The zig-zag hunt for Zarqawi

John Dwyer:

Hibhib lies several miles northwest of Baquba, Iraq, which is about 40 miles north of Baghdad. As the reliable site Iraq the Model tells us Â?Most of its people are from the Azzawi tribes,Â? and it is Â?famous for producing some of the finest Arak in Iraq.Â? (Arak is a popular alcoholic beverage of the Middle East.)

But then Zarqawi and some of his terrorist pals came to town.

Â?Severed heads of Iraqi civilians were twice found in fruit boxes in and around Hibhib, a terrible crime that shocked Iraqis.Â?

Then came the cold-blooded murder of 19 students just north of the town. In its reporting on ZarqawiÂ?s death, Iraq the Model stated

Â?PM al-Maliki said that Jordan provided intelligence that was used in the raid on ZarqawiÂ?s hiding place, but he stressed that tips from locals were the primary lead to ZarqawiÂ?s exact location and were the information used to guide the bombs.Â? [italics added]

A New York Times article several days ago stated that JordanÂ?s assistance in this historic event was vital Â? a mole, courtesy their intelligence service, inside ZarqawiÂ?s Al Qaeda in Iraq network. Since that story broke, some have suggested that there was no mole, that this is a psychological warfare gambit on the part of the coalition and its allies.

Meantime, the not always reliable DEBKAFile is reporting that a Jordanian sting operation captured one of of ZarqawiÂ?s partners in murderous thuggery, Abu Hufeiza. He not only named al QaedaÂ?s operations chief and two other high ranking AQ officers, he provided the first clue for the location of ZarqawiÂ?s Hibhib unsafe house. Here is what Multi-National Force Iraq spokesman, Maj. General William Caldwell said about pinpointing ZarqawiÂ?s location yesterday:

Â?It was the result of some tremendous work by coalition forces, by intelligence agencies, partners in our global war on terrorism, that all came together, feeding different parts and pieces to allow us to build that [intelligence] puzzle, to establish the patterns, the methods, the techniques which allowed us to track and then monitor things which led us to that building that night to find Zarqawi in there.Â?

It had been a painstaking effort

Â?very focused over the last three weeksÂ?there was a lot of information that came inÂ?Â?

Prior to this time frame statement MG Caldwell said things had started coming together a month and-a-half ago. LetÂ?s look at what happened, based on MNF-Iraq press releases, available here. But first, letÂ?s establish the fact that Special Operations Task Force 145, tasked with killing or capturing Zarqawi and high level al Qaeda personnel, has been the point unit in these operations. As with TF 120, tasked with SaddamÂ?s capture, TF 145 works alone or with coalition forces. Here is the timeline....

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The timeline does provide some interesting clues that you may want to check out. I think the suggestion that the US has a mole in the organization is brilliant. Even if we do not, the Zarqawi killing will make the everyone in al Qaeda distrust everyone else. This brakedown of trust could have a compounding effect that might lead to more people wanting to cut a deal now. The detail on the satelite phone used by al Rahman will probably mean the group will further restrict its communications, meaning their command and control will be seriously degraded. Remember we are still in the exploitation phase with respect to intelligence picked up at the house Zarqawi was killed in as well as the nearly sixty places raided since then. The ones who are still alive have had to scatter from their base of operations making them more vulnerable to being caught in a check point.

Dwyer does have a factual error in his account concerning the bombing of the house. Only one of the planes delivered both bombs. The other was still latched onto the fuel tanker. While Dwyer talks about the Task Force 145 special forces team that was involved in the hunt for Zarqawi, initial reports credit Task Force 77 with being the first at the scene of the Zarqawi bombing.