Portrait of a Shadow

They may have been wise, but they were also too late. In the midst of the violence, a very senior Qaeda leader ordered Abu Ahmed to carry out a recruiting and fundraising mission outside Iraq. Abu Ahmed said no—and Al Qaeda's killers responded by decapitating his father and brothers. "Everything was out the window after that," Abu Ahmed says. Within three weeks, he made sure the killers' own heads had been chopped off. Senior Qaeda men contacted him personally to apologize. But Abu Ahmed didn't buy their story, and he refused their offers of compensation. "They told me, 'If you hadn't killed [your father's killers], we would have'," he says. "But I was convinced they had planned to do this." He set off on his own—fatherless and brotherless, pursued as a terrorist by the Americans and no longer able to trust the insurgency's fiercest supporters.

But he wasn't as alone as he thought. He had first met his friend the sheik back in 2005. Even then the older man had no use for Al Qaeda: all that brutality is bad for business, as he sees it. Although Abu Ahmed was "stuck in the fighting," the sheik nevertheless saw the young insurgent as a potential ally. "I didn't try to convince [Abu Ahmed] directly," he recalls. "I had to be smarter than that."

Whenever possible, the sheik arranged for Abu Ahmed to meet with Iraqi widows and orphans, so the young insurgent could get a close look at the human cost of warfare, and urged him to do more humanitarian work. It was slow going, but the encouragement began to take root. The sheik appealed to Abu Ahmed's sense of nationalism. "I said, 'We don't want the Americans to stay here forever, but what we have now is bad'." The sheik was convinced that Al Qaeda's sectarian war would end with Iran stepping in to defend Iraq's Shiite majority. The only alternative to living under Iranian rule was to help the Americans stop Al Qaeda. "I told him, 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend—for the time being'."

One day in mid-2007, the sheik sat down in Baghdad with a group of Americans in civilian clothes to talk about getting rid of Al Qaeda in Iraq. "We started to discuss the future, and our talk came around to names," he says. The Americans were interested in Abu Ahmed, but they were more interested in capturing him than working with him. "They asked what did I think. I said, 'We can't kill all the terrorists.' They knew I knew Abu Ahmed. I said I would convince him."

Negotiations between the former insurgent and the U.S. operatives continued via intermediaries for months until they finally met face to face in late 2007. Abu Ahmed wasn't sure what to think of the men. They expressed surprise at his appearance, saying they had imagined he was at least 10 years older. They had intelligence photos supposedly of him—all showing someone else. They told him three aliases they had for him. All three were wrong. Abu Ahmed took a liking to his new acquaintances anyway. He could work with them, he decided. And they clearly needed his help.

Abu Ahmed has dedicated himself ever since to tracking down the purveyors of Al Qaeda's toxic ideas in Iraq. He keeps a little book in which he lists individuals and their roles in the Qaeda hierarchy. Some are old friends; others are former students; and still others are foreign jihadists he got to know in his insurgent years. He goes to talk to them, one by one, and tries to get them to see Al Qaeda's corrosive influence not only on the resistance effort but also on Islam itself. More often than not, they eventually agree to join him, he says. Sometimes it takes more than one visit. He recently sat down at a house outside Baghdad with a senior insurgent plotter and organizer. "He is very dangerous," Abu Ahmed says. "But he also listens." At last word, the man was still thinking it over.