My Share of the Task(86)

                The mosaic we constructed was revealing. Through June, internal wrangling among insurgent groups and personalities yielded no single dominant force; instead, powerful families maintained control throughout parts of the nicer northwest section of Fallujah, while foreign fighters rooted themselves in the southern parts of the city. Civilians largely fled the commercial parts of the southeast, where jihadi-Salafi volunteers took up in guesthouses and restaurants. At the time we struck Big Ben on June 19, the already moribund Fallujah Brigade was no real challenge to Zarqawi’s rising influence. By the end of July, while some of the city’s blocks remained parceled, Zarqawi’s foreign-backed jihadists had largely wrested control of the resistance away from the Sunni nationalist insurgency.

                Although we could never fix him in Fallujah definitively enough to support a strike, sources described the kabuki Zarqawi performed. A chauffeur would drive him through the city’s bazaars and commercial districts, and he would hold meetings in the backseat of his car between stop and start points. We believed that for most of the summer Zarqawi operated north of Fallujah, pulling strings within the city while staying outside the area under our scope. He deftly managed alliances and eventually co-opted local insurgent celebrity leaders to be his deputies. On some level, I admired Zarqawi’s cunning.

                The Jordanian and his supporters professed a desire to make Iraq the seat of a resuscitated caliphate, governed by the puritan formulation of Islamic law. The parts of the city they controlled offered a chance to try out this draconian rule. They shut down hair salons and movie theaters. They forbade Western clothing. Weeks before our air strike, the jihadists had flogged liquor sellers, displaying them half naked in the back of a truck that roved through town. We watched them line up “spies” on their knees and shoot them in the back of their skulls. One video surfaced that showed members of Zarqawi’s network burning Iraqi policemen alive. After the coalition wrested the city back the following November, forces found crude torture chambers, where these jihadists had brought frightened Shia or Iraqi policemen kidnapped in Baghdad or the south. Zarqawi’s troops—through their cruelty, fanaticism, and glut of resources—emerged as the strongest group. And he was still ascendant.

                Although coalescing within Fallujah allowed Zarqawi’s influence to gestate, his choice to control much of the city was a strategic mistake. He burnished his legitimacy with insurgents, but as our targeting matured over the summer, we stripped his network of a cadre of mid- and senior-level leaders who operated within Fallujah’s limits. More important than any losses to his force, however, were the gains to our own. Our UAV-centric approach to targeting in Fallujah was dangerously limited, but the experience forced us to hone our aerial surveillance skills. Those soon proved even more effective when combined with maturing signals, human, and other intelligence disciplines.

                Of course, the enemy was more agile than Fallujah reflected and would soon be far more dispersed. Pressuring him across his network would require that our methods of intelligence development become far more efficient, so that we could replicate the process in many locations simultaneously. Small teams of men, in a time span of days or hours, would have to do intelligence collection, planning, and coordination that in June 2004 spanned weeks and consumed the focus of an entire squadron and task force. In April of that year, we ran a total of ten operations in Iraq. Later that summer, in August, we conducted eighteen. In two years, we would average more than three hundred per month, against a faster, smarter enemy and with greater precision and intelligence yield. Getting there would require further revamping our force by pursuing many of the principles that enabled us to destroy the arms hidden inside Big Ben.

                As we grew stronger and more agile, however, our enemies grew more ruthless. And Fallujah was just the opening salvo.





| CHAPTER 10 |

                Entrepreneurs of Battle

                June–December 2004



It was the machine guns and munitions we found in the flatbed of the truck driven by two Iraqi men out of Fallujah that convinced us we needed to strike Big Ben. But in the days before we hit the arms cache on June 19, 2004, a thirteen-year-old boy, whom the drivers had placed in the front seat as a decoy, gave a hint of an even bigger target.