I had with me a digital recorder, a Nikon digital camera, and a reporter’s notebook and pen, and I set them all on the table, along with my grandfather’s pocket watch so I could keep careful time. When the prisoner sat down in front of me and was chained to the metal chair, Ismail nodded his assent.
I turned on the recorder and began immediately.
“You are Abu Khalif?”
Ismail repeated my question in Arabic.
“I am,” Khalif replied in English, catching both of us completely off guard.
“You speak English?” I asked. “I had no idea.”
He nodded and glared at me, never once looking at the Iraqi officials.
“My name is J. B. Collins,” I continued.
“I know who you are.”
“I’m a foreign correspondent for the New York Times.”
“While you’re still alive,” he replied in a monotone.
That stopped me cold. In chains, in prison, in the middle of Iraq’s most secure facility, this man was threatening to kill me. I fought to keep my composure.
“May I take some pictures?”
He nodded, and I snapped twenty or so photos from several different angles. They bore none of the quality or artistry of Abdel’s work, but they would suffice.
“Now, recently I interviewed your deputy in Syria, your cousin Jamal Ramzy.”
“Yes, he told me.”
“You spoke with him? How?”
“That is none of your concern,” he said, leaning forward in his chair. “Or yours, Mr. Tikriti,” he added while still looking at me.
I looked at Ismail and the warden, both of whom were clearly flabbergasted. It was all I could do not to get up from the table, but I was determined not to show fear, though it was rapidly welling within me.
“Very well,” I said. “Let’s begin this interview so you can make your case to the world. First, a few background questions. You are the spiritual leader and supreme commander of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham?”
“Yes.”
“And your name, Khalif, essentially means a political and religious leader of a Muslim state, ‘the representative of Allah on earth,’ does it not?”
“It does.”
“But that is your nom de guerre.”
“Yes.”
“Your real name is Abdel Diab.”
“Yes.”
“Diab, the wolf?”
He nodded.
“What year were you born?”
“1969,” he said.
“Month?”
“January.”
“What day?”
“The fifth.”
“Your father was Palestinian, from Ramallah?”
“Yes, peace be upon him.”
“And your mother’s family escaped from Nablus in 1948 and settled in Zarqā, in Jordan?”
“Yes.”
“Who was your great-grandfather?”
“Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem,” he said, straightening his posture.
“The Grand Mufti who allied himself with Hitler.”
“Yes.”
“Would you align yourself with Adolf Hitler if you could?”
“No,” he said without hesitation.
“Why not?” I asked.
Again Khalif did not hesitate. “He would align himself with me.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Because, Mr. Collins, in the end, I will kill more Jews than Adolf Hitler ever dreamed.”
41
There were still more biographical details I wanted to confirm.
Jordanian intelligence officials had told Omar that Khalif’s father was killed during the Black September events of 1970—the Palestinian revolt led by Yasser Arafat that attempted to overthrow the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. They also said that after Black September, Khalif’s mother had escaped with all six children to the United Arab Emirates, where her uncle was living. She never remarried.
Ari Shalit, meanwhile, had told me Khalif himself had been born in Zarqā and raised in Dubai. He returned to Jordan in his teen years and was reportedly arrested numerous times for theft, drug smuggling, and even rape but was repeatedly released from Jordanian jails in a series of prisoner amnesty programs.
Jamal Ramzy, of course, had told me—or confirmed to me—other details of the story: about recruiting his cousin into al Qaeda to fight in Afghanistan and later in Iraq. But how exactly had Khalif risen to power after the death of Zarqawi? What were the specific events that led to his formal break with al Qaeda? What difference if any did the recent death of Zawahiri at the hands of the U.S. government make to the equation?
I wanted answers to these and a hundred other questions. But there simply wasn’t time. I wasn’t writing a book on Abu Khalif; I was writing a newspaper profile. I had only twenty-two minutes left, and I had to get him on the record on several current and critical issues.
“What has been the biggest ISIS victory so far?” I asked for starters.
“Being disavowed by al Qaeda,” he said calmly.
This guy never ceased to catch me by surprise.
“You’re saying of all your successes on the battlefield, you consider Zawahiri publicly disavowing you the greatest ISIS victory?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It showed the world how weak Zawahiri was. It confirmed that al Qaeda died with Usama bin Laden, peace be upon him. ISIS is the rightful heir to bin Laden’s legacy, and we will build the caliphate without the infidels.”
I was taking notes as fast as I could. “You consider al Qaeda leaders infidels?”
“Of course, and we call on all their jihadis to abandon them and come join us for victory.”
“Okay, what was your second-greatest victory?”
“Driving the Americans out of Iraq and cleansing the holy soil of their filthy, arrogant presence.”
“You’re speaking of the American military withdrawal from Iraq at the end of 2011?”
“Yes.”
“What was your strategy to accomplish this?”
“It had four parts,” he replied matter-of-factly. “First, we aimed to target and kill as many of America’s allies in Iraq as possible.”
“Why?”
“To persuade them to leave and thus isolate the United States.”
“Which allies?”
“All of them, but especially the British and the U.N.”
“What was the second part of the strategy?”
“To target, kill, damage, and destroy as many Iraqi government officials and facilities as possible to exhaust and demoralize the Iraqi government and persuade them to want U.S. forces to leave.”
“Third?”
“We aimed to target and kill as many NGO aid workers and government contractors as possible, to exhaust and demoralize them as well and drive them out of Iraq.”
“And fourth?”
“To target and kill Shias, destroy Shia mosques, and bait the Americans into the middle of a Sunni–Shia civil war. Zawahiri was opposed to this most of all. He said it would never work. But as you well know, it did. The last American soldier left the seat of our caliphate in December 2011, and then we turned our attention to Syria.”
“Why Syria?”
“Bashar al-Assad is an infidel. He had to be taken down.”
“Your gains in Syria have captured the attention of the world.”
“Our gains in Syria have been a serious strategic failure, though we recovered in time and recalibrated.”
“Failure?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
“One of my major objectives was to penetrate the suburbs of Damascus,” Khalif explained without emotion. “I believed that if ISIS forces could breach the perimeter of the capital, we could force the criminal Assad to use chemical weapons against us.”
“Which he did,” I said.
“Yes, and thereby crossed the Americans’ famous ‘red line.’ At that point, I was certain we had won
. I was certain that the Americans would unleash their military might against the Assad regime and either bring it down or so weaken it that we could finish the job. Then ISIS would have filled the vacuum and seized Damascus and the rest of the country. But to my astonishment, your president surrendered. He did nothing. He did not launch air strikes. He did not bring down Assad, and consequently it’s taken us much longer than we planned to finish the job. That was a serious failure on my part. I vastly overestimated the fortitude of American leadership.”
I was surprised but pleased by how responsive Khalif was being. He was talking, on the record. And he wasn’t giving me pablum; he was giving me real insights to his worldview and quotes that would make news.
“Zooming out for a moment to look at the big picture, why is ISIS necessary?” I asked. “I mean, you’ve talked about your disappointments with al Qaeda, but what about Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad? Why is another jihadist group necessary?”
“Was the caliphate established before we emerged?” Khalif asked. “Has Palestine been liberated? Have the infidels been exterminated from the holy lands, from Mecca and Medina to Jerusalem? No. Why not? Because too many leaders who say they are committed to jihad are really businessmen. They are not true warriors for Allah. They are not true revolutionaries. They are running big corporations, large bureaucracies. They are not true believers. They are infidels. They are kuffār. If they were faithful warriors, then the hand of Allah would be with them. They would have gotten the job done by now. They would have established the caliphate and restored the glory that once belonged to Islam.”
“Do you believe the hand of Allah is with you?”
“Of course. The evidence is clear.”
“Ten more minutes,” Ismail Tikriti said behind me.
I glanced at my pocket watch. The time was going far too fast.
“So what are your objectives now?” I asked.
“We have many,” Khalif said. “We must finish our work here and in Syria. But as my cousin Jamal told you, we are about to open a new front. We are focused on a third target.”
“Where?”
“Wasn’t Jamal clear?”
“I think the world needs to hear from you directly.”
“It is not a secret—we will ignite a Third Intifada in Palestine,” he replied. “We will launch a full-scale, all-out jihad against the Zionists, and we will hunt down and destroy anyone who aids or abets them in their criminal occupation of Muslim lands and their enslavement of the Arab people.”
“That’s rather ambitious, is it not?”
“We submit to the will of Allah.”
“Can you be more specific? What are your tactical objectives in the year ahead?”
“We have ten,” he said.
“Ten objectives you want to achieve in the next twelve months?”
“They may take a few years to achieve, but I hope to do it in just one—inshallah.”
“Will you share them with our readers?”
“Of course,” he said. “We aim to capture and behead the president of the United States and to raise the flag of ISIS over the White House. We aim to assassinate the prime minister of Israel. In due course, we will unleash a wave of suicide bombers and other attacks against the Great Satan and the Little Satan and rid the world of these cancerous tumors. But our highest priorities are to rid the region of apostate Arab leaders who have betrayed the Muslim people and the Prophet himself. We will target the leaders of Jordan and the Palestinian Authority and Saudi Arabia, as well as Syria and Iraq—we will find them, kill them, and topple their governments one by one. In the time of our choosing, we will deal with the Egyptians, too. We will unify these liberated lands and people under a single command and reestablish the true caliphate, with me as the emir, beginning in the heart of the Levant but eventually extending throughout the region and soon the globe.”
I was writing as fast as I possibly could. I was struck that Khalif was not animated. He spoke without any real emotion. Indeed, it was mostly in a monotone. He looked like a serial killer—creepy, sadistic—but there was an almost-supernatural aura of authority about him, as if he were truly in complete command of not only his own destiny but that of millions of others as well.
“Suicide bombers against the U.S. and Israel—when, how?” I asked.
“You will see soon enough, Mr. Collins.”
“Does ISIS have sleeper cells in the U.S.?”
“I will not go into operational details,” he said. “You asked for our goals. That’s what I’ve given you. But I will say that we have recruited many Americans, Canadians, and Europeans to the cause of jihad. These warriors have gained real combat experience in Syria and here in Iraq. They are well trained. They look like you. They will blend in easily. And they carry valid American, Canadian, and E.U. passports. They will not be detected by your Homeland Security. I guarantee you that.”
I absorbed this for a moment, then changed course. “Why do you hate the United States so much?”
He started to go on a lengthy riff about America’s rejection of God and exportation of pornography and Washington’s funding of the Israelis (whom he called “criminal Zionists”) and lack of support for the Palestinians. Each sentence was a headline unto itself, and I now realized I might need to break up the interview into a series of articles. But when Ismail said we had just three minutes left, I had to cut Khalif off. There was one more topic I had to ask him about and this was it. It was now or never.
“So, Mr. Khalif, I must ask you: did ISIS capture chemical weapons in Syria?”
There was a long silence. Indeed, it was so long and so quiet that I could actually hear my pocket watch ticking over the hum of the fluorescent lights above us. And all the while he just stared at me, without blinking, and I stared back. It was weird—eerie. I’d heard people say they’d been in the presence of evil and it had made their skin crawl. I’d never known what they meant. But now I did. This guy was sheer evil. I’m not saying he wasn’t human. But if I had ever been in the presence of someone who was demon-possessed, it had to have been right then.
I could feel the fear rising in me, but I resolved not to give in. This man was a killer. His people weren’t just conquering Arab lands; they were slaughtering everyone who got in their way. But I was not going to let him intimidate me. He was the one in chains. I was walking out of here a free man in a few minutes. He’d already given me a huge story. It was going to be the lead story in tomorrow’s paper and front-page news around the globe—the world’s first interview with the world’s most dangerous terrorist. I had what I needed. If he didn’t want to talk about the WMD, that was fine. I’d given him his chance, but I wasn’t going to beg.
Finally he opened his mouth and stunned me again.
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?” I asked, not sure I could have possibly understood him correctly.
“Yes, ISIS forces captured chemical weapons in Syria,” he said clearly and directly. “They were precursors, actually, to produce sarin gas. I don’t have the exact figures, but my men drove off with hundreds and hundreds of crates.”
“Where?”
“At the base near Aleppo, as you reported.”
“You’re aware of my report?”
“I am aware of and have read all your recent articles.”
“You have access to the New York Times in Abu Ghraib?”
“I’m in prison, Mr. Collins, not a cave. We are not, let us say, without certain amenities.”
I was insatiably curious about how he got his information and how he could continue to run ISIS and stay in touch with Ramzy and his other commanders from behind bars and walls that were eight feet thick. But there was no point asking him in front of the deputy director of Iraqi intelligence. There were certain questions I knew Khalif would not answer.
“We need to wrap up,” Ismail said, tapping his wristwatch.
“Just one more question,” I said.
“Make it quick,” Ismail replied.
/>
He was on a tight timetable, and I could see the security guys getting antsy. They were clearly not happy having a high-level Iraqi cabinet official outside the Green Zone, especially in the presence of the head of ISIS, who apparently had direct communication with his commanders outside.
I was about to ask my final question when suddenly the lights flickered and the table shook.
The warden barked a question or perhaps an order to one of his aides, who immediately radioed someone else, presumably at the prison’s security command post we had passed on our way inside.
I turned back to Khalif to pose my question when the steel door behind me flew open and a guard shouted something in Arabic.
“We need to go,” the warden said. “Right now.”
42
The moment the door opened, I heard the explosions.
I knew immediately the prison was under attack, and I knew it had to be ISIS forces. But what worried me most was the sudden realization that Abu Khalif had likely been aware the attack was coming and might have even planned its timing.
Ismail Tikriti grabbed me by the arm and shouted, “We must go—now!”
I turned to gather my camera, digital recorder, and pocket watch and threw them into my satchel as the guards were dragging Abu Khalif out the other door, but I will never forget the twisted smile on his face or his cry at the top of his lungs: “Allahu akbar!”
Surrounded by soldiers, Ismail, the warden, and I raced through the corridors of the dilapidated prison complex amid the sounds of massive explosions, intense machine-gun fire, and the raucous cheers of hundreds of inmates. We quickly linked up with other heavily armed soldiers who guided us back toward the main courtyard.
I could hear the Black Hawk powering up and was eager to board and get as far from this nightmare scenario as possible. But just as the doors to the courtyard were electronically unlocked for us, I heard the high-pitched whistle of an inbound mortar shell coming from the southwest. It missed the chopper’s rotors by maybe twenty or thirty feet but created an explosion that literally lifted me off my feet and sent me flying through the air. I slammed against a cement wall and landed hard. A terrible pain shot through my back and right leg. I felt blood on my head and was afraid I’d broken something.