Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second-in-command of Al Qaeda, may well have watched this back-and-forth—in which Zarqawi invoked Zawahiri’s earlier calls of support—as he composed his own letter to Zarqawi, dated a few days later on July 9.
The fifteen-page letter, which the U.S. government obtained that summer and released publicly in October, began with fulsome if perfunctory praise. But after stoking Zarqawi’s ego, Zawahiri cautiously prodded his “political angle” in Iraq, reminding Abu Musab that “the strongest weapon which the mujahideen enjoy—after the help and granting of success by God—is popular support from the Muslim masses in Iraq, and the surrounding Muslim countries.” At issue was the targeting of Shia. In hushed tones, Zawahiri assured Zarqawi the Shia would one day get their comeuppance. But at that critical moment, “many of your Muslim admirers among the common folk are wondering about your attacks on the Shia.” He urged Zarqawi to tone it down, to stop inciting so much wanton carnage, and to turn his attention to the more urgent target: “Expel the Americans from Iraq.”
Zarqawi never answered Zawahiri directly, but later that summer he weighed in on the Shia question. Al Qaeda in Iraq, he announced in a speech posted to Al Qaeda’s “Jihad Media Battalion” website on September 14, “has decided to declare a total war against the . . . Shi’ites throughout Iraq, wherever they may be.” “Beware,” he warned. “By Allah, we will not treat you with compassion, and you will have no mercy from us.” That same day, Baghdad shuddered with twelve separate bombings, including a van bomb in the Shiite neighborhood of Khadamiya that exploded near a crowd of poor Shiites waiting in line for day labor, killing 114 of them. Six hundred Iraqis were wounded in that day’s blasts.
Zarqawi’s ability to deflect these attempts to rein him in reflected his growth as both a commander and an ideologue. Zarqawi’s campaign, as Maqdisi portrayed it, looked less like one designed to restore the caliphate and more like nihilistic revenge on a wide scale. But to many entering Iraq, that mattered little: Unlike the generation before, these less ideological, more violent volunteers were less concerned with the creation of an Islamic society than with drawing blood in the name of Islam.
While Zarqawi largely deflected this outside criticism, he soon made a critical mistake. On the evening of Wednesday, November 9, 2005, coordinated explosions rocked three hotels in Amman, Jordan. The deadliest attack came inside the Radisson, which Zarqawi had tried to blow up six years earlier during millennium celebrations. That night an Iraqi from Anbar, who had driven across the border four days earlier with three other members of AQI, made his way into a wedding reception in the Philadelphia Ballroom, mingling quietly with the partygoers. Shortly after 8:50 P.M., he detonated a belt he wore under his clothes, the RDX explosives sending a hail of ball bearings through unsuspecting guests. More would have died, but the attacker’s wife, also wearing a suicide vest, was unable to set hers off and ran out of the room moments earlier. Two other suicide bombers exploded themselves elsewhere in Amman nearly simultaneously, one inside the lobby of the Grand Hyatt and another just outside the Days Inn. In total, more than 60 people died from the blasts, and 115 were wounded. At the Radisson, bodies were wheeled frantically out of the fume-filled lobby on hotel luggage carts.
The Jordanians quickly suspected Zarqawi, and indeed Al Qaeda in Iraq claimed responsibility for the attack the next day. It was worrying proof of his ability, gestating over years, to strike outside Iraq and to establish his part of Al Qaeda as a regional power. In April 2004, Zarqawi had aspired to use chemical agents against Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate headquarters, the office of the prime minister, and the U.S. embassy in Amman. The Jordanians estimated that such attacks could have resulted in horrific civilian casualties in and around those buildings. A mix of talent, ruthlessness, growing mystique, and unprincipled ambition enabled him to lead both a national insurgency inside Iraq and a transnational terrorist network, leveraging his connections throughout Jordan, Iraq, and Syria. His long-harbored ambitions to compete with the top echelons of Al Qaeda were not delusional.