[alanamosteller]

22:11 GMT, 16 June 2012 | The Daily Mail

They killed with apparent impunity, effortlessly dodging capture by the world’s deadliest special forces.
Nothing, it seemed, could stop Al Qaeda’s two top Iraqi terrorists as they orchestrated a campaign of
high-profile kidnappings, car bombings and executions in Baghdad and beyond.

At the height of their reign, one of them, Maher Ahmed Mahmoud az-Zubeidi, better known by his alias
Abu Rami, was believed to have been responsible for the murders of 200 people each month.



Yet perhaps even more ferocious was his charismatic co-leader, Abu Uthman, whose exploits in two
battles in Fallujah earned him the nickname Abu Nimr – The Tiger. The American military bestowed on him
a more prosaic title: Number One HVI (high-value individual).

Uthman was linked to the murder of British aid worker Margaret Hassan and the kidnapping of British
peace activist Norman Kember and – like Rami – had the blood of hundreds of soldiers and civilians on his hands.

But by mid-2008, despite years of trying, US special forces were still no nearer tracing either of the men who,
helped by a vast network of supporters, rarely slept in the same beds for longer than a few weeks.

The Russians were also searching. Rami was blamed for the beheading of four embassy workers abducted
from a diplomatic car in Baghdad and Vladimir Putin put a £7 million price on his head and a team of assassins
on his tail.



The missions took place during the SAS ‘D’ squadron’s six-month tour of Baghdad in the second half of 2008, a
time when car bombers were wreaking carnage in the capital.

Documents seen by this newspaper – accounts of the tour by the regiment’s senior officers – suggest the SAS
was helped by a controversial set of ‘legal freedoms’ permitting the detainment of any individual, even without
evidence to justify their captivity.

The powers mentioned in the documents include ‘security detention without criminal evidence, continued detention
without sufficient criminal case, transfer to judicial system without sufficient criminal case’.

Crucially, the freedoms helped provide much of the human intelligence needed to thwart the enemy.



To succeed where others failed, An SAS operative went undercover, joining a group of Iraqi
counter-terrorist personnel called Apostles and setting up a car dealership in an open-air market in the
Rusafa district of Baghdad.

Scrupulous cross-referencing of phone, residential and criminal records paid off when it was discovered
that a brother of Abu Rami was serving a prison sentence at Camp Bucca – a US detention facility at
Umm Qasr on Iraq’s coast.

When his mother arrived for a visit, they confiscated her phone – a standard procedure for visitors – and
while she was speaking to her son stripped every detail from the SIM card and placed a tiny geo-locating
device in the handset.

Rami’s mother returned to Baghdad and was tracked to a house in a northern neighbourhood. In late September
2008, it struck the SAS that as a practising Muslim, Rami would be obliged to see his family during the festival
of Eid, which fell on October 1 and 2. The SAS setup a smart, subtle and meticulously planned ambush, using hi-tech
ingenuity at the mother's residence.

When a young informer confirmed Abu Rami was inside, and was armed, the SAS troopers took lethal action.

A ground assault team charged through the front and back doors. Abu Rami, the most wanted active terrorist in the
world, the Al Qaeda leader who had foiled the Americans and the Russians, was gunned down by the SAS during the
house clearance.



The capture of Abu Uthman – also known as Salim Abdallah Ashur al-Shujayri – had taken place three months
earlier. Leads generated in part by the new legal freedoms led to many of Uthman’s ‘bed-downs’ in the city’s northern
neighbourhoods being identified.

Analysts compared the accounts of interrogations of various Uthman associates and identified one of the terrorist’s
closest henchmen. Working on this information, an assault force from D Squadron, stormed a house in Rusafa on
August 10, 2008 and questioned its male occupants.

A man agreed to lead SAS team to the home of Yassin, another close associate of Uthman. Yassin and his parents
were gagged and bound.

The following morning, a mobile phone call for Yassin was received, the caller was Falah – understood by SAS to be
Abu Uthman’s gatekeeper – who told Yassin: ‘Come to a meeting at the mosque, you should be here already, hurry up.’

As the sun rose over the River Tigris, SAS team bundled their hostages into a minivan and set off across Baghdad to
the mosque.

On the way, they radioed the SAS Operations Centre to request air support – a US F-16 jet to provide covering fire
should an ambush ensue, and a UK Puma helicopter from the RAF’s Special Forces flight, for casualty evacuation.

They also provided the cell phone details for Falah so he could be tracked. An SAS ground assault force was also
mobilised.

As the mini-van approached the mosque, the SAS team leader tightened his grip on a Demarco rifle and peered
through the minivan’s dusty windscreen. Then to his disbelief, he saw Uthman walking behind the mosque towards
the mini-van.

Seizing the moment, the team leader scrambled on hands and knees, pulled open the minivan’s back doors and
pounded on the surprised Al Qaeda man before taking him into custody.

The SAS had snared The Tiger.