Zarqawi’s charisma was the topic of one of the more memorable of these sessions that fall, when we sat down with raw transcripts eavesdropped from a broadcast he had made. He began with a lengthy preamble. For minutes, Zarqawi enthusiastically praised each of his cells in Iraq.
“To the brave lions of Samarra,” he said, “you strike fear in the hearts of the invaders. . . . And to sons of the sword in Diyala Province . . . To the vanguard in Tikrit . . .”
After a while, John Christian cut in. “He does it by township,” he said, reluctantly impressed. What could be more powerful to a struggling group of jihadists in some dusty basement than to have Zarqawi himself praise their outfit on a broadcast that would soon rocket around the world on the Internet?
“This guy is the real deal,” John said. “He understands what he’s doing.” I agreed. The speech confirmed the image we had stitched together of Zarqawi as a leader. Recovered videos showed him circulating the battlefield, motivating his disparate frontline cells. Firsthand reports of his visits described him as exceedingly quiet and gracious yet visibly confident enough to be inspiring. To the awe of his followers, Zarqawi personally went on missions, donning disguises to get past American checkpoints.
Zarqawi’s reputation as a battlefield commander was the foundation for his mystique. That jihadist mystique—a potent mix of violence and real charisma, perfumed by thick propaganda efforts—was wafting outside of Iraq’s borders. As it did, he became the face of the insurgency. Without that personification and his celebrity, the otherwise anonymous Iraqi resistance groups would have had a harder time pulling in foreign volunteers.
At the time, we believed between 100 and 150 jihadists were entering Iraq every month, but that calculation, based on a combination of assessments, was less than scientific. Against the Coalition’s estimate that the Sunni insurgency comprised between 12,000 and 20,000 men of varying levels of enthusiasm and expertise, this might have appeared small. But I believed their impact on the violence was disproportionately large. The leadership of Al Qaeda in Iraq remained heavily foreign, replenished by outsiders who were sometimes experienced operatives with personal and ideological connections to Al Qaeda’s regional network. At the lower end of the spectrum, the younger, harsher, and more enthusiastic jihadists infused energy into the insurgency. Without competing commitments like jobs or families, these foreign volunteers had nothing to do but fight full time. Unlike aggrieved Iraqis, they had no indigenous stake in the future of Iraq. So a functioning electric grid or more jobs or even greater political concessions for Iraq’s Sunnis would not convince them to lay down arms. They came to hurt and kill Americans.
Most critical was the steady resupply of suicide bombers. If even a fraction of the hundred men crossing the borders were willing to blow themselves up on suicide missions—and documents TF 714 later captured and released showed the majority crossed the border with that stated intention—they could do great harm. Through increasingly seismic car bombs that left whole city blocks charred and relentlessly decimated Iraqi police and army recruits, a single suicide bomber could exact a disproportionate toll.
As we studied the problem, we found the enemy network had a frighteningly efficient system to recruit, intake, move, and employ foreign fighters. We were most amazed by cases where, in a year or less, they could reach a young man with no prior history of violence, pluck him from his daily life, get him into Iraq, and convince him to strap a suicide vest across his torso or torch off a car bomb in a crowded, daylight market. Although each person volunteered for individual reasons, we began to see a template emerge.
For many, the journey began in the glow of a computer screen, watching slick propaganda videos posted to the Internet. Carefully constructed montages, overlaid with hymnal chanting or righteous sermons, played on the man’s guilt and anger, while propagandists challenged his sense of manhood with stories of Iraqi women raped by Americans. But often, slick videos were superfluous: In my experience, we found that nearly every first-time jihadist claimed Abu Ghraib had first jolted him to action. Ginned up, he started to hang around a local mosque. There, a spotter picked him out, detecting in him the same fidgety, adolescent yearning he’d seen in dozens of other young men. The spotter befriended him and soon introduced him to a wider group of men. These guys, the recruit found, also liked to discuss the American war in Iraq and the jihad. They met regularly at the mosque to listen to the smooth, airtight lessons of their mentor or cleric.