Portrait of a Shadow

The American operatives were openly skeptical when the sheik said they might find a valuable ally in Abu Ahmed. The Americans knew who the young man was: a longtime insurgent organizer and spiritual leader. U.S. forces had been trying to kill or capture him almost since the Iraqi resistance began. But the sheik, a powerful tribal leader from Anbar province, knew Abu Ahmed better than the Americans did. "They said, 'He's a terrorist'," the sheik recalls. "I said, 'No, don't judge him—you can use him'."

The sheik was right. For more than a year, Abu Ahmed and the Americans have been indispensable partners in a covert war against Al Qaeda in Iraq. The Americans provide the resources, while Abu Ahmed provides the inside knowledge he gained from his years with the insurgency. Their teamwork has turned, captured or (in a few cases) killed dozens of extremists. "Is it strange to go from wanting to kill [Americans] to wanting to work for them?" the slender, scholarly young Sunni says. "Definitely, yes." But Iraq's hope for a lasting peace depends on Abu Ahmed and other Iraqis like him. "He's an ace in the hole" for the Americans, says one U.S. official familiar with Abu Ahmed's role in the shadow war. "He's the real deal."

Abu Ahmed and the sheik are unsung heroes in the Iraqi people's fight to reclaim their country from the jihadists. To use their proper names or recount their stories in too much detail would be to put their lives at risk. Fighters on the battle's other fronts have received far more coverage: the Sunni tribal leaders whose Awakening Councils first rebelled against Al Qaeda's reign of terror, the Americans whose troop surge finally rolled back the warring sectarian factions, the Sons of Iraq whose neighborhood patrols have helped to keep the peace since then.

While they have all helped to reduce Al Qaeda's grip on Iraq, the group still has a solid foothold in the country. That's what Abu Ahmed, the sheik and possibly hundreds of other anonymous Iraqis are fighting for: to eliminate the last vestiges of the extremist group. "The hive is still there," says Abu Ahmed. "If you kill the swarm but leave the queen, you've done nothing." (Key details of his story and his cooperation with the Americans are confirmed by well-placed Iraqis as well as by two U.S. officials, one of them recently retired. Both Americans are familiar with Abu Ahmed's case but forbidden to speak on the record.)

In many ways Abu Ahmed's story is also Iraq's story. His transformation traces an arc followed by many of his countrymen, from all-out war against the Americans to revulsion against Al Qaeda's psychopathic ideology. Abu Ahmed personifies what went wrong in Iraq, and then went right, but could still go terribly wrong again.

From childhood Abu Ahmed was drawn to religion. As a teenager in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, he gravitated to the Salafist branch of Sunni Islam. Often known as Wahhabis (a term many of them consider derogatory), the Salafists preach a revivalist version of Islam, calling for a return to what they consider the faith's original beliefs and practices. In general, Salafists reject Western-style secularism and permissiveness, and they particularly abhor what Abu Ahmed calls the "superstition and lies" of Shiite Islam.