Killing Zarqawi

[thedrifter]

Killing Zarqawi
June 11th, 2006
John B. Dwyer

Hibhib lies several miles northwest of Baquba, Iraq, which is about 40 miles north of Baghdad. As the reliable site Iraq the Model tells us “Most of its people are from the Azzawi tribes,” and it is “famous for producing some of the finest Arak in Iraq.” (Arak is a popular alcoholic beverage of the Middle East.)

But then Zarqawi and some of his terrorist pals came to town.

“Severed heads of Iraqi civilians were twice found in fruit boxes in and around Hibhib, a terrible crime that shocked Iraqis.”

Then came the cold-blooded murder of 19 students just north of the town. In its reporting on Zarqawi’s death, Iraq the Model stated

“PM al-Maliki said that Jordan provided intelligence that was used in the raid on Zarqawi’s hiding place, but he stressed that tips from locals were the primary lead to Zarqawi’s exact location and were the information used to guide the bombs.” [italics added]

A New York Times article several days ago stated that Jordan’s assistance in this historic event was vital – a mole, courtesy their intelligence service, inside Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda in Iraq network. Since that story broke, some have suggested that there was no mole, that this is a psychological warfare gambit on the part of the coalition and its allies.

Meantime, the not always reliable DEBKAFile is reporting that a Jordanian sting operation captured one of of Zarqawi’s partners in murderous thuggery, Abu Hufeiza. He not only named al Qaeda’s operations chief and two other high ranking AQ officers, he provided the first clue for the location of Zarqawi’s Hibhib unsafe house. Here is what Multi-National Force Iraq spokesman, Maj. General William Caldwell said about pinpointing Zarqawi’s location yesterday:

“It was the result of some tremendous work by coalition forces, by intelligence agencies, partners in our global war on terrorism, that all came together, feeding different parts and pieces to allow us to build that [intelligence] puzzle, to establish the patterns, the methods, the techniques which allowed us to track and then monitor things which led us to that building that night to find Zarqawi in there.”

It had been a painstaking effort

“very focused over the last three weeks…there was a lot of information that came in…”

Prior to this time frame statement MG Caldwell said things had started coming together a month and-a-half ago. Let’s look at what happened, based on MNF-Iraq press releases, available here. But first, let’s establish the fact that Special Operations Task Force 145, tasked with killing or capturing Zarqawi and high level al Qaeda personnel, has been the point unit in these operations. As with TF 120, tasked with Saddam’s capture, TF 145 works alone or with coalition forces. Here is the timeline:

April 16: Coalition forces killed 5 Al Qaeda terrorists and detained 5 others during a raid on a safe house in Yusufiyah. They just missed Zarqawi, holed up a block away. The main target of the raid, identity withheld, was among the captured.

May 15: In a series of raids on 13-14 May, coalition forces killed known terrorist Au Mustafa and 15 other suspected Al Qaeda associates. Eight suspects were detained. This date constitutes the 3 week mark noted by MG Caldwell. It can be assumed that interrogation of terror suspects provided solid intelligence. The following raid description pretty much says just that.

May 17: Acting on timely intelligence, coalition forces located & killed two al Qaeda associates. One of them, Abu Ahad, managed foreign fighter facilitation and provided command & control between terror cells operating throughout Fallujah, Baghdad, Yusufiyah, Taji and Mahmudiyah. Based on intelligence gathered, follow-on raids were conducted.

May 26: An al Qaeda in Iraq gathering was raided by TF 145 and coalition forces. Six suspects were detained. The raid was based on intelligence gathered from recent detainees. Two days later, seven more terrorists were captured in southern Ramadi.

May 29: Achmed al-Dabash, a key terrorist leader with close ties to Zarqawi’s AlQaeda in Iraq, was captured by Iraqi and coalition forces in Baghdad’s Mansour district.

And then on June 5 it was reported that Coalition forces killed wanted al Qaeda terrorist Hasayn Ali Muzabir and detained one other during a June 2 raid near Balad. Muzabir fancied himself Al Qaeda’s military emir in the Samarra area.

Here is how Multi-National Force-Iraq described the “Road to Zarqawi,” listing these high-level terrorists killed or captured since April 9:

Abu Karrar

Abd al-Karim

Abu Abdullah al-Saudi

Hammadi Tahki

Abd al-Rahman

Ali Wali and Khalid al-Kurdi

(see slide here)

This then is the outline of snowballing, accumulating intelligence described by MG Caldwell that helped build the intelligence puzzle. The method used was probably similar to that employed by Task Force 1/22nd Infantry in their successful hunt for Saddam: data bases, link diagrams, prisoner interrogation and, most important, human intelligence. For the latter, it appears there was a mole inside Zarqawi’s network. And there were, as PM Maliki stressed, tips from local residents of Hibhib, who wanted the homicidal thug and his accomplises out of their neighborhood.

Based on MG Caldwell’s three week time frame when the hunt for Zarqawi heated up, and his statement that Al Rahman was identified “through military sources from somebody inside Zarqawi’s network” at that time, it could mean that one of the terrorists captured during the 13-14 May raids identified Al Rahman (see above). Or, it might mean that Abu Hufeiza, as reported by the DEBKAFile, gave Jordanian interrogators his name.

At 6:15 p.m. June 7, 2006 two Air Force F-16Cs dropped one 500 lb. bomb each on Zarqawi’s unsafe house. One was a laser-guided GBU-12, the other, a GBU-38 Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM). MG Caldwell made it clear that the operational commander on the ground made the decision to bomb the target because the target was isolated (no collateral damage) and because the surrounding terrain offered too much cover. He didn’t want Zarqawi escaping again in the aftermath of a ground assault.

When Iraqi police arrived at the site, they found Zarqawi barely alive and put him on a stretcher. (see initially cited MG Caldwell transcript) US forces from the 4th ID (same unit that bagged Saddam) got there soon afterward. When they approached, Iraqis were loading Zarqawi into an ambulance. He was taken back down so US troops could employ life-saving measures, but it was too late. (reference Multi-National Force commander Gen. Casey’s Fox News Sunday interview) Three men, one of them Al Rahman, and three women were also killed in the bomb attack. Positive identification, a 100% fingerprint match, revealed at 3:30 Wednesday morning, proved beyond doubt that it was Zarqawi.

Site exploitation revealed an intelligence bonanza that was immediately utilized. Seventeen raids in and around Baghdad were conducted, followed by an additional 39 operations throughout Iraq. Twenty-five personnel were detained and one killed. Among the items found in those raids: passports, ID cards, night scopes, Iraqi army uniforms, weapons, ammo, other munitions, bullet-proof vests and suicide belts.

You can bet that intel exploitation is continuing and more raids will be forthcoming, that al Qaeda cells in Iraq will continue to be eliminated.

John B. Dwyer is military historian and a frequent contributor.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

June 19, 2006
The hunt ends
Spec ops’ ‘unblinking eye’ leads to airstrike that kills terrorist leader

By Sean D. Naylor
Times staff writer

In the end, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi could not escape Task Force 145’s “unblinking eye.” TF 145 is the latest name for the shifting collection of U.S. and British special operations units that has hunted the most wanted terrorist in Iraq for three years, and “the unblinking eye” is what its members call the fusion of intelligence and operations that allowed them to relentlessly peel away the layers of Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq organization until the terror mastermind was left defenseless and almost alone.

When that moment came, at 6:15 p.m. June 7, a hidden Delta Force reconnaissance and surveillance team from TF 145 watched as two 500-pound bombs dropped by an Air Force F-16 pulverized the safe house near Baqubah, in which Zarqawi; his spiritual adviser, Sheikh Abd Al Rahman; and four other people had taken refuge.

The house, in a tiny farming hamlet called Hibhib, was leveled by the blast. Rahman, another man and three women are believed to have died in the strike, but Zarqawi was still breathing when Iraqi police arrived at the scene, Army Maj. Gen. Bill Caldwell said during a June 9 briefing from Baghdad. However, the terrorist leader died within moments.


Earlier reports that a child also had been killed in the bombing were incorrect, Caldwell said.

Zarqawi’s death marks a high point in the history of Joint Special Operations Command, which provides most of the units that make up TF 145, and is a serious — perhaps fatal — blow to Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq terrorist group.

But observers say it is too soon to judge the impact on the wider war in Iraq, which includes a Sunni insurgency separate from Zarqawi’s group and several Shiite militias vying for power.

“Things are not going to go away now,” said Vali Nasr, a Middle East expert at the Naval Postgraduate School. “But it’s now not as likely that we’ll see an attack on Ayatollah Sistani or Najaf,” he said, referring to Iraq’s most influential Shiite cleric and its holiest Shiite shrine.

The strike that killed Zarqawi was the culmination of “a very long, painstaking, deliberate exploitation of intelligence, information-gathering, human sources, electronic, signal intelligence … over a period of time,” Caldwell said.

Rahman, Zarqawi’s spiritual adviser, was the key. “He was identified several weeks ago … through military sources from somebody inside Zarqawi’s network,” Caldwell said.

“They were able to start tracking him, monitoring his movements and establishing when he was doing his link-ups with Zarqawi,” he said.

The capture of Sheikh Ahmed al-Dabash in Baghdad’s Mansour district May 29, described by U.S. Central Command as “a major financier and facilitator of terrorism in Iraq,” may have been another critical breakthrough, multiple sources said.

“You follow the money — and he was the money man,” said an officer familiar with special operations in Iraq.

TF 145 tracked Rahman to a safe house about five miles west of Baqubah in Hibhib, an isolated cluster of about 300 buildings, most of them made of sun-baked mud, and surrounded by miles of farms, orchards and fields.

Hibhib, which has seen a fair amount of insurgent activity, is almost 100 percent Sunni and is home to at least three prominent families who would have gladly given sanctuary to a man like Zarqawi, said Army Maj. Kreg Schnell, former intelligence officer for 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, which spent a year in Baqubah starting in February 2004.

Zarqawi “obviously had friends in the area who gave him meals and a place to sleep,” Schnell said.

Indeed, U.S. intelligence had confirmed that Zarqawi would meet Rahman in Hibhib. A reconnaissance-surveillance team from Delta Force’s B Squadron infiltrated the area to get “eyes on” the house, said a source in the special operations community. Sources said a Predator unmanned aerial vehicle was also overhead.

After slipping through coalition fingers on several occasions in the past three years, Zarqawi was in the sights of U.S. forces.

It was, Caldwell said, “the first time that we … had definitive, unquestionable information as to exactly where he was located,” in a place where he could be hit “without causing collateral damage to other Iraqi civilians and personnel in the area.”

Senior U.S. military leaders in Iraq discussed whether to launch a ground assault, but decided “they could not really go in on the ground without running the risk of having him escape,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters June 8 in Brussels, Belgium.

Air power on display

That left an airstrike as the only option.

Two F-16C Fighting Falcon jets were in the air on a routine on-call mission due to last four or five hours over central Iraq when the decision was made to launch the mission, Air Force Lt. Gen. Gary North, Central Command’s air component commander, told reporters at the Pentagon on June 8.

The jets carried a mixed load of laser-guided and satellite-guided bombs and LITENING targeting pods equipped with laser designators to mark targets, as well as video cameras.

Caldwell said June 9 that at the time the order was given to launch a strike on the house, one of the two F-16s was receiving fuel from an airborne tanker, so only one aircraft made the bombing run.

The pilot knew there was a high-value target in the building, North said, but he declined to say whether the pilot was told that target was Zarqawi.

North also refused to name the pilot, the unit or the base from which the mission was flown. For the past year, most F-16Cs flying over Iraq have been staged out of Balad, a sprawling Army and Air Force complex about 50 miles north of Baghdad. The Air Force typically has the equivalent of two F-16 squadrons at Balad.

Flying at “medium” altitude — at least 20,000 feet — the pilot circled the safe house, noting how it was built, setting targeting coordinates and deciding which bombs to use.

The pilot set his fuses so the bombs would explode inside the house, rather than on contact with the roof, in order to collapse the structure.

At 6:15 p.m., the F-16 dropped a 500-pound laser-guided GBU-12 bomb on the house, causing a massive explosion.

Using the cameras in the LITENING pod, the pilot peered through the smoke to observe the damage and decided a second bomb was needed. About 30 seconds later, the pilot released a 500-pound GBU-38 Joint Direct Attack Munition that was guided by Global Positioning System satellite signals. That also hit the home, leaving the building a smoking pile of rubble.

Iraqi security forces were the first to arrive on the ground — and found Zarqawi still alive, Caldwell said. They had placed the terrorist leader on a stretcher just as U.S. troops from Multi-National Division-North rolled in.

Zarqawi tried to get off the stretcher. Troops again secured him and attempted to start medical treatment, but he died within minutes, Caldwell said.

Coalition forces took Zarqawi’s body to an undisclosed secure location, where his identity was confirmed by scars and tattoos he was known to have, and by his fingerprints, Caldwell said.

Gathering the puzzle pieces

TF 145 was responsible not only for gathering the intelligence that led to Zarqawi, but also for acting upon it swiftly, creating a cycle in which each set of raids yielded more intelligence, which in turn drove more raids.

Made up of a rotating set of units from Joint Special Operations Command, the task force, based at Balad, includes squadrons from the military’s two “direct action” special-mission units — the Army’s 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, better known as Delta Force, and the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, also known as Naval Special Warfare Development Group, as well as other Army and Air Force special operations elements and a variety of intelligence organizations.

The June 7 attack culminated about six weeks of focused effort.

“We had clear-enough evidence about a month-and-a-half ago that allowed us to start [getting] down to the point where we were able to prosecute the action … against that safe house,” Caldwell said, showing a slide that listed eight men in Zarqawi’s organization captured or killed between April 6 and May 31.

But judging from Central Command’s press releases, Caldwell’s slide only scratches the surface of TF 145 operations in recent weeks.

On April 16, a force of SEALs and Rangers attacked an al-Qaida in Iraq safe house in Yusufiyah, 20 miles southwest of Baghdad, killing five terrorists and capturing another five. On June 2, “wanted al-Qaida terrorist” Hasayn Ali Muzabir was killed near Balad.

Between those two missions, “coalition forces,” the phrase often used by Central Command to disguise the participation of TF 145, captured or killed more than 100 members of al-Qaida in Iraq. Indeed, in a prophetic remark, Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch told reporters in Baghdad on May 4 that the coalition was “zooming in” on Zarqawi.

In Iraq, U.S. special operations forces have captured former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, tracked his sons Uday and Qusay to a hide-out where they were killed, and killed Zarqawi — who, because of the perception that his terrorist organization was such a massive obstacle to peace in Iraq, had become arguably the highest-priority individual target for the U.S.

The question is whether al-Qaida in Iraq can withstand the loss of its iconic leader, who earned grudging respect from U.S. special operators for his willingness to lead from the front.

One candidate may be Abu Ayyub al-Masri, an Egyptian whom Caldwell said met Zarqawi in Afghanistan in 2001 or 2002. U.S. operators have intelligence indicating al-Masri has had close contacts with Ayman Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s chief deputy.

Caldwell said al-Masri “helped establish maybe the first al-Qaida cell that existed in the Baghdad area.”

Analysts generally agree that although Zarqawi was the focus of heavy U.S. combat and propaganda efforts, he and his group were a relatively small facet of the Iraq insurgency and mounted a relatively small number of attacks.

Those attacks had a disproportionate effect, both in their violence and their political and sectarian aftermath, though Zarqawi’s death may reduce the likelihood of his ultimate goal: igniting a massive civil war between Iraq’s Sunni Muslim minority and the Shiite Muslims who control political life.

But it is also possible that Zarqawi’s death will create space for other insurgent groups to focus more on the political process than violence, said Ahmed Hashim, a Naval War College professor who has written extensively on Iraq’s insurgency. Jeffrey White, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, said Zarqawi’s death, paradoxically, creates a new challenge for the Bush administration, which no longer has the specter of Iraq’s most violent and fanatical terrorist to hold up as its enemy.

“We killed our bogeyman,” White said. “A lot of effort went into making him enemy number one. If the violence continues, who do we blame?”

The key, Schnell said, is for coalition forces to press the advantage and deny the insurgency a new poster boy. “You have to keep cutting the head off,” he said.

TF 145, of course, is working hard to do just that. Within hours of Zarqawi’s June 7 death, 17 simultaneous raids were carried out in and around Baghdad, yielding “a tremendous amount” of information and intelligence that is “presently being exploited … for further use,” Caldwell said.

Another 39 operations were conducted the night of June 8, Caldwell said.

“This is a big oak tree that got shaken, so there’s stuff falling all over the place,” Schnell said.

The unblinking eye cannot afford to rest yet.

Staff writers Bruce Rolfsen, Gordon Trowbridge and Gina Cavallaro contributed to this story.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

June 26, 2006

Zarqawi document details insurgents’ woes


BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. military forces are weakening the Iraqi insurgency in myriad ways, according to a “huge treasure” of documents found in the hideout of the late terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Iraqi officials said June 15.

One document said the insurgency was being hurt by, among other things, the U.S. military’s program to train Iraqi security forces, by massive arrests and seizures of weapons, by tightening the militants’ financial outlets, and by creating divisions within their ranks.

It also offered a blueprint for trying to start a war between the U.S. and Iran in order to rectify a “crisis” in the insurgency.

“Generally speaking and despite the gloomy present situation, we find that the best solution in order to get out of this crisis is to involve the U.S. forces in waging a war against another country or any hostile groups,” the document said, as quoted by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The document purports to reflect the policy of al-Qaida and its cooperation with groups loyal to ousted President Saddam Hussein.

The translated document was released by Iraqi National Security Adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie. There was no way to independently confirm the authenticity of the information attributed to al-Qaida.


Although Iraq officials said the document was found in al-Zarqawi’s hideout following a June 7 U.S. airstrike that killed him, U.S. military spokesman Army Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said the document had in fact been found in a previous raid as part of an ongoing three-week operation to track al-Zarqawi.

“We can verify that this information did come off some kind of computer asset that was at a safe location,” Caldwell said.

While the coalition was continuing to suffer human losses, “time is now beginning to be of service to the American forces and harmful to the resistance,” the document said.

According to a summary of the document, insurgents were being weakened by operations against them and by their failure to attract recruits. To give new impetus to the insurgency, they would have to change tactics, it added.

“We mean specifically attempting to escalate the tension between America and Iran, and Americans and the Shiite in Iraq,” the summary quoted the document as saying, especially among moderate followers of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most influential Shiite cleric in Iraq. “Creating disputes between America and them could hinder the U.S. cooperation with them, and subsequently weaken this kind of alliance between Shiites and the Americans.”

According to the summary, the document pointed to clashes in 2004 between U.S. forces and followers of radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army militia as evidence of the benefits of such a strategy. Al-Sadr and his growing followers are among the fiercest advocates of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

The document said the “results obtained during the struggle between U.S. Army and al-Mahdi army is an example of the benefits to be gained by such struggle,” according to the summary.

— Compiled from Associated Press reports

Ellie