I saw the evolution of our fight in Iraq against Al Qaeda the same way. Al Qaeda had never planned or desired for Iraq to be the place in which it clashed with and bled the United States. Afghanistan had always been the more appealing country to which to lure the Americans. For our part, America did not invade Iraq in order to fight Al Qaeda. Despite some reports and claims of Saddam’s purported late-in-life connections with bin Laden’s network, any ties were insignificant. No one on either side, except perhaps Zarqawi, wanted or expected Iraq to be the main battleground for the war on terror. But by mid-2005, it was precisely that.
To win in Iraq, Al Qaeda did not need to destroy our army. It needed only to demonstrate that our success in Iraq was impossible. It needed to show that the thesis of a politically moderate Muslim world, engaged with the West, was invalid, that American power was illusory. We needed to defeat it in what became its self-stated main effort. We also needed to succeed in ours. For us, the war against Al Qaeda could not be won in Iraq. But it could be lost.
Now in late June, as commanders were gathering in Gettysburg and I prepared to brief the president, we had gotten news from Afghanistan of another loss. Eight men from our 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment had been killed. After a small team of SEALs under a separate command was ambushed in a remote valley, the 160th pilots had taken off from a nearby base, flying the urgent rescue mission. Insurgents shot down one of the Chinook helicopters, carrying eight SEALs. All sixteen men on board died.
In Gettysburg, several commanders and I gathered in one of the small hotel rooms outfitted by our team as a temporary communications center, drew the curtains, and conducted a video teleconference with the leader of our Afghanistan task force, then-Captain Ed Winters. Ed, also the commander of TF 714’s SEALs, had an impressive ability to drive elite forces in tough situations.
As we talked on the VTC, Ed was preparing to send members from his task force, which included SEALs, Rangers, Air Force Special Tactics operators, and others, into the valley in an attempt to find survivors or, more likely, recover bodies. He was forward and solidly in control of the situation, and we were thousands of miles away. But in the new way in which we had constructed and operated our network, my command team and I were always in the fight, even at Gettysburg. That night, weather prevented Ed from launching the mission. When they could get to the site two days later, the operators who searched for their comrades had to search intensively through the charred crash site before they were able to account for each of the fallen.
* * *
From notes I’d received before the Situation Room meeting, I’d known that President Bush wanted to know about Zarqawi the man and the leader. After a year and a half of hunting Zarqawi, we had studied him closely.
He was born in 1966 as Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh into the dun, industrial city of Zarqa, northeast of Jordan’s glitzier capital of Amman. Ahmad grew up—along with two older brothers and seven sisters—in one of Zarqa’s drab, boxy concrete apartments. With no parks in the dusty, hardscrabble neighborhood, Zarqawi spent his time playing among the headstones of the cemetery near his apartment.
He was unremarkable in his youth, but not the dunce some made him out to be. He captained his soccer team and earned Bs in school but suddenly dropped out at age seventeen. He married and got a job sweeping Zarqa’s brown streets but before long was drinking heavily. He used and sold drugs. He earned a reputation for his temper and became known as the Green Man for the tint the ink of his many tattoos gave his skin. During this time he was, by various accounts, either arrested for a case of attempted rape or questioned in relation to it and briefly detained for wounding a man with a knife in a fight.
Reportedly at the insistence of his mother, Ahmad attended a mosque in Amman recognized for its strict Salafist bent. As with others schooled there, it soon led him to Afghanistan. Only by the time he arrived, in the spring of 1989, he had missed the war: The Soviets had already withdrawn back across the Amu Darya. He instead worked as a correspondent for a Peshawar-based jihadist mouthpiece, traveling around Afghanistan interviewing mujahideen, chronicling their heroic exploits. Drawing up these burnished portraits would surely be useful to him later in fashioning his own persona.