My Share of the Task(142)
We then moved to the backyard, where the rest of the Green operators, pilots, intelligence officers, and other members of the task force who lived and worked at the villa gathered in a half circle. The grounds backed to the Tigris, the river’s slick black surface reflecting the orange-ish glow of nighttime. The backyard was otherwise unlit. I could make out only darkened features or pairs of eyes when they caught the ambient light from the house or the city across the river.
“Listen, a lot of people are talking about all of this, what a big deal it all is,” I said. “Let me tell you, I know what it took to get here. I know the price you have paid to do this. We have been at this a long time. We all know how important this was, and I just want to thank you.” I spoke about Tom D.’s leadership and that of Major Jason. I talked about the work of J.C. and his team.
In typically laconic fashion, no one cheered or clapped. Age and rank still separated me from them. But in that moment, in the dark, I sensed I was as close as I would come to being a brother and friend with the men half visible around me.
“Feel good about what you’ve done, but you know, and I know, we cannot let up,” I said. “This is far from finished.”
They knew this. Indeed, no one in our task force believed killing Zarqawi would be the end of Al Qaeda in Iraq or the insurgency it leavened. But his ability, for more than two years, to evade us had given Zarqawi a dangerous aura and handicapped the Coalition’s credibility.
His death was more than symbolically important. It was a trite reaction among some to point out that there were thousands of men ready to replace Zarqawi—or any leader we removed. It was of course true that the organization regained a leader: Within days of Zarqawi’s death, Al Qaeda in Iraq announced that Abu Ayyub al-Masri would head the group. And yet there were not, in fact, thousands of “Zarqawis.” He was a peculiar leader. His mix of charisma, brutality, and clear-eyed persistence was never matched by al-Masri or al-Masri’s successor. While Zarqawi’s leadership style had opened rifts within the insurgent movement in Iraq, he also had the ability to keep the insurgency largely congealed. Al-Masri lacked the magnetism or deep connections to marshal the factions as coherently.
Given how badly Zarqawi’s campaign of ethnic murder had eroded global support for Al Qaeda, it’s likely that the Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan just hearing of Zarqawi’s death that night were partially relieved to see him go. Indeed, Zarqawi’s final message—a four-hour-long anti-Shia screed recorded that spring but released four days before his death—again defied bin Laden and Zawahiri’s desire that he attack Americans, and not so many Shia. “We will not have victory over the original infidels,” Zarqawi preached, unless “we fight the apostate infidels simultaneously.” Some within our force made a convincing case that if we had not killed Zarqawi, he would have been retired from Iraq by bin Laden and given a top post in Al Qaeda’s central leadership from which to project violence in the Levant. Indeed, before Zarqawi’s death, Al Qaeda’s senior leadership sought to salvage their project in Iraq by dispatching Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, the Mosul-born operative who had helped broker the agreement between bin Laden and Zarqawi two years earlier. Our Afghanistan-based Task Force 328, however, monitored al-Iraqi as he grew restless in Waziristan, and when he set off for Iraq, Turkish authorities intercepted him on their soil and sent him back to Afghanistan, where he was detained.
And yet the more important, ironic point we understood even at the time of Zarqawi’s death was that the success of his campaign in Iraq had made him, or any leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, less relevant. While he did not do so single-handedly, Zarqawi’s focused sectarian killings helped inaugurate a system of violence that was, by the time he died, a self-propelling cycle. The antigovernment Sunni insurgency was no longer the sole furnace of violence—the ethnic killing was—and Iraqis’ fear of unbridled civil war was increasingly self-fulfilling. Across the Tigris from us, extremist Sunni and Shia factions contested Baghdad, while previously mixed neighborhoods drained of one ethnic group or the other, with Shia often fleeing to the south and Sunnis to Anbar. We were halfway through June, during which 3,149 Iraqis died from the war’s violence. That number would rise to more than 3,400 for July, when the coroner in Baghdad alone took in more than 1,855 Iraqi corpses, 90 percent of them executed. We had killed Zarqawi too late. He bequeathed Iraq a sectarian paranoia and an incipient civil war.