JDAM, when it absolutely, positively, needs to be taken out.
Posted on 06/10/2006 11:20:03 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
N THE late afternoon sky over Iraq, two F-16 pilots were "in the orbit", as the US Air Force calls it, cruising through a routine patrol about to become anything but.
Their radios crackled. A "high-value target" - military-speak for a terrorist big shot - was in an isolated safe house in a date palm grove below. Here are the co-ordinates, they heard. Prepare to engage. As the pilots swung towards Baquba, the most wanted man in Iraq probably did not even notice the fighter jets, kept kilometres away, or realise he had been betrayed by an ally and trailed by US special forces.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - the face of the Iraqi insurgency, beheader of hostages and bomber of civilians, a man whose taste for violence made him stand out even in a violent land - never saw it coming.
The first 227-kilogram, guided bomb hit the safe house at 6.15pm on Wednesday, Baghdad time. The pilots doubled back and decided not to take any chances. They dropped a second satellite-guided bomb "to ensure the target set was serviced appropriately", an air force general said.
Zarqawi, his spiritual adviser, Sheik Abu Abdul-Rahman, and four others were dead - after a week-long investigation.
Through tips from a leader in Zarqawi's network, and other sources, the US was onto Abdul-Rahman, who inadvertently led coalition forces to the house.
Zarqawi's capture or death was a priority for US troops in Iraq. The Jordanian terrorist, in his late 30s, had risen almost to Osama bin Laden's stature, in terms of US attention.
Zarqawi and his aides had been hunted by an elite and secretive team of US special forces - Task Force 77. They nearly apprehended him several times, most recently in April during raids near Yusufiyah in the south.
Now US officials say his capture happened through some old-style investigations and breaks. There were varying reports of how Zarqawi was tracked down.
Iraq's Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, who announced on Thursday morning that Zarqawi had been "eliminated", credited tips from residents in Baquba, north-east of Baghdad. And Iraq's Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari, suggested Zarqawi had slipped up trying to gain publicity, saying officials "pinpointed" his location in a video released in late April.
And in a crucial breakthrough last month, Jordanian intelligence officers captured a mid-level Zarqawi operative near the Iraqi border.
The operative, Ziad Khalaf al-Kerbouly, used his position as an Iraqi customs clearance officer in Rutbah, along the main road from Amman to Baghdad, to help Zarqawi smuggle cash and materiel for the insurgency.
Kerbouly told Jordanian interrogators the identity and contacts for Zarqawi's spiritual adviser, who served as his liaison to Muslim clerics across Iraq, gathering recruits, funding and support for the insurgency.
Major-General Bill Caldwell, a US military spokesman in Baghdad, declined to comment about Jordanian help on Thursday. By his account, the capture or killing of al-Qaeda lieutenants in recent weeks, beginning with a cell leader in Yusufiyah on April 6, produced critical intelligence.
Task Force 77 located Abdul-Rahman and kept him under surveillance, partly by remote-controlled planes. When US forces knew the adviser would meet Zarqawi on Wednesday night, they decided to strike.
"We knew exactly who was there," General Caldwell said. "We knew it was Zarqawi, and that was who we went to get."
Shown from above in a military photograph, the house appeared to be a white, two-storey structure with a verdant courtyard, located beside ploughed fields and a paved road at the edge of a date palm forest. No other buildings were nearby.
US officials say his dead body was photographed as evidence within minutes of the strike.
bttt
Wasnt Ramsi Yousef's "spiritual advisor" named Abdul Rahman as well?
JDAM, when it absolutely, positively, needs to be taken out.
Different noodle....that was Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. He's in US Federal custody, serving a life sentence.
I wonder, though...can we do profiling based on one-eyed clerics? Seems like many of the baddies have that similarity! Was that the case with Abdul Rahman?
Thats right-Ramsi's boy was passing messages through his lawyer, Lynne Stewart..
Just DAMN!
Were you in the unit?
ROFL.....all targets should be serviced so Appropriately!!
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Photograph taken in 2002
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No, but one of the guys in my unit is currently deployed there.
Both himself and his "spiritual advisor" are all of the same kind: Mass Murderers
Or as another FReeper so cleverly put it, Zarcoward (pig fat be smeared upon his rotten corpse) is out having a smoke, hears a jet in distance, looks up, and says, "Oh look, something broke off that plane."
We used to joke about the whole Demming Total Quality Management phraseology when it became the Air Force's big initiative in the mid 1990s. The various organizations started sending out surveys to make sure the "customer" was satisfied with the service rendered. We made a lot of jokes about sending surveys to targets who were the recipient of our services, to ensure they were completely satisfied.
I'd be willing to bet that the Jordanian interrogators were not encumbered by our suicidal self-imposed PC restrictions on interrogation techniques.
Monster betrayed by closest allies (Zarqawi location tipped off by captured deputies)
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