Portrait of a Shadow

Money can be a powerful incentive. Abu Ahmed says his friend the sheik has put up roughly $1.5 million—on top of an undisclosed sum from the Americans—to attract recruits to the fight against Al Qaeda. The cash has helped him wean away dozens of top-tier members from the insurgency. "All I'm doing is correcting the holy warriors' souls," he says. "Poverty is more dangerous than occupation."

But in some cases Abu Ahmed finds that all his arguments are useless. "I always have a backup plan," he says. Sometimes his American friends have helped him persuade incorrigibles to flee the country, using what Abu Ahmed calls "instruments that will make them fear"—a simple phone call, for instance, in which reams of personal data are relayed back to an unrepentant individual, along with the implicit message that he could easily be found and eliminated. If gentler methods don't work, Abu Ahmed may give the Americans the necessary information to have the subject arrested.

But the worst offenders can't be allowed to live, Abu Ahmed says—not Al Qaeda's foot soldiers but its propagandists and ideologues. "The ones who need to be killed are the ones who create the thoughts," says Abu Ahmed. "The ones who need to be killed give the justification for the thoughts, and the ones who need to be killed are the ones who publish the thoughts, because they have reached the point of no return." At last count, Abu Ahmed and his American partners had gone through 63 names in his book. "Five of them we decided to kill," he says.

Abu Ahmed won't go into detail on the subject except to mention two recent "strategic victories" that he says Al Qaeda will need months to recover from. American officials in Baghdad say the pace of victories against Qaeda leaders has picked up in recent months, with the help of up-to-date information from a growing network of former insurgents. In the past year or so, Abu Ahmed estimates that he has recruited about 70 former insurgents. His friend the sheik directs a group of about 20 men like Abu Ahmed—and he's hardly the only sheik working with the Americans. "We do think [Al Qaeda in Iraq] is facing serious problems," says a senior U.S. official who was not authorized to speak on the record. "Killing their leaders does make it harder for them, especially when you kill their financial people."

Even so, the extremists are continuing their fight. Abu Ahmed says Al Qaeda in Iraq maintains a "security wing" of high-ranking, fully committed "consultants" who direct its Iraqi operations from relative safety. They're the most dangerous of all, Abu Ahmed says. He estimates there are about 20 altogether, based in Iraq and nearby countries. U.S. officials won't confirm specific numbers but agree that the remaining senior Qaeda leaders are few enough to be counted.

Al Qaeda's surviving main force appears to be effectively cornered, the Americans say. The extremists are making their stand in Mosul. "Geographically and ethnically, it works for them," says one senior U.S. official familiar with the situation. "It's close to the Syrian border, close to supply lines; it has a multiethnic population where they can hide, and where Iraqi security forces have not been that successful. [Qaeda operatives] come down-valley from there to Baghdad. We see increased desperation in what they're doing."