Stalking Zarqawi

NY Times:

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General Caldwell declined to say how Mr. Rahman was being tracked, or how exactly the American command knew once he reached the house that Mr. Zarqawi was there. But from what he did say, the strong implication was that the Americans were relying on a combination of remotely piloted surveillance aircraft and electronic intercepts of the phone being used by Mr. Rahman.

The combat camera images of the attack released on Thursday showed a large white dot circling the target area at relatively low altitude before, during and after the bombing, the characteristic signature of a reconnaissance drone.

General Caldwell said that the surveillance of Mr. Rahman in the past month had shown that there was a pattern in what he did when he was preparing for meetings with Mr. Zarqawi, and that this pattern in his behavior on Wednesday was crucial to the American operation. "We knew that he did certain things" when preparing for a meeting, the general said, "and all these things in fact happened when he arrived at the house and went inside."

The general gave no details, but accounts circulating in Baghdad in recent days, citing unnamed Iraqi officials, have said that Mr. Rahman, apparently wary of using a cellphone because of American monitoring, relied on a Thuraya hand-held satellite telephone when calling Mr. Zarqawi. One of the features of satellite phones is that a caller usually has to be outside a car or building when he makes the calls, in order for the handset to have a direct line to the satellite — in the Thuraya's case one that hovers about 30,000 miles above the equator, almost directly due south of Baghdad.

The aerial drone appeared to have provided the geographic coordinates that were crucial to the bombing, and possibly the laser beam that guided the first bomb. General Caldwell said that the first bomb dropped by the F-16 pilot was a GBU-12 laser-guided bomb, and that it was guided to the target by a laser beam that was independently directed at the house.

The second bomb, which the general identified as a GBU-38, was guided to the target by pinpoint coordinates that the pilot had to program into his weapons system, and the generals said these coordinates came from an "overhead asset," apparently the drone.

Mr. Zarqawi could hardly have a picked a more secluded hideaway. The house outside Hibhib sat about 400 yards off the main road and was accessible only by a dirt road. The building lay in a grove of date palms, with the nearest house about 300 yards away. An irrigation canal ran along the property.

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Interesting details on the tail. The phone call ritual to avoid US tracking of cell calls gave him away. Elesewhere in the story, the Times reports that the US has not confirmed that Zarqwi's wife and daughter were killed in the bombing.