http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6885867/site/newsweek/~snip~
He wasn't supposed to live, and the way he tells the story today, this "suicide bomber" wasn't quite ready to die. Twenty-one-year-old Ahmed Abdullah al-Shayea had come to Iraq from Saudi Arabia to join the infamous terrorist known as Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi in a holy war against the American infidels. On Christmas morning, 2004, he got his first assignment, to park a tanker truck full of explosives near the high walls around the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad. He didn't know that four fellow terrorists in a Jeep Cherokee following a safe distance behind held the remote-control trigger. When they pushed it, an explosion thundered across the city, killing 10 Iraqi policemen. But al-Shayea, unlike scores of other bombers who've been vaporized beyond recognition, was blown through the windshield and, against all odds, survived.
Taken to a hospital with third-degree burns over 70 percent of his body, al-Shayea was thought to be just another bystander wounded in the blast. But when police got a tip the second week in January that men were willing to offer money to get him out, or kill him, the cops got interested. If terrorists wanted him, so did they. "Our intelligence agents kidnapped him from the hospital," says Brig. Gen. Hussein Ali Kamal, deputy minister of the Interior for intelligence affairs. Speaking to NEWSWEEK at his heavily guarded headquarters in Baghdad last week, Kamal described the scene. Al-Shayea was brought into the office swathed in bandages and propped up on a makeshift seat without a back. A pillow was put on his lap to ease the pain of his burned arms. Then the interrogators began their questioning, threatening to hand al-Shayea to the Americans, and at one point putting him on the phone with his father in Saudi Arabia. "You see those drops," Kamal said, pointing out several stains on the carpeted floor. "This is the suicide bomber's blood. We interrogated him right here."
A video obtained by NEWSWEEK shows some of al-Shayea's half-whispered testimony, prompted by the commanding voice of an interrogator. He seems terrified, confused. Yet according to Kamal, the information he supplied offered startling insights into the relentless insurgency that has grown dramatically since U.S. troops toppled the statue of dictator Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003. Al-Shayea claimed the Iraqi police even had Zarqawi himself under arrest in Fallujah last October, but despite a $25 million reward—and perhaps not knowing whom they had—they let go the most ruthless and notorious killer in Iraq. (According to the deputy minister, security officials who have checked the circumstances now believe that may well be true.)
General Kamal says information supplied by al-Shayea helped Coalition forces round up several of Zarqawi's key lieutenants within a matter of days. Among them is Abu Umar al-Kurdi, real name Sami Muhammad Saeed al-Jafi, a terrorist demolition man who confessed to 32 car bombings over the last two years. Even if Zarqawi continues to elude capture, nailing al-Kurdi was a critical score. It might—just might—eventually help change the course of this war that has seemed to defy political or military solutions, despite last weekend's elections, and despite an enormous toll in blood that included the loss just last week of 31 Americans in a nighttime helicopter crash.
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