The Secret Spies Keeping Baghdad Safe
For many of the years Margaret Coker reported from Baghdad, the city was, as she remembers it in The Spymaster of Baghdad, a “kaleidoscope of horror.” Years of sectarian fighting and terrorist bombs had burned violence into the city, feeding morgues with unclaimed bodies and colonizing almost every aspect of everyday life. But when she returned in 2017 as a bureau chief for the New York Times, Coker saw a living city: New cafés opening every week, families strolling in parks, kids playing in repaired playgrounds, nightclubs bumping at night. Baghdad was even safer than it had been before the US invasion in 2003. Coker asked numerous officials, US and Iraqi, how this happened, who’d led the change. No one could give her a satisfying explanation.
No one except Abu Ali al-Basri, the eponymous spymaster. Al-Basri heads al-Suquor (“The Falcons”), a little-known espionage unit that Coker calls “one of the US military’s closest counterterrorism allies in the Middle East.” Even as an active offensive continued in northern Iraq, the Falcons infiltrated the Islamic State and, with intelligence from within the Caliphate, shielded the Iraqi capital from one potential massacre after the other. Within one sixteen-month period, Al-Basri and his team of spies foiled thirty suicide bomb attacks and eighteen terror attacks targeted at Baghdad.
also traces the story of two brothers, Harith and Munaf al-Sudani, whom al-Basri personally recruited from an eastern Baghdadi
