Hunt for the Bomb Factories

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Adjacent to House 69, in a small palm grove, the Estonians uncover a weapons cache: rocket-propelled grenades (RPG) and an AK-47, its ammo hastily buried nearby. The weapon's magazines are wrapped in plastic and sealed in a tin ammunition box. "There's gotta be stuff all over the place," says 2-12 battalion commander Lieut. Colonel Tim Ryan. Two days later, one of the detainees would break during interrogation and betray the site of Abu Ayesha's main arsenal, which supplied the al-Zarqawi, Ansar al-Sunnah and nationalist cells blasting away at the U.S.-led coalition and the fledgling Iraqi government's security forces. The 2-12 spent a day digging into berms gouged from the flat desert, retrieving one of the largest weapons caches found in Iraq in the past year, including two suspected Scud-missile warheads. Says Ryan: "The member of the cell who gave up the information said that this is untouched, that it is a place where they've drawn their supplies from ever since the fall of the Saddam regime, and from which they're supplying activities in this part of the country, from southwest Baghdad over toward Fallujah and then down to Musayyab."

The weapons seizure underlines the diverse and fractured nature of the Iraqi insurgency. Al-Zarqawi's cells, mostly directed by non-Iraqi jihadis, often don't know where the arms caches are and so cannot function without the support of the Iraqi nationalists, mostly former military officers, who do. The proliferation of car bombs doesn't indicate a formal alliance between the two groups. But the ideological divide is bridged by tribal commerce. Within a single tribe, there can be a diversity of Islamist and nationalist strains--and genealogy can usually produce a cousin able to provide arms to a distant relative, perhaps via another distant relative. Insurgents from the Karghouli tribe, for instance, are principally led by a figure dubbed the Strawberry Sheik. One of his relatives, Abu Mustafa, heads a self-titled military "company" of the nationalist Islamic Army. Another of the sheik's kinsmen, Amara Adnan Hamza, is a fundamentalist Muslim. Known locally as Little Zarqawi, he commands a network loyal to the more famous al-Zarqawi that has prepared car bombs destined for Baghdad. According to American as well as insurgent sources, both Little Zarqawi and his nationalist relative Abu Mustafa have drawn weapons from their senior relative, the Strawberry Sheik. Ryan's battalion disrupted Little Zarqawi's cell and found two tons of explosives at its disposal.