My Share of the Task(149)
The Pentagon and White House discussed competing courses of action. A continuation of the current strategy was an option, and reportedly some called for a rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces. Others argued for scaling up troop levels. But would additional forces, along with the Awakening, be enough to make a difference?
As the administration debated and American support slid, Sunni insurgents did their best to keep the sectarian violence roiling. On Thanksgiving, Sunni insurgents exploded five car bombs into a dense crowd in Sadr City, while dropping shells into the Shiite slum and assaulting the Ministry of Health. All told, the day saw 202 Iraqis killed and another 250 wounded. It was the deadliest single attack of the war. Tragically, it would not hold that record for long.
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“Sir,” I told Casey that fall, “we’re going to beat Al Qaeda. The leadership is cracking right now. We can feel it. I can’t prove it, but I can feel it.” Some of our assessment may have been wishful thinking—code for How many of these guys do we need to kill before they break? But there were also metrics behind my optimism—persistent targeting of AQI’s leadership, for example, had pushed younger, less experienced leaders into key positions. Adding to my confidence were a series of swift raids by TF 16 that had delivered a prime opportunity to divide—and potentially cripple—the Sunni insurgency.
Toward the end of November, I sat and listened to M.S.—whose relentlessness and poise had been fundamental to the final stages of the Zarqawi hunt six months earlier—as she spoke in front of the whiteboard in a small room Task Force 16 used in the back of the bunker at Balad. In a series of raids that month, Task Force 16 had captured most of Ansar al-Sunnah’s leadership, including at least ten of the organization’s topmost leaders—three national-level administrators, a founder of the group, and seven geographic emirs from Al Qaim to Baqubah to Tikrit. Pointing to a diagram of the enemy’s network, M.S. described each capture and the cumulatively crippling impact to the organization.
To be convinced to reconcile, an enemy organization normally has to think it’s losing—or at least be convinced it cannot win. Decapitating the leadership of the organization, as we had just done, went a long way toward doing that. Graeme soon made these leaders, now in our custody, a focus of his efforts. Among other things, Graeme sought to slip a wedge into the fissure between Ansar al-Sunnah (AAS) and AQI.
After offering sanctuary to Zarqawi and other Al Qaeda operatives who fled the American bombing runs in Afghanistan, AAS had adopted many of AQI’s tactics during the insurgency, including beheadings and wanton killing of civilians. Closest to home, two years earlier AAS had dispatched the Saudi suicide bomber into the mess-hall tent in Mosul. For years, Al Qaeda in Iraq had sought to formally bring Ansar al-Sunnah under its control. But, leery of Zarqawi, the group’s Kurdish leaders had reported through back channels to Al Qaeda’s leaders that Zarqawi—impious and power hungry—was not the man in propaganda reels, and that they had made a terrible choice staking their fortunes on him. Despite these persistent tensions, rumors had surfaced again that fall of a potential merger between the two groups.
Graeme initially focused his time on a detainee, the religious emir of Ansar al-Sunnah, a man named Abu Wail. Every ten to fourteen days, Graeme had Abu Wail brought out of detention to talk with him. Graeme made sure the emir was allowed to change out of his orange jumpsuit, cleanse himself, and put on Iraqi robes. The guards would bring the emir into the room, unshackle him, and leave him alone with Graeme, who would be preparing tea to serve to the emir. As the door closed, a primal electricity would fill the small room, or even the larger Maude House salon where they met. In any other moment or place, the two men sitting there, separated by a table and two small glass cups of hot golden tea, would have attempted to kill each other. It was this mutual recognition—that Graeme had spent most of his life hunting men like Abu Wail and that, given half a chance, the emir would saw Graeme’s Scottish head off—that allowed them to have a conversation. Hard recognized hard. These were conversations that no United Nations technocrats or State Department diplomats, no matter how skillfully schooled, could have had.