John wanted to find Sabah and the house believed to be rented by Mohammed’s brother, Sulwan, where Mohammed was purportedly staying. They would have to do a reconnaissance on the houses, which would take some time. John also wanted to keep the pressure on Wa’ad who, most likely, was somewhere in Tikrit.
If we end up with a dry hole tomorrow night, we want to assault every known location of Wa’ad Abdullah Haras. We will do the [recon] of all of the locations in Tikrit/Cadaseeyah during the day on 8 Dec and hit them that night at 082400 Local. . . . We plan on hitting Wa’ad’s sister’s house in Cadaseeyah and would like 1-22 to hit the aunt’s house in Tikrit. Amir and Bassam believe they can convince Wa’ad to give up the info on Mohammed within an hour of his capture.
There was much at stake and much to accomplish in a short amount of time. Bryan Luke, Clay Bell, and I set about looking over the Wa’ad targets to make sure that we were ready. We also had some leads of our own that we would pursue on the Khader and Rashid families to help get at Wa’ad and we acted on a tip that Munther Idham Ibrahim al-Hasan was in Cadaseeyah. He was Saddam’s cousin, and we had already captured three of his brothers. We raided several more houses the night of December 6 with some success but did not catch Munther.
That same night, John’s team was partially successful in Samarra. They did not find Sabah’s house, but they did nab his brother, Luay. They also found Mohammed’s rental house, but Mohammed was not there. Still, they did not come up completely empty-handed. They found Mohammed’s son, Musslit Mohammed Ibrahim al-Musslit, which was exciting news. They also found a stash of cash totaling $1.9 million. We were definitely on Mohammed’s trail. He had fewer and fewer places in which to move about freely.
THE BOY
December 7 dawned with more combat patrols and more raid planning. The night before, Command Sergeant Major Martinez and I paused long enough to light a Christmas tree in our headquarters. The tree was graciously provided by the Iraqi governor’s staff and was presented to us by the Governor, General Abdullah, and the Governor’s security chief, Colonel Jassim. We were deeply moved; the gesture flew in the face of the concept that Iraqis would never accept our friendship. We sang carols and had a generally good time. We ended the lighting ceremony by singing “Feliz Navidad” as more than one third of our battalion was Hispanic. With only a moment’s reprieve from the demands of war, it was back to the grind and the evening raids.
Even so, it was nice to think about Christmas, even if briefly. There were still parts of the world that cared about holidays and delighted in the details of what to buy and cook and wear. My prayer was that we would soon have a special Christmas gift of our own.
As the day unfolded, we began getting tips on the Khatab family, the one from which the Ace of Diamonds, Abid Mahmood came. Despite having scattered Mohammed al-Musslit’s network and the upper tier leaders, it had made minimal impact on the trigger pullers if the day’s activity was any indication. A policeman, a relative of Bassam Latif, was on patrol when a hand grenade was tossed into the back of his police pickup. Fortunately, he was not hurt. Our own patrols found and eliminated three more roadside bombs. The bomb stuffed in a wheat sack on Highway 1 had two 120mm mortar rounds capped with plastic explosives. It was powerful enough to have killed anything within a 250-foot radius. Bomb sweeps were dangerous work, and I was thankful that we continued to find so many of them before the enemy was able to bring their evil plans to fruition.
Jon Cecalupo’s “Cougars” in Mazhem and Cadaseeyah reported seeing the remnants of the volcanic car that blew up a Khatab and a Hussein on November 9. When the car hit a bump in the road, the bomb they were transporting detonated prematurely (or on cue, depending on one’s perspective). I decided to pursue the leads and ordered Chris Morris’ scouts to run two targets to ground to find the connections to the Crispy Khatab. While yielding little, the enemy could not miss the clear message sent to them: we could be everywhere all the time.
The success of recent raids loosened the lips of many locals. Seeing known Saddam sympathizers thinned out, they became quick to distance themselves from their erstwhile neighbors. John and his special ops team, as well my battalion of Regulars, began to receive a flood of information on Mohammed al-Hadooshi. While Hadooshi had taken a backseat in priority in recent months, we were always interested in him because of his pre-war position as Saddam’s personal secretary. Most of the information turned out to be useless, but we did get some critical information tying together a family whose last name was Ali.
The Alis were not strangers to us. Early in the war they skirted along the periphery, making contact with Americans through their in-laws. The most prominent of the in-laws was a former decorated general named Thamar Sultan. There had been many meetings with General Sultan and fish bakes at his palatial home in Mazhem on the west bank of the Tigris. A raid on his home once produced more than 250 AK-47s from an outbuilding and six tons of plastic explosives from his front yard.
Sultan claimed that he had been working covertly with an undercover organization and was to serve as a link between Sunnis and Kurds for an uprising against Saddam in the north as our troops came in from Turkey. He claimed that the weapons had been stockpiled for that purpose. He knew too many details to be a total liar, even supplying names and descriptions of individuals with whom he professed to work. When we cross-referenced his association to various organizations, we were told to leave him alone. We declined, however, to return the AK-47s or the explosives.
Sultan and a man named Dr. Sami Sharif Shehab Ahmad, a former Deputy Minister of Oil under Saddam Hussein who had been educated in Houston, Texas, had become well known to Mark Woempner when he first led our battalion north of Tikrit in April and early May of 2003. “Dr. Sam” and General Sultan were among the first Iraqis with whom I had conversations upon arriving in May. Though the relationships I maintained with them were by no means close, Sultan and Sharif were quite well known to us. What was not well known to us then, we were about to discover in a few days.
After pooling our leads and coordinating them with the flow of intelligence coming from the SOF team, we had another breakthrough on December 8 regarding the trigger pullers. We compared our information with John’s special ops info on Wa’ad via e-mail and went after the Khader targets discussed earlier. We raided four targets in Cadaseeyah as Brad’s “Cobras” and Jon’s “Cougars” nabbed Kamil al-Awayes, Ayman Hameed Bardee, and Thamer Jasim Mohammed Ali. Abdel Khader and Wa’ad Abdullah Haras were not found, but we detained eight insurgents and unearthed vast quantities of explosive-making materials, including several radio-controlled cars used for their electronic parts.
The next day we gained a critical lead in the race to find Mohammed al-Musslit. A teenaged boy presented himself at the front gate of Colonel Hickey’s headquarters between Tikrit and Auja on the west bank of the Tigris. The soldiers on guard were alert enough to grab an interpreter rather than just shoo the boy away. It was not long before Colonel Hickey decided to talk to this young man himself.
The boy claimed to know where some important people were hiding. His information was specific enough that Hickey decided to believe him—not only because he was a boy but also because he claimed to know where people were right now. Following our dictum “If you do nothing, you get nothing,” Colonel Hickey promptly radioed me with orders to raid the farm in question.
Since the farm was to the south and west of Tikrit proper, I called on Mark Stouffer’s “Gators.” We hashed out the details, and Mark set out for the farm with Joe Filmore in tow to translate. The raid was enormously successful and set in motion some very surprising links.
By evening, we had captured Thaier Amin Ali and some of his other cronies at the farm. As Joe Filmore pored over the information and questioned them, it was obvious that something was up. In the search, we found pictures of the captives with persons of interest whom we had been hunting for six months. The ties went so much deeper than snapshots.
Thaier’s father, know
n as Haji Amin Ali because of his trek to Mecca, had once owned a farm on the east bank of the Tigris River, near the village of Ad Dawr and across the river from Auja. Apparently, Thaier’s father had helped Saddam escape following his failed attempt to kill Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qassim in 1959. As a young Saddam was in hiding, Iraqi forces closed around that farm near Ad Dawr to arrest him, but he swam the river and was given a horse on which he rode off into the sunset to become the future tyrant of Iraq. Each year, Saddam would reenact the swim with his peers. Little could we know in just a few days the significance of that very location.
Saddam had always treated the Ali family with favor out of gratitude for the help that Haji Ali had given him in 1959. That simple good deed catapulted the Ali family into the inner circle of trustees. Thaier Amin Ali and his brother, Mahsin, were also very close to Mohammed al-Musslit. So close, in fact, was their association that Thaier and Mohammed co-owned a gravel business. Mohammed had hidden five of his automobiles on Thaier’s farm when the war erupted. Further, Thaier’s sisters were married to Mohammed al-Hadooshi, General Thamar Sultan and Dr. Sami Sharif’s brother. Thaier’s oldest brother, Khalid, had inherited the mantle of his father’s namesake as “Haji Amin Ali” and was living in Mazhem, home to another brother, General Sultan, and Sami Sharif.
As if the Ali family reach were not long enough already, we learned that Gazwan Nazhem Sharif Shehab Ahmed, the son of Sami Sharif’s brother, worked as a translator at the local office of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Tikrit. We immediately notified the CPA as we suspected Gazwan of tipping off the insurgency to the recent inbound VIP helicopter flights. I was taken aback by the information we were drilling through. Still, every new vein seemed to be connected to the same families. Once again, the enemy was hidden in plain sight until we could unravel the big “ball of yarn,” as Colonel Hickey once put it.
The result of Colonel Hickey’s intuition to raid the farm on December 9, based on the boy’s tip, would prove critical. John and his SOF men were already on the hunt for Thaier’s brother, Mahsin. They believed that Mohammed al-Musslit might now be in Baghdad. The information Thaier and Mohammed’s son, Musslit, were able to provide pointed to a very narrow group of targets among which Mohammed al-Musslit could be hiding. John updated Colonel Hickey and the rest of us on a follow-on raid by other special ops men in Baghdad:
Gents,
Our guys in B-dad caught two . . . who are still undergoing interrogations . . .
Nasar Farhan Jasim: This name is an alias, another detainee says his real name is Mahsin Amin Ali . . . he is a good friend of Mohammed Ibrahim Omar Al Musslit’s . . . is from Mazhem village. Mahsin’s brother ended up giving up two additional target locations, one about 20 km SSE of Tikrit where Mohammed Ibrahim’s brother uses a farm as a safehouse and another location in Samarra where Mohammed Ibrahim’s girlfriend, a hooker, lives. 1-22 IN just rolled up Mahsin’s brother, Thaier, in a raid last night and we are questioning him now.
Qusay Shehab Ahmed: some fisherman at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Will keep you advised when we get something actionable. John
At the time, John believed the first guy was Thaier’s brother when, in fact, he was Nasar Farhan Jasim, a cousin of Mohammed Khader. Apparently, he was related to Thamer Jasim whom we rolled up trying to find a Khader in Cadaseeyah on the same night of the Baghdad raid. The second captive of the Baghdad raid, the fisherman, was actually connected to the Shehab Ahmed family information we were deciphering from Thaier’s raid. Even he was part of the network.
By December 10, we had plowed through almost more information than we could handle. It was like getting a crate of Cracker Jacks; it was more than enough to feed you and nice to have, but you really just wanted the prize. We had probed every Mohammed al-Musslit enabler in the Tikrit area. Unless we developed new leads from recent raids, we would have to pursue Tier 2 targets. Clay Bell and Bryan Luke had put a couple of these targets on hold while we were chasing Mohammed al-Musslit. Now, there were no more places in Tikrit to search for Mohammed. We had connected as many dots as we could to try to find him. It would be up to John’s SOF men to focus on the Baghdad leads with information garnered from the combined raids of the last few days.
I deemed it best to keep the momentum building and ordered the Tier 2 raids to proceed anyway. Even if I had not, Colonel Hickey would have done nothing less. It was not uncommon for trigger-puller raids to net important links to the big guy networks. If nothing else, it would discourage the enemy from throwing a counterpunch while we were closing in on them. Consequently, we hit Mohammed Abdul Karim Waheeb and his brother, Mahmood, in south-central Tikrit that night. We found a small amount of potentially explosive material in their house in a residential neighborhood, and I was prompted to call in the mine detectors to thoroughly search the yards and garden.
Reporters at the scene were astonished at the raid because it initially appeared to be yet another example of Americans raiding homes in the middle of the night, hauling innocents from their beds while their women and children huddled weeping in the corner. When the house search produced nothing other than large quantities of cash, you could see the sympathetic looks given to the two brothers and their families. When we started digging out vast amounts of explosives, weapons, and ammunition from the yards and garden, their outlook changed.
“Colonel, what do you make of this?” asked Robin Pomeroy from Reuters.
“Well, it is not very often we get the middle guys, the guys that supply the street fighters,” I explained. “These are the guys that are connected to the top tier but supply weapons to cells,” I continued. “We are draining the swamp at both the high end and the low. It is starting to get pretty good . . . as good as it was in July and August.”
“What do you make of the types of things you have pulled out of the ground?” reporters continued.
“It is a wide variety of items. It is like a Fedayeen candy shop, where you could find almost anything you were looking for,” I tried to illustrate. One reporter estimated there was enough weaponry to launch fifty attacks. The candy shop quotes went around the world that night. I was just content to pull the stuff from our little corner of it.
Any type of attack could have been planned with the variety of weapons we found buried in the front yard of that filthy little house on the outskirts of Tikrit. We seized roadside bombs, Pepsi can bombs, RPG launchers with rockets, two different and complete mortar systems (one in the outhouse), small arms, ammunition, grenades, explosives, and radio-controlled devices for bombs. The Waheeb brothers denied all knowledge of the find, claiming that the Iraqi Army must have planted it all there. Oh, I did not think of that! Of course, our own Army issues the Mark 1 Pepsi Can Bomb. And I would never have noticed a large caliber mortar system in my own outhouse. My disgust for the enemy was reaching a peak. The sooner we could knock them out, the sooner Iraq could find its true potential.
FAT MAN, FIREFIGHTS, AND FIREFIGHTING
The key to Iraq’s true potential was to sever its ties to Saddam Hussein forever. With sons Uday and Qusay (and even 14-year-old grandson Mustafa) dead, Saddam remained the only direct link to the past. In him was little hope for the future. Even so, every day he remained at large bolstered the Iraqi belief that his power and regime still existed. To find him was to offer Iraq a clean break with that sordid past. After months of analyzing intelligence, pursuing leads, and looking under rocks, it appeared that there was only one man who could lead us to him—The Fat Man.
Apart from Saddam himself, Mohammed al-Musslit had been the primary focus of our efforts, though little of it was known to the outside world, including most Coalition military leaders and intelligence chiefs inside Iraq. At the ground level, ours had been a strategy of striking at Saddam’s support, chipping away at the base of his pedestal by hitting the Special Security Officers and Fedayeen leaders in the group of followers closest to Saddam. We had targeted the Musslit family as early as May 2003. By
June, we were tracking named individuals with sets of photos.
We knew the tiered strategy was working when important gains were made in June and July. Yet, with the exception of Saddam’s personal bodyguard, Adnan Abdullah Abid al-Musslit, and a few Ibrahims and Khatabs in the lineage of al-Musslits collected along the way, there was little to show for it in the following months. Nearly all of our captures had been enablers. Most of the enablers had been disabled by this time. Only the primary players were left on the field. We were certain that Mohammed would be found in a matter of time. It is impossible to explain how we all sensed and felt it. Still, even with high expectations, we realized that time was against us.
Mohammed Ibrahim Omar al-Musslit was an elusive figure. Little was known about how this man came to be so trusted by Saddam. In retrospect, it should have been obvious that he was a close confidant of Saddam. A review of the last public footage of Saddam in Baghdad on 9 April 2003 revealed some clues. Playing to the cheering crowd, “the benevolent dictator” perched himself defiantly atop a white Oldsmobile in which he would later flee. The man that jumped up beside him with a pistol to protect him was none other than Mohammed al-Musslit. His trustworthiness was total, and his connections were immense.
As John’s team of special operators focused their efforts on the lead to locate Mohammed Khader in Baghdad, thereby hoping to grab Mohammed al-Musslit, we received a tip about an emergency Fedayeen organizational meeting south of Auja in the town of Oynot. The tip had copious details, too many to ignore. I sent Mark Stouffer’s “Gators” to carry out the raid. Six men belonging to a cell operating between Samarra and Tikrit led by one Mohammed Jabar Mahai were captured. He was a trigger puller with connections not entirely clear but loosely connected to Saddam. In addition to the cell leader, his two brothers, Abdul and Sofian, and three of their insurgent peers were captured. One of those peers, Arkan Hardin Ali, was the son of the bodyguard of Saddam’s half-brother, Sabawi.
We Got Him! Page 30