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 Page B

“mission” was conducted without a grain of mercy toward anyone. Betrayal in any form always resulted in instant reprisals, with the murder of the suspect’s family.
    Wives, children, and the elderly were massacred on a routine basis. No desert outlaw, in all the long history of Fallujah’s blood-spattered and violent history, had ever been more feared by his own people. He was sheltered, protected, and guarded even by those who trembled at the mention of his name.
    Al-Isawi had successfully petrified the populace into becoming his unwilling helpers while also remaining deep in the shadows. He was feared as no other Iraqi commander since Yusuf Saladin, the ferocious Kurdish warrior who captured Jerusalem in 1187. Saladin, however, was famous for never turning his fury upon civilians. Al-Isawi had no such scruples.
    His reputation had spread widely on the strange bush telegraph of Iraq, and US manhunts for the man were invariably met with blank stares. The Americans, however—particularly the Marines and the Navy SEALs—were not remotely afraid of Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi. They were simply unable to find the sonofabitch.
    And the entire hunt jumped up about seven notches when the CIA disclosed that the March 31, 2004, murders of the US security men were simply too gruesome to be the work of al-Zarqawi, who had never, even in his most chilling acts of slaughter, resorted to tribal butchery and exhibitionism on this scale.
    The burned corpses on the old bridge at Fallujah had brought a new dimension to terrorism in Iraq. And for the first time US and coalition forces were searching Iraq for someone other than al-Zarqawi—a different killer, someone even more deranged.
    And they would need to be extra vigilant. Like the US Special Forces in the Middle East, Al-Isawi worked mostly after dark, and as oneSEAL commander stated it: “This bastard will slit your throat before you have time to clear it. But we should bear in mind our brother, Scott Helvenston, a former SEAL instructor, whose body swung from that bridge. We need to track down this Al-Isawi, and do it quickly.”
    He was right about that. Within hours of the four murders an IED blew up, killing five US soldiers. CIA agents believed this new and local killer had struck again.
    The immediate aftermath, conducted during the first week of April 2004, was a heavy-handed US response, with the Marines taking on the insurgents in a five-day battle that saw six hundred Iraqis killed and more than twelve hundred injured. Fighting in the area near the bridge was so fierce that both the Fallujah and Jordanian hospitals were closed. Slowly the city calmed down.
    But the insurgents regrouped and attacked again. There was little doubt among the Americans that this new al-Qaeda commander was a tough-minded and dangerous enemy. And for the first time they discovered he did have a quasi-religious side to his character. Marines found several major arms caches hidden in a couple of local mosques—heavy machine guns, AK-47s, several tons of high explosive, RPGs, and improvised homemade bombs.
    At this time the name Al-Isawi was being freely mentioned. And, as ever, there was a cruel and sinister edge to any conversation that involved him—reports of civilians being used as human shields and firing on the American troops from inside schools, mosques, and even temporary hospitals.
    Local people were forced to help the insurgents build roadblocks; others were barricaded inside their homes. And Al-Isawi’s men, as they turned certain city streets into armed fortresses, even roughly ejected some less lucky civilians.
    As the month wore on, the situation worsened, despite US efforts to offer terms to surrendering insurgents. In one spectacular air strike US fighter pilots hit a flatbed truck and a following vehicle, both of which exploded continuously for about twenty minutes, shaking the entire area. The Iraqis fled, charging across the street into