Original subtitles

Narrator: A vicious militant

is systematically targeting innocent civilians.

Mudd: The guy was so brutal.

If you kill everybody else, eventually people stand back

and say, "whoa, we got a big guy."

Narrator: An elite group of special forces

are hand-picked from across the world

to take the terrorists out.

You do a series of raids that is devastating.

Narrator: They are led by a Maverick general

with radical new methods.

If you hit an organization repeatedly enough,

you could actually cause them to collapse.

Narrator: It's a race against time.

[ Explosion ]

They must stop him before more blood is shed.

Nothing's routine if there is lives at risk.

-- Captions by vitac -- www.Vitac.Com

captions paid for by discovery communications

narrator: Iraq, April 2006.

In the dead of night,

a helicopter lifts off from a desert air base.

Onboard is a group of elite soldiers

from a secretive unit code named task force black.

Zinke: On the way to a mission,

I'm often asked, "were you nervous?"

You don't have time to be nervous

because there's so many things happening.

I mean, everyone is busy.

Narrator: They are bound for a house

in an area known as the triangle of death.

Their mission is to arrest a senior member

of the deadly terror group Al-qaeda in Iraq.

You should always be expecting the worst.

What if we get fired upon?

What if the fast rope is in the wrong spot?

What if we get around

and the helicopter is downed outside the compound?

Narrator: Their targets are ready to resist

with extreme violence.

Urban: Almost as soon as they were through the door...

[ Gunfire ]

...they were hit by a hail of bullets.

The people inside clearly knew somebody was coming.

They were armed, and they were waiting.

Narrator: The team quickly kill the first militant...

[ Indistinct shouting ]

...and move in to clear the rest of the building.

Urban: There were half a dozen assault rifles.

There were dozens of hand grenades.

There were at least two, possibly three

wearing suicide vests.

Narrator: And at the top of the staircase...

[ Shouting indistinctly ]

Narrator: ...One of the suicide bombers steps out of the shadows

and detonates his vest.

[ Explosion ]

By now, the militants are fighting

with everything they have.

Two more appear on the roof

and spray the assault force with bullets.

The soldiers of task force black

are accustomed to this kind of brutal violence.

They face it on a daily basis.

At the end of the day, we're gonna win.

And we'll do whatever it takes to win.

Narrator: Though the special forces don't realize it,

this house holds the key

to finding the most wanted man in the middle east.

One of their captives tonight

will lead them to abu musab Al-zarqawi,

the leader of Al-qaeda in Iraq.

He has murdered thousands of innocent civilians

and spread terror throughout the region.

[ Siren wails ]

His campaign of violence is so effective,

the U.S. has created a black ops task force

with just one mission --

taking Al-zarqawi down.

This was a guy who had murdered thousands of people.

In fact, he murdered many more people

than osama bin laden ever did.

Narrator: To understand how Al-zarqawi rose

to become one of the most feared terrorists on the planet,

we must look to the town of zarqa, Jordan,

500 Miles to the west of Baghdad.

Al-zarqawi was born here in 1966.

Alexander: Al-zarqawi's background is he was a criminal.

He spent time in a Jordanian prison for sexual assault.

He was a drug dealer.

He was a petty criminal in Jordan.

Urban: Accounts differ as to whether he was actually

a sort of hard-boozing villain in his hometown,

but it's certainly true

that he was involved in some forms of crime

and that he probably had some kind of epiphany,

some kind of moment when he realized

that his life was going the wrong way

and that islam was the answer for him.

Narrator: In 1989, Al-zarqawi travels to Afghanistan

to become a freedom fighter against the Soviet occupation.

It is here that he meets his mentor and inspiration,

osama bin laden.

He had come up during the course of the war in Afghanistan.

People understood his importance as an operational leader,

and he was clearly trusted by bin laden

and the Al-qaeda senior leadership.

Narrator: Over the next 15 years,

partly with bin laden's support,

Al-zarqawi grows to become an accomplished terrorist.

By 2003, he is in Iraq,

fighting against the American-led invasion.

The early months of the war

appear to be a swift and stunning victory,

as the old regime melts away.

But Al-zarqawi is waiting in the shadows

to start a new campaign of violence.

Townsend: When he was deployed into Iraq,

we understood, as the American counterterrorism community,

that this was a significant event.

He had that unique combination of skills

that would allow him to be a real force for Al-qaeda

against us inside Iraq.

Narrator: In the months that follow Saddam's overthrow,

chaos envelopes the country.

Al-zarqawi takes full advantage of this,

actively working to stir up hatred

between Iraq's two main religious groups --

the majority shia muslims and the minority sunnis.

He creates a militant group

with the aim of killing as many shias as possible,

thus sparking retaliations

and creating a brutal cycle of violence.

It's called Al-qaeda in Iraq or a.Q.I.

We mistakenly look at these organizations

as terrorist groups.

This is too narrow.

These are revolutionary organizations

that want to spread an idea.

[ Man chanting in native language ]

Urban: The militant islamists were prepared

to do pretty much anything,

and, of course, quite soon they discovered

that bombing things like markets,

queues outside police stations

where the police were recruiting,

all those sort of things,

were actually far easier targets

than American convoys or American bases.

Narrator: Al-zarqawi orchestrates numerous suicide bombings.

A devastating series of attacks in march 2004

kills close to 200 people at shia holy sites.

So, they shifted their targeting

towards the sort of softer targets

that could yield more spectacular results.

And, of course, soon they were killing dozens,

scores, maybe even sometimes over 100 people

in a single complex attack.

Narrator: On may 11, 2004,

Al-zarqawi is linked to a new outrage.

A video of an American hostage appears on a jihadist website.

The American, deliberately dressed

in a Guantanamo bay style orange jumpsuit,

is Nick berg,

a 26-year-old communications engineer from Pennsylvania.

Berg was kidnapped in Iraq a month previously,

and the video shows his unimaginably horrific death.

[ Man speaking native language ]

Urban: The video is one of those

horror-show type of jihadist videos

in which a long knife is used to cut his throat,

and you can even hear the sound of knife on bone,

the screams.

It's a truly horrific video.

But the point is at the beginning of the video,

in the original form it was released,

it says, "abu musab Al-zarqawi slaughters an American."

Narrator: The CIA determines that Al-zarqawi himself

is the hooded man wielding the knife.

[ Man shouting in native language ]

The guy was so brutal, so tough,

it's sort of like a mafia family operating in New York City.

If you kill everybody else,

eventually people stand back and say,

"whoa, we got a big guy, a big dog on the corner in town,

and we better be careful."

So, just the brutality and the effectiveness of his efforts

against first the Americans and then the locals,

I think people stood back and said,

"this guy's a blowtorch. We better let him roll."

What the Iraqi sunnis started to believe,

and those people who had joined Al-qaeda,

was that if the Americans can't kill abu musab Al-zarqawi,

can't stop him,

then maybe he was predestined to win the war.

Narrator: Berg's death is a signal to the world

that Al-zarqawi's reign of terror

is escalating out of control.

But secretly, the U.S. is planning a series of black ops

designed to bring him crashing down.

[ Indistinct shouting ]

Narrator: Abu musab Al-zarqawi and his terror group,

Al-qaeda in Iraq, or a.Q.I.,

are waging a devastating campaign of violence

against the U.S.-led coalition.

In Washington, ending Al-zarqawi's reign of terror

has become a top priority for president bush

and his inner circle of advisors.

You come in, and the days where the momentum --

you feel like the momentum hasn't been with you,

you start with -- your thought is really so simple.

It's "let nothing blow up today.

Let me get through today with nothing blowing up."

Mudd: It wasn't that we were losing.

It was just like, when will this end?

And how will it end?

Narrator: Al-zarqawi seems to have the power to strike at will,

and yet somehow, he remains completely hidden.

We really didn't know what he was doing in Iraq,

and we didn't know, like, did he have wives there?

Did he have kids there? Where was he moving?

What was his support network?

Narrator: No one even has a recent photo of Al-zarqawi,

let alone any idea where he is.

He doesn't use a cellphone for fear it will be tracked.

He only meets with a select group of trusted advisors

whose own whereabouts are unknown.

He really was kind of a ghost for a long time.

And you would get bits and pieces here,

but usually by the time you got them, they were outdated.

Narrator: In September 2003, a new general arrives in Iraq.

His name is Stanley mcchrystal.

He has radical new ideas

for hunting down Al-zarqawi and destroying a.Q.I.

General mcchrystal is one of the most dedicated individuals

I've ever met.

He is a driven, driven warrior.

He artfully looked at where he could make the most impact.

Narrator: Mcchrystal is the newly-appointed commander

of the joint special operations command,

or jsoc.

Zinke: Certainly in every conflict, the jsoc has been there.

They were in Grenada.

They were in Panama, Gulf I, Gulf ii, Kosovo.

Pretty much where there's a conflict,

you can depend that jsoc has been there first...

...and they're always the last to leave.

[ Machine-gun fire ]

Narrator: Formed in the late 1980s

to coordinate the work of America's elite troops,

jsoc controls the best of the best

from across the U.S. military.

These are the so-called special mission units --

Navy seal team 6...

Army delta force...

...and the air force 24th special tactics squadron.

Active in every corner of the world,

usually on highly-classified missions,

the men of jsoc are experts in precise targeted strikes

against hard-to-reach enemies.

Urban: It was a very secret organization,

and it was tasked with fighting

the most sensitive types of mission against U.S. enemies,

obviously in the context post 9/11 terrorist enemies,

counterterrorism.

Narrator: At the start of the war,

jsoc's mission had been to find and arrest

the leaders of the old Iraqi regime.

The men famously depicted on the deck of cards

with Saddam Hussein as the ace of spades.

Ladies and gentlemen, we got him.

[ Cheers and applause ]

Narrator: Within a year,

even Saddam himself was in custody.

But this creates a power vacuum,

and Al-zarqawi is ready and waiting

to step into the breech.

In decapitating what some called the baathist

or nationalist leadership,

they probably assisted the growth of Al-qaeda in Iraq,

because by taking away the leadership figures,

the sheiks, the former generals,

the key people, the key baathists,

they left quite a lot of angry young militant sunnis

with nowhere to go.

Narrator: Mcchrystal makes a strategic decision

to abandon the hunt

for ex-members of the old Saddam regime.

Instead, he will focus almost all of his resources

on just one man --

abu musab Al-zarqawi.

Alexander: Our commander gave us a big speech.

The point of the speech was

the only way to win the Iraq war

and to stop the violence between sunni and shia

is to find and kill or capture abu musab Al-zarqawi.

Narrator: To get to know Al-zarqawi himself,

mcchrystal knows he needs to build a complete picture

of his terror network, a.Q.I.

He sets up a large command center

at an old Iraqi air base in the town of belat,

north of Baghdad.

Then he invites all of America's many competing spy agencies

to set up camp there.

From now on, interagency turf wars are banned,

and everything will be shared.

Mudd: When we started working with special forces --

and I remember general mcchrystal,

who's a real hero in this war --

I remember him coming in to CIA headquarters and saying,

you know, "we need some of your people."

And as any bureaucrat will, you sit back there and say,

"all right, is this dog gonna hunt?

What are we trying to do here?"

Narrator: The idea is that every piece of information,

however insignificant,

will be brought here and fed into a massive database.

If mcchrystal and his men

learn everything they can about a.Q.I.,

they may be able to quickly find its weakest points

and strike.

Zinke: Senior leadership understood

that in order to win a counterinsurgency,

you could not win it by being on the defensive.

You had to go on the offensive.

Narrator: A key part of the plan

is to pump each captured militant

for as much intelligence as possible.

[ Camera shutter clicks ]

So mcchrystal sets up a special detention facility

right next door to his command center.

Alexander: The interrogation unit

essentially composed of where we kept the prisoners

and also our interrogation rooms

and then our analysis room and our desk,

which we called the gator pit.

Part of our facility was, you know,

an old Saddam era aircraft hangar,

and then the rest of it was just kind of like

makeshift-built additions to a warehouse, essentially.

Narrator: Using his huge store of the most up-to-date intelligence,

mcchrystal unleashes the most dangerous weapon

in jsoc's arsenal --

the special mission units of elite frontline soldiers.

These men will also now work in an entirely new way.

Historically,

they ran only one or two major operations per year.

Now they will conduct multiple raids on a daily basis.

I can remember visiting Iraq and watching them.

They didn't go out once on a night.

They went out multiple times.

Oftentimes the intelligence operators

would go with the special forces.

Alexander: It all starts by piling in the back of a stryker vehicle

and sitting in a very cramped space

that's very hot and very dark.

And then you're going through the streets, you know,

and there's all types of hazards --

roadside bombs and snipers,

and by the time you get to the target,

you're usually already like drenched in sweat

and your adrenaline's going.

Zinke: You're fired up. You have your game face on.

You need to be intense,

because intensity and momentum are critical,

you know, as far as winning the day.

Nervous?

Not really nervous.

Alexander: You're jumping out of the vehicle.

You're running down the street.

[ Gunshot ]

When it gets really exciting

is when you have more than one house.

Oftentimes, these terrorists, they would run out of one house,

jump a wall, and into another house.

Then you'd have to raid a second house.

And then sometimes it would end up with a third or fourth house.

[ Gunshot ]

Don't move!

Narrator: The critical factor is speed.

Every time a militant is captured,

the members of a.Q.I. Around him will try to cover their tracks

by reorganizing the entire network.

You had information that would perish.

It was time-sensitive.

That sometimes needed to be run down to the ground,

and maybe that would be the only chance

of preventing a catastrophe

or an act that would kill a U.S. soldier of our ally.

Narrator: It's a cat-and-mouse game.

The terrorists constantly change their routines,

abandon safe houses,

and recruit new men to replace those that have been lost.

But if mcchrystal's people can work faster than their enemy,

they will destroy a.Q.I. Before it can regenerate.

Mudd: You take tactical information,

things like the stuff you get off a captured cellphone

or a captured hard drive.

You take detainee operation --

what detainees are saying about the network they just came from.

And you put them in a big hopper

and say, our software, our analysis, our people

have to be good enough

so they can put together a picture

of what that network looks like.

And not only put that picture together,

do it well enough

so that an operator can conduct a raid within 24 hours.

You're doing it for years on end

with people from every agency in town.

Incredible.

In a way, the most important idea

that general mcchrystal and jsoc brought to this whole thing

was that if you hit an organization fast enough,

accurately enough, and repeatedly enough,

you could actually cause them to collapse.

Narrator: Jsoc soon develops into a well-oiled machine.

Every night, four black ops task forces spread out through Iraq,

performing up to a dozen raids at one time.

Go!

Go, go, go!

Each group is assigned to take down targets

in a different part of U.S.-occupied territory.

To the north is task force red,

formed from the army's 75th rangers brigade.

To the west, task force blue, made up of U.S. Navy seals.

The center of Iraq

will be the responsibility of task force green,

staffed by the U.S. army's most elite unit,

delta force.

These soldiers are joined by a team of elite troops

from britain's special air service,

the s.A.S.,

operating under the code name task force black.

[ Explosion ]

The s.A.S. Are the pioneers in the art of black ops,

such as this daring hostage rescue from the iranian embassy

in the heart of London in 1980.

[ Explosion ]

In particular,

they are masters of surveillance and intelligence gathering.

There was undoubtedly a feeling

among many of the American intelligence operators

that they s.A.S. And the other British special forces

had skills that were quite unusual

and quite different

to the type of skills that delta force or the seals had.

They drove around in Baghdad taxis.

They disguised themselves.

And the American intelligence people

saw some of this during the early years in Baghdad,

and they liked it.

Narrator: Mcchrystal and his team

work through their targets night after night.

The supply lines of foreign fighters are intercepted.

Bomb makers are taken out of action.

Mountains of intelligence are captured and analyzed.

Townsend: They would do a raid.

They would get what's called pocket litter or hard drives --

you know, pieces of paper out of people's pockets.

They'd come back,

they'd bring it to analysts back on the base from the CIA

who would go through that information.

That would lead to another targeting package,

and the special forces would go out again.

That sort of continuous feed, continuous loop

is what made them incredibly effective.

Narrator: Despite two years of taking Al-zarqawi's network apart,

the ultimate objective, the man himself,

still eludes them.

But the task force is about to find a crucial breakthrough --

one that could finally stop Al-zarqawi for good.

Narrator: Strike teams from jsoc,

the U.S. joint special operations command,

are staging multiple raids across Iraq every night.

This secretive organization

joins together elite special forces

from across the U.S. military and its allies.

They are under the command of a single leader,

general Stanley mcchrystal.

By the start of 2006,

their system of rapid-fire raids

and sophisticated intelligence gathering

is beginning to rip apart the terror network known as a.Q.I.

They are also getting ever closer to its feared leader,

abu musab Al-zarqawi.

I'm gonna target each discrete, tiny, little element,

and if I can begin to pull little elements away,

suddenly the whole thing falls of its own weight.

Narrator: But whenever they get close to Al-zarqawi,

he seems once again to slip through their grasp.

Yet he still retains the ability

to perpetrate devastating attacks,

especially against so-called soft targets

like shia mosques,

killing hundreds at once.

[ Man speaking native language ]

In April, Al-zarqawi releases a video

which for the first time in years shows his face.

[ Speaking native language ]

Townsend: The fact that he was

a charismatic military and tactical leader

lead to this larger-than-life sort of myth about him.

I think it fed his ego, as well.

He kind of began believing his own press, if you will.

Alexander: You had little kids in the street, you know,

pretending to be abu Al-zarqawi

because he was essentially invincible.

Narrator: The video urges Al-zarqawi supporters

to show no mercy against their so-called enemies --

Iraq shia Muslim community and the U.S. forces.

Just as that video hits the air waves,

one element of the jsoc task force

is preparing the latest in their long series of nightly raids.

It's a team from the British s.A.S.

Operating under the code name task force black.

They are now concentrating on an area

to the South of the capital,

a militant heartland

that soldiers call the triangle of death.

Urban: The British special operations task force

conducted a series of operations in the triangle of death

in early 2006.

And they planned an operation in April 2006

which they called larchwood 4.

Narrator: Operation larchwood 4 is a dangerous and daring raid

to arrest a mid-ranking Al-zarqawi henchman,

code named abu haider.

Mcchrystal's intelligence machine has pinpointed him

to a safe house in the town of yusufiyah.

Alexander: We put surveillance on that safe house,

and we watched it continuously for I think almost a month.

And then one day, you know,

we see this meeting happening there.

These cars converge.

And so we quickly sent a raid team to go out

and capture the members in that safe house.

Narrator: The team know that houses like this

are often well defended with heavily armed men,

some wearing suicide vests.

But the house could also contain a number of innocent civilians.

Zinke: If they're a threat, then you engage.

If they're not a threat, then you don't.

You have to be able to make that decision in a snap.

That's what special operations trains for.

That's what they're really, really good at.

Narrator: Just after 2:00 A.M.,

task force black sets off in their helicopters

for the target house.

Following them is a support group

from the British parachute regiment, the paras.

They will form a cordon around the house

to prevent reinforcements arriving

and arrest so-called squirters,

targets trying to make a run for it.

A short flight of just 20 minutes

puts them within range of the house.

Urban: The s.A.S. Men realized

it was not going to be a typical sort of mission.

They thought they could hear sounds inside the building.

They approached very gingerly,

and to their surprise and satisfaction,

found that there was a door just wide open.

Almost as soon as they were through the door...

[ Gunfire ]

...they were hit by a hail of bullets.

These people were heavily armed,

and they were prepared to fight to the death

in order to prevent the s.A.S. From getting in

and taking their man.

[ Indistinct shouting ]

Narrator: The team quickly withdraws to a safe distance.

They must decide whether or not to resume their attack.

Urban: Some of these incidents

where heavy resistance was encountered,

they simply pulled back

and dropped a bomb on the building

and killed everybody inside.

For many different reasons,

the s.A.S. Commander on the ground decided not to do that.

They wanted this person alive for intelligence purposes.

They felt it was worth trying to fight their way in,

and that's what they did.

[ Machine-gun fire ]

Zinke: When you raid compounds,

the objective is to keep the opposition on the run,

keep him on the defensive.

Narrator: The team encountered their worst nightmare --

a suicide bomber.

[ Indistinct shouting ]

Urban: As one of the s.A.S. Men went up the stairs,

he detonated.

[ Explosion ]

The s.A.S. Man was blown down the stairs.

Fortunately for him, he wasn't seriously wounded.

He had cuts and bruises.

But, of course, the suicide bomber had blown himself up.

Narrator: Meanwhile, outside the house,

more militants join the fight.

They rain fire down on the special forces.

Urban: Another man wearing a suicide vest, a squirter,

fled out the back of the building

and hid under a car.

Narrator: The outer cordon of paratroopers enters the fight.

Taking out the two militants firing from the roof,

they turn their attention to the suicide bomber

hiding under the car,

shooting him dead before he can detonate his vest.

Urban: So, at the end of a sort of terrifying 20 minutes,

there were a whole lot of dead people.

Inside the house,

we captured five senior-ranking members of Al-qaeda.

Narrator: The operation is considered

another good day at the office for task force black.

The main target of the raid, abu haider, is in custody,

along with four other detainees.

In addition,

a treasure trove of intelligence is recovered from the house.

Urban: They sweep everything up they think might be of relevance --

mobile phones...

...computers...

...everything else -- and they take it away.

As a result of larchwood 4

and subsequent operations that it generated,

a huge amount of actionable intelligence

came into jsoc's hands.

Narrator: When a jsoc analyst starts to probe

one of the captured computers,

he discovers something extraordinary --

raw footage of Al-zarqawi himself

from his recent propaganda video.

Urban: Through traces of DNA that were found on it

when it was sent back to the U.S. for analysis,

they would conclude it was his laptop.

Narrator: The analysts realize

that Al-zarqawi must have left the house

just hours before the s.A.S. Arrived.

Alexander: We actually started to get excited that we were close,

because zarqawi was in that house

the day before we raided it.

And that's when we finally had the confidence

to think that we were hot on his trail.

Narrator: They had narrowly missed their target,

but the net is closing in fast.

Narrator: By the spring of 2006,

the hunt for abu musab Al-zarqawi,

the leader of Al-qaeda in Iraq,

has reached a turning point.

An elite assault team

from the joint special operations command, jsoc,

has secured a major breakthrough

following a daring raid on a terrorist safe house.

[ Gunfire ]

The momentum had shifted.

The raids of his network

were getting faster and closer to him,

and so you had the sense "we're gonna get there."

Narrator: As well as capturing several senior members

of Al-qaeda in the raid,

jsoc soldiers discover a video of enemy number one --

Al-zarqawi.

Hoping to tarnish Al-zarqawi's fearsome reputation,

the coalition releases the full, unedited video to the media.

It contains the familiar footage

of the terrorist leader parading through the desert,

confidently firing a machine gun.

But it also shows another side to Al-zarqawi --

a slightly overweight, unimpressive figure of a man.

Man: Here's zarqawi, the ultimate warrior,

trying to shoot his machine gun.

It's supposed to be automatic fire.

He's shooting single shots.

No sooner does he figure out

how to switch his weapon to fully automatic

when it jams,

and the self-styled holy warrior can't get it going again.

[ Gun clicking ]

He looks down, can't figure it out.

Calls his friend to unblock the stoppage

and get the weapon firing again.

[ Gunfire ]

He also appears to be going into battle

wearing a nice pair of white sneakers --

hardly the image of a man

threatening the might of America.

It makes you wonder.

Narrator: Meanwhile, deep inside jsoc's secret detention center,

the task forces interrogators get to work on their captives.

Alexander: The men that we brought in we called the group of five,

and we knew that they were five important members of Al-qaeda,

but we didn't know what their roles were.

And they had this very unbelievable story

that they were there to attend a wedding,

even though there was no bride or groom

and there were suicide bombers in the house.

And little by little,

we would get information from one of them,

and then we would take that

and turn around and use it against the other four.

Narrator: One member of the group,

the senior a.Q.I. Operative known as abu haider,

refuses to say anything.

He was interrogated for about 20 days,

and during that time, he just maintained this story

that he was just there to videotape a wedding,

even though it was completely unbelievable.

Narrator: For weeks, rotating teams of interrogators

try psychological pressure, pleas for cooperation,

subtle threats, and subtle promises.

Eventually, they decide he will not talk

and arrange to have him sent to Iraq's main detention facility,

abu ghraib prison.

Alexander: I decided that I would go and interrogate him

one last time before he left.

And I didn't really have permission to do that,

but I felt that he could provide very important information

towards finding zarqawi.

And that conversation started with nothing about Al-qaeda,

nothing about terrorism.

It just started with a friendly conversation

about who he was, what was his life story,

how did he come to be sitting in a chair opposite me,

and getting to know each other.

Narrator: Over the course of five and a half hours,

Matthew Alexander discovers

abu haider has a fatal weakness --

his arrogance.

He believes he has beaten the mighty American machine

and should be recognized for it.

Alexander obliges him.

Alexander: I would constantly stroke his ego,

constantly make him believe in this fallacy in his head

that he was a very important man,

that he could affect the future of Iraq.

And then in the last 15 minutes,

what I did was essentially offer him a deal.

I offered him the chance to work with us instead of Al-qaeda

in a secret program that didn't exist

in which he could be a person

who could influence the future of Iraq.

And he decided to work with me.

Narrator: During the next few weeks,

Alexander visits abu haider in his cell at night

and coaxes more and more information out of him

about Al-zarqawi's whereabouts,

all on the pretext of proving his worth

for the nonexistent secret program.

I said, "you're so close to getting in this program.

All we need is that one last piece of information

that'll convince my bosses."

And he said

every month zarqawi would meet with his spiritual advisor,

who was our detainee's best friend.

Narrator: It's the piece of intelligence

that everyone has been waiting for.

For years, Al-zarqawi has been a ghost striking with impunity.

Now at last,

jsoc has what it needs to find him and take him out.

The intelligence and military effort

that had been put together

was beginning to close the noose around his neck.

We knew that zarqawi had a spiritual advisor.

We knew that he was going to visit him.

It was just a matter of being patient.

Narrator: Using this information,

jsoc quickly traces the spiritual advisor

and begins following him day and night.

Using high-tech systems like predator drones

as well as old-fashioned undercover operatives,

they create what mcchrystal calls the unblinking eye.

Their target is never out of sight.

Abu haider tells Alexander that if they want to find Al-zarqawi,

they need to look for one particular sign.

We would know when he was gonna meet with zarqawi

because he would change cars from a white car to a blue car.

And whenever he got in this blue car,

that meant he was going to meet zarqawi.

Urban: Once again, it was a joint U.S.-u.K. Surveillance

on a building in Baghdad.

Lo and behold, they realize by following his movements

that every few days, this man got into his car.

They used predator and other methods

to follow his car as it went up the road

to this place in the palm groves near tecrete,

where, indeed, abu musab Al-zarqawi himself

was hiding.

Narrator: By now, pictures from the drone

are being fed live to jsoc's command center.

Everyone, including general mcchrystal himself,

is watching in silence

as Al-zarqawi's spiritual advisor gets out of his car.

Then abu musab Al-zarqawi himself appears.

Once the blue car arrived at the house,

helicopters took off immediately

to go to that house and capture zarqawi.

And it was about 20 minutes away.

Narrator: A discussion is held in the command center.

Is it really worth trying to capture Al-zarqawi alive

in broad daylight?

Or is it better to wait until nightfall

and take him when he's asleep?

If they strike now,

they risk a heavy firefight and numerous casualties.

Worse, Al-zarqawi is a master of the last-minute escape.

If they wait, he could easily slip through the net again.

This could be their one and only chance to finish the job.

And there was a period of time in which we were just waiting.

I was watching it live on the video.

And we were just waiting.

Narrator: Mcchrystal believes there's no time to lose.

He can't even wait 20 minutes

for the assault force to arrive by helicopter.

He opts for another plan

designed to take Al-zarqawi completely by surprise.

Narrator: After years of hunting,

America's most elite combat unit,

the joint special operations command, jsoc,

has located one of the world's most wanted terrorists --

abu musab Al-zarqawi, the leader of Al-qaeda in Iraq.

Fearing he might escape,

jsoc's commander, general Stanley mcchrystal,

decides that he can leave nothing to chance.

He calls up two f-16 fighters patrolling nearby.

We were expecting to watch the helicopters land and the raid,

which we typically would watch.

And instead, after about maybe a five-minute wait...

...the house just exploded.

Urban: They knew he was in the building.

And they made the decision

without losing any time to prosecute the target.

They didn't even feel there was time

to get one of their special ops task forces in the air

to go and raid the building.

They simply decided to hit it with bombs from an f-16,

which is what they did.

[ Applause ]

Narrator: Just minutes after the bombing,

special forces arrive at the house.

Incredibly, they find Al-zarqawi still alive in the wreckage.

A soldier grabbed him, and then zarqawi died.

And it was sort of a sweet justice if you will

that zarqawi's last image was a U.S. soldier grabbing him.

Narrator: The day following the raid,

the U.S. announces to the world

that they have their man at last.

Good morning.

Now zarqawi has met his end,

and this violent man will never murder again.

Narrator: Pictures are released of his dead body

as grim confirmation.

Zarqawi could be responsible for upwards of almost 100,000 deaths

by starting the civil war in Iraq.

And so, I don't think the world's gonna miss him.

Narrator: It's a devastating blow to Al-qaeda in Iraq.

The man who was thought to be invincible is dead.

But the work is not over.

With the intelligence that was collected

from the smoldering remains of Al-zarqawi's compound,

another series of raids is launched...

And a.Q.I. Starts to fall like a house of cards.

Townsend: There was, you know,

a good deal of chaos inside the organization,

and what you do is, you know, when you're targeting zarqawi,

you're also collecting intelligence on the network.

And so what that allows you to do is the minute he's dead,

they're far more vulnerable, the people around him,

than they realize.

And so, you do a series of raids that is devastating.

And they never really came back from his death.

Narrator: Today, the joint special operations command

is the group of special forces operators

that is tasked with planning and executing

dangerous and secretive missions for the United States.

The black ops it conducts

have continued to strike at the heart of Al-qaeda

and other terror groups around the world.

In 2011,

it was jsoc that planned and executed the mission

to take down the world's most wanted man --

osama bin laden.

You have to win,

and at the end of the day when the heat is on,

you're gonna do whatever it takes to win.