Black Flags Read online

  Also by Joby Warrick

  The Triple Agent:

  The al-Qaeda Mole Who Infiltrated the CIA

  Copyright © 2015 by Joby Warrick

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover design by Emily Mahon

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Warrick, Joby.

  Black flags : the rise of ISIS / Joby Warrick.—First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-385-53821-3 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-385-53822-0 (eBook)

  1. IS (Organization) 2. Terrorism—Iraq. 3. Terrorism—Middle East. 4. Terrorism—Religious aspects—Islam. 5. Islamic fundamentalism. 6. Middle East—Politics and government—21st century. I. Title.

  HV6433.I722I8593 2015

  956.9104′2—dc23

  2015020949

  eBook ISBN 9780385538220

  v4.1

  a

  To Maryanne

  With love and gratitude

  I bring the men who desire death as ardently as you desire life.

  —Khalid ibn a-Walid (seventh-century Islamic warrior, companion of Muhammad)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Joby Warrick

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  List of Principal Characters

  Map of Key Locations

  Prologue

  BOOK I: THE RISE OF ZARQAWI

  1. “What kind of person can command with only his eyes?”

  2. “Here was a real leader”

  3. “A problem like that always comes back”

  4. “The time for training is over”

  5. “I did it for al-Qaeda and for Zarqawi”

  6. “This war is going to happen”

  7. “Now his fame would extend throughout the Arab world”

  BOOK II: IRAQ

  8. “No longer a victory”

  9. “So you guys think this is an insurgency?”

  10. “Revolting is exactly what we want”

  11. “It would surpass anything al-Qaeda did”

  12. “The sheikh of the slaughterers”

  13. “It’s hopeless there”

  14. “Are you going to get him?”

  15. “This is our 9/11”

  16. “Your end is close”

  BOOK III: ISIS

  17. “The people want to topple the regime!”

  18. “Where is this Islamic State of Iraq that you’re talking about?”

  19. “This is the state for which Zarqawi paved the way”

  20. “The mood music started to change”

  21. “There was no more hope after that”

  22. “This is a tribal revolution”

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  A Note About the Author

  Illustrations

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The names of several current and former Jordanian intelligence officers interviewed for this book have been altered by mutual agreement due to concerns about threats to their safety. They are referred to in these pages by their informal Arab kunya titles, rather than by traditional family names.

  LIST OF PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

  Zarqawi and His Generation

  Abu Muhmmad al-Maqdisi (given name Aasim Muhammad Tahir al-Barqawi), Jordanian-Palestinian cleric and author, former cellmate and mentor to Zarqawi

  Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (given name Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh), Jordanian terrorist, founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq

  Abu al-Ghadiya, Syrian dentist, senior Zarqawi associate, and supply master

  Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of al-Qaeda’s “core” branch, former deputy to Osama bin Laden

  Osama bin Laden, founder of al-Qaeda

  The Islamic State of Iraq and Its Successors

  Abu Omar al-Baghdadi (given name Hamid Dawud Mohamed Khalil al-Zawi), former member of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist Party and leader of the Islamic State of Iraq from 2006 to 2010

  Abu Ayyub al-Masri (given name Abu Hamza al-Muhajir), Egyptian explosives expert and Zarqawi associate who became the number two commander of the Islamic State of Iraq in 2006; killed in an air strike in 2010

  Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (given name Ibrahim Awad al-Badri), Islamic cleric and ISI spiritual adviser who rose to leadership in 2010; declared himself “caliph” of the Islamic State of Iraq in 2014

  Abu Wahib (given name Shaker Wahib al-Dulaimi), brutal, media-obsessed ISIS commander in Anbar Province notorious for killing Shiite truck drivers and other civilians

  Haji Bakr (given name Samir al-Khlifawi), deputy to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and leader of ISIS’s military council; killed in 2014

  In Jordan

  King Abdullah II, fourth sovereign of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan

  Abu Haytham, senior counterterrorism official, General Intelligence Directorate (GID), Jordan

  Abu Mutaz, GID case officer and later manager; expert in “flipping” Islamists into informants

  Ali Bourzak, GID official and legendary interrogator known as the “Red Devil”

  Laurence Foley, midlevel official at the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan

  Salem Ben Suweid, Zarqawi disciple who plotted Foley’s assassination

  Azmi al-Jayousi, Palestinian-Jordanian, trained at Zarqawi’s camp in Herat, Afghanistan; plotted to explode chemical “dirty” bomb in Amman

  Sajida al-Rishawi, would-be suicide bomber in 2005 terrorist attack on hotels in Amman, Jordan

  In Iraq

  Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq, 1979 to 2003

  Charles “Sam” Faddis, CIA operative inside Iraq prior to 2003 invasion; urged preemptive strike on Zarqawi’s camp

  Nada Bakos, CIA officer and chief “targeter” responsible for tracking Zarqawi

  Zaydan al-Jibiri, Sunni tribal leader from Ramadi, Iraq

  General Stanley McChrystal, head of Joint Special Forces Command that led the hunt for Zarqawi in Iraq

  Zaid al-Karbouly, Iraqi customs officer in the pay of al-Qaeda in Iraq

  Nouri al-Maliki, Shiite prime minister of Iraq from 2006 to 2014

  In Syria

  Bashir al-Assad, president of Syria

  Robert Ford, U.S. ambassador to Syria, 2010 to 2014

  Mouaz Moustafa, director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a nonprofit that offered a window into deteriorating conditions in Syria

  Abu Mohammad al-Julani, leader of Jabhat al-Nusra (“al-Nusra Front”), the Syrian branch established by the Islamic State of Iraq in late 2011

  Kofi Annan, U.N. secretary-general, 1997 to 2006, who sought to broker Syrian peace accord

  In Washington

  Dick Cheney, U.S. vice president, sought the CIA’s support in connecting al-Qaeda to Iraqi regime

  Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, 2009 to 2013

  Michael V. Hayden, NSA director and director of National Intelligence during anti-Zarqawi campaign; CIA director, 2006 to 2009

  Frederic C. Hof, special State Department adviser on the Middle East and Syria, 2009 to 2012

  Sen. John McCain, chairman, Senate Armed Services Committee

  Leon Panetta, CIA director, 2009 to 2011; defense secretary, 2011 to 2013

  Robert Richer, the CIA’s former station chief in Jordan, later chief of the agency’s Near East Division and deputy director of operations

  George Tenet, CIA director, 1996
to 2004

  Detail left

  Detail right

  PROLOGUE

  Amman, Jordan, February 3, 2015

  Just after nightfall, a warrant arrived at the city’s main women’s prison for the execution of Sajida al-Rishawi. The instructions had come from King Abdullah II himself, then in Washington on a state visit, and were transmitted from his private plane to the royal court in Jordan’s capital. A clerk relayed the message to the Interior Ministry and then to the prisons department, where it caused a stir. State executions are complicated affairs requiring many steps, yet the king’s wishes were explicit: the woman would face the gallows before the sun rose the next day.

  The chief warden quickly made the trek to the cell where Rishawi had maintained a kind of self-imposed solitary confinement for close to a decade. The prisoner, forty-five now and no longer thin, spent most of her days watching television or reading a paperback Koran, seeing no one, and keeping whatever thoughts she had under the greasy, prison-issued hijab she always wore. She was not a stupid woman, yet she seemed perpetually disconnected from whatever was going on around her. “When will I be going home?” she asked her government-appointed lawyer during rare meetings in the months after she was sentenced to death. Eventually, even those visits stopped.

  Now, when the warden sat her down to explain that she would die in the morning, Rashida nodded her assent but said nothing. If she cried or prayed or cursed, no one in the prison heard a word of it.

  That she could face death was not a surprise to anyone. In 2006, a judge sentenced Rishawi to hang for her part in Jordan’s worst-ever terrorist attack: three simultaneous hotel bombings that killed sixty people, most of them guests at a wedding party. She was the suicide bomber who lived, an odd, heavy-browed woman made to pose awkwardly before TV cameras showing off the vest that had failed to explode. At one time, everyone in Amman knew her story, how this thirty-five-year-old unmarried Iraqi had agreed to wed a stranger so they could become a man-and-wife suicide team; how she panicked and ran; how she had wandered around the city’s northern suburbs in a taxi, lost, stopping passersby for directions, still wearing streaks of blood on her clothes and shoes.

  But nearly ten years had passed. The hotels had been rebuilt and renamed, and Rishawi had vanished inside Jordan’s labyrinthine penal system. Within the Juwaida Women’s Prison, she wore a kind of faded notoriety, like a valuable museum piece that no one looks at anymore. Some of the older hands in the state security service called her “Zarqawi’s woman,” a mocking reference to the infamous Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who ordered the hotel bombings. The younger ones barely remembered her at all.

  Then, in the span of a month, everything changed. Zarqawi’s followers, it turned out, had not forgotten Rishawi. The terrorists had rebranded themselves over the years and were now known in Jordan by the Arabic acronym Daesh—in English, ISIS. And in January 2015, ISIS asked to have Rishawi back.

  The demand for her release came in the middle of Jordan’s worst domestic crisis in years. A Jordanian air-force jet had crashed in Syria, and its young pilot had been captured alive by ISIS fighters. The group had broadcast photos of the frightened, nearly naked pilot being paraded around by grinning jihadists, some of them reaching out to embrace this great gift that Allah had dropped from the sky.

  From the palace to the security agencies, the king and his advisers steeled themselves for even more awful news. Either the pilot would be publicly butchered by ISIS, they feared, or the terrorists would demand a terrible price for his ransom.

  True to form, ISIS announced its decision in macabre fashion. Less than a week after the crash, the captured pilot’s family received a call at home, from the pilot’s own cell phone. On the other end, a stranger, speaking in Iraqi-accented Arabic, issued the group’s singular demand.

  We want our sister Sajida, the caller said.

  The same demand was repeated, along with several new ones, in a constantly shifting and mostly one-sided negotiation. All the requests were routed to the headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Jordan’s intelligence service, and all eventually landed on the desk of the imposing forty-seven-year-old brigadier who ran the department’s counterterrorism unit. Even in an agency notorious for its toughness, Abu Haytham stood apart, a man with a burly street fighter’s physique and the personality of an anvil. He had battled ISIS in its many incarnations for years, and he had famously broken some of the group’s top operatives in interrogation. Zarqawi himself had taken several turns in Abu Haytham’s holding cell, and so had Sajida al-Rishawi, the woman ISIS was now seeking to free.

  Outside of Jordan, the demand made little sense. Rishawi had no value as a fighter or a leader, or even as a symbol. She was known to have participated in exactly one terrorist attack, and she had botched it. Hardly “Zarqawi’s woman,” she had never even met the man who ordered the strike. If ISIS hadn’t mentioned her name, she would likely have lived her remaining years quietly in prison, her execution indefinitely deferred for lack of any particular reason to carry it out.

  But Abu Haytham understood. By invoking Rishawi’s name, the terrorists were reaching back to the group’s beginnings, back to a time before there was an ISIS, or a civil war in Syria; before the meltdown in Iraq that gave rise to the movement; even before the world had heard of a terrorist called Zarqawi. The Mukhabarat’s men had tried to keep this terrorist group from gaining a foothold. They had failed—sometimes through their own mistakes, more often because of the miscalculations of others. Now, Zarqawi’s jihadist movement had become a self-declared state, with territorial claims on two of Jordan’s borders. And Rishawi, the failed bomber, was one of many old scores that ISIS was ready to settle.

  In summoning this forgotten ghost, ISIS was evoking one of the most horrifying nights in the country’s history, a moment seared into the memories of men of Abu Haytham’s generation, the former intelligence captains, investigators, and deputies who had since risen to lead the Mukhabarat. Once, Zarqawi had managed to strike directly at Jordan’s heart, and now, with the country’s pilot in their hands, ISIS was about to do it again.

  —

  Abu Haytham had been present that night. He could remember every detail of the crime for which Rishawi had been convicted and sentenced to hang. He could remember how the night had felt, the smell of blood and smoke, and the wailing of the injured.

  Mostly he remembered the two girls.

  They were cousins, ages nine and fourteen, and he knew their names: Lina and Riham. Local girls from Amman, out for a wedding party. They were both dressed in white, with small faces that were lovely and pale and perfectly serene. “Just like angels,” he had thought.

  They still wore the nearly identical lacy dresses their parents had bought for the party, and stylish shoes for dancing. Almost miraculously, from the neck up neither had suffered a scratch. When Abu Haytham first saw them, lying side by side on a board in those chaotic first moments at the hospital, he had wondered if they were sleeping. Injured, perhaps, but sedated and sleeping. Please, let them be sleeping, he had prayed.

  But then he saw the terrible holes the shrapnel had made.

  The girls would have been standing when it happened, as everyone was, whooping and clapping as the bride and groom prepared to make their entrance in the ballroom at Amman’s Radisson Hotel, which was lit up like a desert carnival on a cool mid-November evening. The newlyweds’ fathers, all big grins and rented tuxedos, had taken their places on the podium, and the Arabic band’s bleating woodwinds and throbbing drums had risen to a roar so loud that the hotel clerks in the lobby had to shout to be heard. The party was just reaching its gloriously noisy, sweaty, exuberant peak. No one appeared to have noticed two figures in dark coats who shuffled awkwardly near the doorway and then squeezed between the rows of cheering wedding guests toward the front of the ballroom.

  There was a blinding flash, and then a sensation of everything falling—the ceiling, the walls, the floor. The shock wave knocked guests ou
t of their beds on the hotel’s upper floors and blew out thick plate-glass doors in the lobby. A thunderclap, then silence. Then screams.

  Only one of the bombs had gone off, but it cut through the ballroom like a swarm of flying razors. Hundreds of steel ball bearings, carefully and densely packed around the bomb’s core, sliced through wedding decorations, food trays, and upholstery. They splintered wooden tables and shattered marble tiles. They tore through evening gowns and fancy clutches, through suit jackets and crisp shirts, and through white, frilly dresses of the kind young girls wear to formal parties.

  Abu Haytham, then a captain, was winding down another in a string of long shifts on that Wednesday in early November 2005. It was just before 9:00 p.m. when the first call came in, about an explosion of some kind at the Grand Hyatt across town. The early speculation was that a gas canister was to blame, but then came word of a second blast at the Days Inn Hotel, and then a third—reportedly far worse than the others—at the Radisson. Abu Haytham knew the place well. It was an Amman landmark, glitzy by Jordanian standards, perched on a hill and easily visible from most of the town, including from his own office building, nearly two miles away.

  He raced to the hotel and pushed his way inside, past the rescue workers, the wailing survivors, and the recovered corpses that had been hauled out on luggage carts and deposited on the driveway. In the ballroom, through a haze of smoke and emergency lights, he could see more bodies. Some were sprawled haphazardly, as though flung by a giant. Others were missing limbs. On the smashed podium lay two crumpled forms in tuxedos. The fathers of both the bride and the groom had been near the bomber and died instantly.

  Abu Haytham assembled teams that worked the three blast sites through the night, gathering whatever remnants they could find of the explosive devices, along with chunks of flesh that constituted the remains of three bombers. Only later, at the hospital, standing over a wooden slab in a makeshift morgue, was he overwhelmed by the horror of the evening: The broken bodies. The scores of wounded. The smell of blood and smoke. The girls, Lina and Riham, lying still in their torn white dresses. Abu Haytham, a doting father, had girls the same age.