The last armed man stood little chance. Owens fired a round through his leg and cut him down. Struggling on the ground, he dropped the weapon. The engagement was officially over.
When rounds began to hit the arms dealers, the Friday market crowd dispersed in a circular pattern, exposing a vacant area like a crop circle. Closer to the building, a crowd began to gather and peer up at the windows from which the snipers fired. Sergeant Jesse Sample and Specialist Danny Harris tossed a red smoke grenade down at the crowd. Though quite harmless, it had the desired effect of spooking the innocent to move out of the way.
The quick-thinking Owens then rushed to the site with his men. He wanted to secure the area before the crowd stole the weapons and components. He and the snipers “circled the wagons” until Chris Morris’ scouts and the battalion QRF arrived.
A sea of confusion raged among the locals. A bystander had already stolen one of the AK-47s but everything else was still in place when the snipers and scouts arrived. Soon soldiers from A Company cordoned the market and we secured the scene. The two wounded were transported to the Tikrit Hospital. Iraqi police appeared to assist in crowd control and body recovery.
The press arrived, wanting a full account of the ambush once things had settled. Most could clearly see what had happened, but Theola Labbé from the Washington Post was puzzled by our actions.
“Did you give them any warning?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.” I replied.
“Your men just opened fire?” she continued.
“Yes, ma’am,” I explained. “We will not allow people to carry weapons in the city. We had received complaints about these arms dealers from the people and the governor. When someone takes up a weapon openly in public, he is considered a combatant at that point.”
“Do you think that is fair?” she pried, incredulously.
“Why don’t you ask my soldiers who have been wounded by roadside bombs, hit by landmines, or ambushed by RPGs?” I countered. “No such warnings were afforded my men. We are clearly within the laws of land warfare.”
While a bit annoyed by her stance, I was happy for the chance to answer those kinds of questions. We didn’t get that opportunity from everyone, though. Not waiting for the details, the French AFP media went to the hospital where they found two Iraqi boys from a village about 30 kilometers across the river who had been injured by an unexploded shell of some kind in an unrelated incident. Assuming the boys were somehow connected to our actions against the enemy, they flashed pictures around the world stating Americans had wounded the boys by gunning them down and throwing grenades at the market. I was furious. Our soldiers had incredible discipline and were doing the tough work of separating insurgents from the innocent population. They clearly knew the difference between schoolboys and armed insurgents.
Fortunately, the rest of the media reported it accurately. Our actions sent shock waves through the town and effectively curtailed illegal arms trade in the city. The Governor thanked us, as did the mayor. General Mezher, the Salah ad Din police chief, informed us that the two men we killed from the red car were known thugs who smuggled weapons from a major military complex on the outskirts of Baghdad. They would show samples, fill orders, and arrange deliveries. He was very happy to see them removed. It was certain we would see no more weapons traded openly in Tikrit.
5. TARGETS
RAIDS AND ROCKET GRENADES
Unable to take us on directly, the enemy began to focus more on explosive apparatuses in his attempt to strike at us. Each week we discovered some of these devices before they could be used and foiled some new attempt before it struck. I could feel the prayers of many back home making that possible.
Still, all it would take was one incident to give the appearance of enemy vitality to people not directly involved with our operations. West of Tikrit, an unfortunate soldier driving a truck lost his leg when he and a fellow soldier supporting Mark Huron’s 299th Engineer Battalion ran over an anti-tank mine positioned along the edge of a road. To the south of us, one of Dom Pompelia’s 4-42nd artillerymen lost his life in a similar episode.
We worked feverishly to counter such activity, operating on the premise that the best way to prevent an exploding bomb was to kill the guy trying to plant it. Short of that, we looked for anything unusual and took immediate action against it. Our snipers and combat patrols continued to shoot at suspected devices while locals helped intercept several others. We remained vigilant because it was in our best interest to do so. The enemy was beginning to use more indirect means to hit us, having mostly failed with direct contact. Obstinately, he did not entirely abandon his direct attacks.
Brad Boyd’s men scrapped with an insurgent cell south of the Birthday Palace on August 11 when insurgents ambushed his patrol with three RPGs. The assailants fled in one white and one black Mercedes when Brad deployed his men and began to engage them. Saddam’s loyalists were not going to surrender until we had either killed more of them or forced them into submission.
On August 12, we successfully raided three more objectives in large block sections of Saddam’s birth village, Auja. I reinforced Mark Stouffer’s A Company with First Lieutenant Jason Lojka’s platoon from C Company. Scouts and my command elements worked with Jack’s SOF team. We combined both family network targets with mid-level targets for a giant surprise daylight raid. It paid some key dividends. Two former Republican Guard officers were captured: General Kareem Jasim Nafous al-Majid, a “Five Family” network man who had been a division commander, and the other, a corps-level chief of staff. They were both on several wanted lists. The third objective netted a leader and payment officer of the Fedayeen militia. Also among the detainees was Nafit Ali Hussein al-Heremos, another “Five Family” network man. It was a very good day.
By August 13, we had seen small enemy attempts to harass or strike back at us. On a secondary market street, Captain Boyd’s convoy once again narrowly escaped harm as assailants rolled a volley of RPGs down the street like a game of ten pins. The enemy attackers had fired from several hundred meters away in the middle of a street and then fled. The rockets whooshed, skipped, and scraped along the pavement but did not explode. One rocket was discovered with the safety pin still in the nose—rocket grenades are far more effective with the pin removed. There were no complaints from us.
Our actions continued to gain momentum. By mid-month, two men wanted by our forces turned themselves in. One of them worked for Saddam’s wife. On the same day, we received weapons from helpful Tikriti merchants with keen eyes. That evening, Jack’s SOF men, with support from our scouts, netted another “Five Family” network man named Rashid Abdullah al-Heremos. We were penetrating the inner circle of Saddam’s bodyguard network.
Even so, the young and the stupid continued to step forward as this network attempted to recruit for the insurgency. In a suburb to our south, attackers launched a volley of RPGs at A Company soldiers in yet another classic “miss and run” attack. Our “Gators” responded so quickly that the enemy was forced to flee for his life and abandoned his rocket launchers in the street. The attackers blended into the local population before they could be apprehended. Hence, we continued to work with the locals and the sheiks and planned more raids.
Planning raids against the Saddam network, continuing street battles to subdue the city, and working on local governance and Iraqi security to fill the gap characterized our operations at this point. We continued to work with the Governor and invested a great deal of time establishing a municipal government in the city that had never existed before. Much effort was also invested in dialogue with the major tribal sheiks.
One benefit of that dialogue was the recruitment of reliable Iraqi men to train for the militia. Tapping into some previous experience I had forming executable plans for the Afghan National Army, we launched a modest training program that began to produce small but good-quality elements to assist the local government and the American forces. In Afghanistan, there was a concern about “vetting” sold
iers to ensure that we did not hire Taliban or al-Qaeda. We asked each of Afghanistan’s thirty-two provincial chiefs to provide us with their own recruits. If they sent troublemakers, we could turn back to the provincial chief and play to his honor.
Our situation in Tikrit was on a much smaller scale, but I would introduce the same concept. Although there were plans to establish a national army, we would create local platoon-sized troops ultimately able to evolve into functional battalions under Iraqi command. Leaders in Baghdad called these “Civil Defense” troops to distinguish them from the new army troops being formed. Their deployment would be local. Although there was some discussion that they might be absorbed into the new Iraqi army in the future, the immediate plan was to train local levies for hometown security. Recruitment would be tricky because of widespread anti-American sentiment in Tikrit and latent support for Saddam.
I had been meeting for weeks with the tribal leadership in the area. Tikrit was far more tribal than other cities because it was nearly all Sunni, and though renowned throughout Iraq, was a small city given its wide range of influence. I recognized the need to engage tribal leadership in the process, but finding the “real” sheiks of major tribes would take some effort. I had an idea in mind.
I announced the plan to form a “Tribal Council of Sheiks” and used Governor Hussein’s assistance to broadcast the message. At the first meeting, I intentionally orchestrated a twenty-minute delay on a hunch about Arab culture. Watching the small auditorium fill with men in their robed finery soon confirmed the hunch. The men sat wherever they wished but seemed to sit in a pecking order. Some, who initially imagined themselves to be more important, would rise and surrender their seat at the entry of another whom they felt was more important. By the end of the twenty minutes, the front row appeared to be filled with the key players.
I presented some basic information about progress and the desire to create dialogue. I thanked everyone for coming but asked those on the front row to remain for additional information. These were the men I needed and now had a chance to identify. At the follow-up meeting, I recorded their names and tribes and expressed the desire to meet with them regularly. Thus was born the Tribal Council of Sheiks. It would serve us well.
The council paid benefits in recruits for the new Iraqi troops we wished to train. I told the sheiks that we could offer their best men good jobs as local security troops for $110 a month (about $10 above the average monthly wage at that time). This piqued their interest. Appealing to their status and power, I explained to the tribal leaders the impossibility of recruiting soldiers without their help because only they could identify their best men.
To make it fair, I asked them to sort out among themselves the number of recruits each tribe should provide according to their own populations. I did not wish to involve myself in that process as they could execute it more fairly. I firmly stipulated that I would not accept a single recruit without a signed letter of endorsement from their tribal sheik—not local but tribal sheik. No paper, no head sheik signature, no recruitment. No exceptions.
The idea appealed to their sense of power and influence and created quite a murmur among them. While removing us from accusations of favoritism, it secured the recruits to us as they did not have to be so much loyal to us as to their own tribe. Further, it bonded the tribes in our area to one another, as they joined together on task for the new Iraq.
Soon, we had far more “vetted” recruits than openings for them. I promised that the loyal men would be placed on the recruiting roster for the next training class. The quality of men we received was generally very good. Only once did we have a soldier disappear for an extended period. I took his name to his sheik, and soon the man reappeared. He was barely able to walk and somewhat bruised, but we never had another problem with him again.
Through the exceptional work of First Lieutenant Jason Deel and Sergeant Major Cesar Castro, and with the assistance of several former drill sergeants from each of my companies, we moved forward to train Iraqis in martial and civil arts to help stabilize their own town. They were initially called the “Iraqi Civil Defense Corps” (ICDC). Our effort was merely one of many across Iraq, but we were the first to mobilize so quickly and efficiently. In doing so, we gained the attention of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Assistant Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
We trained the recruits on a palace island we occupied in the middle of the Tigris River. The site was ideal for training as it was isolated, heavily vegetated for concealment, and had large, beautiful buildings for training and billeting. We were even able to construct a firing range on the island. Colonel Hickey, impressed with our work, nicknamed it the “James Bond Island.”
To further meld our new Iraqi brothers to our soldiers, we lived and trained with them. We also designed a shoulder patch that incorporated the crest of our regiment and solicited a local vendor to produce them. This was a point of pride for all of us, and it eventually marked our trained recruits. Changes would transpire as the troops became more and more integrated into the new security forces of Iraq, but for our immediate needs, these men served and fought alongside us as auxiliaries of the Regulars. Just four months earlier, we had been fighting each other.
In addition, Tim Morrow continued to sift through some great tips from Iraqi civilians willing to inform us about a cell leader and bomb maker known as Thamer Mahdi Salah Hamoudi. He soon became known as “Thamer the Bomber.” We raided his house on August 17 as a part of a wider operation. Though we missed netting him, we did find plastic explosives, electronic switches and devices, fragmentation pellets, blasting caps, and a few weapons. While raiding this house, alert soldiers outside began to root around the fields across the street and found three grenades and a complete 60mm mortar system with seven rounds of ammunition. All in all it was a very productive week.
The enemy continued to adapt his tactics to counter ours. He attacked bravely but hid immorally among the population and legitimate emergency services, placing civilians in great danger. It was despicable. This strategy violated every law of land warfare.
For example, on the night of August 18 at a temporary checkpoint, our soldiers searched an ambulance transporting an older man home from the hospital. Exploiting these circumstances, some men in a white car placed an explosive on a side street and ignited the fuse. A Company soldiers reacted to the blast west of their location. The ambulance drove north to escape danger. As it did, the white car pulled alongside the Red Crescent vehicle to mask its own movement as the enemy in it sent a burst of gunfire toward another unit’s outpost. The outpost responded, seeing the fire come from what appeared to be the ambulance.
Observing the fire exchanged between the outpost and the ambulance, our snipers engaged the emergency vehicle as it sped north, the victim of a cruel crossfire. The white car, fully masked in its movements, veered down a dark alley and made its escape. The ambulance shuddered to a stop. The driver, fearing for his life, abandoned the vehicle to escape the bullet exchange. He nearly made it but for one round that hit his ankle. Another aide was cut by glass from the windshield. The patient took a round to the shoulder and the thigh. The police and our forces quickly arrived along the dark street. The police took the seriously wounded victim back to the hospital where he was stabilized, and he ultimately survived.
The ambulance then began its journey northward toward a checkpoint where it was met by both police and our scouts. The driver’s ankle wound was treated, and he was transferred to better care for professional removal of the bullet. We also returned the ambulance to the emergency workers, and the Iraqis helped us piece together the confusing puzzle of the preceding events. While frightened and initially angered, they became more incensed when they learned that the attackers had once again used innocent people as shields.
Such immoral incidents infuriated me. The insurgents callously placed men, women, and children at risk to launch their attacks and promote their agenda. They continued to use the protected status of hospitals, ambu
lances, mosques, and the like to find safe harbor. Many decent Iraqis would die as a result.
This inhumane behavior incited such rage in the Iraqi people that they would surrender significant information leading to the apprehension of the perpetrators. Such was the case with the Hadooshi farm we had raided before. It was where we uncovered eight and a half million U.S. dollars and Sajida Hussein’s papers and jewelry on 17 June. Locals told us that the enemy persisted in planning and funding attacks from that location.
We acted quickly on local intelligence about an alleged planning meeting at the farm. Confirmed sightings of two particular individuals on our hit list energized us to charge in quickly with guns bristling. Our source indicated that a portion of the Musslit family would be present and that perhaps even Saddam himself would be there. Jack’s SOF team had a great interest in the intelligence and wanted to join us. They were always most welcome. I did not want a repeat of the last raid where we had even odds at the gate with armed men. I did want to send the message that we were on to them.
We surrounded the farm with reconnaissance troops to set the cordon and then A Company rolled up to the capacious compound gate and flattened it with a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. The Bradley continued forward as residents of the two large farm complexes scrambled in every direction. Jack’s SOF guys rolled up in their specialized vehicles, darted to the farmhouse, and cleared it with their usual precision.
Our soldiers poured through the gap in the wall, and more soldiers spilled from the back of the Bradley. Fingers of light from flashlights mounted on soldiers’ rifles danced around each corner and flashed around each window and room. Back alleys were cleared, aqueducts were jumped, and orchards were searched. Activity seemed to slacken at the farm.
Joe Filmore and a SOF man went to work interrogating the farmhands and women detained. We learned that Rudman and Mohammed Ibrihim Omar al-Musslit had left about three hours earlier. We also found evidence that Saddam might have been there. More questioning revealed a secondary farm location across the Tigris about 20 kilometers east toward Al Allum. It belonged to a man known as al-Asawi. Disappointingly, nothing was found at that farm either. After an exhausting night, we had narrowly missed Saddam’s key henchmen. They fled knowing that they were hunted men who must live like the rats they were. We wanted them to know that no rat hole would be safe.
We Got Him! Page 15