CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
List of Principal Characters
Map of Key Locations
Prologue
BOOK I: THE RISE OF ZARQAWI
1. “What kind of person can command with only his eyes?”
2. “Here was a real leader”
3. “A problem like that always comes back”
4. “The time for training is over”
5. “I did it for al-Qaeda and for Zarqawi”
6. “This war is going to happen”
7. “Now his fame would extend throughout the Arab world”
BOOK II: IRAQ
8. “No longer a victory”
9. “So you guys think this is an insurgency?”
10. “Revolting is exactly what we want”
11. “It would surpass anything al-Qaeda did”
12. “The sheikh of the slaughterers”
13. “It’s hopeless there”
14. “Are you going to get him?”
15. “This is our 9/11”
16. “Your end is close”
BOOK III: ISIS
17. “The people want to topple the regime!”
18. “Where is this Islamic State of Iraq that you’re talking about?”
19. “This is the state for which Zarqawi paved the way”
20. “The mood music started to change”
21. “There was no more hope after that”
22. “This is a tribal revolution”
Epilogue
Picture Section
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
Also by Joby Warrick
Copyright
To Maryanne
With love and gratitude
I bring the men who desire death as ardently as you desire life.
—Khalid ibn a-Walid (seventh-century Islamic warrior, companion of Muhammad)
The names of several current and former Jordanian intelligence officers interviewed for this book have been altered by mutual agreement due to concerns about threats to their safety. They are referred to in these pages by their informal Arab kunya titles, rather than by traditional family names.
Zarqawi and His Generation
Abu Muhmmad al-Maqdisi (given name Aasim Muhammad Tahir al-Barqawi), Jordanian-Palestinian cleric and author, former cellmate and mentor to Zarqawi
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (given name Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh), Jordanian terrorist, founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq
Abu al-Ghadiya, Syrian dentist, senior Zarqawi associate, and supply master
Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of al-Qaeda’s “core” branch, former deputy to Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Laden, founder of al-Qaeda
The Islamic State of Iraq and Its Successors
Abu Omar al-Baghdadi (given name Hamid Dawud Mohamed Khalil al-Zawi), former member of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist Party and leader of the Islamic State of Iraq from 2006 to 2010
Abu Ayyub al-Masri (given name Abu Hamza al-Muhajir), Egyptian explosives expert and Zarqawi associate who became the number two commander of the Islamic State of Iraq in 2006; killed in an air strike in 2010
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (given name Ibrahim Awad al-Badri), xvi List of Principal Characters Islamic cleric and ISI spiritual adviser who rose to leadership in 2010; declared himself “caliph” of the Islamic State of Iraq in 2014
Abu Wahib (given name Shaker Wahib al-Dulaimi), brutal, media-obsessed ISIS commander in Anbar Province notorious for killing Shiite truck drivers and other civilians
Haji Bakr (given name Samir al-Khlifawi), deputy to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and leader of ISIS’s military council; killed in 2014
In Jordan
King Abdullah II, fourth sovereign of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan
Abu Haytham, senior counterterrorism official, General Intelligence Directorate (GID), Jordan
Abu Mutaz, GID case officer and later manager; expert in “flipping” Islamists into informants
Ali Bourzak, GID official and legendary interrogator known as the “Red Devil”
Laurence Foley, midlevel official at the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan
Salem Ben Suweid, Zarqawi disciple who plotted Foley’s assassination
Azmi al-Jayousi, Palestinian-Jordanian, trained at Zarqawi’s camp in Herat, Afghanistan; plotted to explode chemical “dirty” bomb in Amman
Sajida al-Rishawi, would-be suicide bomber in 2005 terrorist attack on hotels in Amman, Jordan
In Iraq
Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq, 1979 to 2003
Charles “Sam” Faddis, CIA operative inside Iraq prior to 2003 invasion; urged preemptive strike on Zarqawi’s camp
Nada Bakos, CIA officer and chief “targeter” responsible for tracking Zarqawi
Zaydan al-Jibiri, Sunni tribal leader from Ramadi, Iraq
General Stanley McChrystal, head of Joint Special Forces Command that led the hunt for Zarqawi in Iraq
Zaid al-Karbouly, Iraqi customs officer in the pay of al-Qaeda in Iraq
Nouri al-Maliki, Shiite prime minister of Iraq from 2006 to 2014
In Syria
Bashir al-Assad, president of Syria
Robert Ford, U.S. ambassador to Syria, 2010 to 2014
Mouaz Moustafa, director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a nonprofit that offered a window into deteriorating conditions in Syria
Abu Mohammad al-Julani, leader of Jabhat al-Nusra (“al-Nusra Front”), the Syrian branch established by the Islamic State of Iraq in late 2011
Kofi Annan, U.N. secretary-general, 1997 to 2006, who sought to broker Syrian peace accord
In Washington
Dick Cheney, U.S. vice president, sought the CIA’s support in connecting al-Qaeda to Iraqi regime
Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, 2009 to 2013
Michael V. Hayden, NSA director and director of National Intelligence during anti-Zarqawi campaign; CIA director, 2006 to 2009
Frederic C. Hof, special State Department adviser on the Middle East and Syria, 2009 to 2012
Sen. John McCain, chairman, Senate Armed Services Committee
Leon Panetta, CIA director, 2009 to 2011; defense secretary, 2011 to 2013
Robert Richer, the CIA’s former station chief in Jordan, later chief of the agency’s Near East Division and deputy director of operations
George Tenet, CIA director, 1996 to 2004
Just after nightfall, a warrant arrived at the city’s main women’s prison for the execution of Sajida al-Rishawi. The instructions had come from King Abdullah II himself, then in Washington on a state visit, and were transmitted from his private plane to the royal court in Jordan’s capital. A clerk relayed the message to the Interior Ministry and then to the prisons department, where it caused a stir. State executions are complicated affairs requiring many steps, yet the king’s wishes were explicit: the woman would face the gallows before the sun rose the next day.
The chief warden quickly made the trek to the cell where Rishawi had maintained a kind of self-imposed solitary confinement for close to a decade. The prisoner, forty-five now and no longer thin, spent most of her days watching television or reading a paperback Koran, seeing no one, and keeping whatever thoughts she had under the greasy, prison-issued hijab she always wore. She was not a stupid woman, yet she seemed perpetually disconnected from whatever was going on around her. “When will I be going home?” she asked her government-appointed lawyer during rare meetings in the months after she was sentenced to death.1 Eventually, even those visits stopped.
Now, when the warden sat her down to explain that she would die in the morning, Rashida nodded her assent but said nothing. If she cried or prayed or cursed, no one in the prison heard a word of it.2
That she could face death was not a surprise to anyone. In 2006, a judge sentenced Rishawi to hang for her part in Jordan’s worst-ever terrorist attack: three simultaneous hotel bombings that killed sixty people, most of them guests at a wedding party. She was the suicide bomber who lived, an odd, heavy-browed woman made to pose awkwardly before TV cameras showing off the vest that had failed to explode. At one time, everyone in Amman knew her story, how this thirty-five-year-old unmarried Iraqi had agreed to wed a stranger so they could become a man-and-wife suicide team; how she panicked and ran; how she had wandered around the city’s northern suburbs in a taxi, lost, stopping passersby for directions, still wearing streaks of blood on her clothes and shoes.
But nearly ten years had passed. The hotels had been rebuilt and renamed, and Rishawi had vanished inside Jordan’s labyrinthine penal system. Within the Juwaida Women’s Prison, she wore a kind of faded notoriety, like a valuable museum piece that no one looks at anymore. Some of the older hands in the state security service called her “Zarqawi’s woman,” a mocking reference to the infamous Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who ordered the hotel bombings. The younger ones barely remembered her at all.
Then, in the span of a month, everything changed. Zarqawi’s followers, it turned out, had not forgotten Rishawi. The terrorists had rebranded themselves over the years and were now known in Jordan by the Arabic acronym Daesh—in English, ISIS. And in January 2015, ISIS asked to have Rishawi back.
The demand for her release came in the middle of Jordan’s worst domestic crisis in years. A Jordanian air-force jet had crashed in Syria, and its young pilot had been captured alive by ISIS fighters. The group had broadcast photos of the frightened, nearly naked pilot being paraded around by grinning jihadists, some of them reaching out to embrace this great gift that Allah had dropped from the sky.
From the palace to the security agencies, the king and his advisers steeled themselves for even more awful news. Either the pilot would be publicly butchered by ISIS, they feared, or the terrorists would demand a terrible price for his ransom.
True to form, ISIS announced its decision in macabre fashion. Less than a week after the crash, the captured pilot’s family received a call at home, from the pilot’s own cell phone.3 On the other end, a stranger, speaking in Iraqi-accented Arabic, issued the group’s singular demand.
We want our sister Sajida, the caller said.
The same demand was repeated, along with several new ones, in a constantly shifting and mostly one-sided negotiation. All the requests were routed to the headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Jordan’s intelligence service, and all eventually landed on the desk of the imposing forty-seven-year-old brigadier who ran the department’s counterterrorism unit. Even in an agency notorious for its toughness, Abu Haytham stood apart, a man with a burly street fighter’s physique and the personality of an anvil. He had battled ISIS in its many incarnations for years, and he had famously broken some of the group’s top operatives in interrogation. Zarqawi himself had taken several turns in Abu Haytham’s holding cell, and so had Sajida al-Rishawi, the woman ISIS was now seeking to free.
Outside of Jordan, the demand made little sense. Rishawi had no value as a fighter or a leader, or even as a symbol. She was known to have participated in exactly one terrorist attack, and she had botched it. Hardly “Zarqawi’s woman,” she had never even met the man who ordered the strike. If ISIS hadn’t mentioned her name, she would likely have lived her remaining years quietly in prison, her execution indefinitely deferred for lack of any particular reason to carry it out.
But Abu Haytham understood. By invoking Rishawi’s name, the terrorists were reaching back to the group’s beginnings, back to a time before there was an ISIS, or a civil war in Syria; before the meltdown in Iraq that gave rise to the movement; even before the world had heard of a terrorist called Zarqawi. The Mukhabarat’s men had tried to keep this terrorist group from gaining a foothold. They had failed—sometimes through their own mistakes, more often because of the miscalculations of others. Now, Zarqawi’s jihadist movement had become a self-declared state, with territorial claims on two of Jordan’s borders. And Rishawi, the failed bomber, was one of many old scores that ISIS was ready to settle.
In summoning this forgotten ghost, ISIS was evoking one of the most horrifying nights in the country’s history, a moment seared into the memories of men of Abu Haytham’s generation, the former intelligence captains, investigators, and deputies who had since risen to lead the Mukhabarat. Once, Zarqawi had managed to strike directly at Jordan’s heart, and now, with the country’s pilot in their hands, ISIS was about to do it again.
Abu Haytham had been present that night. He could remember every detail of the crime for which Rishawi had been convicted and sentenced to hang.4 He could remember how the night had felt, the smell of blood and smoke, and the wailing of the injured.
Mostly he remembered the two girls.
They were cousins, ages nine and fourteen, and he knew their names: Lina and Riham. Local girls from Amman, out for a wedding party. They were both dressed in white, with small faces that were lovely and pale and perfectly serene. “Just like angels,” he had thought.
They still wore the nearly identical lacy dresses their parents had bought for the party, and stylish shoes for dancing. Almost miraculously, from the neck up neither had suffered a scratch. When Abu Haytham first saw them, lying side by side on a board in those chaotic first moments at the hospital, he had wondered if they were sleeping. Injured, perhaps, but sedated and sleeping. Please, let them be sleeping, he had prayed.
But then he saw the terrible holes the shrapnel had made.
The girls would have been standing when it happened, as everyone was, whooping and clapping as the bride and groom prepared to make their entrance in the ballroom at Amman’s Radisson Hotel, which was lit up like a desert carnival on a cool mid-November evening. The newlyweds’ fathers, all big grins and rented tuxedos, had taken their places on the podium, and the Arabic band’s bleating woodwinds and throbbing drums had risen to a roar so loud that the hotel clerks in the lobby had to shout to be heard. The party was just reaching its gloriously noisy, sweaty, exuberant peak. No one appeared to have noticed two figures in dark coats who shuffled awkwardly near the doorway and then squeezed between the rows of cheering wedding guests toward the front of the ballroom.
There was a blinding flash, and then a sensation of everything falling—the ceiling, the walls, the floor. The shock wave knocked guests out of their beds on the hotel’s upper floors and blew out thick plate-glass doors in the lobby. A thunderclap, then silence. Then screams.
Only one of the bombs had gone off, but it cut through the ballroom like a swarm of flying razors. Hundreds of steel ball bearings, carefully and densely packed around the bomb’s core, sliced through wedding decorations, food trays, and upholstery. They splintered wooden tables and shattered marble tiles. They tore through evening gowns and fancy clutches, through suit jackets and crisp shirts, and through white, frilly dresses of the kind young girls wear to formal parties.
Abu Haytham, then a captain, was winding down another in a string of long shifts on that Wednesday in early November 2005. It was just before 9:00 p.m. when the first call came in, about an explosion of some kind at the Grand Hyatt across town. The early speculation was that a gas canister was to blame, but then came word of a second blast at the Days Inn Hotel, and then a third—reportedly far worse than the others—at the Radisson. Abu Haytham knew the place well. It was an Amman landmark, glitzy by Jordanian standards, perched on a hill and easily visible from most of the town, including from his own office building, nearly two miles away.
He raced to the hotel and pushed his way inside, past the rescue workers, the wailing survivors, and the recovered corpses that had been hauled out on luggage carts and deposited on the driveway. In the ballroom, through a haze of smoke and emergency lights, he could see more bodies. Some were sprawled haphazardly, as though flung by a giant. Others were missing limbs. On the smashed podium lay two crumpled forms in tuxedos. The fathers of both the bride and the groom had been near the bomber and died instantly.
Abu Haytham assembled teams that worked the three blast sites through the night, gathering whatever remnants they could find of the explosive devices, along with chunks of flesh that constituted the remains of three bombers. Only later, at the hospital, standing over a wooden slab in a makeshift morgue, was he overwhelmed by the horror of the evening: The broken bodies. The scores of wounded. The smell of blood and smoke. The girls, Lina and Riham, lying still in their torn white dresses. Abu Haytham, a doting father, had girls the same age.
“How,” he said aloud, “does someone with a human heart do a thing like this?”
Just two days later came the news that one of the attackers—a woman—had survived and fled. A day after that, Sajida al-Rishawi sat in a chair in front of him.
She would surely know something, tied as she was to such an obviously important and well-planned mission. Where would the terrorists strike next? What plans were unfolding, perhaps at this very hour?
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” the woman would occasionally manage, in a soft mumble. She repeated the line slowly, as though drugged.
Abu Haytham pleaded with her. He threatened. He appealed to her conscience, to religion, to Allah. Hours passed—crucial hours, he feared.
“How brainwashed you are!” he shouted at one point. “Why do you protect the people who put you up to this?”
The woman would never offer a useful syllable, then or in the months to come, after she was convicted and sentenced to die. Yet, already, Abu Haytham knew who was behind the act. All the Mukhabarat’s men knew, even before the culprit boasted of his responsibility in an audio recording made in his own voice. The signatures were all there: The coordinated blasts, all within ten minutes; the deployment of human bombers, each skillfully fitted with a device consisting of military-grade RDX explosive and enough loose metal to ensure maximum carnage. Most telling of all was the choice of targets—ordinary hotels where, on any given evening, Amman’s middle class would pack a rented ballroom in their finest apparel to celebrate a union or mark a milestone. No intelligence operative or general was likely to pass through the lobby of the Radisson at 9:00 p.m. on a weekday night. But scores of Jordanians would be there, clinging to the rituals of normal life in a country bordering a war zone.
Such hallmarks, like the voice on the audio recording, unmistakably belonged to Zarqawi, a man the Mukhabarat knew exceptionally well. He was, at the time of the bombing, the head of a particularly vicious terrorist network called al-Qaeda in Iraq. But the Jordanians had known him back in the days when he was Ahmad the hoodlum, a high school dropout with a reputation as a heavy drinker and a brawler. They had watched him wander off to Afghanistan in the late 1980s to fight the communists, then return as a battle-hardened religious fanatic. After a first try at terrorism, he had vanished into one of Jordan’s darkest prisons. This time he emerged as a battle-hardened religious fanatic who also happened to excel as a leader of men.
Abu Haytham had been among those who tried to alter Zarqawi’s path after prison. He had been the last intelligence officer to meet with him in 1999, before Zarqawi was granted permission to leave the country for good, headed again to Afghanistan and a future that surely—so the Jordanians thought—offered nothing more than futility and a dusty grave.
Then, in the most improbable of events, America intervened. Few beyond the intelligence service had heard of Zarqawi when Washington made him a terrorist superstar, declaring to the world in 2003 that this obscure Jordanian was the link between Iraq’s dictatorship and the plotters behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The claim was wrong, yet, weeks later, when U.S. troops invaded Iraq, the newly famous and well-funded terrorist gained a battleground and a cause and soon thousands of followers. Over three tumultuous years, he intentionally pushed Iraq to the brink of sectarian war by unleashing wave after wave of savage attacks on Shiite civilians in their mosques, bazaars, and schools. He horrified millions with a new form of highly intimate terrorism: the beheading of individual hostages, captured on video and sent around the world, using the Internet’s new power to broadcast directly into people’s homes. Along the way, he lashed out violently at his native Jordan and helped transform America’s lightning victory in Iraq into the costliest U.S. military campaign since Vietnam.
Yet his most significant accomplishment was not apparent until years later. Though some would cast his movement as an al-Qaeda offshoot, Zarqawi was no one’s acolyte. His brand of jihadism was utterly, brutally original. Osama bin Laden had sought to liberate Muslim nations gradually from corrupting Western influences so they could someday unify as a single Islamic theocracy, or caliphate. Zarqawi, by contrast, insisted that he would create his caliphate immediately—right now. He would seek to usher in God’s kingdom on Earth through acts of unthinkable savagery, believing, correctly, that theatrical displays of extreme violence would attract the most hardened jihadists to his cause and frighten everyone else into submission. His strategy shook the region as al-Qaeda never had.
But Zarqawi’s excesses also deepened his adversaries’ resolve. In the immediate aftermath of the hotel bombings, Abu Haytham and other Mukhabarat officers had a simple goal: to eliminate the man who had ordered them. And when they succeeded, in 2006, by providing the United States with intelligence that helped it track Zarqawi to his hideout, the terrorist and his organization appeared finished. Instead, his followers merely retreated, quietly gaining strength in Syria’s lawless provinces until they burst into view in 2013, not as a terrorist group, but as an army.
This time, war-weary America would refuse to help until it was too late. There would be no serious effort to arm the moderate rebels who sought to deny ISIS its safe haven, and no air strikes to harry ISIS’s leadership and supply lines. Twice in a decade, a jihadist wave had threatened to engulf the region. Twice, it seemed to the Jordanians, the American response had been to cut a fresh hole in the lifeboat.
Zarqawi’s successors called themselves by different names before settling on ISIS—or simply the Islamic State. But they continued to refer to Zarqawi as the “mujahid sheikh,” acknowledging the founder who had the audacity to believe he could redraw the maps of the Middle East. And, like Zarqawi, they believed their conquests would not end there.
In the prophetic passages of the Muslim holy texts known as the Hadith, Zarqawi saw his fate foretold. He and his men were the black-clad soldiers of whom the ancient scholars had written: “The black flags will come from the East, led by mighty men, with long hair and beards, their surnames taken from their home towns.”5 These conquerors would not merely reclaim the ancient Muslim lands. They also would be the instigators of the final cataclysmic struggle ending in the destruction of the West’s great armies, in northern Syria.
“The spark has been lit here in Iraq,” Zarqawi preached, “and its heat will continue to intensify until it burns the Crusader armies in Dabiq.”6
The Mukhabarat’s men had heard enough of such talk from Zarqawi back when he was their prisoner. Now the brazen claims were coming from his offspring. Thirty thousand strong, they were waiting just across the border, calling for their sister Sajida.
The charade of a prisoner swap ended abruptly on February 3, 2015, the day after Jordan’s king arrived in Washingon for the official visit. For Abdullah II, it was the latest in a series of exhausting journeys in which he repeated the same appeal for help. His tiny country was struggling with two burdens imposed from abroad: a human tide of refugees from Syria—some six hundred thousand so far—and the cost of participating in the allied Western-Arab military campaign against ISIS. The trip was not going particularly well. Members of Congress offered sympathy but not much more; White House officials recited the usual pledges to bolster Jordan’s defenses and struggling economy, but the kind of assistance Abdullah most desperately needed was nowhere in the offing.
The king’s disappointment had long since hardened into resentment.7 During previous visits, President Obama had declined Jordan’s requests for laser-guided munitions and other advanced hardware that could take out ISIS’s trucks and tanks. On this trip, there was no firm commitment even for a meeting between the two leaders.
Abdullah was in the Capitol, making a pitch to Senator John McCain, the Republican senator and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, when one of the king’s aides interrupted him. The monarch stepped into the corridor and, on the small screen of a smartphone, watched ISIS deliver its final statement on the proposed prisoner swap. As video cameras rolled, masked jihadists marched the young Jordanian pilot into a small metal cage that had been doused with fuel. Then they lit a fire and filmed as the airman was burned alive.
By the time Abdullah returned to the meeting, McCain’s aides had seen the video as well. The monarch kept his composure, but McCain could see he was badly shaken.
“Can we do anything more for you?” McCain asked.8
“I’m not getting support from your side!” Abdullah finally said. “I’m still getting only gravity bombs, and we’re not even getting resupplied with those. Meanwhile, we’re flying two hundred percent more missions than all the other coalition members combined, apart from the United States.”
The king continued with his scheduled meetings, but he had already made up his mind to return home. He was making arrangements when the White House phoned to offer fifteen minutes with the president. Abdullah accepted.
Inside the Oval Office, Obama offered condolences to the pilot’s family and thanked the king for Jordan’s contributions to the military campaign against ISIS. The administration was doing all it could to be supportive, the president assured the monarch.
“No, sir, you are not,” Abdullah said, firmly. He rattled off a list of weapons and supplies he needed.
“I’ve got three days’ worth of bombs left,” he said, according to an official present during the exchange. “When I get home I’m going to war, and I’m going to use every bomb I’ve got until they’re gone.”
There was one other item of business to attend to before his return. From the airport, Abdullah called his aides in Amman to start the process of carrying out a pair of executions. On Jordan’s death row, there were two inmates who had been convicted of committing murderous acts on orders from Zarqawi. One was an Iraqi man who had been a midlevel operative in Zarqawi’s Iraqi insurgency. The other was Sajida al-Rishawi. Both should be put to death without further delay.
The king foresaw that Western governments would protest the executions as acts of vengeance, even though both inmates had been convicted and sentenced long ago as part of normal court proceedings. But he would not be deterred. As far as he was concerned, the appointment with the hangman had already been delayed too long, he told aides.
“I don’t want to hear a word from anyone,” Abdullah said.
The king was still airborne at 2:00 a.m. Amman time, when the guards arrived to collect Sajida al-Rishawi from her cell. She had declined the customary final meal and ritual bath with which devout Muslims cleanse the physical body in preparation for the afterlife. She donned the red uniform worn exclusively by condemned prisoners on the day of execution, along with the usual hijab for covering her head and face.
She was escorted outside the prison to a waiting van with a military escort for the drive to Swaqa, Jordan’s largest prison, on a desert hill about sixty miles south of the capital. The vehicles arrived just before 4:00 a.m., as a full moon, visible through a light haze, was dipping toward the southwestern horizon.
Her last earthly view, before she was blindfolded, was of a small execution chamber with white walls and a row of tiny windows, and a few tired faces looking up from the witness gallery just below her. An imam prayed as a noose with a heavy metal clasp was secured, and a judge asked if Rishawi cared to convey any last wishes or a final will. She gave no reply.
She likewise made no audible sound as the gallows’ trap opened and she plunged hard into the darkness. It was 5:05 a.m., nearly ninety minutes before sunrise, when the prison doctor checked for a pulse.
“Zarqawi’s woman” was dead, her execution the closing scene in the worst act of terrorism in Jordan’s history. But Zarqawi’s children were pursuing the founder’s far grander ambitions: the end of Jordan and its king, the erasing of international boundaries, and the destruction of the modern states of the Middle East. Then, with black flags raised above Muslim capitals from the Levant to the Persian Gulf, they could begin the great apocalyptic showdown with the West.
The most notorious of Jordan’s prisons is the old fortress of al-Jafr, known for decades as the place where troublesome men went to be forgotten. It lies outside a Bedouin village of the same name, on a road that marks the outer boundary of human habitation in the country’s fierce southeastern desert. Beyond the prison, the terrain flattens into a basin of baked mud that stretches to the horizon without a hill or rock or stubble of grass. The ancient sea that once stood here evaporated eons ago, leaving an emptiness like a missing limb, a void so unnatural that it stirs feelings of dread among the few travelers who pause for a look. “There’s a terrible loneliness,” wrote filmmaker David Lean, who shot parts of Lawrence of Arabia on the same mudflats in 1962 and pronounced the place “more deserted than any desert I’ve ever seen.”1 His picture editor, Howard Kent, would describe al-Jafr as, simply, “a warning of what hell is like.”2
It was at this spot that British military overseers chose to build an imposing prison with limestone walls and high watchtowers for detainees regarded as too dangerous for ordinary jails. And it was here, years later, that the Jordanians began the practice of quarantining Palestinian militants and other radicals viewed as threats to the state. Hundreds of men, many of them held without formal charge, languished in stifling, vermin-infested cells where they endured temperature extremes, rancid food, and a catalogue of abuses later documented by United Nations investigators.3 Newly arriving prisoners were routinely beaten until they lost consciousness. Others were flogged with electric cables, burned with lit cigarettes, or hung upside down by means of a stick placed under the knees, a position the guards gleefully called “grilled chicken.” Over time, the monarchy grew weary of the costs of running a prison so isolated from the country’s population and so damaging to its reputation. In 1979, the last of its inmates were transferred to other jails, and al-Jafr was abandoned to the scorpions and its own ghosts.
Years passed, and then, in a sudden shift, the old prison was resurrected. Officials of the Public Security Directorate had grown worried about the behavior of a band of antigovernment zealots in the country’s central Swaqa Prison, and in 1998 they decided to isolate the group to prevent the contagion from spreading. The officials reopened one of al-Jafr’s dusty wings and dispatched an army of workers to sweep out corridors and prepare a large cell where all could be housed together. Twenty-five bunk beds were assembled and stacked in cramped rows, and a new door of latticed steel was bolted across the cell’s entrance, the room’s only opening other than air slits cut into walls at knee level. When the grounds were ready, the department appointed a warden and hired the usual complement of guards, laundrymen, and cooks. The inmates were too few to justify the hiring of a separate prison physician, and so it was that Basel al-Sabha, a recent medical-school graduate assigned by the Health Department to the local village, was pressed into service as the doctor of record for fifty of the most dangerous men in Jordan.4
It was an unwelcome assignment for Sabha, a tall twenty-four-year-old with boyish good looks, and he complained bitterly about the posting. Prisons in Jordan were vile places, and this one exceeded all others, at least by reputation. Sabha’s anxiety deepened on his very first day, as the warden, a middle-aged colonel named Ibrahim, sat him down to review a list of safety precautions. When dealing with inmates such as these, the warden cautioned, it was essential to stay on the other side of the bars at all times, even during medical examinations. And Sabha shouldn’t be lulled into thinking that a metal door was protection enough, he warned.
“These people are very dangerous,” Ibrahim said. “Even if they’re not physically dangerous, they have a way of affecting you. Even I have to be careful that they don’t affect me.”
The warden went on to describe the peculiarities of the new arrivals, from their strange dress—most insisted on wearing an Afghan-style tunic over their jailhouse uniforms, because tight-fitting prison trousers were regarded as too revealing—to their ability to make converts out of hardened criminals and even prison employees. At Swaqa, so many guards had fallen under their spell that prison officials were forced to limit shifts to ninety minutes in any sector where the inmates might be encountered.
As the tour was ending, the warden repeated his warning about the prisoners. There was one inmate—the sect’s apparent leader—whose seductive powers were extraordinary, he said. He was the one called Maqdisi, a religious scholar and preacher of considerable gifts, capable of infecting and twisting minds like a Muslim Rasputin.
“He is very smart, a walking library of Islamic knowledge,” Ibrahim said. “You will know when you see him. A handsome guy, tall and slim, with light-brown hair and blue eyes. Don’t be fooled.”
Moments later, Basel al-Sabha was being escorted by guards into the prison’s interior, past the watchtowers and armed guards, to the wing where the prisoners were kept. It was well past dark, and a dim light shone feebly through the bars of the doorway as the doctor approached. Drawing closer, he could make out the rows of bunks, followed by a jarring first glimpse of the prisoners themselves.
Forty-eight inmates sat upright on their bunks or prayer rugs, facing the doorway with rapt attention, like military conscripts awaiting inspection. Each wore the same peculiar uniform, a loose-fitting tunic worn over the standard blue prison shirt and trousers, just as the warden had said. All eyes appeared fixed on a figure near the doorway, and Sabha inched forward to see who it was.
At the front of the cell were two men. The first was tall and slender with scholarly glasses and a tangle of light-brown hair protruding from his prayer cap. Sabha guessed that this was the one the warden had called Maqdisi, the cell block’s charismatic leader. Yet it was the second man who appeared to command the room’s attention. He was darker and shorter but powerfully built, with a thick neck and shoulders that might have belonged to a wrestler or gymnast. Sabha, now only feet away, noticed an unusual scar on the man’s right arm: a jagged gash across a patch of ink-stained skin the color of an old bruise. Around the wound the flesh showed the pulls and folds of amateur suturing.
The owner of the scar studied the rows of bunks for a long moment, then turned to lock his gaze on the visitor. The face was unremarkable, fleshy, with full lips framed by a thin beard. But the eyes were unforgettable. Deep-set and nearly black in the low prison light, they conveyed a cold intelligence, alert and probing, but lacking any trace of emotion. Neither welcoming nor hostile, his look was that of a snake studying the fat young mouse that had just dropped into his cage.
At last the warden spoke. He mumbled words of introduction for the new doctor, and then declared the start of clinic hours. All prisoners with medical complaints can step forward to be examined, he said.
Sabha edged closer to the door to await the inevitable rush. He had prepared for the moment and had brought along a supply of pills and salves to treat the rashes, minor wounds, allergies, and gastric ailments common to men living in close confinement. But, to his surprise, no one stirred. The inmates sat motionless, waiting for a sign from the scarred man, who at last turned his gaze on an inmate seated on a bed near the front of the cell. When he gave a slight nod, the seated prisoner stood and walked to the doorway without a sound. He nodded a second time, and a third, and, one by one, inmates took their place in line in front of the doctor.
Five men, and only five, were summoned, and still the man with the scar had not uttered a word. He turned to the doctor with the same reptilian stare, the look of a man who possessed, even in Jordan’s harshest prison, absolute control.
Sabha felt an uneasiness, like a tremor welling up from somewhere deep in the foundation of the old fortress. “What kind of person,” he wondered, “can command with only his eyes?”
Over the following days, the doctor scoured files for insights into his new patients and why prison officials had come to fear them. The group’s core, he learned, consisted of about two dozen men who had been members of radical Islamic sects that sprang up in Jordan in the early 1990s. With the exception of the leader, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi—a firebrand preacher known for penning screeds against Arab leaders—their individual histories were unimpressive. Some had been street thugs who had gotten religion and found acceptance and purpose among the zealots. Others had been part of the Arab volunteer army that had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Back home in safe, stable Jordan, these men had been drawn to organizations that offered a way to relive the glories of the Afghan campaign through perpetual holy war against the enemies of Islam.
Their efforts at jihad in Jordan had been anything but glorious. The leaders of Maqdisi’s small band had been arrested before they could carry out their first operation, a planned attack on an Israeli border post. The other groups’ targets had consisted of small-time symbols of Western corruption, from liquor stores to video shops and pornographic movie houses. One of the early attempts at a bombing had been a spectacular failure: A member of the group had volunteered to plant explosives inside a local adult cinema called the Salwa. After a few minutes in the theater, the would-be assailant had become so engrossed in the film that he forgot about his bomb. As he sat, glued to the screen, the device detonated under his feet. No patrons were hurt, but the bomber lost both his legs. Six years later, the double-amputee was among Sabha’s charges at al-Jafr Prison. The doctor had noticed him on his first visit, propped up on his bunk, his pant legs neatly pinned at the knee.
By now, nearly all the men had been locked up for four years or more. But if prison was meant to break the jihadists and weaken their cause, the attempt was an utter failure. Confined mostly in the same communal cells, the men had been bound together by their privations and by the daily struggle to persevere as religious purists among drug dealers, thieves, and killers. They shared a common creed, an austere brand of Islam invented by Maqdisi and inculcated during endless weeks of confinement. They also possessed an uncommon discipline. The group behaved as a military unit, with clear chains of authority and unquestioned obedience to Maqdisi’s handpicked enforcer, the scarred, thick-chested man who had made such an impression during Sabha’s first visit to the prison. Maqdisi told the men what to think, but his number two controlled everything else: how the men spoke and dressed, which books they read and which television shows they watched, whether they accepted or resisted prison dictates, when and how they fought. The man’s given name was Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh, but he preferred to be called “al-Gharib,” or “the Stranger,” a handle he had picked up during his days as a fighter in the Afghan civil war. Some, however, were already calling him “the one from Zarqa,” the tough industrial town in northern Jordan where he grew up. The phrase in Arabic is “al-Zarqawi.”
Sabha was able to observe both leaders up close. The Maqdisi he saw was mild and agreeable, more amiable professor than beguiling mystic. At just shy of forty, he had the weary air of an intellectual who felt he deserved better company than the few dozen backward men who shared his cell. He freely dispensed religious advice and the occasional fatwa, or religious ruling, but he preferred spending his time in solitary pursuits, writing essays and reading the Koran. On the printed page, Maqdisi was fearless: he gained renown throughout the Muslim world for inflammatory books with titles such as Democracy Is a Religion, in which he denounced secular Arab regimes as anti-Islamic and called for their destruction. His work eventually gained such resonance among Islamists that a Pentagon-commissioned study in 2006 would call him the most important new thinker in the jihadi intellectual universe.
Previous Islamist ideologues also had criticized leaders of the Arab world as corrupt and unfaithful to the religion. The same themes appeared in the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the influential Egyptian author whose works inspired the founders of al-Qaeda. But in Maqdisi’s view, each Muslim bore a personal obligation to act when confronted with evidence of official heresy. It wasn’t enough for the faithful simply to denounce corrupt rulers. They were compelled by Allah to slaughter them.
“His radical conclusion was that the leaders were infidels, and Muslims should kill them,” said Hasan Abu Hanieh, a Jordanian writer and intellectual who was friendly with Maqdisi during the years when his ideas were beginning to congeal.5 “The ‘killing’ was the turning point. It was a message that resonated with Muslims who felt that the regimes were stupid and had allowed foreigners to occupy Arab lands. For these people, Maqdisi was not only validating their views but telling them they were obliged to do something about it.”
Oddly enough, the man who called so bluntly for confronting Islam’s enemies tended to shy away from conflict. As Sabha observed, whenever interrogators and agents of the intelligence services visited the prison, he would greet them politely and ask about their families, to the dismay of other inmates who had suffered at the hands of the same men. He would patiently explain to guards and prison officers why they and their government were heretics, buttressing his arguments with quotes from the Koran. But he would often retreat when challenged, allowing that less severe interpretations of scripture could also be valid.
“You can be a member of Parliament and still be a good Muslim,” he told Sabha one day, offering a nuance that seemed to contradict his central thesis about the evils of nontheocratic governance. “If someone is elected because he wants to serve the people, that’s being a good Muslim. But if he believes in democracy—if he believes in rules made by men—he is an infidel.”
Maqdisi seemed fond of the young physician, who, though secular, was the only other person at al-Jafr with an advanced degree. Their relationship took a turn one day when the youngest of Maqdisi’s wives fell ill during a visit to the desert prison. The woman suffered from unusual menstrual bleeding, and Sabha arranged to see her at his private clinic in the village. The gesture might have risked offense—many ultra-conservative Muslim men refuse to allow their wives to be seen by male doctors—but Maqdisi seemed genuinely grateful. After that day, the physician’s visits to the cell block were greeted with wide grins.
But politeness and intellect are poor instruments for commanding men in such a hard place as al-Jafr. Maqdisi needed an enforcer. In Zarqawi, he had found the perfect helper: a man with the distinction of being at once slavishly devoted and utterly ruthless. “He is very tough,” Maqdisi would say admiringly, referring to his number two, “and he is a Jordanian’s Jordanian—a man of the tribe.”6
Their personalities could hardly have been more different. Zarqawi had no capacity for warmth or nuance. The man with the scar did not smile. He did not return greetings from prison employees, or engage in their small talk. When he spoke at all, it was with the street slang of a high-school dropout who had grown up as a brawler and petty criminal in one of Zarqa’s toughest neighborhoods. His gruffness and refusal to conform to convention had marked him as a troublemaker since boyhood. They also helped burnish the legend that was already beginning to cement around Zarqawi in his thirty-third year.
Whereas Maqdisi preferred the ethereal world of books and ideas, Zarqawi was purely a physical being, with a compact, muscular frame that he chiseled through weight lifting, using buckets of stones as barbells.7 The whispered stories of his criminal past—the stabbings and beatings, the pimping and drug dealing—made him seem dangerous and unpredictable, a man of action, capable of anything.
He had fought bravely, even recklessly, in Afghanistan, and his reputation for impulsive violence had followed him into prison. He habitually defied authorities in the first of the jails where he and the others were confined, and he brutalized and humiliated inmates who crossed him, sometimes with fists or crude weapons and sometimes, it was widely said, sexually. Once, in a rage, he had grabbed a prison guard by his uniform collar and suspended him from a coat hook. Another time, he instigated a violent protest by inmates armed with crude clubs and swords fashioned from bed frames. “We have come to die!” the prisoners had screamed, and some surely would have, except for the timely intervention of a warden who acceded to many of the jihadists’ demands.8
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