Blown Away
A long hunt. A killer's quick death. But it may not change much in Iraq
When two U.S. bombs plunged toward an isolated farmhouse in a field of date palms last week, it was the culmination of one of the longest, most intense manhunts ever conducted by the U.S. military. After several tantalizingly close calls, including a botched ambush attempt in February, Iraq's most wanted terrorist, Abu Musab Zarqawi, died in the smoldering ruins of the remote farmhouse near the Sunni hotbed of Baqubah.
The U.S. team that finally located the elusive Zarqawi is so highly classified that its name keeps changing for security reasons. Known until recently as Task Force 145, it is currently called Task Force 77. Working under U.S. Special Forces Command, hundreds of operatives and analysts from the nation's most elite military and intelligence units--Delta and SEAL teams, Army Rangers, CIA officers, eavesdroppers from the National Security Agency, and a significant presence from British intelligence--worked around the clock to find Zarqawi. The group's operations center on a large military base outside Baghdad is dominated by giant projection screens and rows of monitors, filled with live feeds from satellites, unmanned surveillance drones, and U.S. helicopters flying over Iraq.
The pace of the task force's work was punishing. For more than a year, it has been running multiple operations a day, sometimes as many as 14 raids in 24 hours. Suspected insurgents were picked up almost daily. Other militant cells identified by the unit were allowed to keep operating, but under tight surveillance, in the hope that they would lead U.S. operatives to Zarqawi. Last fall, the unit got so close to nabbing the Jordanian-born Sunni militant that operatives expected to arrest him any day.
Tipoff. The breakthrough came several weeks ago, when a key source identified Zarqawi's spiritual adviser, Abu Abdul al-Rahman. Two weeks ago, the unit kicked into even higher gear, staging three raids in quick succession. Seven Zarqawi associates were nabbed in one day. Then came word that Rahman was headed for a meeting with Zarqawi. Tracking him through sophisticated surveillance technology, Task Force 77 followed Rahman to the doomed safe house.
Finding Zarqawi near Baqubah was no surprise--U.S. intelligence was aware that the terrorist was making monthly visits to the surrounding Diyala province, often donning elaborate disguises, including police uniforms. "He would come in, leave, and then things would flare up," one special operations officer in the area told U.S. News. He added that U.S. forces were also concerned about a spate of beheadings in the area, which, although Sunnis were the victims, was believed to be the handiwork of Zarqawi.
With Task Force 77 monitoring the operation live on the screens in its command center, F-16 fighters launched their deadly payload last Wednesday at 6:15 p.m. Zarqawi briefly survived the attack, only to die on a stretcher.
The level of effort that went into tracking down Zarqawi, however, belies the extent of the benefit that may result from his death. The head of al Qaeda in Iraq, with his grisly resume of beheadings, suicide bombings, and indiscriminate killing of civilians, was responsible for some of the most horrific attacks in Iraq since the U.S. invasion. "He embodies the worst of these three years--the sectarianism, the brutality, the complete ruthlessness," says a senior U.S. official. But his followers were only a small part of the predominantly indigenous insurgency that has been impeding the U.S. effort to rebuild Iraq. "No one thinks that this is the decisive point here," says a U.S. intelligence official. "There has long been an understanding that the insurgency in Iraq is an Iraqi phenomenon." In fact, the day after Zarqawi was killed was typically bloody--at least 40 people were killed in attacks around Iraq.
Still, Zarqawi's death gives a psychological boost to the beleaguered Bush administration. President Bush, whose poll numbers on his performance in Iraq had just dropped to their lowest point yet, cautiously hailed Zarqawi's death as "an opportunity for Iraq's new government to turn the tide in the struggle." Bush got another boost the same day when Iraq's prime minister finally announced that he had filled the three outstanding security posts in his administration. After several weeks of agonizing delays, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki named ministers for defense, interior, and national security.
Today, in the wake of Zarqawi's death, U.S. troops in Baghdad are braced for retaliatory attacks. "If I were a follower of Zarqawi," says a senior U.S. military official in Baghdad, "I would try to do anything to prove [the organization] is not decapitated."
It will most likely take several weeks to assess just how significant Zarqawi's removal really is. In the wake of the fatal airstrike, U.S. forces carried out an additional 56 raids on suspected Zarqawi associates, collecting what a military spokesman called a "treasure-trove" of intelligence. Some of the operations targeted the militant cells that had been under surveillance for weeks or even months during the Zarqawi hunt. But U.S. officials say that Zarqawi designed al Qaeda in Iraq as a decentralized operation capable of surviving his death. Zarqawi's emirs, or regional commanders, run most day-to-day operations. "It's possible there might not even be very much disruption to al Qaeda in Iraq's activities for some time because things might be in the works," says a U.S. counterterrorism official. "Iraq's jihad will go on even without him at the helm." In the past, Zarqawi's group has shown an impressive resilience, easily replacing the many key lieutenants captured or killed by U.S. and Iraqi security forces.
While Zarqawi relied largely on foreign fighters in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion, more recently, he had recruited Iraqis as his lieutenants. For one thing, many of the foreign fighters lacked training, while Zarqawi was increasingly able to enlist former Iraqi intelligence and military officers, as well as other Iraqi Islamic militants. In fact, U.S. News has learned that the State Department's Intelligence and Research Bureau concluded two years ago that Zarqawi's removal would have minimal impact. "His network through the most heavily Sunni Arab areas was so diverse, so decentralized, and so deeply rooted that we concluded in the summer of 2004 that if he were taken out, it would only be of limited value," says Wayne White, who was the chief Iraq analyst in the State Department's intelligence unit. "You can imagine what he has been able to do in the two years since." (Where Zarqawi might be missed, some analysts say, is as a fundraiser for the insurgency. "He was," says a U.S. intelligence official, "a magnet for money.")
"Full-blown war." Perhaps more important, Zarqawi accounted for only a small percentage of the violence in Iraq. Sen. Joseph Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was told by U.S. military officials in Iraq that foreign fighters make up no more than 10 percent of the overall insurgency. Privately, U.S. officials estimate that Zarqawi's group numbers between 800 and 1,200 fighters, compared with somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 insurgents. Even these estimates, however, are sketchy. "The more people know about Iraq, they more skeptical they are about such numbers," says a U.S. intelligence official. The best information on insurgents comes from captured fighters. But many are found with multiple forged foreign passports. Says one U.S. official: "You don't even know who you are dealing with."
More broadly, U.S. officials agree that the biggest threat facing Iraq remains the indigenous Sunni insurgency. "Even if every single solitary jihadist was eliminated in Iraq, we'd still have a full-blown war in Iraq," says Biden. "You still have a major sectarian war and full-blown insurgency that he had no control over." Zarqawi's death will have little effect on the Sunni insurgents, who are behind most of the roadside bombs that have been so deadly for U.S. soldiers. Those insurgents are also blamed for many of the attacks on Iraqi security forces and infrastructure targets like the electricity grid and the oil industry.
Zarqawi had also become the most visible symbol of the specter of a sectarian civil war in Iraq. U.S. officials believe that his network was behind the bombing of the Shiite mosque in Samarra in February, which sparked a violent round of sectarian-related killings that continues today. U.S. officials are privately debating what, if any, effect Zarqawi's death will have on the Sunni-Shiite tensions. "It is unlikely that anyone will immediately take his prominence in terms of verbal provocation," says a senior U.S. official. "But it doesn't necessarily make it easier to get the Shiites to back down on some of their more egregious behavior." (One such incident was the apparent kidnapping last week of some 50 people from transport companies, which turned out several days later apparently to have been a raid by a unit in the Shiite-run Interior Ministry.)
All along, outside experts and even some officials inside the U.S. government have been concerned that Zarqawi's role had been exaggerated. "The best thing about Zarqawi's death is that maybe we'll stop fixating on him and start focusing on things that matter more," says Kenneth Pollack, a former Iraq analyst at the CIA who is the research director for the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. "Maybe we can start focusing on the broad societal problems we have allowed to develop in this security vacuum."
With David E. Kaplan and Anna Mulrine in Baghdad
This story appears in the June 19, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.