The 9/11 Wars (45 page)

The result was that when some Sunni communities in Anbar had decided to vote in the December 2005 national assembly elections they found themselves shot at and bombed on polling day by the militant groups who eighteen months earlier they had welcomed, albeit warily, as protectors. Their assailants justified the killings on the basis that participating in democratic elections was a challenge to the unique authority of God and therefore polytheism and therefore
takfir
. Old ladies voting were thus excommunicable and as apostates were legitimate targets.
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This kind of uncompromising extremism and the sophistic arguments which purported to provide its intellectual underpinning were spectacularly ill-suited to running an insurgent campaign. A key moment came when, during the polls, nationalist insurgent Iraqi groups ended up fighting to protect Sunni voters alongside, though not in formal alliance with, American troops engaged in the same task.

This was a breakthrough. A second came in January of 2006, only a month before the bombing of the al-Askariya mosque in Samarra, when the tribes of Ramadi, the city where Colonel Hector Mirabile’s men had blasted gansta rap on dawn raids in 2003, sent their sons to enlist in the police force to start a drive to force out al-Qaeda. Seventy were killed by a suicide bomber, and the leaders of the initiative were systematically assassinated over subsequent weeks. Despite the ongoing carnage, however, the balance was shifting.
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The sheiks in Ramadi announced that they were ‘withdrawing protection’ from foreign extremists and those who fought alongside them. Clashes between tribal fighters and radical Islamic militants broke out in Falluja, Samarra and in the anarchic towns of Latifiya and Mahmoudiya on the main highway south-west of Baghdad.
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Casualties among foreign militants mounted.

More experienced extremist strategists had tried to warn al-Zarqawi of how a loss of popular support could jeopardize his project in Iraq. Through 2005 and early 2006 the extremist leader had received a stream of communications from senior al-Qaeda militants in Pakistan and other senior figures in the jihadi movement. One, from al-Zawahiri, had thanked al-Zarqawi for ‘his efforts and sacrifices’ but reminded the younger man that ‘popular support would be a decisive factor between victory and defeat’. Telling al-Zarqawi to be mindful that ‘the mujahed movement must avoid any action that the masses do not understand or approve’, the Egyptian explained that ‘in a race for the hearts and minds of our Ummah … more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media’.
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Significantly, the letter had pointed to the rout of the Algerian extremists in the 1990s as an example of what happens if popular support and legitimacy are lost.
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A second admonishment, also citing Algeria, came from Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a senior Libyan militant based in Pakistan who had watched events there at first hand having been sent to the Maghreb as an envoy of bin Laden in the late 1990s. Atiyah, as he signed himself, reminded al-Zarqawi of how ‘at the height of their power and capabilities’ the Algerian militants had ‘destroyed themselves with their own hands by their alienation of the population with their lack of reason … oppression, deviance and ruthlessness’ and called on him to avoid ‘things that are perilous and ruinous’ such as killing tribal leaders or religious scholars. ‘Their enemy did not defeat them,’ Atiyah had said of the extremists in Algeria, stressing his credentials as an eyewitness. ‘They defeated themselves, were consumed and fell.’
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In June, five months after the al-Askariya attack and as Iraq’s slide into the Shia–Sunni civil war accelerated, al-Zarqawi was killed by two 500 lb bombs dropped by American aircraft on a farmhouse north-east of Baghdad in Diyala province, where he had apparently been hiding for six weeks.

A TURNING

The beginning of the end for the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) can be dated to a night the previous November when suicide bombers blew themselves up in three luxury hotels in Amman, the Jordanian capital, killing sixty people, including thirty-eight members of a wedding party.
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The attacks had been organized by al-Zarqawi, who claimed responsibility. Almost all the victims were Jordanian, and the images of the bloodied and torn bodies of the revellers, broadcast continually for days by local TV channels, provoked an outcry locally with scores of well-attended and genuinely spontaneous demonstrations against such violence taking place over the days after the attacks. The extended family of al-Zarqawi took out advertisements in Jordan’s three main newspapers to announce that ‘the sons of the al-Khalayleh tribe’ would ‘sever links’ with their kinsman ‘until doomsday’.
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Subsequent polls revealed that the effect the November hotel bombings had on Jordanian public opinion. The kingdom had always been in a delicate position with its moderate religious and cultural tradition, frequently pro-American foreign policy and Westernized elite coexisting uneasily with a deep and popular Islamist sentiment. With its proximity to Israel and very substantial population of Palestinian refugees, Jordan had also always played a pivotal role in the core Middle East and for a long time support for Osama bin Laden and for suicide bombing had been higher there than elsewhere. This phenomenon was no doubt due in part to the sensitivity of the Palestinian issue in the kingdom and to the distinction between suicide attacks in Israel and elsewhere made by most local clerics and many local people. Support for the Iraqi insurgents had been even greater. From 2002 to 2005 support in Jordan for violence against civilians in ‘the defense of Islam’ had increased from 43 per cent to 57 per cent according to successive polls by the American Pew Centre. Another survey conducted by the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan in the second half of 2005 indicated that 70 per cent of the Jordanian public considered al-Qaeda an ‘armed resistance organization’ and not a ‘terrorist group’. A further secret study by the Jordanian authorities confirmed the results.
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Yet the November 9 bombings totally changed the dynamic. A public opinion poll conducted by Ipsos Stat for the Jordan-based
al-Ghad
newspaper in the aftermath of the attack revealed that 64 per cent of the respondents now had a negative view of bin Laden’s group and only 2.1 per cent a positive view. When asked, ‘Do you think al-Qaeda is a terrorist organization?’ nearly 90 per cent answered ‘yes’.
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Polling by Pew six months after the attacks confirmed that the change was not simply a knee-jerk response: support for violence against civilians in Jordan had halved to 29 per cent. Confidence in bin Laden ‘to do the right thing in world affairs’, 64 per cent in 2005, had dropped to 24 per cent in 2006.
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The shift in public sentiment had an immediate tactical impact. Al-Zarqawi’s networks in Iraq had a long logistical tail stretching back to hundreds of radical activists and extremist clerics in his native land who had promoted him as a true believer and
mujahed
and supplied significant practical, theological and financial support throughout 2004 and 2005. These had proved resistant to attempts by intelligence services to penetrate them.
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Yet in the aftermath of the Amman bombings, new sources of information began to open up. In May 2006, an official serving on the western border was arrested by the Jordanian police. A key figure in the transfer of weapons, money and material to al-Zarqawi’s fighters in Iraq from Jordan, he had been betrayed by associates who had been disgusted by the hotel attacks.
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The details his interrogation furnished were fed through to the American teams in Iraq running the hunt for the fugitive leader of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Clever and patient questioning – far removed from the atrocities of Abu Ghraib – by US interrogators of an ever-lengthening list of close associates through the spring and summer of 2006 and information volunteered by senior figures, many still active in the insurgency, within major Anbar tribes, meant that the identities of most of those in al-Zarqawi’s inner circle were now known.
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By the early summer of 2006, the animosity towards al-Zarqawi and his foreign militants in Anbar meant the province was no longer safe for the AQI leader. Effectively on the run, moving from safehouse to safehouse, the forty-year-old traversed the semi-rural belt to the north of Baghdad and ended up in a small village in Diyala province, not far from the tough mixed Sunni and Shia town of Baqubah. When a former associate of al-Zarqawi, ‘turned’ by Jordanian security forces after being betrayed by a suspicious hotel owner and arrested early in the year, provided a key telephone number, this lead, together with the work of the interrogators in Iraq, allowed al-Zarqawi’s spiritual adviser, Sheikh Rahman, to be physically located and put under surveillance. A Predator drone then followed the cleric to the farmhouse where al-Zarqawi himself was believed to be staying. The two men and two or three women and children also staying in the building died almost immediately in the ensuing strike.
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In addition to the new sophistication of American methods, key to the capture of the militant leader were thus two critical phenomena: the alienation of the tribes from the foreign extremists within Iraq, forcing al-Zarqawi to leave Anbar, and the changing attitude of ordinary people in Jordan towards a man whom many had once seen as a heroic resistance fighter which had led to crucial leads reaching the Jordanian intelligence services. But the real significance of the plunging support for radical Islamic violence and senior militant leaders in Jordan had ramifications much more wide-ranging than the death of a single militant, albeit one of the notoriety of al-Zarqawi. If the same phenomenon was reproduced elsewhere then it was clear that it would signal a genuine strategic shift in the evolution of the 9/11 Wars.

It had been obvious for a long time to anyone working or living in Muslim-majority countries that support for bin Laden or for radical Islamic militants was far from universal and that, by the middle of the decade, more and more people were beginning to question al-Qaeda’s means and message. In a barber shop in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, the site of the infamous massacres of 1982 and as likely a location for support for radical Islam as one could hope to find in the region, three brothers gave three different answers – ‘Yes, it is justified’, ‘No it is never justified’, ‘It depends on the circumstances’ – when questioned by the author about suicide bombings and executions of civilians in Iraq in late 2005. Similar responses were heard in living rooms, shops and restaurants in Indonesia, Pakistan and Qatar, in Morocco in January 2006 and among British, French, German and Dutch Muslims. Along with the indication of the beginning of a reaction against extremist violence came a clue as to why and where this emerging trend might be strongest. There was good evidence, though at that time still only anecdotal, of a strong correlation between the proximity of any violence and the degree of support for the perpetrators of violence.

By the spring of 2006, however, starting with the surveys in Jordan, a wealth of polling had begun to put flesh on the anecdotal bones. In Indonesia support for radical violence had dropped in the wake of the first Bali bombing in 2002 from the already low level of 26 per cent to 20 per cent and then continued to drop further to 11 per cent after a further round of bombings in 2005.
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The most dramatic drop in support for terrorism had been seen in Morocco, where fully 79 per cent of those surveyed said that support for suicide bombing and violence against civilians was never justified – more than double the percentage (38 per cent) who had expressed this view in 2004.
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In Turkey, despite the growing chaos in Iraq, confidence in bin Laden to ‘do the right thing in world affairs’ dropped from 15 per cent before the Istanbul bombing of 2002 to 7 per cent a year after it and to 3 per cent by 2005.
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In Egypt, the attacks, in the holiday town of Taba in the autumn of 2004, Cairo in April 2005 and then in the Red Sea resort of Sharm-el-Sheikh in July of that year contributed to 68 per cent of people remaining ‘very or somewhat concerned’ about the rise of Islamic extremism in 2006.
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One of the key reasons for the collapse of support for the militants of Islamic Jihad and Gamaa al-Islamiyya in Egypt in the 1990s had been the combination of local casualties and the economic damage done, especially to the crucial tourist trade, which had particularly hit the middle class, and the 2005 strikes in the country appeared to have a similar effect, with a decline in support for suicide bombing from 28 per cent to 8 per cent in 2007.
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In Saudi Arabia high levels of support for bin Laden and his violent tactics and for suicide bombing in general had plunged the instant that the first bombs had exploded on Saudi streets and the reality of what such attacks meant became clear. Though the shift in public sentiment was reinforced by the deliberate dissemination of graphic images by the Saudi authorities and statements against violence made by clerics once known for their radical stance, the reaction against the extremists was a genuine and deep one. ‘When we hear bin Laden railing against the West, pointing out the corruption and incompetence of the Arab governments and the suffering of the Palestinians, it is like being transported to a dream, [but] when we see the images of innocent people murdered for this ideology, it’s as if we’ve entered a nightmare,’ one poll subject in a conservative southern Saudi town explained.
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When violence remained abstract, something that happened over there to those people, it could be supported. But when it was local men, women and children who were blown apart, and local economies that suffered, and local governments who were undermined, the response was very different. Only one conclusion could be drawn: the moment communities started seeing close up what radical Islamic militancy genuinely meant, they turned against it. What had happened on a small scale in Anbar Province in Iraq was indeed happening on a much wider scale across the Islamic world.