CNN.com: Papers give peek
inside al Qaeda in Iraq
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Papers give peek inside al Qaeda in
Iraq
By
Michael Ware
CNN Correspondent
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- With Christmas 2005
approaching, the princes of al Qaeda's western
command were gathering. They'd been summoned for
something special -- to plot a three-month campaign
of coordinated suicide, rocket, and infantry attacks
on American bases, checkpoints, and Iraqi army
positions.
In al Qaeda in Iraq's hierarchy, prince designates a
senior leader, and these princes had been gathered by
the most senior among them, the prince for all of
Anbar province itself.
This commander, his name not recorded in al Qaeda's
summaries of the meetings and referred to only by
rank, spent that December fleshing out his vision for
the wave of assaults with the gathered subordinates
who would lead his combat brigades.
The gathering was a council of war, its meetings
remarkably detailed in al Qaeda records. In minutes
of their secretive meetings, a grim notation was
made: Project "Operation Desert Shield" had been
approved and would "hopefully commence in mid-January
2006."
With the operation approved, the prince of Anbar
listened to the briefings of his assembled
commanders: the chairmen of both his military and his
security committees; plus the various princes from
the sectors he controlled -- Falluja, Ramadi,
Anbar-West, and Anbar-Central. All boundary
demarcations strikingly similar to those used by the
American soldiers they were fighting.
The overall plan, too, was similar to any that the
U.S. army would devise. First, the military committee
chairman outlined plans to seal off the U.S. targets
as much as possible by harassing supply lines,
damaging bridges, and targeting helicopters and their
landing zones, in a bid to restrict reinforcement or
resupply.
Then the security chairman spoke of the need to
maintain strict "operational security," ordaining
that only the princes, or leaders, involved in the
meetings be informed of the grand strategy, leaving
cell leaders and battalion commanders to believe
their individual attacks were being launched in
isolation.
All this would be "Phase I," a precursor to the 90
days of attacks of "Phase II," to be timed across not
just Anbar, but across much of Sunni Iraq to stretch
and distract America's war commander, Gen. David
Petraeus.
Flowing from the memo approving "Operation Desert
Shield," a stream of reports follow.
On January 7, 2006, a memo called for Iraqis who'd
infiltrated various U.S. bases to conduct site
surveys to help identify the camps that would be hit.
The two-page note also spoke of placing ammunition
stores well in advance of the attacks so the fighters
could resort to them during the battles.
The January memo also commented on training and
rehearsals for the offensive and the extraction
routes their fighters would use after the attacks,
and it dictated the need to obtain pledges from the
foot soldiers of their willingness to die.
In another memo, reports were compiled from al Qaeda
field commanders recommending which U.S. Army and
Marine bases or Iraqi checkpoints or police stations
should be targeted. Baghdad International Airport was
one of the targets named. Beside each entry were
notes on weapons each target would require -- Grad
surface-to-surface missiles, Katyusha rockets,
roadside bombs, and suicide bombers.
Phase II, the 90-day offensive, commenced around
March 2006, with al Qaeda's records from Anbar that
month reading like a litany of what the U.S. Army
would call AARs, or After Action Reports, listing
each attack's successes and failures. It also noted
the losses suffered by both al Qaeda or, in what
Americans would call Battle Damage Assessments, the
losses suffered by the coalition.
Al Qaeda's folder on "Operation Desert Shield"
expresses the depth, structure and measure of its
military command. It is perhaps the most compelling
illustration of how al Qaeda works.
Yet the Desert Shield folder is but one found among
the thousands of pages of records, letters, lists,
and hundreds of videos held in the headquarters of al
Qaeda's security prince for Anbar province, a man
referred to in secret correspondence as Faris Abu
Azzam.
Killed 18 months ago, Faris' computers and filing
cabinets were captured by anti-al Qaeda fighters from
a U.S-backed militia, or Awakening Council (the
militias made up of former Sunni insurgents, now on
the U.S. payroll and praised by President Bush for
gutting al Qaeda in Iraq). The Awakening militiamen
handed the massive haul of al Qaeda materials to both
their U.S handlers from the Navy, Marine Corps and
Army, and to CNN.
In all, these Anbar files form the largest collection
of al Qaeda in Iraq materials to ever fall into
civilian hands, giving an insight into the
organization that few but its members or Western
intelligence agents have ever seen.
Rear Adm. Patrick Driscoll, the American military's
spokesman in Baghdad, says the document trove is
unique, "a kind of comprehensive snapshot" of
al-Qaeda during its peak.
"It reveals," Driscoll told CNN, "first of all, a
pretty robust command and control system, if you
will. I was kind of surprised when I saw the degree
of documentation for everything -- pay records, those
kind of things -- and that [al Qaeda in Iraq] was
obviously a well-established network."
That network is now under enormous stress, primarily
from the more than 100,000 nationalist insurgents who
formed the Awakening Council militias and initiated
an extremely effective assassination program against
al Qaeda, but also from recent U.S. and Iraqi
government strikes into their strongholds.
As a result, says Lt. Col. Tim Albers, the
coalition's director of military intelligence for
Baghdad, "al Qaeda in Iraq is fighting to stay
relevant."
So, what do these captured documents from 2006 tell
us about al Qaeda in Iraq today? A lot, according to
a senior U.S. intelligence analyst in Iraq, who
cannot be named because of the sensitivity of his
position.
"We're still finding documents like these throughout
the country, but I would say that's starting to
lessen in amount as the organization shrinks," the
analyst said.
The al Qaeda command mechanism and discipline seen in
the documents, he said, persist.
"The hard-core senior leadership is still trucking
along, and there are always going to be internal
communications, documents, and videos," he said.
With as many as six suicide attacks and three car
bombings in the past 10 days in Iraq (including one
attack that killed a U.S. soldier and wounded 18
others), Driscoll agrees the picture the documents
paint of a well-oiled, bureaucratic organization is
relevant today.
"Certainly we see that in several different ways how
they communicate ... as they've got to be able to
talk to their troops in the field to maintain morale,
especially when we're pursuing them very
aggressively," Driscoll said.
Be it then, in 2006, or be it now, al Qaeda in Iraq
is nothing if not bureaucratic.
Included in the headquarters of the security prince,
Faris, are bundles of pay sheets for entire brigades
-- hundreds of men carved into infantry battalions
and a fire support -- or rocket and mortar --
battalion. To join those ranks, recruits had to
complete membership forms.
"These are the application forms filled in by the
people who join al Qaeda," said Abu Saif, holding one
of the documents obtained by CNN. Until recently, Abu
Saif was himself a senior-level al Qaeda commander.
"They took information about [the recruits], and if
the applicant lied about something -- because they
were investigated -- they would whip him," Abu Saif
said.
Induction into al Qaeda, he said, would take up to
four months. In one case, Abu Saif recounted, an
applicant lived for four months at the home of what
he thought was a local supporter of the organization
providing a safe house. Finally accepted and called
to a cell leaders' meeting, he discovered his host
was actually a senior recruiter who'd been studying
his every move for those four months.
Al Qaeda's bookkeeping was orderly and expansive:
death lists of opponents, rosters of prisoners al
Qaeda was holding, along with the verdicts and
sentences (normally execution) the prisoners
received, plus phone numbers from a telephone
exchange of those who'd called the American tip line
to inform on insurgents, and motor pool records of
vehicle roadworthiness.
And there are telling papers with a window into al
Qaeda's ability to spy on its pursuers. One is a
document leaked from the Ministry of Interior naming
all the foreign fighters held in government prisons.
Other documents discuss lessons al Qaeda learned from
its members captured by American forces and either
released or still in U.S.-run prisons. The leadership
studied, and discussed, the nature of the American
interrogations, the questioning techniques used, and
the methods that had been employed to ensnare its
men.
And an Iraqi contractor even wrote to the Anbar
security prince asking permission to oversee a
$600,000 building project on a U.S. base, attaching
the architectural drawings of the bunkers he was to
make, with an offer to spy and steal weapons during
the construction.
It seems al Qaeda in Iraq is almost as pedantically
bureaucratic as was Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party --
a trait that really shouldn't surprise.
Though al Qaeda was denied a foothold in Iraq during
Hussein's regime, with its ideology unappealing to
the mostly secular professional military officers in
the former dictator's armies, that has now changed.
According to the internal al Qaeda correspondence in
the files, Iraqis have taken to, and effectively run,
al Qaeda in Iraq. Foreign fighters' roles seem mostly
relegated to the canon fodder of suicide attacks.
Though the upper tiers of the organization are still
dominated by non-Iraqis, in Anbar, at least, all the
princes and brigade and battalion commanders are
homegrown.
"Correct. They're all Iraqis," said Abu Saif. "In my
house [one time] there were about 18 Arab fighters
under Iraqi commander Omar Hadid, mercy of God upon
him, and the [foreigners] did not object, they just
did their duty."
That Iraqification of the network is what perhaps
enabled al Qaeda to foresee its demise years before
the Americans did.
Documents from 2005 and 2006 show top-ranking leaders
feared the imposition of strict religious law and
brutal tactics were turning their popular support
base against them.
One memorandum from three years ago warned executions
of traitors and sinners condemned by religious courts
"were being carried out in the wrong way, in a
semi-public way, so a lot of families are threatening
revenge, and this is now a dangerous intelligence
situation."
That awareness led al Qaeda to start killing
tribesmen and nationalist insurgents wherever they
began to rally against it -- long before America ever
realized they had potential allies to turn to.
Yet those same practices that accelerated al Qaeda in
Iraq's undoing were breathtakingly documented.
In a vein similar to the Khmer Rouge's grisly
accounting of its torture victims, within the files
of one al Qaeda headquarters in Anbar alone was a
library of 80 execution videos, mostly beheadings,
none of which had been distributed or released on the
Internet. And all were filmed after al Qaeda in Iraq
ended its policy of broadcasting such horrors.
So why keep filming? According to former member Abu
Saif and the senior U.S. intelligence analyst: to
verify the deaths to al Qaeda superiors and to
justify continued funding and support.
The videos also bear insight into al Qaeda's media
units. Raw video among the catalog of beheadings
shows how al Qaeda's editing skills hide not just its
members' faces (caught in candid moments on the
un-edited films), but also their failures.
When three Russian diplomats were kidnapped and
killed in June 2006, a well-polished propaganda piece
was released. It showed two diplomats being
gruesomely beheaded, and yet the third diplomat was
shot with a pistol, in a different location. The full
video of the slayings answers why.
Though bound and blindfolded, the third diplomat
struggled so defiantly that his ailing executioners
could not draw their knife across his throat. In the
horrific and chaotic scenes, the faces of his killer
and the cameraman are to be seen.
And those scenes, like the intricacy of the prince of
Anbar's planning and internal analysis of "Operation
Desert Shield," reveal an al Qaeda in Iraq that the
world still barely knows.