My Share of the Task(122)
Lying on the southwest outskirts of Baghdad, Yusufiyah was a largely rural area that Al Qaeda used as a staging ground for attacks in the capital. It sat in what the enemy called the Baghdad “belts”—the suburbs and cities ringing Baghdad. Beginning the year earlier, as we had seen the ratlines from Syria pouring violence into Baghdad, captured documents, detainee interrogations, and other sources had allowed us to refine our understanding of Al Qaeda’s strategy in operation. While a network, its campaign increasingly reflected a geographic overlay. It used the ratlines from Syria, west along the Euphrates and southwest through Ar Rutba, to move foreign fighters. A third ratline ran north into Mosul, which AQI used as a rear support area, raising money and building cells but committing relatively fewer operations there. While Al Qaeda never tried to hold terrain in Baghdad itself, it increasingly sought to control the belts around the city—more sparsely populated, with less Coalition troop density. It aimed to funnel violence into Baghdad, the country’s seat and most visible city, in order to demonstrate the futility of MNF-I’s efforts, paralyze the government, and help spur civil war.
When our intel team in Baghdad first surveyed the buildings Abu Zar had identified, they saw nothing—no abnormal security measures, no enemy movement to and from or around the sites. But the squadron’s top intel analyst, a sergeant major named Allan,* was convinced the site was important. When unused ISR orbits were available, he directed the aircraft toward what became known as Named Area of Interest 152 (NAI 152), monitoring for activity until the ISR was needed for more urgent tracking. At first, NAI 152 was just another plot point among a country’s worth of locations we kept tabs on, some of them for years.
During Allan’s eighth week of directing spare ISR toward Yusufiyah, two explosions one hundred miles to the north, in Samarra, rerouted the war. Before dawn on Wednesday, February 22, 2006, attackers had placed bombs inside the huge gilded dome of the Askariya shrine. Although in a city with a roughly 90 percent Sunni population, the shrine, known as the Golden Mosque for its glistening teardrop-shaped dome, was one of Shiism’s holiest sites. Shiites believed that two of the main sect’s twelve revered imams were buried beneath the dome and that the Mahdi—now namesake to Muqtada al Sadr’s extremist militia—had visited the site before his disappearance. At around seven o’clock that morning, the bombs inside the dome exploded it like an eggshell, leaving behind a stump of crumbled cement and twisted rebar.
Within hours, spontaneous sectarian killing broke out through most of Iraq. Thousands of men gathered outside of Muqtada’s headquarters in Sadr City, loading onto the backs of flatbed trucks and slinging weapons. Sunni mosques were torched or strafed with bullets. Hundreds of Iraqis died in ethnic violence in the days following the attack, and perhaps a thousand Iraqis were killed in the five days after the bombing.
Although shocking, the full implications of the destruction of the Golden Mosque were not immediately obvious to me. The first spasm of Shiite reaction was predictable, but it took a number of weeks before the full scope of the Shia counterattack was clear. We’d watched Zarqawi’s cruelty for more than two years, but now the violence went both ways, as Shiite militias acted with brazen impunity. The ethno-sectarian targeting campaign waged in the following weeks and months was methodical, appearing to reflect the cold-blooded release of frustration and hatred. But some deaths reflected emotional, intimate methods of murder. Bodies arrived at morgues melted by acid or were found with their heads still covered in the plastic bag used to suffocate them, one by one. Sunni bodies were found with their kneecaps drilled hollow, while severed heads of Shia were carefully spotted for public view and horrific videos were circulated.
Throughout March the violence emanating from Samarra rippled through Baghdad and into the belts like Yusufiyah as Al Qaeda sought to expel Shia from these suburbs. And yet amid this simmer, NAI 152 remained unperturbed.
The Green squadrons were set to rotate out in early April. The new squadron’s intel team arrived in Iraq before the assault forces to reimmerse themselves in the effort. The team was led by the squadron’s J2, Sergeant First Class J.C. I knew J.C. and much of his team well from regular visits with them. Throughout my command, I scheduled chunks of time—usually two or so hours at a shot—to sit down with intel teams. Like hounds on a scent, by 2006 they didn’t need much encouragement. In a community of impressive intelligence talent, J.C. was one of the best. He was tall, but not bulked out like the operators he worked with. His slightly shaggy hair and slow, calm cadence begged you to dismiss or underestimate him. But his muted appearance and delivery betrayed intensity and strong opinions formed over years of hunting Zarqawi. When you got him going, he could rattle off connections (“and his sister is married to . . . ”) and names, the Arabic kunyas twisted a bit by his slight southern accent. J.C. and the other intel men and women working for the unit had spent more than two years doing nothing but studying and hunting the Al Qaeda in Iraq network. Zarqawi was an obsession.