Portrait of a Shadow

Young Abu Ahmed studied hard in his Qur'an classes and in due course became a teacher. He took the most promising of his young students on meandering road trips into the backcountry of southern Iraq, visiting with Bedouins in the desert and sharing meals with the poorest of the poor. But their travels caught the attention of Saddam's police, who repeatedly jailed the young teacher as a suspected political agitator. His father visited him every week with food, fresh clothes and money for bribes, so the guards would spare Abu Ahmed from the prison's weekly mass punishments. At night in his cell the young man brooded on the evils of Saddam's regime. "His injustice filled Iraq," Abu Ahmed says of the dictator.

Nevertheless, Abu Ahmed didn't welcome the American troops who overthrew Saddam in the spring of 2003. Many hard-line Salafists consider it a sacrilege for outside forces to occupy Muslim soil—as Osama bin Laden once objected to American troops being based in Saudi Arabia. In May 2003, Abu Ahmed attended a meeting of about 50 Salafist imams and religious scholars at a house a few miles south of Baghdad. They agreed on a threefold plan to prepare for war against the Americans: gather arms from Saddam's storage depots, collect money left behind by the regime and steal intelligence files from government offices. Later that month, on May 20, the fledgling insurgency struck its first blow against the Americans, ambushing a U.S. military unit in Baghdad.

Since he had no military training or experience, Abu Ahmed focused on logistics: supplying and transporting weapons and money, organizing safe houses and coordinating the operations of different cells. His wife drove when he had guns to deliver—the Americans were less likely to stop and search a car with women or children inside. "Our marriage was like that from the beginning," Abu Ahmed says. "She was often afraid; she knew the car was full of weapons, but she did that with me."

By the middle of 2005, Abu Ahmed had risen to the top tiers of one of Iraq's best-equipped resistance groups, with hundreds of fighters battling American forces throughout Iraq. But the dangers of his work made him practically a hermit. He stayed away from public events and gatherings, and only one of his brothers and a couple of friends knew where he lived.

Nevertheless, his life then was relatively pleasant compared with what it became after Feb. 22, 2006. That was when a gang of men blew up one of Shiite Islam's holiest shrines, the golden-domed Al Askariya mosque in Samarra. The resulting sectarian blood feud fueled a merciless Shiite backlash, which in return drove thousands of Sunnis into the arms of Al Qaeda.

In mere weeks, Abu Ahmed's insurgent group hemorrhaged two thirds of its fighting force. "We lost control of our people," he says. When the group's Saudi bankrollers realized what was happening, they cut off funding and supplies. "They wanted to prevent a sectarian fight," Abu Ahmed recalls. "They had experience in Afghanistan, and what they did was wise." The Saudis remembered the factional warfare that had torn the Afghan mujahedin apart in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal, and they had no desire to see such a bloodbath right next door in Iraq.