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How U.S. Hunted Down Al-Zarqawi: Elite Troops Chased Him for Years. Then They Got a Break.Terrorist Leader's Death Raises Hopes of Progress in Iraq

Posted on: Friday, 9 June 2006, 09:00 CDT

By Liz Sly, Chicago Tribune

Jun. 9--BAGHDAD -- Abu Musab al-Zarqawi died in much the same way as many of his thousands of victims--in a massive explosion that brought down the house in which he was hiding and left him lying in a pool of blood.

With Iraq's most wanted terrorist finally hunted down and killed, Iraq braced Thursday for a feared surge of revenge attacks as al-Zarqawi's followers in Al Qaeda in Iraq seek to demonstrate that they still are a powerful force within the insurgency.

The government declared a four-hour curfew during Friday's prayer time in Baghdad and a daylong curfew in Baqouba, the town nearest to the site of the air strike that killed al-Zarqawi--a sure sign that no one expects the demise of the man blamed for so much bloodshed to herald an instant end to the violence.

But al-Zarqawi's death was a rare moment of triumph for the U.S. military, dogged by allegations of misconduct, by its failure to contain the relentless pace of insurgent attacks over the past three years and by unsuccessful attempts to capture the Jordanian-born extremist blamed for the vast majority of suicide attacks in Iraq.

It also was a day of hope for Iraq's new government, in the midst of a struggle to assert its control over the increasingly lawless country. After months of bickering, appointments were made to the crucial Ministries of Interior, Defense and National Security, ending the vacuum of leadership that had fueled a steady escalation of bloodshed.

U.S. officials described the effort that finally snared al-Zarqawi as the culmination of a long and painstaking intelligence operation that led them Wednesday evening to a small stone house tucked beside a forest of date palms in the isolated village of Hibhib, about 5 miles north of Baqouba and 60 miles north of Baghdad.

The operation began as long as a month and a half ago, when the U.S. military began tracking al-Zarqawi's deputy and spiritual adviser, Abdul Rahman, based on a variety of intelligence sources, including an informant within al-Zarqawi's group, said Maj. Gen William Caldwell, a U.S. military spokesman in Iraq.

By the time Rahman arrived at the house in Hibhib moments before the 6:15 p.m. air strike, U.S. officials had no doubt that al-Zarqawi was there.

"We knew exactly who was there," Caldwell said. "We knew it was Zarqawi, and that was the deliberate target that we went to get."

Two F-16 jets circled over the palm trees, dropping one 500-pound bomb and then another just to make sure. According to military footage shown at a briefing in Baghdad, both bombs struck the target, demolishing the house in a mushroom cloud of smoke and debris.

In an instant, the man deemed responsible for so much of the death and devastation that plagued America's plans to build a model democracy in the Middle East was gone. Television footage of the aftermath showed nothing but a pile of rubble. The hand of a child poked from beneath a chunk of concrete--belonging to one of the six people who died with al-Zarqawi.

The military said the others included a woman and three unidentified men, as well as Rahman.

Al-Zarqawi had been Iraq's most wanted man for three years. The lead agency pursuing him was a Special Operations task force, the latest version of several such teams that helped track down Saddam Hussein and his two sons. Over the past several weeks, it had become clear that the task force was beginning to close in.

The Army Times, a newspaper that covers the military, reported last month that the task force twice killed a number of al-Zarqawi associates during raids on safe houses in Yusufiyah, about 30 miles south of Baghdad. In one of those raids, the paper reported, al-Zarqawi was believed to have just departed.

That was just one of numerous apparent close calls in the hunt for al-Zarqawi, including an instance in late 2004 when Iraqi forces stopped but failed to detain the insurgent leader in Fallujah because they did not recognize him.

In February 2005, U.S. forces just missed capturing al-Zarqawi after chasing down his car and driver. They did arrest the driver and recover a laptop computer, which military officials later said led to the arrest of several al-Zarqawi associates.

It was not clear whether task force members were present when al-Zarqawi was killed Wednesday.

'Long, painstaking' pursuit

Iraqi police were first to the scene, followed by U.S. soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division, who quickly recognized the bearded al-Zarqawi. They took fingerprints to be certain, and a little more than six hours later, the FBI confirmed his identity. Results of DNA confirmation tests should be available within 48 hours, military officials said.

"It truly was a very long, painstaking, deliberate exploitation of intelligence, information-gathering, human sources, electronic signal intelligence that was done over a period of time--many, many weeks--that led us last night to that target," Caldwell said Thursday.

The al-Zarqawi operation had put on hold a number of other planned actions against his network, but as al-Zarqawi's death was confirmed, U.S. soldiers conducted 17 raids in the Baghdad and Baqouba areas, yielding a "treasure-trove" of information, Caldwell said.

That suggested the operation targeting al-Zarqawi represented more than just a lucky strike and that U.S. officials may finally have come closer to cracking the network of foreign Arab volunteers and Iraqi extremists that has proved to be the most lethal and effective of the many insurgent groups operating in Iraq.

As the news rippled through Baghdad that al-Zarqawi was dead, Iraq's Shiite majority, which has borne the brunt of his suicide bombings, rejoiced. Iraqi journalists broke into applause when Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced the news, just as they did when the capture of Saddam Hussein was announced by U.S. administrator Paul Bremer in December 2003.

But the U.S. military, mindful that Hussein's capture did not end the insurgency, struck a note of caution.

"We must be careful not to be overly optimistic, as one man's life does not signify an end to an insurgency," Caldwell said. "The elimination of Zarqawi is neither the beginning nor is it the end, but it is a stride in the direction of law and order."

Within hours of the announcement, the Web site used by Al Qaeda hailed the "martyrdom" of their leader and vowed to continue his work.

"The death of our leaders means life for us and will only intensify our determination to pursue jihad until God's word reigns supreme," said a statement issued in the name of the Mujahedeen Shura Council and signed in the name of Abdul Rahman al-Iraqi, the deputy emir of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

This appeared to be the same man who the U.S. military said had been killed in the strike alongside al-Zarqawi, and there was no immediate explanation as to why the statement bore Rahman's name.

One possibility is that the organization, anticipating the possibility of al-Zarqawi's death, had prepared a statement without foreseeing that his deputy also would be killed. But the message delivered was unequivocal.

"The war is still on, and the infidels will learn their lesson," it warned.

In an early indicator that al-Zarqawi's death is unlikely to have an immediate impact on the violence, four car bombs killed at least 30 people in Baghdad on Thursday, an average day for a city in which bombings are considered routine. They all targeted Shiite neighborhoods, a hallmark of al-Zarqawi's strategy to provoke a sectarian civil war between the Shiites and Sunnis.

More attacks can be expected in the days ahead, Caldwell warned.

"We're sure that they'll try to incite violence over the next few days, to reassert themselves, to show that they are still a viable insurgent organization," he said.

President Bush, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, echoed the expectation of further violence, in stark contrast with the euphoria that greeted the capture of Hussein.

Alliance of convenience

Since then it has become clear that the insurgency is far more complicated than originally had been recognized, with a variety of groups pursuing different ideologies and agendas while simultaneously vying for influence and cooperating with one another.

The U.S. military has been trying to drive a wedge between Al Qaeda extremists loyal to al-Zarqawi and the more moderate Iraqi Sunni insurgents who seek to end the U.S. occupation but do not share al-Zarqawi's radical views.

There also have been signs in recent months of dissatisfaction with al-Zarqawi's leadership, and some experts believe his influence was on the wane.

In December, the Web site used by Al Qaeda in Iraq announced the formation of the Mujahedeen Shura Council, an advisory panel representing six groups affiliated with Al Qaeda. The following month, the Web site announced that al-Zarqawi had been replaced as council leader by an Iraqi, Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi, in what experts believe was an attempt to give the radical wing of the insurgency an Iraqi identity.

Al-Zarqawi's removal will come as a blow to the organization, said Mustafa al-Ani, director of the Center for Counterterrorism at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center. "They won't replace him easily--there's no one with his fame and his experience," he said.

But while a change of leadership might not signal a reduction of violence, it could herald a change in tactics, al-Ani said.

"His replacement might not be as extremist as Zarqawi, and it's possible we'll see a change in tactics, but not really a change in the level of violence," he said.

Seeds of conflict sown

Even if the insurgency does abate, in many ways al-Zarqawi already has won a victory of sorts. The seeds of the sectarian conflict he sought to provoke have been sown, and the biggest challenge now confronting Iraq is to contain the fierce hatreds between Shiites and Sunnis.

The divide was evident in the response to al-Zarqawi's death. Members of the Shiite majority, whose mosques, markets and ceremonies have been relentlessly targeted by bombers over the past 18 months, were elated. In some neighborhoods, Shiites fired celebratory gunshots in the air.

"This is very happy news. I cried with happiness," said Ayman Hilal Abdul Ameer, 28, a Shiite tailor who lost friends when the Shiite mosque beside his home in the Karradah neighborhood of Baghdad was blown up last year. "But I'm afraid that this is not the end of terrorism in our country. There are 100,000 other Zarqawis. It's an ideology, not only one person."

Sunnis were more circumspect. Adnan al-Dulaimi, a top leader of the Iraqi Accord Front, the leading Sunni bloc in the new government, reflected the fears about the Shiite-dominated security forces, who have been accused of targeting Sunnis with arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings.

"Zarqawi is not the problem," he said. "The real problem is the terrorism committed by those who have government IDs, ride in government vehicles and wear government security forces uniforms. They are capturing and killing people just because of their identities."

lsly@tribune.com

Nadeem Majeed in Iraq contributed to this report, as did Tribune correspondents Stephen J. Hedges, Mike Dorning and Andrew Zajac in Washington

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Copyright (c) 2006, Chicago Tribune

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Source: Chicago Tribune

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