The Longest War (31 page)

Those findings were broadly confirmed in October 2007 by the discovery of a trove of al-Qaeda documents by the U.S. military in Sinjar, close to the Syrian border. They documented foreign fighters who had traveled to Iraq since August 2006.
Of the 606 foreign fighters
whose biographies were detailed in the documents, 41 percent of them were Saudi, 19 percent were Libyan, and smaller percentages from other Middle Eastern countries made up the rest of the total. Of the 389 fighters who designated their “work,” more
than half wrote that they intended to be suicide bombers. Those bombers saw themselves as acting on behalf of the
umma
, the global community of Muslim believers, a supranational concept that doesn’t recognize national boundaries. The suicide attackers who often attacked Shia shrines and religious processions in Iraq were motivated by vicious anti-Shiism that was also obviously religious in character.

In short, the suicide attackers in Iraq were as far from being nationalists as it’s possible to imagine, paying their own way to travel to Iraq, a country that most of them had never previously visited, to commit suicide. The only explanation for their suicidal missions was the rationale that the foreign volunteers themselves offered—that they were doing this for Islam and a one-way ticket to Paradise. In the Sinjar documents, for instance, a “martyr’s will” made no mention of Iraq at all and simply said instead, “Make my burial gathering
as my wedding party
.”

Not content with whipping up mayhem only in Iraq, al-Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate also exported its terror campaign. On November 9, 2005, the group launched simultaneous suicide bombings at three American hotels in the Jordanian capital of Amman—the Radisson, Hyatt, and Days Inn—
killing sixty
. Most of the victims were Jordanians attending a wedding party and the attack provoked a wave of revulsion against Zarqawi in his birthplace. His hometown of Zarqa issued a formal condemnation of its most infamous son and tens of thousands of Jordanians took to the streets in protest, an early indication of how counterproductive Zarqawi’s tactics were becoming. Even Zarqawi felt it necessary to defend the bombings, releasing an audiotape two days after the attacks claiming that the hotels were targeted because they were frequented by Israeli spies.

At the height of its power, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, like its parent organization, was a
highly bureaucratized group
. AQI asked its non-Iraqi recruits to fill out application forms that asked for their countries and cities of origin; real names; aliases; date of birth; who their jihadist “coordinator” was; how they were referred to al-Qaeda in the first place; their occupation; how they had entered the country from Syria (the usual transit point for foreign fighters arriving in Iraq); who in Syria had facilitated their travel; an assessment of how they had been treated there; what cash and ID cards they had with them when they arrived in Iraq; any relevant knowledge—such as computer skills—they might have; and whether they were volunteering to be fighters or suicide attackers.

AQI also recorded detailed battle plans for attacks that would take place over the course of three months; the organization maintained pay sheets for brigade-size units of hundreds of men; it recorded the detailed minutes of meetings, kept prisoner rosters, maintained death lists of enemies, and kept the records of vehicles in its motor pool. Most chillingly, AQI’s Anbar branch videotaped
eighty executions
, which were not used for propaganda purposes but simply as a record of having done the job. The tapes showed prisoners thrown from bridges with ropes tied around their necks.

AQI was well financed
, as was demonstrated by a 2005 letter from al-Qaeda’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in which he requested a $100,000 transfer from al-Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate to al-Qaeda headquarters in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Al-Qaeda’s “border emirate,” on Iraq’s Syrian border,
recorded income of $386,060
and spending of $173,200 in a six-month period during 2007.

AQI also brought many tactical innovations to its terror campaign, for instance deploying two vehicles for
double suicide attacks
, as it did for the November 18, 2005, bombing of the Hamra hotel in Baghdad, which housed a number of Western journalists and security contractors. One suicide truck bomb breached the concrete blast wall protecting the hotel, followed quickly by a flatbed truck loaded with explosives that plowed though the breached area and then detonated, killing at least six.

AQI’s suicide campaign increasingly used female suicide bombers, something that other Salafi jihadist groups had largely avoided. In one Iraqi province alone,
Diyala
, there were twenty-seven suicide bombings by women between 2007 and 2009. And the campaign also saw the innovation of
husband-wife suicide teams
. In November 2005, Muriel Degauque, a Belgian woman who worked as a baker’s assistant, and her husband were recruited by AQI from Belgium to carry out suicide attacks on American convoys in Iraq. Degauque became the first female European jihadist to launch a suicide operation anywhere. And only hours after Degauque’s attack, Sajida al-Rishawi, a thirty-five-year-old Iraqi woman also recruited by AQI, walked into a wedding reception at the Radisson hotel in Amman, dressed festively, as was the man accompanying her, Hussein Ali al-Samara, whom she had married just days earlier. Under their clothes they were both wearing explosive belts. According to the televised confession she later gave, when her belt failed to explode her husband pushed her out of the hotel and exploded his device.

Al-Qaeda also deployed children
as suicide bombers. In late August 2008,
a fifteen-year-old girl wearing a suicide vest turned herself in to police in Baquba, in the region near Baghdad where Degauque had killed herself. And AQI exploited the
mentally unstable
, strapping bombs, for instance, to two women, one of whom had undergone psychiatric treatment for depression or schizophrenia, who together killed around one hundred in Baghdad’s central market on February 1, 2008.

It was above all in the manufacture of homemade bombs, known as improvised explosive devices (IEDs), that the insurgents made warp-speed innovations. The first IEDs were simple “passive” victim-operated trip devices. They then progressed to cell-phone-triggered devices; IED “daisy chains” of multiple charges rigged together; and bombs relying on infrared triggers. Another innovation was
the use of chlorine in bombs
, although the insurgents stopped this tactic in 2007, in part because the gas was not especially effective.

The insurgents would often set off multiple IED explosions close together, the first one to cause casualties and the second to maim or kill first responders tending to the injured and dying, or those investigating the scene of the attack. Sergeant Brian Doyne, an Army bomb tech who had served in Afghanistan and was in Iraq on his first tour,
responded to an IED
targeting an American tank south of Tikrit on February 24, 2005. Doyne recalled: “At first look you really don’t know there’s anything else to this incident.” But as Doyne was gathering evidence at the scene of the bombing, a second and then a third bomb detonated, and at the age of twenty-six he lost both his left arm and left eye.

In many ways it was a car- and truck-bomb war, since this was the delivery method for many of the most effective attacks of the insurgency. Typically the insurgents would use 155 mm Chinese shells left over from Saddam’s arsenals as the basic bomb, an explosive charge that came already
wrapped in a steel case
, which was guaranteed to produce plenty of high-velocity fragments. When the bomb went off those fragments would travel faster than the speed of sound, and if one hit a person’s head, it would likely burst it open.

During World War II,
3 percent
of American combat deaths were caused by mines or booby traps. By 1967, during the Vietnam War, the figure rose to 9 percent. In Iraq during the latter half of 2005, IEDs were the leading cause of American combat deaths; by October 2007 some one thousand American soldiers had been killed by homemade bombs. Some of those deaths might have been avoidable, but only one in ten of the some nine thousand military transport trucks in Iraq in 2004 were armored.

Three years into the Iraq War, AQI seemed all but unstoppable. A classified Marine intelligence assessment dated August 17, 2006, found that AQI had become the de facto government of the western Iraqi province of Anbar, which is strategically important as it borders Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia and makes up about a third of the landmass of Iraq. The Marine report’s downbeat conclusion: AQI had become “
an integral part
of the social structure in western Iraq” and was so deeply entrenched in Anbar that it could not be defeated there with a “decapitating strike that would cripple the organization.” In addition, AQI controlled a good chunk of the exurban belts around Baghdad, the “Triangle of Death” to the south of the capital, and many of the towns north of it, up the Tigris River to the Syrian border. Thus AQI controlled territory larger than New England and maintained an iron grip on much of the Sunni population. And in a country with a stratospheric unemployment rate, AQI was paying its foot soldiers salaries and raking in
millions of dollars
from various oil smuggling scams, kidnapping rings, extortion schemes, and overseas donations. In other words, the Bush administration had presided over the rise of precisely what it had said was one of the key goals of the Iraq War to destroy: a safe haven for al-Qaeda in the heart of the Arab world.

It was not only militants who were radicalized by the Iraq War. When the United States went to war against the Taliban in the wake of 9/11, it was understood by many around the world as a just war. The war in Iraq drained that reservoir of goodwill and dragged the United States into what many saw as a conflict with Muslims in general. The Iraq War was widely viewed by Muslims as a classic “defensive” jihad. This was not an arcane matter of Islamic jurisprudence, but in fact a key reason why thousands of Americans died in Iraq, and also the reason that the al-Qaeda movement was reinvigorated by the conflict. The Koran has two sets of justifications for holy war. One concerns a “defensive” jihad, when a Muslim land is under attack by non-Muslims, while another set of justifications concerns grounds for an “offensive” jihad, which countenances unprovoked attacks on infidels. Muslims consider the defensive justifications for jihad to be the most legitimate.

The Bush-appointed Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, contradicted the findings of his own intelligence agencies when he testified to Congress in January 2007 that he was “not certain” that the Iraq War had been a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and stated, “
I wouldn
’t say there has been a widespread growth of Islamic extremism beyond Iraq. I really wouldn’t.”

In fact, a study by New York University’s Center on Law and Security comparing the period after September 11 through the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 with the period from March 2003 through September 2006, found that the rate of deadly attacks by jihadists had actually increased
sevenfold
after the invasion. Even excluding terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, fatal attacks by jihadists in the rest of the world increased by more than one-third in the three years following the invasion of Iraq. The Iraq War, of course, did not cause all of this terrorism, but it certainly increased the tempo of jihadist attacks from London to Kabul to Amman.

The administration’s focus on war in Iraq also
undermined America’s place in the world
in other ways. A poll taken a few months after the 2003 invasion found that Indonesians, Jordanians, Turks, and Moroccans all expressed more “confidence” that bin Laden would “do the right thing” than that President Bush would.

On May 1, 2003
, aboard the USS
Abraham Lincoln
, President Bush announced that “major combat operations” in Iraq had ended. The defeat of Saddam Hussein, he told the American people, was “a crucial advance in the campaign against terror.” For the umpteenth time Bush once again bracketed Saddam and 9/11: “The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September 11th, 2001 and still goes on.” The president went on to describe the 9/11 attacks, “the last phone calls, the cold murder of children, the searches in the rubble,” as if this had any bearing on the Iraq War. The president also made the definitive statement that Saddam was “an ally of al-Qaeda,” something that his own intelligence agencies had determined
was not the case
before the war.

There is no question that the United States liberated Iraqis from Saddam’s demonic tyranny, but that argument was not what persuaded Americans that a preemptive war against the Iraqi dictator was in their best interests. They were hustled to war by the invocation of putative Iraqi mushroom clouds and the argument that there was a genuine and threatening Saddam–al-Qaeda–WMD nexus. The war against Saddam wasn’t conducted under the banner of the liberation of the Iraqi people, but rather under the banner of winning the war on terrorism. And by that standard it was a failure, giving the jihadist movement around the world a new battlefront and a new lease on life.

What the Bush administration did in Iraq is what bin Laden could not have hoped for in his wildest dreams: America invaded an oil-rich Muslim nation in the Middle East, the very type of imperial adventure that bin Laden
had long predicted was the United States’ long-term goal in the region; the United States deposed the secular socialist Saddam, whom bin Laden had long despised; the war ignited Sunni and Shia fundamentalist fervor in Iraq; and it provoked a “defensive” jihad that galvanized jihadi-minded Muslims around the world.