THANKS, MOOKIE:

Portrait of a Shadow: He helped create and equip the Iraqi insurgency. U.S. forces tried for years to kill or capture him. Now he has a different mission: to destroy Al Qaeda in Iraq. (Scott Johnson, 2/14/09, NEWSWEEK)

The American operatives were openly skeptical when the sheik said they might find a valuable ally in Abu Ahmed. The Americans knew who the young man was: a longtime insurgent organizer and spiritual leader. U.S. forces had been trying to kill or capture him almost since the Iraqi resistance began. But the sheik, a powerful tribal leader from Anbar province, knew Abu Ahmed better than the Americans did. "They said, 'He's a terrorist'," the sheik recalls. "I said, 'No, don't judge him—you can use him'."

The sheik was right. For more than a year, Abu Ahmed and the Americans have been indispensable partners in a covert war against Al Qaeda in Iraq. The Americans provide the resources, while Abu Ahmed provides the inside knowledge he gained from his years with the insurgency. Their teamwork has turned, captured or (in a few cases) killed dozens of extremists. "Is it strange to go from wanting to kill [Americans] to wanting to work for them?" the slender, scholarly young Sunni says. "Definitely, yes." But Iraq's hope for a lasting peace depends on Abu Ahmed and other Iraqis like him. "He's an ace in the hole" for the Americans, says one U.S. official familiar with Abu Ahmed's role in the shadow war. "He's the real deal."

Abu Ahmed and the sheik are unsung heroes in the Iraqi people's fight to reclaim their country from the jihadists. To use their proper names or recount their stories in too much detail would be to put their lives at risk. Fighters on the battle's other fronts have received far more coverage: the Sunni tribal leaders whose Awakening Councils first rebelled against Al Qaeda's reign of terror, the Americans whose troop surge finally rolled back the warring sectarian factions, the Sons of Iraq whose neighborhood patrols have helped to keep the peace since then.

While they have all helped to reduce Al Qaeda's grip on Iraq, the group still has a solid foothold in the country. That's what Abu Ahmed, the sheik and possibly hundreds of other anonymous Iraqis are fighting for: to eliminate the last vestiges of the extremist group. "The hive is still there," says Abu Ahmed. "If you kill the swarm but leave the queen, you've done nothing." (Key details of his story and his cooperation with the Americans are confirmed by well-placed Iraqis as well as by two U.S. officials, one of them recently retired. Both Americans are familiar with Abu Ahmed's case but forbidden to speak on the record.)

In many ways Abu Ahmed's story is also Iraq's story. His transformation traces an arc followed by many of his countrymen, from all-out war against the Americans to revulsion against Al Qaeda's psychopathic ideology. [...]

Many hard-line Salafists consider it a sacrilege for outside forces to occupy Muslim soil—as Osama bin Laden once objected to American troops being based in Saudi Arabia. In May 2003, Abu Ahmed attended a meeting of about 50 Salafist imams and religious scholars at a house a few miles south of Baghdad. They agreed on a threefold plan to prepare for war against the Americans: gather arms from Saddam's storage depots, collect money left behind by the regime and steal intelligence files from government offices. Later that month, on May 20, the fledgling insurgency struck its first blow against the Americans, ambushing a U.S. military unit in Baghdad.

Since he had no military training or experience, Abu Ahmed focused on logistics: supplying and transporting weapons and money, organizing safe houses and coordinating the operations of different cells. His wife drove when he had guns to deliver—the Americans were less likely to stop and search a car with women or children inside. "Our marriage was like that from the beginning," Abu Ahmed says. "She was often afraid; she knew the car was full of weapons, but she did that with me."

By the middle of 2005, Abu Ahmed had risen to the top tiers of one of Iraq's best-equipped resistance groups, with hundreds of fighters battling American forces throughout Iraq. But the dangers of his work made him practically a hermit. He stayed away from public events and gatherings, and only one of his brothers and a couple of friends knew where he lived.

Nevertheless, his life then was relatively pleasant compared with what it became after Feb. 22, 2006. That was when a gang of men blew up one of Shiite Islam's holiest shrines, the golden-domed Al Askariya mosque in Samarra. The resulting sectarian blood feud fueled a merciless Shiite backlash, which in return drove thousands of Sunnis into the arms of Al Qaeda.

In mere weeks, Abu Ahmed's insurgent group hemorrhaged two thirds of its fighting force. "We lost control of our people," he says. When the group's Saudi bankrollers realized what was happening, they cut off funding and supplies. "They wanted to prevent a sectarian fight," Abu Ahmed recalls. "They had experience in Afghanistan, and what they did was wise." The Saudis remembered the factional warfare that had torn the Afghan mujahedin apart in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal, and they had no desire to see such a bloodbath right next door in Iraq.

They may have been wise, but they were also too late. In the midst of the violence, a very senior Qaeda leader ordered Abu Ahmed to carry out a recruiting and fundraising mission outside Iraq. Abu Ahmed said no—and Al Qaeda's killers responded by decapitating his father and brothers. "Everything was out the window after that," Abu Ahmed says. Within three weeks, he made sure the killers' own heads had been chopped off. Senior Qaeda men contacted him personally to apologize. But Abu Ahmed didn't buy their story, and he refused their offers of compensation. "They told me, 'If you hadn't killed [your father's killers], we would have'," he says. "But I was convinced they had planned to do this." He set off on his own—fatherless and brotherless, pursued as a terrorist by the Americans and no longer able to trust the insurgency's fiercest supporters.

But he wasn't as alone as he thought. He had first met his friend the sheik back in 2005. Even then the older man had no use for Al Qaeda: all that brutality is bad for business, as he sees it. Although Abu Ahmed was "stuck in the fighting," the sheik nevertheless saw the young insurgent as a potential ally. "I didn't try to convince [Abu Ahmed] directly," he recalls. "I had to be smarter than that."

Whenever possible, the sheik arranged for Abu Ahmed to meet with Iraqi widows and orphans, so the young insurgent could get a close look at the human cost of warfare, and urged him to do more humanitarian work. It was slow going, but the encouragement began to take root. The sheik appealed to Abu Ahmed's sense of nationalism. "I said, 'We don't want the Americans to stay here forever, but what we have now is bad'." The sheik was convinced that Al Qaeda's sectarian war would end with Iran stepping in to defend Iraq's Shiite majority. The only alternative to living under Iranian rule was to help the Americans stop Al Qaeda. "I told him, 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend—for the time being'."

Shi'a reprisals drove home a simple demographic reality to the salafists--if Iraq was going to be all one thing or all the other, it wasn't going to be Sunni.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 18, 2009 9:33 AM