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COPYRIGHT 2006 Newsweek, Inc. All rights reserved. Any reuse, distribution or alteration without express written permission of Newsweek is prohibited. For permission: www.newsweek.com
Byline: Evan Thomas and Rod Nordland (With Christopher Dickey in Amman, Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau in Kabul, Mark Hosenball in Toronto, John Barry, Dan Ephron, Richard Wolffe and Michael Isikoff in Washington, Kevin Peraino in Jerusalem and Babak Dehghanpisheh in Beirut)
This time around, the Americans wanted to make sure they killed him. Again and again, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi had eluded his many well-armed, high-tech pursuers. Now, U.S. commanders were sure, the terrorist butcher was holed up in a safe house about 30 miles north of Baghdad, where he had gone to commune with his spiritual adviser. A circlingF-16C pasted the small building with a 500-pound bomb. Then, just to make sure, the warplane unloaded another 500-pounder. The two bombs, one directed by a laser beam, the other by a satellite, left nothing but a pile of rubble and twisted metal in a grove of splintered palm trees. Inside, two men, two women and a small girl were dead. Somehow, however, Zarqawi was still alive. When Iraqi and American soldiers found him, he was still breathing, barely, and muttering prayers. Lying on a stretcher, he turned away from his captors, imagining, perhaps, what awaited him in paradise.
The Americans examined the corpse closely, looking for telltale green tattoos and old war wounds. No less a presence than Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, chief of the shadowy Special Operations force tracking Zarqawi, looked down on the bloodied body of his adversary, dressed in black. There wasn't much else to see. According to wire reports, soldiers found a few weapons, a skimpy leopard-print nightie, possibly belonging to one of Zarqawi's three wives, and the May 2 issue of the Arabic edition of NEWSWEEK (which featured a cover story on the Iraq war entitled "No Exit"). Nearby was a magazine photo of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Zarqawi's demise may turn out to be a turning point in the long, frustrating war on terror. American special operators staged 17 raids the day Zarqawi died, then 39 more the next day, rounding up at least 25 Qaeda suspects. A military spokesman proclaimed the discovery of a "treasure trove" of information about Zarqawi's shadowy terror network. The jingoes exulted. gotcha! screamed the New York Post, showing a blowup of Zarqawi's face, bruised and puffy (the tabloid couldn't resist a cartoon bubble from the dead terrorist's mouth uttering the command "Warm up the virgins").
But no one expects the Iraqi insurgency to miraculously vanish, or even significantly abate, in the weeks ahead. If anything, Zarqawi's martyrdom may cause a new surge of killing. His goal had been to foment civil war by causing sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites. With morgues filling with bodies daily, some beheaded, it may be too late to stop or contain the bloodshed.
Last week's ambush of Zarqawi was a model of military efficiency, a triumph of patient intelligence gathering and high-tech snooping. But it seems fair to ask why it took three years to get him. Ever since Zarqawi emerged as a threat after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, an elite team--the best of the best, men from Delta Force, Navy SEAL Team Six, Army Rangers and other highly trained special operators--has been on the manhunt, backed by spy satellites and code-crunching computers. Their target,...
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