My Share of the Task (73 page)

another eight times over:
At the time of writing, 4,486 Americans had died in the Iraq war, according to icasualties.org.

“responsibility and duty and engagements”:
T. E. Lawrence,
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
(Vintage, 2008), 41.

four square miles:
William Langewiesche, “Welcome to the Green Zone,”
Atlantic
, November 2004.

busts from their perches
:
Joel Brinkley, “A Joyful Palace Event: Four Heads Roll in Baghdad, and All of Them Are Hussein's,”
New York Times
,
December 3, 2003.

rebuilding the stock market:
George Packer's description of the palace is unfortunately quite accurate: “Amid the grotesque faux-baroque furnishings, the palace was a hive of purposeful activity. . . . Most of them seemed to be Republicans, and more than a few were party loyalists who had come to Iraq as political appointees on ninety-day tours. They were astonishingly young. Many had never worked abroad. . . . Some were simply unqualified for their responsibilities. A twenty-five-year-old oversaw the creation of the Baghdad stock market, and another twenty-five-year-old, from the Office of Special Plans, helped write the interim constitution while filling out his law school application.” George Packer,
The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 183–84. See also Yochi J. Dreazen, “How a 24-Year-Old Got a Job Rebuilding Iraq's Stock Market,”
Wall Street Journal
, January 28, 2004.

only a fraction of their size:
Eight thousand seven hundred soldiers from the 2nd Infantry Division replaced the 101st in January 2004. Eric Hamilton, “The Fight for Mosul,”
Institute for the Study of War
,
7–8.

left my key TF 714 staff behind:
My recollection of this October trip and helicopter flight was confirmed in interviews with team members present.

the administration's official line:
That week President Bush said, “The more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity is available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become.” “Week of Violence,”
NewsHour
, PBS, October 31, 2003.

Sunni stronghold after the invasion:
Eric Hamilton, “The Fight for Mosul,” 4.

sandbags, burlap sacks
:
These processes were described in interviews with participants.

at 4:30
P.M.
:
Langewiesche, “Welcome to the Green Zone.”

KAMAZ flatbed truck:
Sameer N. Yacoub, “FBI: Deadly U.N. Headquarters Bomb Made from Materials from Saddam's Old Arsenal,”
Associated Press
,
August 20, 2003.

“they can rape the land
”:
“The Insurgency,”
Frontline
,
PBS,
February 21, 2006. Zarqawi later claimed responsibility for the U.N. attack, among others, saying, “God honored us and so we harvested their heads and tore up their bodies in many places.”

during
East Timor's independence:
Abu Omar al-Kurdi, an Al Qaeda in Iraq operative, said Zarqawi targeted Vieira de Mello specifically as “the person behind the separation of East Timor from Indonesia.” Quoted in Samantha Power,
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World
(Penguin Press, 2008), 514.

a cap attributed to Secretary Rumsfeld:
Interview with senior military official.

critical step to secure authority:
Interview with participant.

CHAPTER 8: THE ENEMY EMERGES

a framed exhibition case:
Don Van Natta, “Hussein's Gun May Go on Display at Bush Library,”
New York Times
,
July 5, 2009.

three concentric circles:
This understanding of Al Qaeda's structure appears in Coll,
Ghost Wars
, 474. Coll notes that by the late 1990s, such a description of the terrorist group was “common” at the CIA.

core was a bureaucracy:
Commission members and staff: Thomas H. Kean, et al., “Overview of the Enemy: Staff Statement No. 15,” National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States,
June 16, 2004, 2–3 (hereafter, “Overview of the Enemy”).

“centralization of decision”
:
Khalid al Hammadi, “Bin Ladin's Former ‘Bodyguard' Interviewed on Al-Qaida Strategies,”
Al-Quds al Arabi
, trans. by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, August 3, 2004. The article quotes Abu Jandal (a former “personal guard” to bin Laden) explaining this operational model in 2004. Since then, this statement has been cited by both Lawrence Wright (
The Looming Tower,
359) and Peter L. Bergen (
The Osama bin Laden I Know,
253). The organization, as Steve Coll describes it, “was tightly supervised at the top and very loosely spread at the bottom” (
Ghost Wars,
474).

top-level
Military Affairs Committee:
Al Hammadi, “Bin Ladin's Former ‘Bodyguard.'”

staying to clean their tracks:
“Overview of the Enemy,” 8.

in Europe, and elsewhere:
Contrary to reports, bin Laden did not personally finance Al Qaeda; estimates of his fortune were chronically inflated, and determining his actual wealth was a persistent difficulty for the intelligence community. Steve Coll,
The Bin Ladens
, 347–48, 488–96.

twenty other groups:
Commission Members,
9/11 Commission Report
, 470, note 80.

bin Laden attempted to bring:
Leah Farrall, “How Al Qaeda Works,”
Foreign Affairs (
March/April 2011).

ten thousand and twenty thousand:
9/11 Commission Report
, 67. This figure is also cited by Thomas Hegghammer (“Global Jihadism After the Iraq War,”
Middle East Journal
[Winter 2006], 14) and Wright (
Looming Tower
,
341).

as high as seventy thousand:
Bruce Hoffman, “Leadership Secrets of Osama bin Laden,”
Atlantic
, April 2003.

hard, poor lives:
Coll,
Ghost Wars
, 474–75.

science and engineering degrees:
Wright notes the “strong bias” toward these specific academic disciplines (
Looming Tower
, 340–41).

physical training alongside indoctrination:
Behavior we witnessed on the battlefield validated Norwegian terrorism scholar Thomas Hegghammer's assessment: “Here lies the key to understanding the extremism and the internal cohesion of the so-called ‘al-Qa'ida network.' The training camps generated an ultra-masculine culture of violence which brutalized the volunteers and broke down their barriers to the use of violence. . . . [T]he harsh camp life built strong personal relationships between them. Last but not least, they fell under the ideological influence of Osama bin Ladin and Ayman al-Zawahiri, who generated a feeling among the recruits of being part of a global vanguard of holy warriors, whose mission was to defend the Islamic world against attacks by the Jewish-Crusader alliance” (“Global Jihadism After the Iraq War,” 14).

invited attendees to brainstorm:
“Overview of the Enemy,”
9.

an Al Qaeda
trademark:
Wright,
Looming Tower
, 211.

prestige of
such “martyrdom operations”:
“Overview of the Enemy,” 10.

graduating to advanced training:
Ibid.

endorsed the same strategy:
Hegghammer writes of the
“
ideological
unity” among men who had passed through the camps (“Global Jihadism After the Iraq War,” 14).

across sixty countries:
Coll,
Ghost Wars
, 474.

control over the disparate network:
“The eviction from Afghanistan in 2001 made al Qaeda Central more dependent on franchises to maintain operational reach, while local groups were attracted by the strength of the al Qaeda brand name.” Thomas Hegghammer, “The Ideological Hybridization of Jihadi Groups,”
Current Trends in Islamist Ideology
, November 18, 2009.

under orders from bin Laden:
Farrall, “How Al Qaeda Works.”

“In no class of warfare”:
C. E. Caldwell,
Small Wars: Their Principles & Practice
, 3rd ed. (Bison Books, 1996 [1906]), 143.

“We have recently seen”:
J. B. L. J. Rousseau, quoted in Alexei Vassiliev,
The History of Saudi Arabia
(Saqi Books, 1998), 97.

conquer the peninsula:
Vassiliev,
History of Saudi Arabia
, 98. The state established by Saud and Wahhab's army briefly united most of Arabia but flamed out ten years later, in 1815, following an Egyptian invasion.

“12,000 Wahhabis suddenly attacked”:
J. B. L. J. Rousseau, quoted in ibid., 97.

too
passive or too compromising:
On understanding how historical Salafisim and Wahhabism have given rise to the more global and violent modern Salafisim of figures like Zarqawi, I found useful Roel Meijer's introduction to the volume he edited,
Global Salafism: Islam's New Religious Movement
(Columbia University Press, 2009).

largely
avoided the sectarian targeting:
The exceptions were the smaller, explicitly anti-Shiite extremist groups that had existed in Pakistan and were allied with Al Qaeda in the years leading up to the Karbala attack. But their impact was minimal compared to Zarqawi's impending program: “Although Salafi discourse has always been virulently anti-Shi'ite, Arab Islamist militants have never in modern times targeted Shi'ites on the scale we are now witnessing in Iraq” (Hegghammer, “Global Jihadism After the Iraq War,” 27).

to bin Laden and Zawahiri
:
Details of Hassan Ghul's capture appear in Yuri Kozyrev, “Fields of Jihad,”
Time,
February 23, 2004.

“They are an easy quarry”:
“Zarqawi Letter,” trans. by Coalition Provisional Authority, Department of State website, February 2004.

almost thirty
years
:
Jeffrey Gettleman, “A Ritual of Self-Punishment, Long Suppressed, Is Shattered by a Mortar Attack,”
New York Times
,
March 3, 2004.

“display of heathens and idolatry”:
Hamid al-Ali, quoted in “Why the Aggravation?”
Economist
,
March 6, 2004.

outside a hotel and a shrine:
Details of this scene of the Ashura bombings are drawn especially from Anthony Shadid's vivid reporting of the event in
Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's Wars
(Henry Holt and Co., 2006),
422–25. I read
Night Draws Near
the year it came out, and it had a tremendous impact on me. I was in Iraq at the time, and it highlighted the superficiality of our understanding, which was tough to accept in ourselves.

169 dead and hundreds wounded:
Casualty figures are from
“Will the Bloodstained Shias Resist the Urge to Hit Back?”
Economist
, March 6, 2004.

protectors of their fellow Shia:
Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Iraq's Shiites Renew Call for Militias,”
Washington Post
, March 4, 2004.

CHAPTER 9: BIG BEN

pick up kitchen equipment:
A lot about the event remains unclear, especially the exact reason the Blackwater convoy entered Fallujah that day. Tom Ricks in
Fiasco
says the contractors (traveling without the flatbed trucks) were “checking out a route that Kellogg Brown & Root's logistics convoy would take the next day” (
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
[Penguin Press, 2006], 331). However, the guards were not under contract with KBR, but rather a firm called ESS. The
Raleigh News & Observer
's six-part series on the incident and a
Frontline
documentary are most authoritative and suggest the contractors were escorting empty flatbed trucks that were going to get kitchen equipment.

stopped at a checkpoint:
“Interview with Colonel John Toolan,”
Frontline,
PBS, April 5, 2005. John Toolan (who was a colonel commanding the 1st Regiment, 1st Marines at that time) reported to
Frontline
that the contractors “ignored” the Marines' warnings and then somehow bypassed the checkpoint.

its driver slumped over:
Details of the scene come from an extended series by the
Raleigh News & Observer
on the ambush: Jay Price et al., “The Bridge: Chapte
r 6: Fury Boils to the Surface,”
Raleigh News & Observer
, July 31, 2004.

“
cemetery of the Americans”:
John Berman, “Outrage in Fallujah,”
Nightly News
, ABC, March 31, 2004.

in front of news
cameramen:
The front page of the
Rocky Mountain News
for April 1, 2004, carried an image of a Fallujan holding up a sheet of paper that had this slogan printed on it, underneath a skull-and-crossbones logo.