A triumphant sensation coursed through him. The next day he would be leaving as a free man. The troika approached him. He heard the leader say, “We’re not done with you yet.”
20
BLUEPRINT
Who was in charge here?
The judge had released him. The head of the prison had protested. Who decided his fate?
The young fighters were only pawns. The guards locked the doors. The torturers abused whoever they were given. The executioners beheaded on command.
Without these young men, the system would fall apart. It required brutality. Barbarism was the surface, the external face. Behind the façade, there was a strict hierarchy, and behind the hierarchy lay a carefully devised plan: the formula for a reign of terror, a machinery of violence lubricated with blood.
Not far away, a little farther to the east, close to the border in the north, sat the mastermind behind the system that held Sadiq prisoner. Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi was a lean man with a graying beard. He came across as polite and reserved, almost a little absentminded, but those who knew him were aware that he had an extraordinary memory and great logistical prowess.
In a small extension behind a house in the village of Tal Rifat in Aleppo province, beneath some boxes and a pile of blankets, lay a file of handwritten sheets: an organizational chart, pages of diagrams, and lists of names, along with instructions, guidelines, and a timetable. It was the blueprint of the Islamic State.
The man behind the plan had held one of the most trusted positions in Iraq’s intelligence service. On March 17, 2003, when President George W. Bush gave Saddam Hussein forty-eight hours to relinquish power over his “dying regime,” he also addressed Iraq’s military forces in an attempt to get them to lay down their arms: “It will be no defense to say, ‘I was just following orders.’”
Over a quarter of a million U.S. soldiers were on standby in Kuwait, ready to invade Iraq. On March 20, they rolled across the border. Progress through the desert was swift. Many Iraqi forces had quit their bases before the Americans arrived. After a three-week campaign, they reached Baghdad. It took only a couple of hours to take control of the city. The Americans secured the Oil Ministry with a line of tanks and tore down the statue of Saddam outside the hotel where the foreign journalists were staying. Regime change could hardly have been choreographed and packaged for broadcast any quicker. Before a month had passed, Baath rule in Iraq had collapsed. On May 1, George Bush declared, Mission Accomplished.
Toward the end of the year, on a farm near his hometown of Tikrit, the fallen dictator was found in his spider hole, six feet belowground, along with two rifles, a pistol, and $750,000 in cash.
“You will not have to fear the rule of Saddam Hussein ever again,” George Bush said as images of the bearded, bloodied man were flashed around the world.
Saddam was finished. But his men were not.
Most of them were secular Sunni Muslims. Shifting alliances and the bargaining of loyalties were part and parcel of clan rule in Iraq. Many envisaged having a job under the new regime.
The Americans had other plans. When Paul Bremer, the top civilian administrator in Baghdad, dissolved the Iraqi army with the stroke of a pen, forbidding all those who had held leading positions under Saddam from seeking posts in the new Iraq, men like al-Khlifawi found themselves unemployed and banned from practicing their profession. More than one hundred thousand well-trained Iraqi officers and bureaucrats were robbed of their positions and livelihoods. The Unites States had gotten a dangerous enemy—armed and aggrieved.
Colonel al-Khlifawi went underground in Sunni-dominated Anbar province in the west of the country. He changed his appearance and reemerged as Haji Bakr. The rejected officers sought a strategic alliance and found it with al-Qaida’s men in Iraq, who were led by the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a former troublemaker who had discovered radical Islam and sobered up. In the late 1980s, Zarqawi enlisted in the fight against Soviet forces in Afghanistan but realized, to his disappointment, that he had missed the war. The withdrawal was already under way when he arrived. In Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden took him under his wing while he built up al-Qaida, but he came to view Zarqawi as too extreme and did not support his enthusiasm for the mass killings of Shia Muslims.
Zarqawi fought loyally on the Taliban side when the United States attacked Afghanistan after September 11. Wounded in action, he left for Iran, traveling to Iraqi Kurdistan, where he joined the jihadist group Ansar al-Islam. Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Ansar al-Islam’s enemy had been Saddam’s regime, which they viewed as ungodly. Colin Powell, the United States secretary of state, had claimed that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaida, that the Iraqis had trained the group in the use of weapons of mass destruction, and could cooperate with it on an attack against the West. It was a false accusation. In the wake of the U.S. invasion, it would ironically become truth.
For al-Qaida, the war in Iraq provided the opportunity to mobilize anew after the loss of its bases in Afghanistan dried up recruiting. Instead of the friendly society Bush had envisaged in Iraq, the country became the spearhead of a new wave of terror. Zarqawi himself was behind several attacks, including the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad, followed by a series of attacks against American forces and Shia Muslim leaders and holy sites.
The Baathists and the Islamic extremists had one firm conviction in common: Control over the masses was to belong to a small elite who did not need to answer to anyone.
In 2004, al-Qaida in Iraq was formed with Zarqawi as its leader. AQI recruited from across the Arab world. Most came via smuggling routes through Syria. Assad allowed
