It was in Syria that we learned about one such militant leader: Shaker al-Abssi. A Palestinian born in the West Bank town of Jericho in 1955, he’d given up his medical studies to become a fighter pilot for Yasser Arafat’s Fatah organization. He later staged attacks on Israel from a base he established in a Palestinian camp in Syria. From 2002 to 2005, the Syrians imprisoned him on terrorism charges. When he was released, he crossed over to Lebanon, where he began plotting against Americans in Jordan. Abssi wasn’t deeply religious, but he understood that Islamist militancy was the order of the day. His primary area of interest was Palestine, but he used the anger that built in the region after the invasion of Iraq to recruit fighters to his cause.
Abssi also drew our interest because he was a longtime associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq and a gigantic presence in the jihadi world. Born Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalayleh in 1966 in Zarqa, Jordan, Zarqawi was a high school dropout, delinquent, and street thug whose radicalization began when he traveled to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, returning to Jordan in 1993. With his religious mentor, Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, who was inspired by the 1979 siege of Mecca, he founded a Salafist group called Bayat al-Imam (Loyalty to the Imam). “Salafism” derives from the Arabic expression as-salaf as-salih, generally translated as “the righteous ancestors,” which refers to the first three generations of Muslims, who are believed to have practiced a “pure” Islam. In the traditional sense, Salafists are people who recognize only the Koran, the Sunnah, and the practices of these ancestors as the correct way to practice Islam. Zarqawi and others in the group were imprisoned for plotting attacks in Jordan in 1994 and gained a following through writings that were smuggled out of prison and published in Salafist media.
Zarqawi was freed in a 1999 general amnesty. After his release, he helped plan the so-called Millennium Plots, a set of Al Qaeda–engineered attacks timed to occur on about January 1, 2000. But the intended attacks in Jordan never got off the ground, and Zarqawi fled to Afghanistan, where he met with Osama bin Laden. The Al Qaeda leader gave Zarqawi support for establishing a training camp for foreign fighters, where he would focus his attention on the “near enemies”: Jordan and Israel. Zarqawi also hated the Shia and saw them as rivals.
After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, Zarqawi was injured in a U.S. bombing in Kandahar and moved his headquarters to northern Iraq. He gained fame in the West when Secretary of State Colin Powell named him in the speech to the United Nations that laid out what was later found to be the flawed American case for war against Saddam Hussein, claiming that Zarqawi was working in close collaboration with the Iraqi dictator. In fact, he was not. After the United States invaded Iraq, Zarqawi’s group, initially called Jama’at al-Tawhid wa’al-Jihad, whose name means Unity and Jihad, emerged in the vanguard of the insurgency, carrying out suicide bombings and assassinations, killing civilians, and inciting sectarian conflict. He was linked to the August 2003 bombs at the Jordanian embassy and the UN office in Baghdad, as well as to an attack on a Shia mosque in Najaf.
In January 2004, Zarqawi wrote to bin Laden proposing a formal alliance. Their negotiations culminated in an October announcement that Zarqawi’s faction had sworn allegiance to Al Qaeda, and it came to be known as Al Qaeda in Iraq.
Zarqawi described his espousal of extreme cruelty in a book, The Management of Savagery, which was distributed online. His starring role in a horrific video of the beheading of the American businessman Nick Berg established his fame as the “sheikh of the slaughterers.”
Zarqawi’s assaults escalated in Iraq, and his group continued to operate in Jordan as well. In November 2005, suicide attackers from Al Qaeda in Iraq set off bombs in three Amman hotels, killing more than fifty people, including a wedding party. Although Zarqawi claimed that the intended victims were American intelligence officers, the deaths of so many civilians, including Sunni women and children, angered King Abdullah and sparked protests in Zarqawi’s hometown. His own family denounced him, and bin Laden’s operational leader, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, wrote that Zarqawi was required to seek approval for any new major operation.
But just three months later, on February 22, 2006, gunmen loyal to Zarqawi blew up the Askari mosque in Samarra, one of the most important shrines in Shia Islam. Although there were no casualties, the attack set off fighting between Sunnis and Shia that resulted in more than thirteen hundred deaths. Zarqawi celebrated by starring in a video, appearing for the first time in public without a mask.
U.S. and Jordanian intelligence wanted Zarqawi dead. Human sources and drone reconnaissance traced him to a location near Baqubah, Iraq, and on June 7, 2006, a U.S. Delta Force team and F-16 fighter jets were sent in to kill or capture him. The commandos arrived at the site of a building destroyed by two American bombs just in time to watch Zarqawi die. Some politicians and analysts thought that with the ringleader’s death his network would disappear. They were wrong.
Shaker al-Abssi was one of the militants who had taken up Zarqawi’s mantle. Both men had been sentenced to death in absentia for the 2002 assassination of the American diplomat Laurence Foley, a senior administrator in Jordan for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Foley had been leaving his home in Amman when he was shot at close range by a man who had hidden in his garage. The Jordanian government alleged that Abssi had helped the gunman with money, logistics, and weapons and explosives training, while Zarqawi had contributed ten thousand dollars to fund the assassination, as well as thirty-two thousand dollars for additional attacks.
During the winter of 2006–7, we heard that Abssi was living in Nahr al-Bared, a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, where he ran a new group, called Fatah al-Islam. Declaring himself the restorer of religion to the Palestinian cause, he had taken control of three compounds belonging to a secular Palestinian militant organization and raised Fatah al-Islam’s black flag over them. Michael and I wanted to investigate the connection between Fatah al-Islam and the Al Qaeda mother ship.
In February we called Leena Saidi, a stringer in Beirut for the Times and other news organizations. Leena was a Lebanese-British mother of two who spoke English with a crisp British accent. We told her that we were looking for somebody who could help us get into the Palestinian camps.
“Yes, there is someone who might be able to help,” Leena said. “Let me see if he can meet with you the day you arrive.”