USS Cole overslept: He “slept through the page on his phone that would have notified him to set up the camera.” Wright, Looming Tower, 361.
Christmas Eve that year: This man survived the attack, and his account can be found in the first chapter of Ken Ballen’s Terrorists in Love: The Real Lives of Islamic Radicals (Free Press, 2011), 3–44.
openly doubted our assessment: My recollection of these meetings is aided by interviews with other participants.
more than fifty named insurgent groups: Mohammed M. Hafez, Suicide Bombers in Iraq: The Strategy and Ideology of Martyrdom (United States Institute for Peace Press, 2007), appendix 1, 243–49. Other reports indicate around forty insurgent groups during the summer of 2005.
old Saddam apparatchiks: “Its [MNF-I JIATF’s] mission was abruptly changed in November 2004 to the identification of former Ba’athists who posed a threat to the occupation, at which point its name changed to JIATF–Former Regime Elements.” Lamb and Munsing, Secret Weapon, 15.
calling democracy heresy: “Zarqawi and Other Islamists to the Iraqi People: Elections and Democracy Are Heresy” (Special Dispatch no. 856), Middle East Research Institute, February 1, 2005.
mentored a younger Zarqawi: Jean-Charles Brisard with Damien Martinez, Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda (Other Press, 2005), 43–44.
other hard-line insurgent groups: The three groups—Ansar al-Sunnah, Islamic Army of Iraq, and the Jihad Warriors Army—said, we “call upon all Muslims zealous for their religion not to participate in this act of heresy” (Middle East Media Research Institute, “Zarqawi and Other Islamists”).
“The martyr’s wedding”: Ibid.
overran no election sites: Kenneth Katzman, “Iraq: Elections, Constitution, and Government,” Congressional Research Service, February 27, 2007, 2.
freeze them into a minority role: A number of Sunni parties had boycotted the election since December 15, 2004. Max Sicherman, “Iraqi Elections: What, How, and Who,” Washington Institute for Near East Policy, January 24, 2005.
2 percent of the population: Michael Knights and Eamon McCarthy, “Provincial Politics in Iraq: Fragmentation or New Awakening?” Washington Institute for Near East Policy, April 2008, 6.
secured a mere 17: Katzman, “Iraq: Elections, Constitution, and Government.”
independently of the Coalition’s control: Matt Sherman, interviewed in “Gangs of Iraq,” Frontline, PBS, October 4, 2006.
uniforms on Badr militiamen: Ken Silverstein, “The Minister of Civil War: Bayan Jabr, Paul Bremer, and the Rise of the Iraqi Death Squads,” Harper’s, August 2006, 67–73.
more than sixty suicide bombings: Burns, “Iraq’s Ho Chi Minh Trail.”
mangers for their sheep: James Janega, “Too Much Border, Not Enough Patrol,” Chicago Tribune, April 19, 2005.
“featureless, a muddy brown”: Viscount William Slim, quoted in The War: 1939–1945, ed. Desmond Flower and James Reeves (Cassell, 1960), 198.
South Carolina–size: Al-Anbar Awakening, vol. I, 10.
attempted to breach the gate: Steve Fainaru, “The Grim Reaper, Riding a Firetruck in Iraq,” Washington Post, April 19, 2005.
Marine lance corporal: An account of the young Marine’s actions can be found in Elliot Blair Smith, “Pa. Native Thwarts Car-Bomb Attack,” USA Today, April 17, 2005.