Eventually the men carried the coffin through narrow, rutted streets to a nearby cemetery. They set the coffin in the dirt, next to a deep slit in the ground. Men carefully passed the limp body, wrapped head to toe in white linen, down to men standing in the hole, who laid it on its right side, holding it in place as the first shovelfuls of dirt fell over their shoes and covered the white shroud. They climbed out, and the hole was filled in. With the back of the shovel and then their hands, they smoothed the dark mound of dirt, and one of our main lines to Zarqawi ran cold.
Days later, the month ended with a gross demonstration of our failure to stop Al Qaeda in Iraq. On August 31, in northern Baghdad, hundreds of thousands of Shiite pilgrims made their way toward Imam Musa Kadhim shrine. The streets along their route had been blocked off for protection, and the roads swelled with the crowds moving under colorful banners and chants. Eventually, the crowd bottlenecked on Aimma Bridge, leading across the Tigris toward the shrine on the other side. At 10:00 A.M., with the bridge choked with people, shouts emerged from within the crowd of a suicide bomber. Earlier that morning, the crowd had heard explosions from the mortars Sunni insurgents fired at the shrine. The rumors transformed the shuffling procession into a stampede. In the rush, the Iraqis—especially the weakest of foot, the women and children—were crushed to death under the feet of others. As the crowd surged, others suffocated when squeezed against the cement blast barriers lining the route to protect from suicide bombings. Some leaped or were pushed off the bridge, only to hit the sloping concrete banks fifty feet below. Some drowned. Without a fuse even lit, 953 Iraqis died, and nearly that many were injured.
To many people, the noise of violence across Iraq was growing to such a pitch that one day’s atrocities and explosions didn’t stand out from the next. But I remember this day well. So much of a devolving Iraq was wrapped up in the tragedy of that afternoon. Reports that evening were of a surreal death toll, of hospital hallways choked with bodies, of sectarian paranoia tragically entrenched. Back in the States, news of the stampede on the Baghdad bridge ran at the bottoms of newspaper front pages, underneath stark images from Hurricane Katrina’s deadly toll and news that President Bush was dispatching thirty thousand national guard troops to the South.
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The deadly stampede that hot August day fell into the middle of a roiling internal argument among the jihadist community over Zarqawi’s campaign in Iraq, particularly his emphasis on killing Shia civilians. The same energetic, ruthless, stubborn program that had catapulted Zarqawi to his position of leadership now brought him into conflict with serious jihadist thinkers and leaders.
On June 28, as I was in Gettysburg preparing for the meeting with President Bush’s national security team, Abu Mohammad al-Maqdisi, Zarqawi’s former mentor, was released from prison in Jordan. The Jordanian government likely hoped Maqdisi, out in public, might injure the magnetism of Zarqawi. Since their time together in prison, their trajectories had risen in relative parity: While the murderous Zarqawi was the most notorious practitioner of jihad, Maqdisi was its most influential ideologue.
Maqdisi’s writing had soured on Zarqawi in Iraq recently. He complained that the default use of suicide bombing, even when other means were available, had made Iraq a “crematory” for young pious Muslims. He explicitly condemned the widespread attacks on Shia civilians, writing that Zarqawi misunderstood the concept of takfir—or excommunication. Unlike their heretical imams, he said, ordinary Shia civilians, who “only know how to pray and fast and do not know the details of [the Shia] sect,” were not so different from Sunnis that they could be wiped out like another race. Now out of prison, when he appeared on Al Jazeera on July 5, Maqdisi protested that “Six months ago, every day we read in the newspapers and saw on television dozens of killed Iraqi civilians, women and children, while barely one or two of the American occupiers were killed.”
Compelled to respond, Zarqawi flung aside his old mentor, casting him as a queasy theologian with an academic view of jihad, while Zarqawi was on the front lines of a messy war against a Shia who wanted to “liquidate” the Sunnis.