TIME: Hunt for the Bomb
Factories
Monday, February 07, 2005
The car bombs that go off in Baghdad are
manufactured in the relative quiet of an arc of Sunni
tribal lands around the capital. That is the true
heartland of the resistance, where it draws on
massive weapons depots secreted in river valleys and
deserts. The nationalist fighters who control the
area supply Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi's networks with the
ammo they use for their deadly operations, according
to U.S. military intelligence. Even as more attacks
took place last week in the run-up to the
election--including mortar rounds on the U.S. embassy
that killed two Americans--the Iraqi government
announced the capture of several key al-Zarqawi
lieutenants, including an alleged "bomber-in-chief."
U.S.-led forces arrested other significant insurgent
leaders, the result of a monthlong sweep beyond
Iraq's big cities. On a recent mission, TIME Baghdad
bureau chief MICHAEL WARE saw the strategy at
work.
By
MICHAEL WARE
Backed by Bradley fighting vehicles, the American
soldiers of Coldsteel Company swarm into a clutch of
farmhouses as a platoon of Estonian infantry closes
from the rear. The Americans are part of the 2nd
Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment's operation to seal
off a stretch of villages hugging the Euphrates in
the Jafr Sakhr region, about 60 miles southwest of
Baghdad. "Go round 'em up," a U.S. officer hollers,
and male villagers of military age--one with his
crying 3-year-old clinging to his neck--are sifted
out. A humvee approaches and stops in front of the
lined-up Iraqis. From within, a passenger, face
masked, raises or lowers a thumb as each man is
singled out. It isn't clear who the masked man is,
perhaps an intelligence source or an informer. Those
given the thumbs-up are seated. Others, who get the
thumbs-down, are separated and detained. In the
meantime, the village mosque is secured. Its imam and
congregation are known to be hostile to U.S. forces.
The raid's focus shifts to a building marked as House
69 on the soldiers' maps. The night before, a source,
possibly a cell member who turned during questioning,
gave up the names and locations of six suspected cell
members. Among them are two brothers thought to be
central players in nationalist attacks on U.S.
soldiers. Also on the list is the leader of their
Islamic Army outfit, a man known as Abu Ayesha. The
brothers are found in their family compound in a
nearby village. Abu Ayesha is a different story. One
of the homes near House 69 is said to be his. But
although spotters have been positioned to catch
anyone running from the battalion's advance, Abu
Ayesha is not to be found. "Everybody gave us a
different story on which house was his, so they were
well versed in not giving a straight story," an
intelligence officer concludes.
Adjacent to House 69, in a small palm grove, the
Estonians uncover a weapons cache: rocket-propelled
grenades (RPG) and an AK-47, its ammo hastily buried
nearby. The weapon's magazines are wrapped in plastic
and sealed in a tin ammunition box. "There's gotta be
stuff all over the place," says 2-12 battalion
commander Lieut. Colonel Tim Ryan. Two days later,
one of the detainees would break during interrogation
and betray the site of Abu Ayesha's main arsenal,
which supplied the al-Zarqawi, Ansar al-Sunnah and
nationalist cells blasting away at the U.S.-led
coalition and the fledgling Iraqi government's
security forces. The 2-12 spent a day digging into
berms gouged from the flat desert, retrieving one of
the largest weapons caches found in Iraq in the past
year, including two suspected Scud-missile warheads.
Says Ryan: "The member of the cell who gave up the
information said that this is untouched, that it is a
place where they've drawn their supplies from ever
since the fall of the Saddam regime, and from which
they're supplying activities in this part of the
country, from southwest Baghdad over toward Fallujah
and then down to Musayyab."
The weapons seizure underlines the diverse and
fractured nature of the Iraqi insurgency.
Al-Zarqawi's cells, mostly directed by non-Iraqi
jihadis, often don't know where the arms caches are
and so cannot function without the support of the
Iraqi nationalists, mostly former military officers,
who do. The proliferation of car bombs doesn't
indicate a formal alliance between the two groups.
But the ideological divide is bridged by tribal
commerce. Within a single tribe, there can be a
diversity of Islamist and nationalist strains--and
genealogy can usually produce a cousin able to
provide arms to a distant relative, perhaps via
another distant relative. Insurgents from the
Karghouli tribe, for instance, are principally led by
a figure dubbed the Strawberry Sheik. One of his
relatives, Abu Mustafa, heads a self-titled military
"company" of the nationalist Islamic Army. Another of
the sheik's kinsmen, Amara Adnan Hamza, is a
fundamentalist Muslim. Known locally as Little
Zarqawi, he commands a network loyal to the more
famous al-Zarqawi that has prepared car bombs
destined for Baghdad. According to American as well
as insurgent sources, both Little Zarqawi and his
nationalist relative Abu Mustafa have drawn weapons
from their senior relative, the Strawberry Sheik.
Ryan's battalion disrupted Little Zarqawi's cell and
found two tons of explosives at its disposal.
So far, in an offensive that began in late December,
the 2-12 has cracked an al-Zarqawi bombmaking cell
and an Ansar al-Sunnah stronghold, and severely
disrupted a nest of nationalist cells composed of
former Republican Guard officers and Baathists upon
whom the other organizations rely. That has led the
insurgents to attack the 2-12 directly. At one point
during the Jafr Sakhr operation, a report comes in
from 2-12's headquarters. Insurgents are lobbing
mortars on the bridge over the Euphrates where Ryan
has positioned his tanks. He isn't dismayed. "I was
waiting to see how long it would take the enemy to
get mad enough about us being on the bridge before he
started shooting mortars at us. If he's shooting at
us here, he isn't attacking toward Baghdad. We have
the bridge cut off, so now the bad guys on the east
side of the bridge can't connect with the bad guys on
the west side of the bridge." He adds, "The more [the
enemy] has to turn and divert his attention to us
here in his supply lines, in his safe havens, the
less time he's devoted to attacking people in
Baghdad." As a result, the car bombs made in the Jafr
Sakhr area must now pass through Fallujah to the
north or Musayyab to the south, running a gauntlet of
U.S. checkpoints before they can reach the capital.
The insurgents in Baghdad claim to be unperturbed by
the recent U.S. raids in the tribal heartland. The
emir, or prince, controlling many of the nationalist
cells in the capital and in the Jafr Sakhr region,
which Ryan's 2-12 is targeting, told TIME that he
knew of the seizures but declared his group could
recover. Ryan concedes he is only disrupting those
networks. If nothing else, he believes, it helps to
buy time for democracy and a central government to
take hold. But he is aware that the offensive will
slow after the 2-12 leaves Iraq in February. It will
take time for its replacement battalion to get up to
speed with the strategy. And it's a daunting task.
Abu Mohammed, an Iraqi guerrilla leader in Baghdad,
told TIME, "If you dig anywhere in Iraq, you'll find
one of two things: oil or weapons."
Ryan and his men already have recorded a chilling
inventory of what has been available to the enemy. In
House 71, for example, they find an array of
weapons-- a crank-handle detonator, spools of
detonation cord, dozens of mortars, thousands of
rounds of 12.7-mm ammo, a sackful of yellow grenades
and other bombmaking materials--buried in pits all
over a yard in which a herd of sheep and goats graze.
A pocket notebook inside the ramshackle dwelling
proves to be a huge intelligence boon, listing
weapons and the cell leaders to whom they were
distributed. An Arabic-speaking Army specialist, born
to Palestinian and Puerto Rican parents, scans the
pages. "He's written everything here--who he gave
what to. He's very stupid," the soldier says with a
smile. The pages connect a lot of dots to insurgent
bosses Ryan has been tracking.
At the 2-12's approach, the owner of House 71 had run
to a neighbor's home and attempted to mix in with
other civilians, disguising himself by adopting
someone else's name. Ryan saw through it. "Take Mr.
Turban here," he orders, referring to the scarf
around the suspect's head. "All that s___ was right
behind his house--he knows something," he says. Under
interrogation the man identifies himself as the
weapons dealer working under Abu Ayesha and supplying
arms to a host of divergent guerrilla and terrorist
cells.
Ryan decides to send a message, a "show of force," as
he calls it. He instructs his engineers to pile the
weapons caches in the front yard of House 71. "We got
all this stuff in his house, I don't see any reason
why we can't blow it up," Ryan says. His Estonian
counterpart chuckles. "I don't mind; it's not my
house," he says. By day's end, the message has been
delivered repeatedly. Coalition troops destroy two
vehicles and another house in acts of retaliation. At
nightfall the battalion returns to its base, having
uprooted a large number of insurgent weapons sites.
It has produced a staggering array of antiaircraft
guns, TNT, RPG warheads and launchers, machine guns,
plastic explosive, grenades and bombs. Surveying the
booty, Ryan tells a subordinate, "We're just
scratching the surface."