lead an expedition into the Syrian heartland. Outside the capital and other regime strongholds, the institutions that maintained security within Syria were failing, one by one. Here was a chance for Zarqawi’s followers to leap to another badly weakened host.

The scouting party was tiny. “
There were not more than seven or eight of us,” the group’s leader later recalled. The men slipped across the Iraq-Syria border, traveling along a pair of desert highways that parallel the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, passing through small Syrian towns that had long served as way stations for fighters heading in the opposite direction. There, far from Syria’s contested cities, they met with local contacts, including former members of the Zarqawi network in Syria as well as other jihadists who were newly released from Bashar al-Assad’s jails, as the participants themselves would later confirm. The country they encountered was much as Iraq had been nine years earlier: a violent, lawless place where men with weapons moved freely. Unlike in Iraq, there was no threat of Americans suddenly swooping in from above.

“Syria would not have been ready for us if not for the Syrian revolution,” the mission’s leader, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, acknowledged
long afterward. “The revolution removed many of the obstacles and paved the way for us to enter this blessed land.”

Under a plan approved by the Islamic State’s Iraqi leadership, the men would establish a Syrian-run Islamist militia to join the rebels already battling Bashar al-Assad’s government. They called themselves Jabhat al-Nusra, or the Support Front for the People of Greater Syria. The name suggested a kind of auxiliary group coming to the aid of Syria’s outmatched opposition. In reality, Baghdadi’s designs for the group had nothing to do with helping Syrians. The al-Nusra Front would eventually develop an independent streak, breaking with its parent over everything from ideology to tactics and style. But the original idea, Western intelligence agencies later concluded, was to create a Syrian incubator for the caliphate Baghdadi would some day lead.

“
It was to be the face of the organization in Syria, laying the groundwork for the group’s expansion,” said a U.S. official who helped track the organization’s rise. “It was never supposed to be a distinct group.”

Over the months that followed, communications between the Syrian colony and the battered Iraqi leadership became a window into Baghdadi’s personality and growing ambitions. Like his spiritual predecessor, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Baghdadi wasn’t chiefly concerned with installing an Islamist government in the Syrian or Iraqi capitals. The goal was to impose Islamic rule without borders, and the way to achieve this was to act boldly, trusting that Allah would bend history itself to suit his purposes. Al-Qaeda’s more pragmatic thinkers spoke of the caliphate as a distant goal, one that would have to wait until the Middle East’s secular regimes could be toppled. But Baghdadi believed the opposite: raise the caliphate’s ancient banner, and righteous Muslims would fall into line.

“He was talking about physically restoring the Islamic caliphate in a way that nobody else did,” the U.S. official said. “He would establish an extremist vision of Islam and cleanse the land of apostates. And that would pave the way for a final showdown between Muslims and nonbelievers.”

In adopting Zarqawi’s vision, Baghdadi also enthusiastically embraced the Jordanian’s most grisly excesses. In the years following
Zarqawi’s death, his immediate successors appeared to take seriously al-Qaeda’s warning to avoid the kinds of shocking displays that might offend ordinary Muslims. The videotaped beheadings subsided, and there were fewer of the kinds of gratuitous attacks on Shiite women and children that had become a hallmark of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Now Baghdadi would bring them all back, on a scale that evoked the savagery of the Ikhwan hordes that had swept the Arabian Peninsula a century earlier. And, like Zarqawi, he would find a way to force the world to watch.

—

Had it not been for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Islamic State’s greatest butcher would likely have lived out his years as a college professor. Until 2003, life was steering him toward a quiet career of teaching Islamic jurisprudence to twenty-year-olds, rather than strapping bombs to their chests.

Islamist biographers later ascribed to Baghdadi great intellectual gifts and a natural bent toward jihad, though none of this is borne out in the extensive profiles pieced together by Western intelligence agencies. Nothing in his formative years suggested that the man born as Ibrahim Awad al-Badri possessed unusual talents or proclivities, except for a fascination with
fiqh
, or the legal interpretation of the thousands of sayings and edicts contained in Islam’s holy texts. He was not a violent troublemaker like Zarqawi, or an adventurer like Osama bin Laden, who moved to Pakistan after college to join the cause of Afghanistan’s mujahideen. There were no early flashes of charisma or cruelty. Instead, acquaintances remember a shy, nearsighted youth who liked soccer and kept mostly to himself. Indeed, in his first thirty-two years, Baghdadi seems to have drawn little notice even in his own neighborhood. One family friend recalled a young man “so quiet you could barely hear his voice.”