Speaker 1: Welcome back to everybody. Today, we're going to be looking
Speaker 1: at the kill that took Zarkawi. A Delta in the
Speaker 1: sas finally got him. It's one of the most important
Speaker 1: kills of the entire Iraq War. Not some random mid
Speaker 1: level bomb maker, not another faceless facilitator. We're talking about
Speaker 1: Abu Musab al Zakari, the Jordanian thug who turned Al
Speaker 1: Qaeda in Iraq into a factory of beheadings, mass casualty, bombings,
Speaker 1: and a pure sectarian bloodlust. The guy who deliberately ignited
Speaker 1: a civil war between Sunni and Shia because he thought
Speaker 1: chaos was the path to a caliphate. For years, this
Speaker 1: guy ran free near missus close calls. One of them
Speaker 1: in two thousand and five was almost comical if it
Speaker 1: wasn't so frustrating. So Akari's vehicle blew through a Delta
Speaker 1: red roadblock and then a Ranger checkpoint. A Ranger with
Speaker 1: an M two forty had him dead to rights requested
Speaker 1: permission of fire. Lieutenant wouldn't give it, no positive ideas.
Speaker 1: Akari stared out the window holding an America and rifle
Speaker 1: and just kept rolling. By the time the chase was
Speaker 1: on he jumped out in an under an overpass and
Speaker 1: vanished into Ramadi. Let this laptop and a pile of
Speaker 1: euros behind classic Zakari. That was the pattern. Every time
Speaker 1: the net tightened, he slipped until the machine changed. By
Speaker 1: two thousand and six, under Stanley McCrystal, Jaysack had built
Speaker 1: something different. Task Force one forty five Delta Seals Rangers
Speaker 1: in the British Sas working as one relentless organism. Not
Speaker 1: after night, right after ray. They weren't waiting for perfect intelligence.
Speaker 1: They were generating it. Then exploit the hell out of
Speaker 1: whatever you pulled out of the house, and go again
Speaker 1: before the network could recover, find, fix, and finish. One
Speaker 1: of the key pieces came in April two thousand and six.
Speaker 1: Operational Larchwood four B squadroned twenty two SAS hit a
Speaker 1: farmhouse in Usafaia Triangle of Death Country they call it.
Speaker 1: They took casualties, but they also took prisoners at computers
Speaker 1: inside that material where fresh images of our more importantly
Speaker 1: pathways into his inner circle. The intel machine chewed on it.
Speaker 1: One name kept rising, Shake Abdal Rahman's Arkawi spiritual advisor,
Speaker 1: the guy the butcher trusted enough to meet in person.
Speaker 1: They put eyes on the shake, tracked him, watched the
Speaker 1: pattern of life. On the evening of June seven, two
Speaker 1: thousand and six, the Shake drove north of Baghdad into
Speaker 1: a palm grove you know, the village of Habib, just
Speaker 1: outside of Bakuba. A small Delta Force reconnaissance and surveillance
Speaker 1: team was already in their area, tucked into the vegetation,
Speaker 1: watching a center block house set a back among the
Speaker 1: date palms. When the Shak arrived in a heavy set
Speaker 1: man and Black came out to greet them. The team
Speaker 1: knew that was the target. Put the glve for on
Speaker 1: site was thin, not enough shooters to guarantee a clean
Speaker 1: of salt without giving Zarkari a chance to run into
Speaker 1: the dense palm cover of the surrounding villages. They had
Speaker 1: already lost them once under almost identical conditions. The call
Speaker 1: went up instead Air strike two Air Force F sixteens
Speaker 1: were diverted at six twelve pm local time. The first
Speaker 1: five hundred pound bomb, laser guided GBU hit the house.
Speaker 1: Ninety seconds later, the second bomb, a jade am, finished
Speaker 1: the job. The structure simply ceased to exist to crater
Speaker 1: forty feet wide, smoking debris cover climbing into the evening sky.
Speaker 1: Iraqi police got there first and pulled the man out
Speaker 1: of the rubble. He was still alive, barely hanging on.
Speaker 1: American forces from the taskport ride moments later took control
Speaker 1: of the scene and confirm what they already suspected scars tattoos.
Speaker 1: It was Arkawi. He muttered something and tried to turn
Speaker 1: away on the stretcher. Then he was gone. Fifty two
Speaker 1: minutes after the first bomb, five mothers died in the
Speaker 1: house with them, including the sheik who had led them
Speaker 1: there that night. Over the following days, the exploitation machine
Speaker 1: went into overdrive. Seventeen rays, the dozens more. There are
Speaker 1: dozens of additional fighters and facilitators grouped up computers, documents, phones.
Speaker 1: The network that protecteds Ourcari for years started coming apart.
Speaker 1: This wasn't luck, folks, It was the culmination of a system.
Speaker 1: The SAS raided in April the munthcipatient surveillance, the decision
Speaker 1: by a small Delta team on the ground and call
Speaker 1: for bombs instead of risking another escape. The pilots who
Speaker 1: put two precision weapons on a single house in a
Speaker 1: palm grove. The intelligence analysts who connected the shape to
Speaker 1: the target, so cars death and end the war. AQI mutated,
Speaker 1: ISI rose eventually Isis, but that June evening removed the
Speaker 1: most effective, most stadistic operation and leader of the enemy
Speaker 1: had the man who had turned bed he hadding videos
Speaker 1: into a recruiting tool. The operators who made it happen
Speaker 1: didn't get parades. Most of them still don't talk about it.
Speaker 1: That's how things work. A small team in the trees
Speaker 1: or radio called two jets. That's the story. Find, fix, finish,
Speaker 1: and do it again the next night. Thanks for listening, everybody,