June 9, 2006
After Long Hunt, U.S. Bombs Al Qaeda Leader in Iraq
By JOHN F. BURNS
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 8 -- With the two 500-pound bombs that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi on Wednesday evening, American forces eliminated Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq and boosted the flagging confidence of American officials and the new Iraqi government as they moved into the fourth brutal year of warfare here.
But the American officials themselves offered an immediate warning against overstating the impact that the death of Mr. Zarqawi, the most wanted insurgent in Iraq, would have on prospects that American and Iraqi forces can gain the upper hand in the conflict. Among other things, they said they expected Al Qaeda to name a successor to Mr. Zarqawi quickly from among his closest aides.
The killing of Mr. Zarqawi and five others gathered with him in an isolated safe house north of Baghdad was announced on Thursday morning, ending a long and often dispiriting hunt for the 39-year-old terrorist leader. Mr. Zarqawi had become an almost mythic, if widely hated, figure among American troops, still more so among Iraqi Shiites who were his main victims.
The Jordanian-born militant carried a $25 million American bounty for his role in directing many of the conflict's most merciless attacks, including scores of suicide bombings, kidnappings and beheadings, some of which he was believed to have carried out personally.
Still, most Iraqis, as well as American military commanders and diplomats, appeared too chastened by the war's relentless shocks to hail his killing as a decisive turning point.
"Zarqawi is dead," President Bush said at an early morning announcement, "but the difficult and necessary mission in Iraq continues. We can expect the terrorists and insurgents to carry on without him." Britain's prime minister, Tony Blair, added his own caution: "We know that they will continue to kill, that there are many, many obstacles to overcome, but they should also know that we are determined to defeat them," he said.
Less than 18 hours after Mr. Zarqawi's death, Iraq's new Parliament broke a long deadlock and approved nominees for three important cabinet posts, the ministers of defense, interior and national security. The appointments filled a void that had become increasingly worrisome for American officials, who saw rival politicians' squabbling over the posts as a troubling sign of weakness for a government that desperately needs to show it can curb sectarian killings, placate an angry Sunni minority and bring rogue militias to heel.
Indeed, one of Mr. Zarqawi's major aims, and his main legacy, was the effort to inflame the sectarian passions that the new government has to cool, and American officials said he appeared to have laid plans to see that his campaign continued in the event of his death. Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, an aide to the top American commander here, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., told reporters at a briefing that United States commanders had identified the man most likely to take over as Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, an Egyptian militant who uses the nom de guerre Abu al-Masri. General Caldwell said Mr. Masri had been in Iraq since 2002, and had played a major role in organizing suicide bombings around Baghdad.
In an effort to convince skeptics inclined to doubt that Mr. Zarqawi had finally been hunted down, after narrowly eluding United States forces at least twice in the past 18 months and mocking them in audio and videotapes posted on Islamic militant Web sites, General Casey told reporters that Mr. Zarqawi's body had been identified by the American forces "by fingerprint verification, facial recognition and known scars."
At his briefing, aides to General Caldwell mounted on an easel a large photograph of Mr. Zarqawi's face in death, with a small facial scar, closed, puffy eyes, a straggly black beard and what appeared to be minor fragment wounds. General Caldwell said that examination of the corpse had shown other scars and tattoos that tallied with intelligence about the Qaeda leader gathered before the attack. The F.B.I. said DNA samples from the body had been flown to its laboratory in Quantico, Va., on Thursday.
But the most decisive confirmation of the death came, ironically, from Al Qaeda itself, in a series of death notices posted on Islamic Web sites that had been mouthpieces for Mr. Zarqawi. The messages hailed his death, describing him as a martyr and mujahid, or Islamic warrior, and saying that his death was a matter of joy for Mr. Zarqawi himself, for his followers, and for all Muslims.
"We herald the martyrdom of our mujahid Sheik Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and we stress that this is an honor for our nation," a statement signed by one of Mr. Zarqawi's deputies, Abu Abdul Rahman al-Iraqi, said.
In Washington, a senior military intelligence official said late Thursday that the intelligence obtained in raids on 17 targets in and around Baghdad after Mr. Zarqawi's death would probably lead to more raids in the next few days intended to deal a crippling blow to the insurgency.
"On a scale of 1 to 10, the intelligence gathered was about an 8," said the official, declining to give specific details and speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the subject for attribution. "The next 36 to 48 hours will be very crucial in prosecuting other targets. Our goal now is to target as many Qaeda members as possible and keep them off balance."
If anybody needed a caution about the impact of Mr. Zarqawi's death, beyond the fact that American troops have killed and captured more than 160 of his closest aides and commanders in the past two years without significantly blunting the violence inflicted by his followers, it lay in the precedent of Saddam Hussein's capture on Dec. 13, 2003. Mr. Hussein's arrest was greeted triumphantly by American and Iraqi officials at the time, but it proved only a brief interlude on the path of worsening bloodshed.
The lesson learned by top American officials was that in Iraq, it is safer to underestimate the significance of the rare incidents of good news, so often have they been followed by new setbacks and shocks.
At a joint news conference here announcing the killings, General Casey struck a cautious note about the impact Mr. Zarqawi's death was likely to have, as did Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador. They were accompanied at the news conference by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who made the formal announcement of Mr. Zarqawi's death.
The parliamentary session that approved the new ministers had been scheduled on Monday, more than 48 hours before General Casey gave the final go-ahead for United States Air Force F-16's to drop the two bombs that obliterated the isolated safe house at Hibhib, 35 miles north of Baghdad, where Mr. Zarqawi was hiding. The strike occurred at 6.15 p.m. on Wednesday, General Casey said.
Iraqi and American officials said it was coincidence that Mr. Maliki had timed his move to win parliamentary approval for the new ministers on what turned out to be the morning after the elimination of the man who was Public Enemy No. 1 among most Iraqis.
But chance or not, the congruence of the two events appeared to help Mr. Maliki win speedy approval for his nominees from rival political blocs that seemed set on a filibuster only a few days ago. One of the nominees, Abdul Qader Mohammed Jassim, the new minister of defense, is a Sunni Arab and a former army general who was jailed for seven years in 1994 after voicing criticism of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
As recently as last Sunday, Mr. Jassim's nomination appeared doomed by opposition within the dominant Shiite bloc to Mr. Jassim's former membership in Mr. Hussein's ruling Baath party. But that obstacle was lifted on Thursday, and the new mood of consensus carried over to an easy approval for the Shiite nominees for the interior and national security posts.
Named as interior minister was Jawad al-Bolani, a former colonel in Mr. Hussein's armed forces, where he served as an engineer until retirement in 1999. The new national security minister is Sherwan al-Waili, another former military engineer, who retired from the Hussein forces in 2000.
Within hours of winning parliamentary backing, the new ministers were thrust into their first challenge, planning for a major security crackdown in Baghdad that General Casey, Mr. Khalilzad, Mr. Maliki and their aides have been working on intensively since the new government took office on May 20.
The crackdown, no details of which have been publicly discussed, will offer an early test of the impact that the killing of Mr. Zarqawi is likely to have on the violence that has been Al Qaeda's hallmark.
General Casey and Mr. Khalilzad set a wary tone at the news conference with Mr. Maliki that confirmed the rumors of Mr. Zarqawi's death. General Casey, nearing the end of his second year as the overall American commander here, and faced with levels of violence that have sent more than 6,000 bodies to the Baghdad morgue in the first five months of this year alone, was mostly stony-faced as he described the killing as "a significant blow to Al Qaeda and another step toward defeating terrorism in Iraq."
He added: "Although the designated leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq is now dead, the terrorist organization still poses a threat as its members will continue to try to terrorize the Iraqi people and destabilize their government."
Mr. Khalilzad was similarly circumspect. "Zarqawi's death will not by itself end the violence in Iraq, but it is an important step in the right direction," he said. Mr. Maliki struck a more upbeat note, setting off cheers when he opened his remarks by saying, "Today, we have managed to eliminate Zarqawi."
On the streets of Iraq's major cities, there was little of the celebration that had met Mr. Hussein's capture. On Thursday, the most visible signs of celebration came in Shiite neighborhoods that were the victims of Mr. Zarqawi's effort to provoke civil war between Sunnis and Shiites -- an effort that led to Qaeda-linked terrorists relentlessly attacking Shiite mosques, weddings and even funerals.
Some, mostly Sunnis, said they grieved. "I'm very sad, because Zarqawi was at the heart of our holy war, he was fighting for us," said Omar Farouk, a 22-year-old salesman. "Still," he said, "I'm happy because he achieved martyrdom."
But another Sunni supporter of the insurgency hailed Mr. Zarqawi's killing, saying he had damaged Islam. "Zarqawi schooled many young people into adopting kidnapping, beheading and blackmail as part of the armory of holy war, and it's our sadness that there have been so many graduates from this school," he said.
The conflicting responses were echoed even among relatives of some of Mr. Zarqawi's victims. According to the American command, which analyzed videotapes of beheadings carried out by groups led by Mr. Zarqawi, the terrorist leader personally decapitated at least two of the foreign victims, the American Nick Berg and the Briton Ken Bigley, both of whom died in 2004.
In a CNN interview on Thursday, Mr. Berg's father, Michael, speaking from his home in Wilmington, Del., said he felt sorry for Mr. Zarqawi, who was a human being "with a family who are reacting just as my family reacted when Nick was killed." Mr. Berg, who described himself as a pacifist, added: "His death will ignite yet another wave of revenge."
Mr. Bigley's brother, Stan, in a BBC interview, was less charitable. "I'm glad he's off the face of the earth", he said. "Ken was just one of a multitude of innocent people killed by that man. He was a monster."
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington for this article, and Abeer Allam from Cairo.