largely avoided the sectarian targeting: The exceptions were the smaller, explicitly anti-Shiite extremist groups that had existed in Pakistan and were allied with Al Qaeda in the years leading up to the Karbala attack. But their impact was minimal compared to Zarqawi’s impending program: “Although Salafi discourse has always been virulently anti-Shi’ite, Arab Islamist militants have never in modern times targeted Shi’ites on the scale we are now witnessing in Iraq” (Hegghammer, “Global Jihadism After the Iraq War,” 27).
to bin Laden and Zawahiri: Details of Hassan Ghul’s capture appear in Yuri Kozyrev, “Fields of Jihad,” Time, February 23, 2004.
“They are an easy quarry”: “Zarqawi Letter,” trans. by Coalition Provisional Authority, Department of State website, February 2004.
almost thirty years: Jeffrey Gettleman, “A Ritual of Self-Punishment, Long Suppressed, Is Shattered by a Mortar Attack,” New York Times, March 3, 2004.
“display of heathens and idolatry”: Hamid al-Ali, quoted in “Why the Aggravation?” Economist, March 6, 2004.
outside a hotel and a shrine: Details of this scene of the Ashura bombings are drawn especially from Anthony Shadid’s vivid reporting of the event in Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s Wars (Henry Holt and Co., 2006), 422–25. I read Night Draws Near the year it came out, and it had a tremendous impact on me. I was in Iraq at the time, and it highlighted the superficiality of our understanding, which was tough to accept in ourselves.
169 dead and hundreds wounded: Casualty figures are from “Will the Bloodstained Shias Resist the Urge to Hit Back?” Economist, March 6, 2004.
protectors of their fellow Shia: Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Iraq’s Shiites Renew Call for Militias,” Washington Post, March 4, 2004.
CHAPTER 9: BIG BEN
pick up kitchen equipment: A lot about the event remains unclear, especially the exact reason the Blackwater convoy entered Fallujah that day. Tom Ricks in Fiasco says the contractors (traveling without the flatbed trucks) were “checking out a route that Kellogg Brown & Root’s logistics convoy would take the next day” (Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq [Penguin Press, 2006], 331). However, the guards were not under contract with KBR, but rather a firm called ESS. The Raleigh News & Observer’s six-part series on the incident and a Frontline documentary are most authoritative and suggest the contractors were escorting empty flatbed trucks that were going to get kitchen equipment.
stopped at a checkpoint: “Interview with Colonel John Toolan,” Frontline, PBS, April 5, 2005. John Toolan (who was a colonel commanding the 1st Regiment, 1st Marines at that time) reported to Frontline that the contractors “ignored” the Marines’ warnings and then somehow bypassed the checkpoint.
its driver slumped over: Details of the scene come from an extended series by the Raleigh News & Observer on the ambush: Jay Price et al., “The Bridge: Chapter 6: Fury Boils to the Surface,” Raleigh News & Observer, July 31, 2004.
“cemetery of the Americans”: John Berman, “Outrage in Fallujah,” Nightly News, ABC, March 31, 2004.
in front of news cameramen: The front page of the Rocky Mountain News for April 1, 2004, carried an image of a Fallujan holding up a sheet of paper that had this slogan printed on it, underneath a skull-and-crossbones logo.
“‘as if they were lollipops’”: Quoted in Alissa J. Rubin and Doyle McManus, “Why America Has Waged a Losing Battle on Fallouja,” Los Angeles Times, October 24, 2004.
seat of the lead vehicle: Price et al., “The Bridge: Chapter 6.”