"“We knew exactly where every one of these Islamist terrorists slept,” Faddis said afterward, describing his detailed accounts to CIA headquarters. “We knew where each gun was, literally down to every machine-gun position and mortar tube.” Best of all, he added, “None of them knew we were there.”"
"For all their technology, the Americans were arrogant upstarts, with little appreciation for the cultural richness of a land that had given birth to written language, mathematics, astronomy, and the law. Iraq was not a mere product of lines drawn on a colonial map, whose value lay in the oil buried beneath its sands. It was a country of tribes that traced their lineage to the beginning of civilization itself."
"Saddam Hussein went away,” Zaydan said. “Iraq is seven thousand years old. America is only two hundred years old. It’s like comparing a Mercedes to a Hyundai.” "
"Barely a year had passed since Zarqawi arrived in central Iraq, armed with only a few weapons, some cash, and his own ambitions. 9 His stated goals were to isolate and harass the American occupiers and ignite conflict between Iraq’s Shiite and Sunni communities. He had managed to achieve both, and, what’s more, Iraqis had come to blame the Americans for the violence that he himself had sparked."
"Shopkeepers who tried to stay open found themselves subjected to arbitrary and occasionally bizarre regulations. In some neighborhoods, grocers were threatened with punishment if they displayed cucumbers and tomatoes in the same stall. The jihadists maintained that the vegetables resembled male and female body parts and should not be permitted to mingle."
"Records seized by McChrystal’s men also shed light on a remarkably sophisticated system for recruiting, transporting, training, and deploying suicide bombers from across the Middle East and beyond. Often the initial contact was one of Zarqawi’s propaganda videos, available to anyone with a computer and Internet connection, and handily supplying an e-mail address for communication. After the opening e-mail exchange, an army of handlers stood ready to guide the potential recruit through screening and indoctrination and then along a chain of safe houses and, finally, a perilous journey by foot across the Syria-Iraq border. Once inside Iraq, the volunteer would be relieved of any cash he had brought along, and then shunted to a kind of holding cell for further indoctrination in near-complete isolation."
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