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How They Got Zarqawi
A tip from Jordanian intelligence played a key role in the air strike that ended the life of Iraq's terrorist leader
By TONY KARON
In the end, the savagery of Musab al-Zarqawi may have earned him too many enemies. The terrorist responsible for some of the most gruesome killings in Iraq was killed in a joint U.S.-Iraqi military operation Wednesday, after the U.S. and its allies had finally located him. A well-placed intelligence source in Jordan told TIME that the CIA was tipped off after Jordanian intelligence learned of a meeting that Zarqawi planned to hold in the town of Baquba, north of Baghdad. His safe house was targeted in an air attack, and, says the same source, the Jordanian-born leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq was killed in the bombing. A senior Jordanian official confirmed that "there was a Jordanian security role in this." The official said he believed the breakthrough was a result of "cumulative intelligence," including from the recent arrest last month of a senior operative in the group Al-Qaeda in Iraq. U.S. officials have said fingerprint and photographic evidence confirm Zarqawi's identity. Jihadi Web sites are also reported to have announced his death.
The takedown was largely a military effort. But a U.S. official told TIME that American intelligence operatives played a key role in figuring out that Sheik Abd-al-Rahman, Zarqawi's spiritual adviser, was a key link who could lead to Zarqawi himself. "Intelligence was useful in identifying this individual and his importance to Zarqawi…. It's as though you had identified Frank Nitti with the knowledge that eventually he would lead you to Al Capone," the U.S. official said. "This was the culmination of a huge amount of effort."
The ability of the U.S. and its allies to isolate and eliminate Zarqawi may be a reflection of the Qaeda leader's growing isolation within Iraq. Six weeks ago, Zarqawi released an unprecedented video showing himself walking around Iraq, unmasked and in daylight, firing weapons and boasting of his continued primacy in the fight against the U.S. But that video itself may have been a response to growing rumors that the 38-year-old Jordanian was being marginalized within the insurgency out of concern by other leaders that his televised beheadings of helpless hostages was alienating even many Iraqis sympathetic to the insurgency, and that his strategy of mass-murder of Shi'ites in the hope of provoking a civil war was a road to disaster. Even other leaders of al-Qaeda had publicly questioned some of these tactics, while some of the more nationalist leaders of the insurgency who had been quietly negotiating with the U.S. and Iraqi government had made no secret of their animosity toward Zarqawi and the al-Qaeda agenda. The announcement, just a day before Zarqawi's death, that the new Iraqi government would release some 2,500 Sunnis imprisoned for assisting the insurgency, suggests that rapprochement between the government and the Sunni nationalist element of the insurgency may be accelerating, which was bad news for Zarqawi.
The fact that intelligence agencies were suddenly able to pinpoint the location of a man who had eluded capture for three years, during which his terror operations left thousands of Iraqis dead, suggests that some of those close enough to know Zarqawi's whereabouts may have been ready to shop him to his enemies. Not necessarily, of course: The intel services could have simply gotten lucky, or Zarqawi could have made a mistake. Either way, a key agent in the chaos gripping Iraq has now been taken out of the equation. “It is wonderful," said the Jordanian official. "Another window of hope that things hopefully, Inshallah, will be on track."
