Honor and Betrayal : The Untold Story of the Navy Seals Who Captured the "Butcher of Fallujah"-and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured (9780306823091) Read Free

onto the old bridge and left dangling from the rafters.
    All of this seemed somewhat beyond the pale, even for the savagely anti-American al-Zarqawi. And even if it were within the pale, these actions certainly represented a new and grim semitribal low for the apparent successor to Osama bin Laden.
    And there was a planned tribal madness to the attack. The Americans all worked for the private security corporation Blackwater and were helping to safely transport supplies for a catering company. But there were more than 150 Iraqis shouting and chanting at the old bridge as the mutilated bodies swung in the light desert breeze: Long live Islam ... Allahu Akbar [God is great]!
    One town official mentioned, unhelpfully, that this would be the fate of all Americans who entered Fallujah. And for several hours the crowdgrew and grew, still chanting anti-American slogans. It took the sudden and thunderous howl of a US fighter-bomber, screaming in low from out of the southeastern desert, to finally scatter and disperse them.
    And, of course, these four frenzied murders seemed to bear all the hallmarks of the work of al-Zarqawi. Although he was not yet a confirmed member of bin Laden’s inner councils, he very soon would be and, indeed, later that year would be proclaimed “Emir of al-Qaeda in the Country of Two Rivers.”
    But al-Zarqawi required no formal title in order to stand at the pinnacle of al-Qaeda’s anointed rogue’s gallery. His paramilitary training camp in Afghanistan was revered among all jihadists. In Iraq, however, he became famous for a vast series of bombings—roadside, suicide, and targeted IED blasts. He both planned and carried out hostage executions and beheadings. He masterminded the brutal assassination of the senior US diplomat Lawrence Foley right outside Foley’s home in Amman.
    Al-Zarqawi was the scourge of the Jordanian security forces, who only just foiled his monstrous plan to slam chemical weapons into the US Embassy, the prime minister’s office, and the headquarters (HQ) of Jordanian intelligence. When Jordan’s G-men came crashing into the terrorist HQ they seized twenty tons of chemicals, including blistering agents, nerve gas, and sacks containing lethal poisons. In addition to a further five tons of high explosive, there were three trucks with heavy-duty iron plows that had been designed to ram through security barriers in front of the target buildings.
    Al-Zarqawi—not for the first time—was subsequently sentenced in absentia to death. He was still on the loose, and a few short weeks after the outrage on the old bridge, he showed up, masked, on an al-Qaeda video, cold-bloodedly beheading an American civilian, Nicholas Berg, with a jagged tribal knife.
    Everyone in authority knew this was not the only public beheading of an American that al-Zarqawi had carried out; indeed, his pitiless bloodlust appeared to raise the eyebrows of even the icy jihadist monarch, Osama bin Laden himself. In March 2004 US officials credited al-Zarqawi with over seven hundred killings in Iraq, the majority with bombs.
    For more than fourteen years the militant Jordanian seemed to prefer to operate his own private terrorist army, which he named al-Tawhid wal-Jihad. There were times when he worked alongside al-Qaeda, but bin Laden was wary of him, troubled that the pure brutality of Zarqawi’s methods would do their cause no good and may infuriate the tough Republican president in the White House even further.
    Knocking down New York’s World Trade Center with a smoothly orchestrated twenty-first-century suicide air attack was one thing, but bin Laden expressed concern over cleaving off a civilian’s head with a bread knife on television. Thus, he never allowed a formal partnership between his al-Qaeda councils and al-Tawhid wal-Jihad’s bloodstained leader, the most wanted man in both Jordon and Iraq.
    In turn, al-Zarqawi was not in any way certain that bin Laden