Michael Ware: Articles

TIME: Iraq's Resistance After Saddam

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2003-12-19T00:00:00-08:00

By MICHAEL WARE / BAGHDAD

The insurgents are currently in a process of consolidation, reconstituting themselves into tighter and more committed cells, cleaving away the hangers-on and the remotely suspect. Although Saddam's arrest has hardly persuaded them to put down their weapons, some are feeling more cornered than before, others angrier and even more willing to wreak havoc. That may mean they're a little more dangerous, now, their antennae more acutely tuned to pick up signs of trouble, making them more careful to avoid unnecessary risk and more vigilant in their activities.

Their reactions to Saddam's arrest are a complex mix, reflecting a diversity of motivations behind their insurgency. The announcement was initially greeted with genuine shock and disbelief (still lingering in some quarters). Then, as the daze and denial lifted for some, the pragmatism that comes with acceptance began to kick in. And some of the who have evolved into organized networks — rather than ad hoc groups and autonomous cells — believe they are entering a new phase of the war. The U.S. military has snared its big fish, and is now trawling for the smaller ones. This means they must adapt, again, re-focus and move on.

The bad news breaks

Abu Raheman, commander of an Iraqi insurgent cell and an ex-military officer, had the television on when the news of Saddam's capture broke on Sunday Dec 14. Arab satellite channels were full of rumors, then confirmations by unnamed U.S. sources, and finally the announcement by administrator Paul Bremer. As the U.S. diplomat declared "We got him," Abu Raheman sat quietly. He lent forward on the edge of his seat, his face set in concentration. From time to time he passed comment as the conversation around him swayed back and forth over whether the story was true. While others become agitated in their shock, he remained focused, studious. In his mind he weighed what he was hearing on the television with what he knew of Saddam and those who had been close to him, of the military's intelligence-gathering and its operations, calculating the chances of the man he still calls President having fallen into U.S. hands. Mid-way through the afternoon he still wasn't totally convinced, but he certainly knew not to dismiss it. Clearly, he thought, he needed more information. Confirmation from sources and opinions he could trust.

Even then, he was already contemplating the meaning of it all. He knew he would have to change the operations of his cell, and communicate with the commanders above him before taking any action. In the days that followed, his methods shifted in accordance with what he recognized as a new situation. One thing hadn't changed for his commanders and for the roughly two dozen guerrillas under his own command — their will to fight. "We will continue," he said. "We are not Fedayeen, we are mujahideen. We don't fight for Saddam, we fight for Iraq."

Operations suspended

Two Baghdad cells with which I am familiar have temporarily suspended operations, moving into what one of the cell leaders described as a "technical" phase during which the new U.S. tactics will be studied, in order to formulate new modes of operation. Other cells, even those within the same broad network, have continued their attacks. At least one, deeply fanatical cell from this same organization has actually stepped up its strike rate in a blush of rage since Saddam's capture. This crew appears willing to risk the increased danger of exposure to give violent release to those emotions.

The Monday that followed the arrest announcement saw a spate of car- and suicide bombings in and around Baghdad — attacks of a type that U.S. intelligence officers see as the work of, as one put it, "imported talent", with Iraqi logistical and intelligence support . This may indicate that the foreign terrorist element was first to pick up the ball and run with it. Car bombings require planning that would make it unlikely they were launched in response to the arrest, but these operations certainly weren't aborted despite increased U.S. security. But the former Ba'athists weighed in, too, with a sophisticated ambush on a U.S. patrol in Samarra, near Tikrit.

Slowing the insurgent momentum

There's no question that Saddam's arrest struck a heavy psychological blow, even though most of the fighters weren't pining for his return to power. His capture has destroyed a sense of infallibility that had begun to take root among the insurgents. Before this, they felt they were on a roll, citing the White House's revising its political plans for Iraq, and mounting discord in the U.S. over the progress of the mission. They see their campaign, after all, as more political than military in nature, knowing they can't defeat the U.S. military on the battlefield, but believing they can do so in middle American living rooms if people tire of the drip feed of casualties in a war without an apparent end. In this sense, Saddam's capture was a major victory for the U.S. and a major defeat for the insurgency on the very turf on which they agree the conflict will be won or lost. The dictator's arrest has certainly swung many doubters in the Middle American living room more decisively behind the mission. The guerrillas also know now, more than ever, that they are vulnerable. If Saddam can be captured, so can anyone. But this sense may pass — indeed, I can already see it ebbing away with the week not yet over.

Among the broad spectrum of insurgents — disaffected and nationalist Iraqis, Fedayeen loyalists, Islamists and foreign jihadis — only a small proportion is likely to be deterred by the capture. The grouping it will hurt most will be the Saddam loyalists, principally the Fedayeen. They were fighting to restore him to power, and their principal goal is now beyond reach. Any flagging of spirits among the resistance will start with these men. But the others — the majority — are driven by motives more diverse and larger than anything connected with Saddam. Some never cared for him (especially the Islamists), or saw him for all his flaws, and they cast their fight in patriotic or religious terms, or a contagion of both. They respected Saddam, or at least recognized him as a rallying point. But that's about all. As one Iraqi cell commander told me during the week, "This hurts, but it's not the kind of hurt that stops your body from moving. It's only a small hurt and we can go on."

From quantity to quality

And if they have the will to fight on, they certainly have the means to do so. Weapons and ammunition are in plentiful supply, and money does not appear to be a concern. The insurgents' resources did not, by and large, depend on Saddam: Although a lot of their money has come from the coffers of the former regime, it has not been Saddam who has controlled the purse strings. The insurgents appear to have access to deep reserves of cash, managed by low-profile regime figures. While Saddam periodically sent cash in symbolic acts of gratitude or inspiration, say resistance figures, the bread and butter of the insurgency has come from Baathist financiers and from the community — donations, tithes, sponsorship by powerful families and clans — and these, according to the insurgents, show no sign of drying up. There may even be an influx of cash fueled by anger in Sunni communities over the U.S. victory.

Overall, the new phase of the conflict is likely to see a decline in the number and frequency of attacks carried out by each cell, as the guerrillas take more care to disguise themselves and protect their operations. But future attacks may be better crafted and targeted to inflict greater damage. As one mujahid told me in a dark field one night this week, "The games are over, this is more serious than ever." The same may hold for the Coalition.

TIME: Life Behind Enemy Lines

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2003-12-15T00:00:00-08:00

By BRIAN BENNETT; MICHAEL WARE / BAGHDAD

For Abu Ali, lethal rocket strikes against the U.S. occupation army are part of the regular routine. At the modest farmhouse of a fellow member of his network of insurgents one recent evening, Abu Ali--the nom de guerre he has chosen--welcomes seven fighters into a room lined with worn sofas. Despite the steady whoomp-whoomp of circling U.S. helicopters, the insurgents sit back, chain-smoking and chatting about weapons, tactics, the long lines to get gasoline, whose children are starting to crawl. A young man spreads a plastic sheet on the floor and lays out plates of roasted chicken, rice, bean soup and boiled vegetables. As the men eat, the talk is jovial, full of laughter and noisy boasting. The presence of a reporter for a U.S. magazine does not seem to faze them. "American soldier very afraid," roars Abu Ali. "We are not." A grinning fighter brags about what would have happened if he had known President George W. Bush would be in the Baghdad airport complex on Thanksgiving Day. "We would have ... whoosh!" he says, motioning as if firing a shoulder-launched missile.

Outside, under a sliver of moon, the cell's surveillance teams are hard at work, monitoring firing positions for their next assault. Spotters circle the area in taxis; others pose as workmen walking home and flip hand signals to passing colleagues. They all report to Abu Ali, a former officer in the Fedayeen Saddam militia who is well schooled in guerrilla tactics. A tall, sinewy figure with a weathered face, Abu Ali makes no secret of his ambition to attack Americans: "I want to kill all Bush's soldiers until they leave Iraq or it becomes their desert graveyard."

Checking his watch, Abu Ali abruptly rises from a sofa, throws on a woolen overcoat and orders everyone, including the reporter, to move out. The men pile into three cars and tear off in different directions. For more than an hour, they cruise near the launch site until all looks clear. Then a small team walks into a flat field to aim a rack of homemade launching tubes toward the lights of the Baghdad airport, home to U.S. chopper squadrons, supply units and the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group, less than two miles away. The insurgents load three air-to-air rockets they have modified to launch from the ground, flash a signal with car headlights and disappear. A second team creeps in to fire the volley, while a security detail armed with assault rifles and machine guns forms a perimeter. Beyond these fighters, according to the cell's security chief, a ring of men with shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles and rocket-propelled grenades is watching for U.S. helicopters that might try to stop the assault.

A blacked-out attack chopper buzzes in the distance, and the low, heavy drone from what might be an AC-130 gunship rumbles terrifyingly near. Some of the insurgents scramble into a ditch. But Abu Ali calls them back. His plan is set. "God is great," he intones. The three rockets ignite at 2sec. intervals and screech away into the dark. In a matter of minutes, the raid is over. The firing team picks up the launch frame and loads it into the waiting cars. The perimeter detail melts into surrounding fields. The vehicles fan out to take team members--and the reporter--away. According to the insurgents, U.S. helicopters cased the field in vain after the cell left. "We move here with no problem," says Abu Ali. "This is the lie of American power." (A U.S. military spokesman later refused to confirm or deny whether any of the rockets hit the complex.)

This is one face of the insurgency challenging the American occupation of Iraq, an insurgency that so far has claimed the lives of 191 soldiers since President George W. Bush declared the end of "major combat operations" last May. And there are many more faces. U.S. authorities are struggling to illuminate who exactly is out there creeping around in the dark. "It's hard to get your hands around what the enemy looks like," says a U.S. official close to the occupation. In briefings, U.S. officials often claim to know the enemy's size, origins, motivations and chances of success. In private, however, they concede that they know a lot less than they would like about what they are up against. Pentagon optimists remain convinced that the insurgency is small and slowly choking to death. "Real insurgents need the support of the local population, and they don't have that," says a senior civilian aide who traveled in Iraq last weekend with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "They are going to wither and die. The question is how long it will take."

But it seems clear to others, including many American officers on the ground, that if the gangs of anti-U.S. fighters have not yet coalesced into a true insurgency, they are trying hard to become one. Attacks against coalition forces have grown bolder, better organized and broader based. A double ambush last week in Samarra "was the biggest, most sophisticated so far," says a senior intelligence official in Washington. As a Pentagon official sees it: "They know they can't beat us militarily, but they think they might be able to defeat us politically." The guerrillas are trying to drive U.S. casualties so high that the American public turns against the war, he says, adding, "They could succeed."

To prevent that, the U.S. needs to defeat the insurgents, a job that first requires figuring out who they are. U.S. intelligence experts are struggling to patch together a working profile from tidbits gleaned from captives, scraps of information of varying reliability and facts collected after attacks. They now believe the insurgents are a volatile mix of groups and free-lancers who include loyalists of the former ruling Baath Party, Fedayeen militiamen, former Republican Guard and intelligence agents, foreign jihadis, professional terrorists, paid common criminals and disaffected Iraqis. Men, in fact, like the well-educated, English-speaking fellow who appears on TIME's cover displaying a cherished weapon he is learning to use. American analysts generally believe that former regime loyalists, who stand to lose the most in a new Iraq, are calling the shots, while a diverse group of fighters are heeding the call. It has taken months for lines of communication to open among them. Now, say U.S. officials, these disparate elements seem to be learning how to work together toward a common goal: driving the U.S. out of Iraq.

Over the past three months, TIME has interviewed dozens of insurgents and disgruntled Iraqis, attended resistance meetings and viewed videotape of attacks against coalition forces. Often reporters have been required to submit to blindfolds, circuitous drives at night, vehicle switching, meetings that rarely occur in the same place and, of course, frequent personal searches for phones and tracking devices. (At no time did TIME reporters have prior information about attacks.) As seen from the inside, the insurgency looks as complex and diverse an enemy as the U.S. could possibly face. Here is what TIME found:

"BRING BACK SADDAM"

Under the apparent leadership of experienced former Saddam loyalists, the resistance network is growing more organized. Leaders of small cells that once acted independently now share intelligence and tactics and divide up targets. On another night in November, Abu Ali held a meeting of eight cell commanders and 17 lieutenants in a kerosene-lit house a good distance from Baghdad. The younger men cradled AK-47s; the senior men, each representing a different resistance cell with at least two dozen foot soldiers apiece, carried sidearms. Abu Ali gestured toward each man, who in turn rattled off his area of operation. The place names sketched a map of trouble spots for the U.S.: Baghdad, Dora, Hilla, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, Ramadi.

Abu Ali is the network's technical expert and de facto chief. Trained in Europe for Saddam's weapons program, he specialized in missile warheads and electronics as an Iraqi official. Recently, he says, he has developed methods to launch helicopter missiles from the ground. Following a strict chain of command, cell leaders report to Abu Ali, passing intelligence up the chain and carrying instructions back down. Under his guidance the insurgents weigh information on U.S. troop movements and select targets. When they are ready to strike, they quickly activate men and weaponry. The cells work in their own regions, but from time to time, squads are dispatched to other jurisdictions to blur U.S. attempts to identify them. On occasion, Abu Ali says, they also conduct larger, coordinated raids.

Former officials of Saddam's regime tend to have the technical know-how and the cash to mount operations. The organizers are generally midlevel officials from Saddam's extensive security apparatus. "They're colonels, lieutenant colonels and majors who are really the hard-core loyalists," U.S. Major General Raymond Ordierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, tells TIME. While the deposed dictator is the ideological inspiration for these loyalists, chances seem slim that he is directing attacks himself. "The communication involved," says a Pentagon official in Iraq, "would expose him too much to capture." Instead, U.S. officials believe, strategic direction for the resistance is left to Saddam's longtime second-in-command Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, the highest-ranking regime official still at large. He was the target of a 1,000-soldier raid in Kirkuk last week. Al-Duri escaped, but the operation nabbed his deputy, who could potentially deliver a phone book of resistance commanders receiving money and orders from al-Duri. The wanted man's wife and daughter turned themselves in to the Americans two weeks ago. "She was tired of living out of a suitcase," says a U.S. intelligence operative in Iraq. "She wants the $10 million," the reward being offered for helping capture al-Duri.

Financing and armaments appear to be in plentiful supply. When Abu Ali's network runs low on resources, it turns to a man identified only as "the Emir," a shadowy loyalist leader who summons Abu Ali to meetings at irregular intervals. "We are not rich men," Abu Ali says, "but we have everything." Old Soviet surface-to-air missiles that had been stockpiled by Saddam's regime go for upwards of $1,000 apiece on the black market, yet Abu Ali's organization has them in abundance. It also has access to a pipeline of weapons flowing across Iraq's borders. Another major Baghdad cell leader, Mohammed, happily displays the latest acquisition, a batch of 60mm mortars with markings in English that were hidden in a boggy field and retrieved by a farmer's wife. When asked how the group obtained them, Mohammed responds in a word: "Syria."

Abu Ali's most frightening plans involve his desire to employ unconventional weapons. His most prized possession, he says, is a cache of 82mm mortar rounds. Mohammed displays one of the rounds and proclaims, "This is a chemical mortar." Encased in a green storage tube with a flip-lock lid, the weapon has liquid sloshing inside a bulbous head reeking with a putrid odor that burns the nostrils. The Russian markings on the weapon identify it as a TD-42 liquid, high-explosive mortar. It's impossible to know what is really in the device or if the boasts of Abu Ali and Mohammed are true. Iraqi scientists in the Military Industrialization Commission in the 1980s and early 1990s imported Soviet munitions to refill with unknown substances. Abu Ali claims that his cache came from that commission, and he is convinced the mortar contains a highly lethal gas. His group, he says, is just waiting for the right U.S. target and the right meteorological conditions to use it. When a reporter expresses skepticism, Abu Ali smiles and says, "Wait and see."

"ALLAH IS GREAT"

Not all the rank-and-file fighters are die-hard Saddam supporters. Many are thought to be devout Iraqi Muslims who believe that fighting "infidel" occupiers is a Koranic imperative. Tensions exist between former military officers and paid militia, called fedayeen in insurgent circles, and the Muslim fighters who label themselves mujahedin, or holy warriors. The very name indicates that they would like the insurgency to become a sanctioned religious jihad against the U.S. So far, though, the groups have largely set aside their differences to focus on a common goal.

Some of these mujahedin are foreign. An unknown number of passionate but untrained young Muslims from all over the Middle East have been slipping into Iraq, eager for a chance to fight Americans in an Islamic country. According to U.S. intelligence officials, the men tend to come from places like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Yemen and Syria, whipped up by enthusiastic imams back home. Once across the border, they head to mosques to link up with local resistance cells. U.S. officials believe that most of them then carry out missions under the orders of Saddam loyalists. "They use the fundamentalists as cannon fodder," especially for lethal attacks on soft targets involving car bombs, say the officials. "Suicide bombers are generally not Iraqis or former regime types."

Still, some analysts may be overstating the foreign presence. North and west of Baghdad, in the rebellious Sunni triangle, which the 4th Infantry patrols, Odierno says no more than 30 or 40 foreigners have been picked up. Many dedicated Islamists in other countries have no affection for Saddam loyalists, whom they regard as having little religious faith. Nor do they agree with tactics that target innocent civilians, which pious Muslims abhor. The resistance groups of former regime members TIME talked to said they have had no contact with non-Iraqi fighters.

But the mujahedin's ranks are easily filled by Iraqis. A 29-year-old fighter who gives his name as Abu Abdullah agreed to meet in a small village outside Ramadi, home to many regime loyalists. He says he rejoiced at Saddam's downfall, believing it would bring an Islamic government to power. But religion now motivates him to oppose the U.S. "Islam tells us that no one should occupy our land," says Abu Abdullah, who earns his living by building houses along the Euphrates River. "The Koran allows us to kill anyone to defend our country." He contends that some sheiks and mosques in the area support his group of about 15 fighters. But he won't allow his cell to target civilians. "We believe we have only the right to kill soldiers," he says.

Abu Abdullah started planning for a guerrilla war when Baghdad fell, back in April. In the ensuing chaos, he and a few colleagues looted several ammunition stores. "For days we carried weapons and ammunition away and put them in hiding places," says Abu Abdullah, a chubby man in a gray robe. "We knew we would continue fighting the Americans." Abu Abdullah's wife encouraged him to fight the "infidels," he says. "If I am killed, she will be proud of me. We will meet in paradise." Abu Abdullah says he fights only for his convictions. "Nobody pays us to fight," he says. "We fight because America has come to kill our people." He's grateful U.S. soldiers came to Iraq to topple Saddam, but he thinks they should leave. "The Americans got rid of him," he says. "Now we have to get rid of the Americans."

"DOWN WITH THE U.S."

An unanswered question is whether professional terrorists, particularly those linked to al-Qaeda, have infiltrated the insurgency. Senior U.S. intelligence officials say a small number of dedicated terrorists slipped into the country just after the U.S. invasion. "They are burrowing way down, looking for opportunities to strike for maximum political impact," contends Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a Democrat who toured Iraq with colleague Hillary Clinton.

But it's unclear whom these terrorists are affiliated with or how important they are to the overall scope of the insurgency. Some intelligence officials point a finger at Ansar al-Islam, a small Kurdish terrorist group that operated out of the northern mountains of Iraq against local Kurd rulers before the U.S. invasion. In March, during the war, Ansar's mountain headquarters was bombed by U.S. air strikes that scattered its leaders and killed a few hundred fighters. Intelligence officials say some of the highly trained men slipped away to regroup in Iran. Those who took refuge in Iranian Kurdish cities have been crisscrossing the border in teams of two or three to launch attacks. Analysts in Washington say Ansar operatives appear to be roaming the country, looking for targets on their own or occasionally hooking up with regime loyalists. "They're still alive. They're still a factor. They're a danger," says a senior U.S. intelligence official.

According to a U.S. official in Iraq, Ansar is transforming itself from a dispersed remnant into reconstituted cells operating locally under the guidance of leaders who escaped to Europe. Few fighters are as qualified to carry out the recent spate of suicide-bomb attacks in Iraq as the men trained in Ansar's camps. Before the war, according to a Kurdish intelligence operative who recently briefed a team of Pentagon officials, Ansar soldiers training to be suicide bombers were given elaborate mock funerals to prepare them mentally for their martyrdom. After recently interrogating two captured fighters, the Kurd believes there are Ansar cells operating in Kirkuk, Mosul, Samarra and Haweja. "They have sophisticated communications methods," he says, and they keep in touch with former intelligence contacts in the Saddam regime.

An Ansar lieutenant, a 55-year-old lawyer who uses the name Abu Wael, was the Iraqi intelligence service's main contact within the organization, and he is thought to be in Baghdad acting as the group's cell leader. The U.S. suspects that Ansar maintains close ties with al-Qaeda. A number of Ansar fighters trained in Osama bin Laden's Afghan camps, and U.S. officials say Ansar takes its cues from Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, viewed by Washington as a top-level al-Qaeda affiliate. An Arab intelligence official believes al-Zarqawi is playing a major role in lethal attacks in Iraq that bear the hallmarks of al-Qaeda sophistication in terms of planning, timing and technical ability. Based on information from arrested operatives, the Arab official says there are indications that al-Zarqawi has become al-Qaeda's No. 1 leader in the Middle East.

The Bush Administration, for its part, wants to portray the insurgency as mainly homegrown. That allows Washington to claim, as it repeatedly does, that when the die-hards run out of men and munitions, the insurgency will dissipate. It also allows Bush to avoid the charge that the war actually increased danger to the U.S. by stirring up a hornet's nest of terrorism. Yet the Administration's greatest fear is that the rebellion will get too local if the general population turns on the occupiers. "We minimize their impact at our peril," says a Pentagon official.

In a new effort to blunt the insurgency, the U.S. Central Command plans to form an Iraqi quick-reaction force that can identify and counter the guerrillas better than the U.S. can. Commanders want the five main political parties in the temporary governing council to pool their militias in a single unit by Dec. 26. But experts like Mustafa Alani, an Iraqi security specialist at London's Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies, warn that politically aligned militias are a prescription for civil war once the insurgents have been vanquished.

And the disparate elements that make up the rebellion may also find it hard to hang together. Breaking the Ramadan fast last month, Abu Ali talked to his fighters about civilian casualties. "I will kill 10 Iraqis to slaughter one American," he said. Abu Raheman, a former military officer who was playing with his 10-month-old son, retorted that a dead G.I. was not worth a single Iraqi. Mohammed, another ex-army man, said he couldn't abide harming the very people they were fighting for. Abu Ali grunted and waved a dismissive hand. "They are not like me," he said. "I drink blood." The others sat eyeing him impassively. "One day when there are no more Americans, I will kill the mujahedin," he joked, running his finger over his throat. Not, perhaps, if someone gets him first.

--With reporting by Massimo Calabresi and Douglas Waller/Washington, Bruce Crumley/Paris, Mark Thompson/Baghdad and Vivienne Walt/Ramadi

NPR: Iraqi Insurgents Tell Reporters of Strategies

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2003-12-07T00:00:00-08:00

Recent articles by U.S. journalists portray the workings of guerrilla groups trying to force the U.S.-led occupying force out of Iraq. Experts say that insurgent attacks in Iraq are becoming increasingly sophisticated and violent. NPR's Robert Siegel talks with Time magazine's Michael Ware.

NPR: 4:32

TIME: The Secret Collaborators

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2003-10-20T00:00:00-07:00

By MICHAEL WARE / BAGHDAD

Saddam Hussein didn't want to believe what his intelligence networks were saying. Before the war last spring, says a former colonel in the Iraqi intelligence service, Saddam's analysts presented him with classified reports predicting a decisive U.S. victory. The documents described how the Iraqi security forces, already outmatched, had been undermined by Washington's success in recruiting Iraqi spies and double agents. Internal intelligence reported to Saddam that Iraq's defenses would probably collapse. "We diplomatically suggested he should not stay here," the colonel says, "because we couldn't tell him outright that he had to step down." Even as U.S. troops moved into his capital, Saddam struck a resilient pose, appearing on Iraqi TV one day wading through a worshipful Baghdad crowd, grinning broadly, pumping his fist in the air, stopping to kiss a child.

Five days later, the Iraqi leader could no longer keep up his staunch facade. His orders largely unheeded, his soldiers declining to fight, Saddam went out for a look at his falling capital, a secretary who accompanied him recalls. Saddam stood on Zaitun Street, the boulevard decorated with monumental statues of two muscular forearms holding swords that cross above the roadway. As he turned to leave, he paused. Using an Arabic expression of utter disillusionment, he muttered, "Even my clothes have betrayed me."

Indeed, the quick and relatively painless U.S. overthrow of Saddam's regime was achieved not just by military means but also by betrayal. Before a shot was fired, the U.S. recruited and dispatched Iraqi collaborators to uncover Saddam's plans and capabilities, and hobble them. Deals were done; psychological warfare was waged; money was paid; and even blackmail was used. While the Bush Administration's post-Saddam planning has proved wanting, in this area of prewar thinking, Washington's strategies paid off. By the time the first U.S. tanks crossed the Kuwaiti border, top Republican Guard officers had been won over, and the secret police had been penetrated. Spies had infiltrated, and spotters had been dispatched to help guide American bombs. "You'd be surprised at what these guys achieved," says a Pentagon official in Iraq, referring to the Iraqi collaborators. Even if Saddam was the last to know, many of those in his inner circle understood how deeply the Iraqi security services had been penetrated. At a funeral for two junior military officers midway through the war, mourners asked the commanders present how things were going. "They told us we were losing," one mourner remembers, "that there was a kind of treason in the army and the Republican Guard."

A side effect of the mass Iraqi desertions during the war has been that remnants of the regime survived to cause trouble in post-Saddam Iraq. Last week saw a fair share of mayhem. Suicide bombers drove an explosives-packed car into a Baghdad police station, killing eight people, and a Spanish diplomat was shot to death at the gate of his home in the capital. Resistance to the American occupation has been such that 188 U.S. troops have died in Iraq since President Bush declared an end to major hostilities on May 1. Still, the U.S.'s swift dispatch of Saddam undoubtedly saved both U.S. and Iraqi lives. This is the story of America's secret campaign to sabotage the regime from within and of the Iraqis who waged it.

INFILTRATING IRAQ

Al-Jaburi had the right connections to serve as an American spy. Stocky, fit and in his early 40s, al-Jaburi--who prefers not to have his first name published--served for almost a decade in the regime's most feared agency, the Special Security Organization (SSO). In the late 1980s, he was purged from the SSO after Saddam accused his clansmen of plotting a coup. In 1999 al-Jaburi defected to Jordan. There he joined an opposition group, the Iraqi National Accord (I.N.A.), which has a well-established relationship with the CIA.

According to Ibrahim Janabi, one of the I.N.A.'s main liaisons with the CIA in Amman, the CIA began ramping up for war in October 2002. "They asked us to contribute some tough, hardworking people to train for missions inside Iraq," says Janabi. "So I gave them al-Jaburi." The introduction, al-Jaburi recalls, was made in a coffee shop in Amman on Oct. 18. Al-Jaburi says CIA officers, with the aid of a lie detector, questioned him for days on a range of topics, including whether he was volunteering or being coerced to join. One question probed what he would do if he found his brother fighting against him. "I'd kill him," al-Jaburi says he answered. On Nov. 22, al-Jaburi says, he signed a contract guaranteeing him monthly payments of $3,000, with $9,000 paid in advance. Two days later he boarded a small jet bound from Jordan to Washington.

His class of 13 recruits, containing Iraqis and Lebanese, was flown from Washington to a secluded facility of temporary buildings hours away, al-Jaburi recalls. They were told they were in Texas. For two months they trained with some 20 instructors in physical fitness, intelligence gathering, report writing and surveillance. At a separate naval facility, recruits learned about explosives--how to sabotage armored vehicles, tanks, oil pipelines, electricity pylons and railways.

In February, al-Jaburi says, he flew to Kuwait, staying in a villa with his CIA handlers. They equipped him with $50,000 in American currency, a GPS locator, satellite phones and a forged Iraqi identity card showing completion of military service so that he could move around Iraq unhindered. Al-Jaburi says he left for Iraq on March 11, guided across the border by smugglers arranged by Kuwaiti intelligence. "I'd been in the SSO, so I knew how dangerous this was going to be," al-Jaburi says. "But I also knew I had to do it."

The bulk of the $50,000 the CIA had provided al-Jaburi was for buying accomplices. He started with "Ahmed" (not his real name), an SSO officer in the main presidential compound whom al-Jaburi already knew. "I told him everything," says al-Jaburi. "I told him I'd listed his name with the CIA, and I had $5,000 for him." Ahmed proved an easy sell, replying, "What do you want from me?" The SSO man described where the Republican Guard had been posted in Baghdad and its environs, and revealed that it had been ordered to pull back into the city if attacked. In fact, after the U.S. bombed the Guard's positions early in the war, many of its officers abandoned their men, who then deserted en masse. Ahmed also identified the location of heavy-gun emplacements and missile batteries around the capital, targets the Americans hit with great effect during the air campaign.

Faced with the task of scouting the locations Ahmed had listed, al-Jaburi turned to an old friend and contact, A. Mashadani. Al-Jaburi had recruited Mashadani, a major in the mukhabarat, Iraq's main intelligence agency, soon after joining the I.N.A. For two years Mashadani, who had access to some of the mukhabarat's best secrets, had been feeding the CIA--through al-Jaburi--information on Iraqi missiles, antiaircraft systems and troop movements. Mashadani weighed the risks of helping al-Jaburi now. He had watched the execution of a colleague accused of spying for Iran. "Iran wasn't going to save that guy, or anyone," he says. "But we felt the U.S. could get rid of Saddam."

Using a mukhabarat sedan to which he had access as an officer in the organization, Mashadani and al-Jaburi visited as many of the locations Ahmed had identified as they could. Standing at the site, al-Jaburi would discreetly activate his GPS locator, which searches the sky for satellites to triangulate its position, and then note the coordinates. At an appointed hour each night, he would use his satellite phone to contact the CIA and relate what he had found out. This required caution. Just possessing a satellite phone could result in death under Saddam's regime.

From the beginning, al-Jaburi's primary mission had been to scope out Saddam International Airport, one of the keys to taking Baghdad. Ahmed had a way in. He had a friend, "Mahmoud," who he says commanded the SSO's 3rd Battalion and was in charge of airport security. Ahmed knew Mahmoud had cursed Saddam privately, so he took him out for drinks, drawing him out on his views. The airport commander was sufficiently negative about Saddam to warrant a three-way drinking date with al-Jaburi. At a third session, al-Jaburi asked Mahmoud to cooperate and offered him $15,000. The commander, al-Jaburi says, agreed to help.

At sundown on March 23, with the war raging in the south and Baghdad under nightly bombardment, the airport commander drove al-Jaburi, in a military uniform, and Mashadani, bearing his mukhabarat ID, into the airport compound. In an SSO car, the trio crisscrossed the tarmac, mapping every building and bunker, counting every soldier and weapon they could see. Following the CIA's instructions, they repeated the exercise three times over three nights to confirm their sketches. By the time they had finished, U.S. battle planners had a detailed picture of the situation at the airport, from the weak points in the Iraqi defenses to the safest landing zones for American choppers.

On March 26 an exhausted al-Jaburi took a break to visit his family in his hometown near Tikrit. The next day his brother, an engineer at the Bayji oil refinery, was summoned to the plant to remove documents before the Americans got there. Al-Jaburi decided to go too, hoping to get papers of use to the U.S. It was a trap. Saddam's secret police surrounded al-Jaburi's car. He learned later that they had acted on a tip from one of his relatives eager to collect a reward.

Taken to Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib prison, the last stop for many of the regime's opponents, al-Jaburi was sure he was going to die. His jailers, he said, placed a hood over his head and hung him from the ceiling by his arms, which were bound behind him. They hit him repeatedly with wire cords and clubs, smashing his feet.

Meanwhile, Mashadani was informed by his superiors that they had a special duty for him. At the meeting place, a mukhabarat facility, he says, "I found my duty was facing a lot of hands with guns." For six hours, Mashadani was grilled about his dealings with al-Jaburi. "All the senior bosses were coming to my interrogation," he says. "Everyone went crazy that a mukhabarat officer had been meeting a spy." At daylight, his jailers took him to see the beaten al-Jaburi. Both say they admitted nothing.

For four days, al-Jaburi says, his jailers tortured him: beating him, shocking him, smashing his hand. Mashadani gives a similar account. At one point, interrogators dragged al-Jaburi's mother and wife into the prison for questioning. Al-Jaburi could hear them wailing through the cell door. The sessions went on for six to eight hours at a time. Al-Jaburi says he was grilled about other spies, information he had relayed before his capture, GPS coordinates he had sent. He says his CIA training prepared him to give away nothing of importance. But he feared that time was running out. With the regime collapsing, Saddam's execution squads were working double time, plucking five to 10 men from their cells every hour. "It was like a slaughterhouse," says al-Jaburi.

As the war's front changed, al-Jaburi and Mashadani were moved from Abu Ghraib to prisons in Fallujah and then Ramadi. On April 11 the last guard at the Ramadi jail fled the advancing Americans, and locals came to set the two men free. Half-crippled and waving a white flag, they staggered up to an American unit. "I told them that we had just got out of prison and that we worked for the CIA," says al-Jaburi. A military-police humvee whisked them to Baghdad airport, which was under U.S. control. A CIA officer appeared with open arms. "Don't touch my back," al-Jaburi yelped, the wounds from his interrogation still fresh. He remembers the officer saying, "You are the heroes of the airport, the keys to Baghdad. Your future is assured."

ENTICING THE GAMBLERS

As an underground operative of the opposition Iraqi National Congress (I.N.C.), Wael Abu al-Timman spent years hiding from Saddam's henchmen. Now, with the war fast approaching, al-Timman was recruiting them. His instructions from the I.N.C., which worked closely with the U.S. before and during the war, were to find men not only willing to provide information about Iraqi defenses but also willing to see to it that the Iraqi forces failed to fight. Having served as a captain in the Republican Guard, al-Timman, who was based in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq but traveled often to Baghdad, turned to his old comrades. He was astonished by how many were willing to switch allegiances. "They knew it was their last chance [to join the likely winners]," he recalls. "We called them the gamblers."

Once the U.S. began bombing Baghdad, al-Timman's mission changed. He raced from one bomb site to the next, noting the physical damage and assessing casualties, keeping an eye out for leadership figures among the dead and wounded. At an appointed time each night, using a satellite phone, he called in his assessments to an I.N.C. contact, who passed them on to the Americans, who could then decide whether to hit old targets again or move on to others. "I considered it the most important thing I could do because it would bring an end to the war sooner," al-Timman says. On April 7 he milled with bystanders as rescuers dug through the rubble of several destroyed houses in the Baghdad suburb of al-Mansur. The Pentagon, thinking Saddam was inside, had struck the buildings. But the rescuers told al-Timman that Saddam had just been there briefly to inspect the damage and offer condolences for those killed. Al-Timman made sure that Saddam's body was not among those retrieved, then phoned in what he had learned so the hunt for Saddam could continue.

THE BLACKMAIL CARD

The operations chief for the I.N.C. goes by the name of Abu Ranin. His job before the war was to crack the mukhabarat. His tactics were hardball. The I.N.C. had done surveillance on Iraqi missions around the world, making educated guesses about who was an intelligence agent. From these lists, the I.N.C. narrowed down its targets. "We chose them for their weaknesses, setting out to get something on them and force them to work for us," says Abu Ranin, who was then based in Jordan.

In a West European capital, Abu Ranin says, he collected evidence on a mukhabarat station chief who was selling government property on the black market. When Abu Ranin threatened to alert Baghdad, he says, the officer rolled over. Abu Ranin would not say what information the man provided. Abu Ranin's greatest coup, he says, was in Romania. As he tells the story, he discovered a mukhabarat officer in Bucharest who had two useful qualities: he oversaw the regime's East European agents, and he had a weakness for prostitutes. Posing as a wealthy businessman based in Europe, Abu Ranin befriended the officer. He rented a villa and threw a private party with five prostitutes and ample alcohol. The mukhabarat officer brought four colleagues. Abu Ranin secretly audiotaped their drunken boastings and cajoled them into a few snapshots with the women. Blackmail, however, proved unnecessary. When his guests were distracted, Abu Ranin grabbed the officer's cell phone and downloaded its address book.

Over ensuing weeks, Abu Ranin called the names in the address book and concluded that he had the identities of 65 agents--either Iraqis based abroad or their contacts in foreign intelligence services, particularly Syrian and Palestinian. He then traipsed around the Middle East, arranging meetings with the Iraqi agents on various pretenses. Once, for example, he posed as a diamond trader looking to sell gems. Instead of showing up for the assignations, he would hide near the meeting place and surreptitiously photograph the agents. When his dossier was complete, he forwarded it up the I.N.C. chain of command. Exactly what use was made of his work, Abu Ranin isn't certain, but the data would have offered scores of prospects to the Americans working on turning Iraqi agents. And as the story of al-Jaburi, Ahmed and Mahmoud illustrates, one spy can beget another who begets another and so on.

A SINKING SHIP

As war approached and the Iraqi collaborators intensified their work, the underpinnings of Saddam's regime began to quiver noticeably. In the offices of Saddam's son Qusay, commander of the Republican Guard, "a lot of officers told us the coalition had called them or their families, telling them to surrender and offering money," says a former staff member who asks to be called Mohammed. It was the same at the mukhabarat. "Many told us they had been offered money or guarantees of safety or promises of positions of authority in the new government," says a member of the staff in the mukhabarat director's office. More telling was the number of officials who did not report the calls. "We know the Americans called virtually all the senior officers and a lot of the lesser ranks right down to lieutenants, but most of them did not come and tell us," says Mohammed.

When it came to war, most of Saddam's armies either chose flight over fight or were neutered by commanders who had agreed to accommodate the coalition. Colonel Ali Jaffar Hussan al-Duri was not one of them, but his ultimate superior was. Once the fighting had begun, Hussan's division of the al-Quds army, an official Iraqi militia, received what he called "an incredible" order to send half the men home on leave. He challenged the edict with his brigadier, who was equally bemused. They attempted to verify it, but communications had been cut. So they dismissed half the unit and watched the other half vanish soon after. "One top commander, a traitor, can make the whole army disappear," Hussan says, ashamed of his comrades' performance. With the U.S. briefed on the locations of many of Saddam's forces, the Americans devised novel ways to intimidate troops who might have stood their ground. "They broke into our [field] radio and told us they knew our precise locations," says a junior Republican Guard officer.

In Baghdad, Mohammed, of Qusay Hussein's office, was ordered a few days before the capital fell to tour the antiaircraft batteries in the area that had, by and large, stopped firing. When Mohammed asked soldiers sitting in their bunkers why their guns were silent, they answered, "Our general told us not to shoot." Mohammed told them Saddam had ordered that any crew failing to fire that night would be executed. In the morning he returned, bellowing at the units to explain why they had not fired at the U.S. jets. "Because straight after you left yesterday, the general came around," one man replied. "He told us not to listen to you guys."

DAY-AFTER GRUMBLES

Not all the secret agents got away with subversion. "Sultan," a captain in the SSO, says he became suspicious of a man claiming to be a mukhabarat official who was telling colleagues that the Iraqi army was losing and that the Americans were everywhere. Sultan suggested the man come and speak to his unit. "We took him to real mukhabarat officers. They sniffed him out immediately and took him," says Sultan proudly, sipping tea in a back-street cafe in Tikrit.

The suspected spy probably met the same fate as an undercover I.N.C. man called Lieutenant Ali, a close friend of al-Timman's. He was caught when the man who smuggled him to Baghdad from Kurdistan sold him out to the regime. After the war, al-Timman learned that Ali was imprisoned for weeks before being taken to Ramadi, where he was propped against a wall and shot on April 9, the day Saddam's statue came down in Baghdad's Firdos Square.

Some undercover agents who helped the U.S. are dissatisfied with the price they have paid. Disillusioned by their prospects in the new Iraq and threatened by an increasingly bold resistance movement, they feel abandoned by the Americans, for whom they risked their lives and betrayed their country. A mukhabarat colonel who spied for the I.N.C. now sits in a bare office. He has a nominal position with a minimal income and no real authority. He is bitter, claiming he was promised more. "If they don't give the Iraqi groups power, we can liberate ourselves from the Americans and engulf Iraq in fire," he threatens.

Al-Jaburi and Mashadani, the CIA's heroes of the battle for the airport, feel left out in the cold as well. Al-Jaburi says he was paid $75,000 for his efforts, Mashadani $60,000--good money in a country where the average yearly income is $2,500, as well as in the U.S., where the per-capita income is $23,000. Still, the two men feel that they are highly exposed and that the U.S. is not doing enough to protect them. Al-Jaburi's name has appeared on a death list--obtained by TIME--kept by the remnants of the Fedayeen Saddam militia. Two of his relatives were shot dead while driving his car. He complains that the U.S. has not given him a license to carry a gun to protect himself. Without such a permit, Iraqis with arms are subject to arrest at U.S. checkpoints.

"The Americans are good-hearted. When they love you, they really love you," says al-Jaburi, "but when you finish your job, they forget you." Replies an officer of the CIA, who would not comment on the contributions of any particular Iraqi: "The people who have worked for us have been well treated. If there's some unhappiness, I suspect that it is from people who are either exaggerating their role or inventing promises that were never made." The greatest pledge the U.S. made to these people, of course, was that it would take down Saddam. That it did, with their considerable assistance.

--With reporting by Timothy J. Burger/Washington

TIME: Chasing a Mirage

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2003-10-06T00:00:00-07:00

By NANCY GIBBS and MICHAEL WARE / BAGHDAD

The trader was actually sitting at home in Baghdad, waiting. He knew it was only a matter of time before the Americans came. It was just after curfew on the night of June 22, ten weeks after Saddam Hussein's fall, when he heard a helicopter overhead, the humvees in the street outside, the knock at the door. U.S. soldiers came rushing into the house, broke his bed, searched everywhere, then put a blindfold on him and drove him away.

He knew they would come because he knew what they were looking for. He had worked for the import section of Iraq's powerful Military Industrialization Commission (MIC), essentially the state's weapons-making organ, which owned hundreds of factories, research centers--everything you needed if you wanted to build an arsenal of chemical or biological weapons. He spent much of his time in the 1980s buying tons of growth medium, which scientists use to cultivate germs. "We were like traders." he says. "The scientists would tell us what they wanted, and we got it." After Gulf War I, he entertained a steady stream of U.N. weapons inspectors wanting to know what had happened to all that growth medium, how had it been used, what was left.

But there wasn't much he could tell them, not that he could prove, at least. Just before the war, he recalls, the chiefs at the MIC had told people like him involved in the weapons program to hand over some of their documents and burn the rest. "They didn't realize at that time the Americans would insist on every single document," he says. "They thought the [U.S.] attacks would come and that would be it." When in the years after the war U.N. inspectors kept demanding a paper trail, the superiors got nervous. They "started asking us for the documents they had told us to destroy. They were desperate. They even offered to buy any documents we may have hidden."

Ten years and another war later, a new set of interrogators is wondering what happened to Iraq's bioweapons program. On the night of his arrest, the Americans took him to a detention center at the airport, where he was kept in a cell alone, given plenty of water and military rations. Two pairs of Western interrogators took turns asking questions, sometimes through a translator, sometimes directly in English or Arabic. "They asked me about the importation of things like chemicals and about people sent abroad for special missions. The essence of it was, Are there any WMD?" They particularly focused on the period after 1998, when U.N. inspectors left Iraq. "Could any trade have happened without my knowledge within the MIC, not just my section?" The buyer says he had nothing of interest to tell the interrogators; his group, he insists, had long ago quit the weapons-of-mass-destruction business. As they pressed him about what he purchased and for whom, it seemed to him that "it was just like the blind man clutching for someone's hand to hold." After three days he was blindfolded, taken back into the city and released.

The trader's story offers a glimpse into the challenges faced by David Kay, a co-head of the Iraq Survey Group, charged by the CIA with finding the WMD the Bush Administration insists Iraq has. Kay is expected to release a status report on his findings soon, possibly this week. While stressing that the account will not be the Survey Group's final word, CIA spokesman Bill Harlow allows that it "won't rule anything in or out." That remark seems a tacit acknowledgment that the U.S., after nearly six months of searching, has yet to find definitive evidence that Saddam truly posed the kind of threat the White House described in selling the war.

Bush Administration officials never anticipated this predicament. They expected that WMD arsenals would be uncovered quickly once the U.S. occupied Iraq. Since then, Iraq has been scoured, and nearly every top weapons scientist has been captured or interviewed. That the investigators have found no hidden stockpiles of VX gas or anthrax or intact gas centrifuges suggests that it may be time to at least entertain the possibility that Iraqi officials all along were telling the truth when they said they no longer had a WMD program.

Over the past three months, TIME has interviewed Iraqi weapons scientists, middlemen and former government officials. Saddam's henchmen all make essentially the same claim: that Iraq's once massive unconventional-weapons program was destroyed or dismantled in the 1990s and never rebuilt; that officials destroyed or never kept the documents that would prove it; that the shell games Saddam played with U.N. inspectors were designed to conceal his progress on conventional weapons systems--missiles, air defenses, radar--not biological or chemical programs; and that even Saddam, a sucker for a new gadget or invention or toxin, may not have known what he actually had or, more to the point, didn't have. It would be an irony almost too much to bear to consider that he doomed his country to war because he was intent on protecting weapons systems that didn't exist in the first place.

These tales are tempting to dismiss as scripts recited by practiced liars who had been deceiving the world community for years. These sources may still be too frightened of the possibility of Saddam's return to power to tell his secrets. Or it could be that Saddam reconstituted an illicit weapons program with such secrecy that those who knew of past efforts were left out of the loop. But the unanimity of these sources' accounts can't be easily dismissed and at the very least underscores the difficulty the U.S. has in proving its case that Saddam was hoarding unconventional arms.

Iraqi engineering professor Nabil al-Rawi remembers being at a conference in Beirut on Feb. 5 and watching on TV as U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell made a presentation to the U.N. laying out the U.S. case that Iraq was pressing ahead with its weapons programs. Conference participants from other Arab countries grilled al-Rawi whether Powell's charges were true. An exasperated al-Rawi tried to reassure his counterparts that he and his teams had abandoned their illegal programs years earlier. Did they believe him? "I don't think so," he says.

Al-Rawi contends that he had been around long enough to know what was what. He had worked on the Iraqi nuclear program before the 1991 war and until the fall of the regime was a senior member of the MIC. He and a nuclear engineer whom TIME interviewed claim that the nuclear-weapons program was not resumed after the plants were destroyed by the U.S. in Gulf War I. In his more recent work at the MIC, al-Rawi had a perspective on the biological and chemical programs as well. Those too, he insists, were shut down in the early 1990s; the scientists transferred to conventional military projects or civilian work. Last November, al-Rawi says, he was asked by Abd al-Tawab Mullah Huweish, head of the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, to give a seminar--essentially career counseling--to MIC scientists "on ways to attract funding for and shape new research projects because there was no weapons work for them."

Sa'ad Abd al-Kahar al-Rawi, a relation of Nabil's, also thinks he would have known had Baghdad revived its WMD efforts. A professor of economics, he was a top financial adviser to the regime and knew the government books well. He says he would have known if money was disappearing into a black hole created by a special weapons project. Similarly, Iraqi scientists note that their community is small and tightly knit; most of them studied together and worked together. If a new, secret WMD program had started up, they argue, certain core players who held the necessary expertise would have had to be involved. Several scientists told TIME that all their cohort is accounted for; no one went underground. Iraq's premier scientists, according to Nabil al-Rawi, moved on to other things--teaching, water and power projects, producing generic Viagra.

Many did continue developing military technology. After 1991 Nabil al-Rawi worked on electrical controls for unmanned drones and, most recently, Stealth bomber--detection radar. Such projects were meant to be hidden from U.N. inspectors, who, the Iraqis have long asserted, were riddled with American spies. The Furat facility just south of Baghdad was a known nuclear site before the first Gulf War. Last fall the White House released satellite photos showing a new building at the site and suggested it was designed for covert nuclear research. But al-Rawi claims it was rebuilt to produce radar and antiaircraft systems. When TIME visited the plant this summer, there were signs of heavy bombing, but the new building was intact--and carpeted inside with documents in French, Russian, Arabic and English, all having to do with radar equipment, frequencies and trajectories.

In his U.N. presentation, powell asserted that the Tariq State Establishment in Fallujah was designed to develop chemical weapons. When TIME visited the site, it was empty. U.N. inspectors visited the facility six times from December 2002 to January 2003 and reported that the chlorine plant that so concerned the Americans "is currently inoperative." Nabil al-Rawi says the hundreds of scientists who worked there are now "doing other things."

Another site mentioned by the allies in the walk-up to the war was the Amiriyah Serum and Vaccine Institute, which both British intelligence and the CIA suspected was part of a biological-warfare program.

TIME visited the site in July to see the two recently built warehouses that had raised those concerns. One had been bombed, its door cascading with a mountain of debris made up of burned and broken empty vials. The intact other building was packed to the rafters with boxes full of glassware and beakers. Pigeons roost in the ceiling, their droppings and feathers--some of it inches thick--caking the cardboard towers. Nothing appears to have been moved in a long time. U.S. intelligence officials declined to tell TIME about Washington's postwar assessment of the site.

So, why all the hide and seek if suspect facilities did not contain incriminating evidence? The former Minister of Industry and Minerals, Muyassar Raja Shalah, cites national security: "The U.N.'s accusations about hiding things were true," he says, recalling charges that Iraqis hustled evidence out the back door even as U.N. inspectors entered through the front. "This was Iraq's right, because the U.N. was searching for WMD in a lot of military facilities, and of course we held a lot of military secrets relating to the national security of Iraq in these places. It was impossible to let a foreigner have a look at these secrets."

Some analysts suspect that Saddam's game was a sly form of deterrence: keep the U.S. and his neighbors guessing about the extent of his arsenal to prevent a pre-emptive attack. A bluff like that had worked for him before: in 1991, during an uprising among Iraqi Kurds in Kirkuk, soldiers inside helicopters dropped a harmless white powder onto the rebels below, terrifying them into thinking it was a chemical attack. The Kurds retreated, and the uprising collapsed. Hans Blix, head of the U.N. inspection team that entered Iraq last November and left just before the war, told Australian national radio two weeks ago that "you can put up a sign on your door, BEWARE OF THE DOG, without having a dog."

Pentagon officials were so certain before Gulf War II that the Iraqis had outfitted their forces with chemical weapons that U.S. soldiers storming toward Baghdad wore their hot, heavy chemical weapons gear, just in case. But a captain in Iraq's Special Security Organization, the agency that was responsible for, among other things, the security of weapons sites, says no such arms were available. "Trust me," he says, his eyes narrowed, as he sits in a back-alley teahouse in Tikrit, "if we had them, we would have used them, especially in the battle for the airport. We wanted them but didn't have any."

Colonel Ali Jaffar Hussan al-Duri, a Republican Guard armored-corps commander who fought in the Iran-Iraq war and in both Gulf Wars, remembers the time when Iraq's Chemical Corps was fear inspiring. "We were much better at it than the Iranians," he says, who are thought to have suffered as many as 80,000 casualties in chemical attacks. But after Gulf War I, Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Kamal, who headed the MIC, took the most talented Chemical Corps officers with him, according to Hussan. After that, he claims, the unit became a joke. "It should have been a sensitive unit--it once was--but in the end that's where we dumped our worst soldiers." Comments a Republican Guard major of the Corps: "It had nothing."

If that's true, what happened to the banned weapons Iraq once possessed? In the inspections regime that lasted from 1991 to 1998, the U.N. oversaw the destruction of large stores of illicit arms. Some documented inventories, however, were never satisfactorily accounted for; these included tons of chemical agents as well as stores of anthrax and VX poison. The Iraqis eventually owned up to producing these supplies but insisted that they had disposed of much of them in 1991 when no one was looking and had kept no records of the destruction. That made Blix wonder. In an interview with TIME in February, he described Iraq as "one of the best-organized regimes in the Arab world" and noted "when they have had need of something to show, then they have been able to do so."

A former MIC official insists that this view is mistaken. "In Iraq we don't write everything," he says. The claim that Saddam would destroy his most dangerous weapons of his own accord and not retain the means to prove it seems a stretch. But a captain in the Mukhabarat, the main Iraqi intelligence service, says he was a witness to just such an exercise. In July 1991, he says, he traveled into the Nibai desert in a caravan of trucks carrying 25 missiles loaded with biological agents. First the bulldozers took a week to bury them. It took three more weeks to evacuate the area. Then the missiles were exploded. No one kept any kind of documentation, the captain says. "We just did it." This meant that when weapons inspectors came demanding verification, the Iraqis could not prove what or how much had been destroyed.

Sa'ad al-Rawi contends that the men who carried out such missions were junior level, sergeants and first sergeants. "They are not educated men," he says. "You order them to do something, they do it. When we had to try to account for this, we tried to recall them in 1997, but many had of course left the army and were hard to find. And the ones we did find certainly couldn't remember exactly how many missiles were buried, nor what was in each of them."

That still leaves unanswered why the Iraqis would have unilaterally destroyed their most potent arms. One theory, advanced by the U.N., is that the regime used these exercises as a cover for retaining a fraction of their stores. The idea is that they would destroy quantities of weapons (creating a disposal site and eyewitnesses, if not written records) and claim to have got rid of everything yet actually hold on to some of it. The Mukhabarat captain concedes that scientists kept small amounts of VX and mustard gas for future experiments. "I saw it myself, several times," he says.

Samir, a chemicals expert who worked for a branch of the MIC called the National Monitoring Directorate, says he knows of a case in which 14 artillery shells filled with mustard gas were preserved out of a batch of 250 slated for destruction. The main purpose of keeping them, he says, was to test their deterioration over time. The Iraqis handed over the shells to the U.N. in 1997, claiming that they had been mis-stored and recently discovered, an explanation Samir says was a ruse. When four of the shells were unsealed, tests found their contents to be 97% pure. "The gas was perfect," says Samir.

Even if the Iraqis did destroy most of their illegal weaponry in 1991, that does not mean they didn't build up new stores. The notion that the bioweapons program wound down in the 1990s is flatly rejected by Richard Spertzel, who led the U.N. hunt for biological weapons inside Iraq from 1994 to 1998. "We were developing pretty good evidence of a continuing program in '97 and '98," he says. Some U.N. inspectors, disagree, saying they believe that there was no further production after 1991. Spertzel says an Iraqi scientist phoned him just this past April and told him an "edict" went out from Saddam shortly before the war ordering his biological-weapons teams to destroy any remaining germ stockpiles.

That Saddam would have continued feverishly pursuing weapons of every kind seems more in keeping with his character than the idea that he gave up on them. The Iraqi dictator was crazy for weapons, fascinated by every new invention--and as a result was easily conned by salesmen and officials offering the latest device. Saddam apparently had high hopes for a bogus product called red mercury, touted as an ingredient for a handheld nuclear device. Large quantities of the gelatinous red liquid were looted from Iraqi stores after the war and are now being offered on the black market.

Saddam's underlings appear to have invented weapons programs and fabricated experiments to keep the funding coming. The Mukhabarat captain says the scamming went all the way to the top of the MIC to its director, Huweish, who would appease Saddam with every report, never telling him the truth about failures or production levels and meanwhile siphoning money from projects. "He would tell the President he had invented a new missile for Stealth bombers but hadn't. So Saddam would say, 'Make 20 missiles.' He would make one and put the rest in his pocket," says the captain. Colonel Hussan al-Duri, who spent several years in the 1990s as an air-defense inspector, saw similar cons. "Some projects were just stealing money," he says. A scientist or officer would say he needed $10 million to build a special weapon. "They would produce great reports, but there was never anything behind them."

If Saddam may not have known the true nature of his own arsenal, it is no wonder that Western intelligence services were picking up so many clues about so many weapons systems. But it helps answer one logical argument that the Administration has been making ever since the weapons failed to appear after the war ended: why, if Saddam had nothing to hide, did he endure billions of dollars in sanctions and ultimately prompt his own destruction? Perhaps because even he was mistaken about what was really at stake in this fight.

Whether the Iraqis had actual stores of unconventional weapons, Spertzel argues, is beside the point. He finds it credible that Iraq converted many of its weapons factories to civilian uses. Baghdad's official policy from 1995, he notes, was that facilities that were not building weapons had to be self-supporting. But, he adds, "they would be available when called upon" to return to armsmaking. Spertzel thinks the focus on finding a 55-gal. drum of poison is misplaced. "The concern that many of us always had was not that they were producing great quantities of stuff but that the program was continuing--they were refining techniques and making a better product. That's all part of an offensive program." Absent a smoking gun, the Administration may have to fall back on means and motive. That's always, however, a tougher case to prove.

--With reporting by Mark Thompson and Timothy J. Burger/Washington

TIME: Caught on Tape

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2003-09-18T00:00:00-07:00

By MICHAEL WARE

TIME has received a 27-minute-long video from anti-U.S. resistance fighters, documenting an attack on a U.S. position at an old Iraqi ammunition facility. The tape was allegedly produced by Mohammed's Second Army, one of the three groups who claimed credit for the U.N. bombing. This particular cell, the Anbar Branch, did not pull off that bombing, but they claim to have some knowledge of that attack. The video taped aired on ABC News on Wednesday night and can be viewed at abcnews.com.

Shot the night of Sept. 6, the video shows an attack on the ammunition storage point at Khaldiya, on the outskirts of the Sunni-dominated town of Falljuah, just west of Baghdad. The ammo dump is about 1.25 miles long and, according to a U.S. military engineer, contains so much ammunition it would take weapons disposal experts a year to blow it all up. Since the official end of hostilities in May, anti-U.S. forces have been raiding the facility, taking mines, anti-tank rounds and other weapons . The unit currently based there, from the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment's 2nd Squadron, is keeping tanks and armored vehicles on the ridge at all hours to guard against more theft. "We shoot anything that moves up here," says one U.S. soldier.

Still, U.S. troops are often tested, and this video portrays one such assault. Shot on nightvision lenses, the video first shows a resistance commander drawing a map in the dirt with a stick, identifying how they will attack, as four footsoldiers with scarves round their faces listen. They discuss breaking into three groups. First, a machine gun is to engage the Americans. The attackers' mortar will then start hitting the ammo storage. In the light of the explosions, the Iraqi resistance fighters hope to glean the number of vehicles the Americans possess — and clarify targets for further RPG and mortar attacks.

The video then cuts to a silhouetted ridgeline overlooking the ammo dump. Neither U.S.vehicles nor attackers can be seen. The voice of someone counting down can be heard. One, two, three, and moments later a huge blast rips up from behind the ridge. Then explosions are heard and the fireworks begin. After some time someone off-camera makes a short speech in Arabic. Translated, it says: "The people who made this operation are from the few honored Iraqi mujahideen and we ask any honored Iraqis to defend this country and we can't accept any forces, Arab or foreigners, whoever it is, whether it is to reconstruct or occupy it. Depend on Allah, mujahideen, and do it!"

The next scene shows four unarmed Iraqi footsoldiers running into view, passing under a line of barb wire, as explosions rip in the background. They give an after action report to their commander: "We exploded it. We are Mohammed's Second Army. Whatever you order us to do, we'll do it, sir, for the sake of jihad, our country, our religion and our Islam, in one strong hand. We will die for the sake of Saddam Hussein and to bring him back to run this country."

"Good work," the commander responds repeatedly. The four then claim that they destroyed Humvees and other targets. U.S. officers, however, say that not only were no Americans injured in this attack, no U.S. vehicles were destroyed. The only damage was to one ammo dump protected by U.S. tanks.

TIME has confirmed that an attack occurred on Sept. 6 on the ammunition storage facility. One soldier involved in the defense of the area says that the Americans do not know who did it, or how they did it. That same night, the airbase where the U.S. forces are headquartered came under fire, as did another position.

The video also shows the aftermath of another RPG attack, on Sept. 11, which destroyed a U.S. semi-trailer and a large transport truck. It shows 50 people dancing by the flames, chanting "we give our blood and souls for you Saddam." A Fedayeen member, his face unshrouded, then shoots the flaming wreck twice with an AK-47. The Anbar branch also claims responsibility for this ambush.

COURIER-MAIL: Life is a war zone

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2003-08-30T00:00:00-07:00

Former Courier-Mail reporter Michael Ware, now Time magazine's Baghdad bureau chief, finds the Iraqi capital has everything and nothing in common with Brisbane

'You have your gun. The rest you have to leave to Allah'

The tell-tale thud of an explosion ripples through the baking afternoon air. The sound rolls over housetops like a beach break, washing over a woman in a headscarf draping laundry on a balcony and boys chatting with a guard nursing an AK-47. A moment later it laps the farthest edges of the western suburb of al-Mansur, dissolving into the traffic din. No one looks up, save for one of the boys, who glances over his shoulder.

The chattering of automatic weapons a while later is barely a distraction. Unless luminescent tracer rounds whiz overhead and the firing moves this way, it's not a concern. Explosions and the punchy staccato of brief firefights or bursts from a weapon are daily beats in the rhythm of family life. This is nothing; this is Baghdad.

Mansur is an attractive suburb, like the Kenmore of Baghdad. Quiet, palm-lined streets carve up blocks of well-kept middle-class homes. It's home to good families from educated, professional backgrounds. Most here were members of Saddam's Ba'ath Party. They had to be. Any half-decent job required it. It doesn't mean they were complicit in the regime; they just had to survive it.

With the rest of the city, Mansur now suffers under the weight of American occupation and endures a war-ravaged economy stripped by years of sanctions, outdated and continually sabotaged infrastructure, social disorder and the fear and loathing that comes with it. Basic services barely function; electricity is rare and random, the police are ineffective, hospitals struggle to make do. Simple errands become a grind. It's life lived in the midst of a guerilla war.

Near Mansur runs a highway, serving Baghdad much as the Western Freeway does Brisbane. It's the main route to what was Saddam International Airport, now a formidable US base. American convoys ply the laneways. The resistance -- a collection of Ba'ath loyalists, Fedayeen Saddam fanatics, disgruntled citizenry and Islamic militants -- use it as a killing ground. The GIs have dubbed it "RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) Alley". Improvised bombs are planted by the road, remotely detonated for passing Humvees, triggering ambushes by hidden fighters who blast away with RPGs and machineguns before melting back into the population.

The resistance strikes everywhere. This month a bomb slipped under a parked Humvee sparked a three-hour gun battle in a bustling shopping district. There's no pattern, no discerning where is safe, where is not.

The constant sniping attacks play on the soldiers' nerves. "We know every time we leave the gate it might be us that's hit with the next RPG or IED (improvised explosive device)," says an exhausted Sergeant Carlos Gomez.

The stress parlays into jittery mistakes. On July 27, Zaid Imad Khazalalrubai, a stringy 13-year-old, was in a small white sedan with his brother Mohammed, 16, collecting the family's monthly food ration. The boys stumbled on a makeshift checkpoint of Humvees sealing off a house as the Americans' elite and shadowy Task Force 20 -- the Saddam Hunters -- raided in a hail of fire.

As Zaid's car edged past the "Checkpoint Ahead, Move Slowly" sign the jumpy soldiers opened up, pouring a torrent of high-velocity rounds through the windshield. The boys survived by ducking down, but as Zaid leant out of the car to brush the glass from his hair, a bullet pierced his forehead, killing him instantly. Four other civilians died that afternoon in a few mad minutes.

"First there was this," a woman cried at the scene, gesturing to a scar of land where houses were hit by missiles in the war, "12 of us slaughtered. And now there is this, five more dead. This is too much."

It was too much for Zaid's brother Mohammed. "I'll take revenge from those American sons of bitches. The Americans will not escape with impunity," he swore by Zaid's coffin the next day.

More was to come. Shortly before 11am on August 7, the suburban quiet was ripped apart by a terrible shudder that slammed doors and splintered windows. A thick black tower of smoke loomed over the treetops to the east. The Jordanian embassy, 1.5km away, had been hit by a massive car bomb.

Scorched bodies littered the footpath outside the embassy. Streams of injured, clutching gaping wounds, staggered in the haze. Neighbours with garden hoses hopelessly battled flames roasting cars on the road. As many as 19 people were killed, more than 50 hurt. Walking from the scene, former businessman Ali Shaheen shook his downcast head.

Ali, like everyone in his street, is a prisoner in his home after dark.

There is no law, no order. Police patrols roam the streets but they are too few, and the looters too many.

Homeowners defend their properties themselves. There is no 000 number to dial for help. Every house has at least one AK-47 and a cache of ammunition. Crimes are reported by pulling the trigger.

"You have your gun," says Ali. "The rest you have to leave to Allah."

Last October Saddam emptied his prisons of every murderer, rapist and thug, all of them time bombs primed to go off with the fall of the regime, when not a single cop was on the streets.

It's impossible to gauge the scale of the crime wave, though Marwan Sadeeq has a measure. He bought a second-hand Mercedes-Benz before the war for $US5200. Carjackings are so rife, and deadly, he hasn't driven it for months. "Mercedes are a prime target and no one wants to be caught in one. I can't sell it out for more than $US4000," he laments.

Rape and the kidnapping of women are at obscene levels. Last month a young woman frantically pleaded for the police to look for her friend who'd just been snatched. They did nothing. Desperate, she implored an American patrol to help. The GIs returned to the spot but the abductors were long gone.

Yet somehow some vestiges of normality are returning. The US-run Coalition Provisional Authority has rallied crews from the vast army of the unemployed to sweep the streets for a handful of dollars a day. Garbage trucks are making their rounds and construction workers are scurrying over destroyed buildings. University exams have been completed and results posted.

Much is still to take hold. Stores are brimming with cheap electrical goods and new satellite dishes are sprouting in shopfronts like mushrooms. Yet there are too few with the cash to buy them. "Window shopping is doing a booming trade," quips Ali.

For Baghdad's inhabitants the electricity supply is the barometer of the US administration's success. With short, irregular spurts of power -- two hours here, three hours a day later -- they are scornful of CPA chief Paul Bremmer and the fledgling government he is forging from the rubble.

They have been sweating on him to get it right. Through July and August temperatures sat above 50C every day, falling to the mid-40s at night. The city didn't sleep. Tempers frayed. Industry faltered.

Former electrical engineer Omar Kamal is watching his friends go out of business, their plants idle, starved of electricity. "My neighbour operates an industrial gas production plant," he says, "supplying the metalworkers and all kinds of businesses. Before the war he pumped out 1500 cylinders a day; now he's managing 200 a week."

Foreign firms are not venturing into Baghdad. A US contractor was killed delivering mail near the city of Tikrit. The international aid organisations are pulling out or scaling back in the wake of the devastating bombing of the UN headquarters earlier this month. Iraqis working with the US military and journalists are branded collaborators, traitors. Their names appear on death lists. Many have been assassinated.

Foreigners are not immune. A Red Cross worker has been killed and journalists are targets. A correspondent was gunned down at the national museum by a man who stole up behind him in a crowd and put a pistol to the back of his head. A Reuters cameraman was shot by US soldiers, his camera mistaken for an RPG launcher.

NPR: Explosion in Baghdad

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2003-08-19T00:00:00-07:00

NPR's Steve Inskeep talks with Michael Ware, reporter for Time magazine. Michael Ware is in Baghdad, and he describes the scene on the ground.

NPR: 3:12

TIME: How al-Qaeda's Ally Came Back

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2003-08-16T00:00:00-07:00

By MICHAEL WARE / BAGHDAD

When U.S. special forces led an assault in March on a compound in northern Iraq belonging to the militant group Ansar al-Islam, U.S. officials said they had taken out a significant terrorist threat. Before the war, Bush Administration officials identified Ansar, some of whose members are believed to have trained in al-Qaeda camps, as a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, a claim based on reports that Saddam had dispatched an agent to northern Iraq to establish ties with Ansar. On March 26, after the strike on the compound, Bush said the U.S. had "destroyed the base of a terrorist group in northern Iraq that sought to attack America and Europe with deadly poisons."

Now it appears that the damage to the group was less than Bush had hoped. Last week Ansar was among the groups U.S. investigators named as possible culprits in the bombing of the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad. A U.S. intelligence official told TIME that the U.S. is looking at Ansar in part because before the war, the group was known for using car bombs that resemble the one that detonated last Thursday.

Specialists combing the bomb site say emerging clues point to professional terrorists. "Certain materials, remnants of the trigger mechanism--these things are saying a lot," says an Iraqi intelligence officer who works with the CIA. And while some locals insist the attack could have been the work of any number of perpetrators--from Shi'ite extremists to foreign-security agencies--most Iraqis believe it was carried out by former Baathists, an Islamic extremist group like Ansar or some combination of the two. A coalition spokesman says, "We know that [Ansar] is in the country, and we know that they would want to do that, but it's too early to say."

The U.S. believes that Ansar has ties to bin Laden--at least one Ansar prisoner in U.S. custody has confessed to being a member of al-Qaeda--but the relationship between Ansar and Saddam is still unclear. A senior intelligence official says the U.S. believes a Saddam "agent" infiltrated Ansar, but the group's leaders may not have known the agent was loyal to Baghdad. Either way, Ansar, which had more than 1,000 fighters before the war, has proved difficult to pin down. In March, despite a week of pummeling by U.S. missiles and a ground assault by close to 10,000 Kurdish fighters and about 100 U.S. special-ops troops, most of Ansar's fighters slipped away to Iran.

Since then, U.S. forces in Iraq have monitored their return. In April Ansar issued a statement declaring that it would no longer operate from a central base and warning that suicide bombers remained key in its arsenal. Two months later, the U.S. attacked a camp in Rawa in northwestern Iraq, killing at least 75 foreign fighters. The U.S. says many of those killed in the strike were members of Ansar plotting to join the resistance against the U.S. occupation.

Military and intelligence officials fear they haven't heard the last from Ansar. In mid-July, U.S. forces uncovered a seven-member cell during a raid in Baghdad--which suggested that Ansar has expanded its area of operations. A senior U.S. intelligence official says most of the group has survived the U.S. assaults. Warns the official: "It doesn't take many of them to be troublesome."

--By Michael Ware/Baghdad. With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Washington and Peshwaz Saadulla/Sulaimaniyah

TIME: Just Who is Pursuing Saddam?

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2003-08-11T00:00:00-07:00

By MICHAEL WARE and BRIAN BENNETT / TIKRIT

Any of the various U.S. military units stationed in Iraq would be thrilled to be part of the hunt for Saddam. And they could be at any time, should intelligence point to his presence in areas they patrol. The two outfits that have most aggressively pursued Saddam in recent weeks are the 4th Infantry Division's RAIDER BRIGADE, which controls Tikrit and the surrounding towns, and the 101st Airborne Division's STRIKE BRIGADE, in charge of Mosul and environs. However, the vanguard unit seeking Saddam is the elite TASK FORCE 20, whose exclusive job is to hunt for Iraq's most wanted. TF20, as it is called within the military, is a shadowy group that avoids the press. Military spokesmen in Iraq have no authority to comment on the unit or its activities. It is built around the Delta Force, the military's storied special-operations force, and bolstered with commandos from other services, aviation units detached from the army, and paramilitary teams on loan from the CIA. Spotted in Tikrit last week, TF20 fighters had the classic commando look: scruffy beards, unkempt hair, distinct black body armor and tiny walkie-talkies.

--By Michael Ware and Brian Bennett/Tikrit

NPR: Violence Continues to Hound Troops in Baghdad

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2003-08-08T00:00:00-07:00

NPR's Alex Chadwick talks to Time magazine correspondent Michael Ware, who describes the scene at the recent bombing of the Jordanian embassy in downtown Baghdad.

NPR: 3:16

(Michael's Time magazine article, mentioned in the report, is here.)

TIME: A Deadly Car Bomb Attack Rocks Baghdad

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2003-08-07T00:00:00-07:00

By MICHAEL WARE

With a roar and a rolling shockwave that shattered windows and trembled rooftops across northern Baghdad this morning the grinding guerrilla war entered a new and more lethal phase. Shortly before 11 am local time a bomb in a Coaster minivan outside the Jordanian embassy detonated with horrific force, unleashing a fireball that incinerated a car full of people passing by. Those in front of the building were killed instantly, the clothes wrenched from their bodies and flung in tufts like singed confetti, their flesh torched. More than 50 others inside the compound or in the family homes nearby were wounded.

The attack heralds a new dimension to the war in Iraq. The resistance has until now been furtive — hit-and-run raids on American convoys, improvised explosive devices that strike military vehicles, snipers and gunmen picking off soldiers one by one. As of today car bombs are in the anti-American forces arsenal. Whether this signals a shift in people or simply a change in tactics is unclear; U.S. commanders say they have reports of foreign terrorists entering the country, but this assault may turn out to be homegrown. Still, the deployment of car bombs, or that most sanguine of weapons the suicide bomber, as was used by the terrorists of Ansar al Islam in northern Iraq earlier this year, could be the next step in the campaign against U.S. forces. "I think that what this shows is we've got some terrorists operating here," says Coalition commander Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez. "It shows that we're still in a conflict zone."

Outside the Embassy

Within minutes of the blast the scene at the embassy was one of furtive screaming, blazing vehicles, dismembered victims and rescuers blindly running in belching smoke, scouring for survivors. The wounded, draped in blood, were stumbling onto the footpath or being carried from the building towards the wailing of approaching ambulance sirens. Nearby, naked torsos littered the pavement and embassy doorways. Little crimson lakes of blood pooled on the concrete. People dashing in and out of the building stepped high over the dead, some without looking down, their gaze fixed ahead. The wounded went to the ambulances first. As each ambulance filled it raced off, only to be replaced by another. When the time came the dead were gingerly lifted, some scooped up in messy bundles. All were quickly wrapped in whatever was at hand; a white scarf, a vibrant yellow blanket, anything. Four men took the edges of the wrappings and hauled them away. As they did emphatic chants went up, "There is only one God," over and over. Eventually gurneys were freed up from the injured and the dead were wheeled through the gathering throng.

Anger Toward America

It was not long before the shock passed, and a mob stormed the embassy, crashing through the twisted bars of a metal gate. Men reappeared with framed photographs of the deceased Jordanian King Hussein Abdullah. The crowd bellowed as the pictures were held aloft and cheered as they were smashed upon the embassy walls. Glass shattered and the pictures were stomped by many sandals. Next came Jordanian tourist posters and images of King Abdullah's son, King Abdullah bin Hussein, Jordan's reigning monarch. They too were smashed. A Jordanian staffer in the bowels of the embassy fired shots as the second wave of looters crashed in. Then the rage turned, and the crowd began yelling Anti-American slogans.

No U.S. forces had yet arrived to secure the embassy. The only Iraqi police were among the dead. The crowd's anger turned on Time's reporter, the only foreigner then on the scene. "Fuck you," a man yelled as he lunged, throwing a punch. "Fuck King Hussein and fuck America." The crowd closed in, snatching, punching and clawing. "Where are the Americans?" a man yelled. "If we saw one injured American here we'd see the area full of helicopters."

When the US troops finally arrived, more than 30 minutes after the bombing, they came in force: humvees and battle tanks. The crowd jeered. Soldiers pressing inside the embassy were heckled. The tanks rumbled forward, cutting a path through the throng. Soldiers grabbed a crowbar to help the Iraqis prying the scorched metal of one of the cars to retrieve more bodies. The crowd demanded they step back. "Leave them," a man in a bloodied shirt ordered in Arabic, "they are Iraqis." The crowd backed up his command, chanting "God is great." It took time for the soldiers to drive the mess of people back; they had to shout and order, and sometimes shove with their rifles.

No one knows who was responsible for the attack. Some of the bystanders surmised it may be payback for Jordan's offer of asylum for Saddam's daughters. Others though it was just deserts for their neighbor's alliance with the U.S. A bearded old man said he didn't care why, though he firmly believed it was pro-Saddam guerrillas. "Look at what they've done, why did they do it here?" he lamented. "The mujahedeen could have done it somewhere else. The only dead are Iraqis."

One thing is certain. The war has changed.

NPR: In Tikrit, U.S. Forces Face Iraqi Resistance

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2003-06-13T00:00:00-07:00

Conducting airstrikes and artillery assaults, U.S. forces clash with Iraqi troops in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit. U.S. military planners had expected remnants of the Iraqi army and Baath party may mount a last stand there, but reports suggest that many soldiers have fled and that defenses in the city are seriously weakened. Hear Michael Ware of Time magazine.

NPR 4:00

"21 Days to Baghdad" -- 2:09

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2003-06-01T00:00:00-07:00

"21 Days to Baghdad" -- 2:09

On Point -- 40:04

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2003-05-23T00:00:00-07:00

On Point -- 40:04

TIME: The Turks Enter Iraq

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2003-04-24T00:00:00-07:00

By MICHAEL WARE

Even as the U.S. works to stabilize a postwar Iraq, Turkey is setting out to create a footprint of its own in the Kurdish areas of the country. In the days after U.S. forces captured Saddam's powerbase in Tikrit, a dozen Turkish Special Forces troops were dispatched south from Turkey. Their target: the northern oil city of Kirkuk, now controlled by the U.S. 173rd Airborne Division's 3rd Brigade. Using the pretext of accompanying humanitarian aid the elite soldiers passed through the northern city of Arbil on Tuesday. They wore civilian clothes, their vehicles lagging behind a legitimate aid convoy. They'd hoped to pass unnoticed. But at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Kirkuk they ran into trouble. "We were waiting for them," says a U.S. paratroop officer.

The Turkish Special Forces team put up no resistance though a mean arsenal was discovered in their cars, including a variety of AK-47s, M4s, grenades, body armor and night vision goggles. "They did not come here with a pure heart," says U.S. brigade commander Col. Bill Mayville. "Their objective is to create an environment that can be used by Turkey to send a large peacekeeping force into Kirkuk."

The presence of the Turkish soldiers highlights the increasing possibilities of instability in the region, which has a sizable Turkoman population that has clashed with the Kurdish majority since the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime. In the first days after Kirkuk fell to allied forces on April 10th, Turkoman families and political parties were attacked by bands of Kurdish looters. In a dramatic display on April 11, an enraged group of Turkoman men dumped the body of a small boy, perhaps seven or eight years old, in front of the Daralsalum Hotel where international journalists had taken rooms. He'd been shot through the waist at close range by a PK light machine gun. The 7.62mm round travelled up through his torso and exited through his skull, leaving a hollowed shell where his little head was supposed to be.

American commanders in the city believe the covert Turkish team was meant to inflame these kind of tensions. "These [Turkish] forces are tied in to Turkoman groups in the city," says Col Mayville. The 173rd Airborne commanders suspect an amalgam of local Turkoman parties under the banner of the Iraqi Turkoman Front (ITF) were to be used by the covert team to wreak havoc. "In this first convoy was real aid. They'd do this two or three times then money or weapons would have started flowing in. We suspect their role was to strongarm or discipline the members of the ITF. What they're doing is crystallizing the ITF along the Turkish agenda," says Col. Mayville.

By Wednesday U.S. paratroopers were holding 23 people associated with the Turkish Special Forces team. Some were drivers and aid workers. But a dozen of them, says Col. Mayville, were identified as soldiers. "We held them for a night, brought them in, fed them and watched their security. After all," he says wryly, "they are our allies." Early Thursday morning American troops escorted the Turkish commandos back over the border.

TIME: A Family's Last Stand for Saddam

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2003-04-21T00:00:00-07:00

By MICHAEL WARE / KIRKUK

Knowing that U.S.-led Kurdish soldiers had entered Kirkuk, Abdul Karim Hamdaniy and his son Ahmed donned plain khaki military uniforms, strapped on ammunition-filled webbing and, with Kalashnikov rifles in hand, headed out of their homes.

The faithful father-and-son team were going to die for a dying regime. "They were real members of the party, so they fought to the end," said Talat Haias, a city resident, many hours later as he stood over Ahmed's body, sprawled as though crucified in a blood-pooled halo on a suburban street. The two had taken up positions near the Baath Party center in Kirkuk's Huria district last Thursday and had fired at people passing by. Eventually separated, the duo hung on for about four hours before teams of Kurdish peshmerga (those who face death) shot them. "We're happy they've killed them because they've done many bad and cruel things," said Haias.

The multipronged assault on Kirkuk began before daylight. U.S. special forces led battalions of peshmerga, who for the most part met no Iraqi resistance. To the east, however, it was a different story, as Iraqi soldiers tried to mount a last stand. They were positioned at the city's edge, having retreated there from bases farther afield amid intense bombing that began in March. This meant Kirkuk's first line of defense was now also its last.

When the assault kicked off, close to 300 peshmerga from one of the Kurds' top units raced to the Iraqi line. The fighters and the U.S. special forces leading them found themselves in a bigger battle than they had anticipated. With two tanks firing as they withdrew, the Iraqis yielded their outer ring of bunkers but stood fast on the city's outskirts. Iraqi soldier Riaz Jihad Zahir explains why he and his comrades stayed. "The officers had told us Baghdad had fallen, but they said the execution squads would kill us if we left," he says.

Five hours into the attack, the advance halted in its tracks. Around 10 a.m., the commanding team of special forces abandoned the eastern front, leaving Kurdish soldiers to hold the line. "We're going back to the 6th element. Let's go. Let's go," shouted the team leader, waving his men into their white Land Rovers. The order wasn't well received by all the special forces. "I'm telling you we're leaving," the leader breathlessly insisted as Iraqi artillery roared in. An argument erupted, with an angry U.S. soldier screaming "Is this how we lead by example?" The team leader called on his subordinate to "get with the program."

Forty-five minutes later, the Kurds began firing rockets into the Iraqi zone. Shortly afterward, a B-52 trailing four white vapors laid a carpet of perhaps a dozen bombs on the Iraqi trenches. Black clouds boiled up as the peshmerga whooped from their hilltop trenches that hours before had been occupied by the Iraqis being bombed. "This attack is a sacred thing," said Ismael Mohammed. He was fighting to return to the home in Kirkuk he had been driven out of seven years before. Kurdish commander Mam Rostam, a nom de guerre meaning Uncle Rostam, reveled in the momentum of the push on Kirkuk. "My soul is returning," he told his staff in the bunker.

When a second B-52 strike at last silenced their artillery, the Iraqis knew the end had come. "The officers took their uniforms off and dressed as civilians," says Iraqi soldier Zahir. "Both the Baathists and the Fedayeen changed their clothes and ran off. That's when I left."

Unknown to Zahir, the mood of the city behind his sandbagged bunker had already changed. Kirkuk inhabitants say that beginning at 10 a.m., they were seeing Iraqi soldiers, paramilitaries and Baath Party members change into civvies and leave town. "Many of them gave their weapons to civilians, and they all seemed to be headed south to Baghdad or Tikrit," says Firhad Saddiq Saeed. But not all the Iraqis who wanted to leave were able to do so. Ali Hussain says he stood mesmerized as two Iraqi soldiers trying to surrender were executed by their own. "They just shot them there in the street," he says.

Surprised by advancing Kurdish columns, one group fleeing the Arafa district tried to blast its way out. A colonel among them "tried to protect himself, and they killed him as his men escaped," says Ramazan Miran Jwainer. Hours later, the colonel's body remained on the sidewalk, his red boots still polished, his uniform still crisply creased. Two small pockets of Fedayeen diehards fought it out from a school and another building in the Wahda district. Kurdish soldiers encircled them, killing a few and capturing others. "We expect more bad things from them because they're finished and want to kill as many of us as they can," says Ghafur Salah Samin, local administrator of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan Party.

As TIME entered the city with peshmerga fighters, scores of Saddam's defeated soldiers were walking the same road. None were harassed. A Kurdish radio station advised people to disarm any Iraqi soldiers they came across but to allow them to go on their way. There was at least one case of Kurdish vengeance, against a man who had killed four peshmerga fighters. Holed up in the Huria district Baath Party center, he battled with Kurdish troops for hours; he surrendered in the afternoon. Burhan Mohammed witnessed what followed: "They asked him many questions, and he said he was Syrian." The peshmerga beat the man unconscious with rifle butts. "As he lay there, the peshmerga shot him," says Mohammed, "then they doused his body in petrol and burned him." Like his neighbors, Mohammed felt no pity. "They treated us like animals, so we must treat them in the same way," he says, staring down at the blackened corpse.

The vast majority of Kurds weren't out looking for blood in Kirkuk. Instead they filled the streets at midday, cheering and waving and beeping car horns. Offices of the regime's apparatus, like Baath Party compounds and police facilities, were looted and, in some cases, torched. Meanwhile, people danced in the streets, giving bouquets of flowers to U.S. special forces whose vehicles were trapped in the throng. In the center of town, a statue of Saddam Hussein was torn down. That evening happy fire from countless Kalashnikovs peppered the city's sound track. Hastily crafted THANK YOU, U.S.A. signs went up everywhere. "We are grateful to George Bush and Tony Blair," says Yaquob Yousef. "We hate not just the governments but all the peoples of Germany and France."

NPR: Northern Iraq

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2003-04-15T00:00:00-07:00

NPR's Juan Williams speaks with Time Magazine's Michael Ware, who is traveling between the northern Iraqi cities of Kirkuk and Tikrit. He says elements of Saddam Hussein's military forces are fleeing west to Syria.

NPR: 4:03 and NPR: 4:05

TIME: Dispatches From the Front

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2003-03-31T00:00:00-08:00

By MICHAEL WARE / KURDISTAN

At about 2:45 p.m. Saturday in the Kurdish city of Gerdigo, in northern Iraq, I heard the thump of a mortar firing. It was coming from the battle line held by Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish fundamentalist Islamic group that's allied with al-Qaeda, with some support from Saddam Hussein. The round landed in front of a forward emplacement held by the Kurdish 61st Uprising Battalion, part of the anti-Saddam Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Moments later, a second round landed even closer. The soldiers scurried into their foxholes, me along with them, before they popped back up to return fire with a DShK heavy machine gun. Then, from behind us, came a whomp of an explosion that I knew wasn't a mortar. Across a grassy field, flame and smoke belched up from what had been a taxicab. With a sickening realization we knew that a suicide bomber had struck. What I didn't know until I got to the scene was that one of the victims was a colleague, Paul Moran of the Australian Broadcasting Corp. He was the first journalist killed in Gulf War II. The most likely suspect: Ansar.

The mortar attack had been a diversion. The taxi had detonated near a Kurdish checkpoint where Moran had been filming some soldiers. The blast loosed a fireball, charred the asphalt and left the taxi a smoking hulk. A roadside stall was set alight. Paul died instantly. Two Kurdish soldiers were also killed and five more seriously wounded.

In the Kurdish-controlled part of Iraq, war can be a two-, three-or even four-way fight. Two main Kurdish groups, the PUK and the Kurdish Democratic Party, have co-existed uneasily, even though both despise Saddam. After Sept. 11, several Taliban-like groups also emerged. They mostly blended into Ansar, which, with help from Baghdad, has used brutal tactics to try to impose Islamic fundamentalism on the secular Kurds. There are no noncombatants here. One morning, while in a position being bombarded by mortars for six hours, one of the local fighters known as peshmerga told me, "These bombs don't recognize your identity." Territory shifts frequently. The day before the blast, the checkpoints were manned by a local fundamentalist militia, known as Komal, which is allied to Ansar and protects its northern flank.

This wasn't the terrorists' first suicide bombing, but never before had they successfully targeted a journalist. Two soldiers and a civilian were ripped apart on Feb. 26 in the same region, outside the town of Halabja, when a taxi passenger strapped with explosives detonated himself at a checkpoint. Afterward, Kurdish intelligence sources warned us that more bombers were aiming for journos and our hotel in Sulaimaniyah. American agencies also warned media organizations that intelligence traffic had picked up a threat against the press pack in northern Iraq. The Kurdish military increased protection for us, beefing up troops around our hotel, introducing stricter registration procedures and logging our travels more closely.

On the day Paul died, Ansar and its allies were supposed to be on the defensive. The U.S., which believes the group has ties to al-Qaeda, had set out to crush its stronghold in the mountains near Iran. For more than two hours that morning, Ansar had been hit by what a Kurdish combat commander described as "a cocktail of Tomahawk and cruise missiles." As many as 40 missiles rained down over the snowy Shinerwe Mountain from U.S. warships in the Red Sea, killing dozens and destroying an ammunition dump and a string of the terrorists' forward bunkers.

The missiles silenced the Ansar mortar batteries. One impudent mortar that opened up a few hours later was taken out by a U.S. warplane. The peshmerga cheered the missiles and spent the day sunning themselves on the grass. Translated literally, their name means "those who face death." Tragically, I learned this applies to journalists too.

TIME: Battling Terrorists in the Hills

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2003-03-30T00:00:00-08:00

By MICHAEL WARE / I SHRAM MOUNTAIN

The battle rages, fierce and bloody, perhaps the heaviest fighting northern Iraq has seen so far in this war. U.S. special forces are here, along with their Kurdish allies, facing down Ansar al-Islam, the diehard terrorist group based in Kurdish-controlled Iraq that the Americans believe is linked to al-Qaeda. "There are three or four isolated pockets of Ansar on very high ground. We're closing in on them from everywhere we can," says an American commando named Mark, who declines to give his rank or surname. The fire coming down from the craggy peak is torrid. Machineguns rattle from above. Ansar snipers pin down troops, their rounds pinging off rocks and buzzing past heads. In return, Kurdish artillery fires in from the flat plains about 2 miles below. Thick whistles sound uncomfortably overhead as a shell passes the Americans' position. It thwacks into the mountainside. "If we can get the blocking force in place, we can smoke them," shouts a U.S. soldier.

Ansar's best assets are their snipers. The day before, a single shooter halted an entire advance of Kurdish soldiers, known as peshmerga ("those who face death"), belonging to the pro-American Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the main Kurdish political parties. The American commandoes have taken to calling the P.U.K. "the Puck" and the Peshmerga "the Pesh." "We were doing well until that sniper," a Special Forces soldier tells his buddy. "I wanted to drop some mortar on top of him but the pesh were too close." On this day's battle, three American snipers lay behind a rock, patiently waiting to sight their Ansar counterparts far above in the Shram Mountain. "There's a sniper playing with us," says a soldier. The American snipers' high-powered rifles crack intermittently. After the incoming rounds seem to cease, they pick themselves up. "I think between us we smoked three guys, sir," one says. "Oh, at least," adds another.

Through four hours of battle, I saw U.S. forces drill the three Ansar positions with mortars, heavy machinegun and anti-aircraft artillery, 40mm grenades and 500 pound bombs dropped from planes overhead. Still, the fire was returned by an enemy clearly visible through binoculars. At one point, three Ansar fighters simply stood on a mountain ledge, not flinching at the torrent of fire poured at them. At one stage one defender screamed "God is Great," even as grenades and heavy rounds peppered the cave he had ducked into.

In spite of the bravado, Ansar has found itself on this day on the defensive on the snowy mountains on Iraq's border with Iran, driven from its lowland frontline by a week of pummeling by Tomahawk and Cruise missiles. For a year, Ansar had fought PUK forces in trenches and bunkers on the plains below Shram mountain. Indeed, until Friday, the lowland village of Biarra was Ansar's base. But on at 2 p.m. that day, a mosque used as a terrorist headquarters, replete with a gunpit on top, was flattened by U.S. bombing. The Puck captured it an hour later. Locals guess that Ansar has 800 footsoldiers. "That's an underestimate," says Mark, "the numbers we've seen reinforcing their positions indicates they had a much larger pool than that to draw on. It's taken everyone by surprise." He sees the influence of Osama bin Laden. "The tactics are so clearly al-Qaeda trained," says Mark, pointing to Ansar's way with propaganda and terrorist strikes behind the lines, even its manner of mutilating prisoners. "I recognize it from the Chechnya-Georgia border, the border area between Tajikistan and Afghanistan, and on the Macedonian border. It screams al-Qaeda training," he says.

Within 24 hours of the U.S. attack, Ansar appeared to have been overwhelmed, fleeing to a last line of defense 4,000 ft. high among the peaks. The area, near the town of Halabja, has always been a redoubt: it is full of deep caves and secretive routes for escape and supply (nicknamed "rat-lines") across the rugged frontier with Iran. "They're ex-filling across the Iranian border," says one Special Forces soldier, using commando lingo for "escaping." For despite the acumen of Ansar's snipers, the peshmerga offensive had succeeded and hundreds of Kurdish troops—along with about 100 American commandoes—advanced into the terrorist stronghold. "My perception is that Ansar's delaying action was not as effective as they thought it would be," says Mark. "They didn't account for our air attack hitting them in front and behind. This allowed the Puck to push right through."

The peshmerga are as tough as Ansar is ruthless. "These guys literally walk up the mountain, get wounded and walk back down," says a U.S. medic. "They're tough sons of bitches." On Friday, as the medic worked at a casualty collection point, he says one wounded Kurdish soldier with a head wound simply straggled in, walked up and just "died on me."

The assault clearly took a toll on Ansar's militants. Politburo member Mahmood Sangarwi of the P.U.K. says 60 dead were left behind after Friday's battles. In the rocky terrain of Saturday's exchange I saw eight more slain Ansar fighters. Some had died in their bunkers; others were cut down as they fled over open ground or among relatively exposed rocky outcrops. Their corpses remained where they had fallen throughout the assault.

In the end, however, the battle for Halabja seemed inconclusive. President Bush last week referred to the destruction of Ansar's base as one of the war's important early achievements. But it may be a limited achievement. In Halabjah, U.S. Commando Mark says, "A lot of the senior cadre fled a long time ago leaving a fanatical hardcore to stay for the last stand. They had little intention of surviving." The Americans blasting away at the holdouts recognize this and lament past opportunities lost. "This is my second time in northern Iraq," says a Special Forces soldier. "I should be in Tampa with my wife enjoying spring break. Instead I'm here, and I wouldn't be if we'd done this right the first time."