The JIATF at Bagram was not a tipping point for our effectiveness, but it was an essential step forward. It wasn’t until 2005 that the JIATF and its counterpart created at Balad that year really began to hit their stride as nodes for focused analysis and hubs to connect the contributing organizations. The stand-up of the JIATF that spring began the process of turning TF 714 from a collection of niche strike forces into a network able to integrate diverse elements of the U.S. government into a unified effort.
* * *
As we built our new network, Zarqawi used his to spark the recrudescence of a bloody, centuries-old hatred. After a spring attack on the Shia in southern Iraq, a French diplomat in Baghdad summed up the terror in his report: “We have recently seen a horrible example of the Wahhabis’ cruel fanaticism in the terrible fate of Imam Hussein,” meaning the holy Shiite mosque in the city of Karbala. His reaction would be a familiar lament to any observer of the Iraq war.
Yet the attack the Frenchman described had occurred in the spring of 1802, when Wahhabis were a new puritanical Sunni movement, led by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an Arabian desert preacher who believed that Islam had been diverted, deceived, and made weak. Only strict Koranic literalism would restore Islamic society to its pure, strong form. Wahhabis had come north to Iraq from the Nejd and Hejaz as part of Ibn Saud’s army, which he was using to conquer the peninsula. That day in Karbala was a chance to enforce one of the Wahhabis’ precepts: The Shia were infidels, corroding the nation of Islam. Their mosques were monuments of idolatry, their rituals blasphemy. And this demanded action.
Witnesses later reported to the French consul in Baghdad that “12,000 Wahhabis suddenly attacked Imam Husain,” killing men, women, and children. “It is said,” he reported, “that whenever they saw a pregnant woman, they disemboweled her and left the fetus on the mother’s bleeding corpse.” The Wahhabi attack was religiously motivated but caused political disruptions. It weakened the central authority in Baghdad, showing it unable or unwilling to protect Shiites and their holy sites. This provoked the Persians, who would need to come guard their fellow Shiites and their sacred mosques.
In the two centuries between the rise of al-Wahhab and the emergence of Zarqawi, a number of strains competed and overlapped within the radical wing of Sunni Islam. Zarqawi’s Salafist jihadism owed much to the Wahhabi creed, though in its violent political manifestation that Zarqawi pushed, it sought to outdo the Wahhabis where they were too passive or too compromising. While anti-Shiism was ingrained in these ideologies, even the most violent Salafist groups that emerged in the late twentieth century had largely avoided the sectarian targeting on display in Karbala in the spring of 1802. Strategically, Zarqawi resuscitated that hatred, and in the spring of 2004 he prepared an attack on that same Iraqi city with largely the same religious motivations, aiming to achieve strikingly similar political aftereffects.
The strike augured a campaign strategy that had become clearer to us at the end of January. In spite of the attacks Zarqawi orchestrated in the fall of 2003 against the U.N. and the ICRC, we were not certain he was in Iraq until the end of the year. But with Saddam now captured and the remnant Baathists increasingly rolled up, Zarqawi became our primary focus. As he did, our understanding of him took an ominous leap forward.
During the third week of January, Kurdish Peshmerga forces arrested a Pakistani Al Qaeda operative named Hassan Ghul near Iraq’s northeastern border. Acting as a courier, Ghul was carrying two CDs and a thumb drive, which yielded a letter written from Zarqawi to bin Laden and Zawahiri. A dispatch from Iraq, the letter described the scene for the senior Al Qaeda leaders holed up in Pakistan, and laid out the strategy Zarqawi would pursue with brutish consistency for the next two and a half years. The Americans were a threat, he acknowledged. But like bin Laden before him, Zarqawi dismissed us as a paper tiger. “They are an easy quarry, praise be to God.” Rather, the Shia were the “insurmountable obstacle, the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy, and the penetrating venom.”
The Iraqi Sunnis had yet to realize this threat—or to coalesce behind Zarqawi’s ranks. So he cast his foreign jihadists as the true keepers of the faith, the hard edge of the insurgency, and the only defense against the Shia. To jolt the Sunnis from their torpor, in which, he contended, the Shia would slaughter them, Zarqawi had a simple strategy. He planned regular and merciless attacks against Shiite civilians, which would provoke Shia reprisals until the back-and-forth escalated to full sectarian war, stoking the rage and sympathy of Sunnis worldwide and bringing the “Islamic nation” to the fight as volunteers and supporters. The new Iraqi government, which the Shia were clearly going to dominate, was the main obstacle to making Baghdad the seat of the reestablished caliphate. Only in the high pitch of an ethnic war would the Sunnis win. In that hell, Al Qaeda would reign.
The Coalition released the letter to the public. Three weeks later, Zarqawi made good on his promises. On Tuesday, March 2, Shia believers from around Iraq and from abroad entered Karbala, the site of the Wahhabi massacre 202 years earlier. For the first time in almost thirty years, these Shia were free to celebrate Ashura in that holy city. For decades, a political desire to suppress Shia identity had driven Saddam to ban the festival.
That Tuesday morning, Zarqawi’s operatives, outfitted with suicide bombs assembled in Fallujah garages, were positioned inside Karbala. Others waited to fire mortars into the crowd, as a prominent Kuwaiti cleric damned the Ashura rituals that would take place that day as “the world’s biggest display of heathens and idolatry.” At 10:00 A.M., with the streets lined, multiple suicide bombs exploded where people were most densely packed in the streets, near choke points, outside a hotel and a shrine. Desperate pilgrims beseeched the panicked crowds not to step in the pools of blood or on the bits of flesh and limbs scattered on the pavement, to avoid profaning them. At roughly the same time, multiple bombs popped in a Shia neighborhood in Baghdad. All told, the day ended with at least 169 dead and hundreds wounded.
Zarqawi’s campaign against the Shia was more than political. It was fueled by a visceral hatred and repugnance and a dogmatic theological commitment. But as the 1802 massacre had done for a spell, Zarqawi’s Ashura bombings, the loudest of an increasing drumbeat of anti-Shia attacks, succeeded in nudging the political realignment his strategy required. Zarqawi wanted Iraq to be contested by extremists, not forged by moderates. Shortly after the twin attacks in Baghdad and Karbala, militias patrolled these cities, portraying themselves as the protectors of their fellow Shia. If Shia lost faith in the ability of the new Iraq project to secure them, they might turn to the volatile militias, the Iranian-backed Badr Brigades, and the growing if more ragtag ranks of Muqtada al-Sadr. These more radical, demagogic groups were liable to conduct anti-Sunni reprisals.
And yet civil war did not erupt that spring. Zarqawi’s persistent and fatal campaign of anti-Shia attacks did not set off the sectarian schism he sought as early as we thought it would. At that time, at least, sectarian war was not in the long-term interest of the Shia, who, as the majority, would be empowered under a democracy. Even while patrols of Shia militias took to the streets, Shia clerics worked to discount Zarqawi’s narrative and dampen sectarian feeling, blaming the Americans instead of the Sunnis. This reflected considerable restraint and, less charitably, a fractured and disorganized Shia political community.
Armchair analysts too often caricatured Iraq as a place of sectarian tinder that was easily lit after we removed Saddam. It was easy to forget, having watched the country fall into civil war, that Iraq in the fall of 2003 and spring of 2004 was not riven along sectarian lines. Iraqis rarely thought of themselves primarily in religious or ethnic terms. Although the Sunni-Shia split had been exploited and frozen under Saddam, there did exist a national Iraqi identity—in part attained through common aspirations toward unity, in part forged in the trenches and minefields along the border war with Iran in the 1980s. While
a contest over resources and political power was inevitable, there remained genuine interest—among Shiites and Sunnis—to work with the Americans following Saddam’s fall. The ease with which we forget this fact—and the stubborn refusal of Iraqi leadership to overcome the sectarian paranoia once it became entrenched—is a legacy of Zarqawi.
Zarqawi aimed to get Iraqis to see one another as he saw them. And to him they were not countrymen or colleagues or neighbors or in-laws or classmates. They were either fellow believers or an enemy to be feared and, in that fear, extinguished. Zarqawi’s rabid anti-Shiism increasingly drove his organization to be less focused on driving the Americans out of Iraq and more bent on attacking Iraqis. In the years ahead, Zarqawi—obstinate and powerful enough to fend off critics—almost succeeded.
* * *
That spring, the logic of Zarqawi’s violence was hazier than it would become later. But the sheer ferocity of these attacks, and the terroristic tendency they lent to the insurgency, convinced me this fight would be long and difficult. From history, I knew of the moral and political traps awaiting forces conducting counterinsurgency or counterterrorism operations, and I wanted us to confront them directly before we found ourselves acting in ways counter to our values or our cause. TF 714 would need to acquire roles and expertise that would demand clear mental, moral, and operational focus. For this reason, I called my commanders together for a conference at Bagram the first week of April 2004.
Periodic commanders’ conferences were especially valuable for TF 714. Given our geographic dispersion and the insularity and elitism ingrained in some of our units, they helped us build a sense of teamwork across the force and aligned our strategy. The Bagram conference convened key TF 714 staff; the flag officers heading the country task forces; and commanders, deputy commanders, and senior enlisted advisers of the component units. Everyone flew into our base on the Bagram airfield. There we still operated out of big canvas tents and rudimentary plywood huts filled with metal folding chairs and folding tables.
As early as our October trip, Scott Miller, the Green deputy at the time, had said we would be deluding ourselves to think we weren’t facing a full, and growing, insurgency in Iraq. He had been reading about the French experience in the insurgencies of the midcentury. We had both read Modern Warfare, a compact 1961 treatise by the French military theorist Roger Trinquier, but I read it again that spring after Scott passed me a photocopy of the book. While we disagreed with many of the hard-edged solutions Trinquier endorsed, his analysis of the challenge was instructive.
At the conference I decided to show The Battle of Algiers. The film is a fictional but historically accurate portrayal of the French 10th Parachute Division, which deployed in 1957 to secure the city after the National Liberation Front (FLN) insurgency overwhelmed the ability of the Algiers police to suppress it. Additionally, I had the commanders read Modern Warfare, but I did not attach any message or opinion when I sent it to them. I wanted them to come with fresh opinions. We also brought Professor Douglas Porch, one of the foremost scholars of French military counterinsurgency campaigns, to Bagram from California.
On the morning of the second day, we watched the film and then had a lively two-hour discussion. Intentionally, I allowed the conversation to flow. As is so often the case, the senior enlisted advisers, in particular, were sharp students of these issues. I felt it was critical that these leaders drew and articulated their own conclusions. But they also needed to understand my personal view, so there could be no ambiguity about what I expected. In order to show the thinking that led to my conclusions, I reminded the group of two powerful scenes from the film. The first showed the fundamental ignorance of the French about the deeply ingrained nature of the FLN insurgency in Algerian daily life. Pointing to one of the walls, I told the group assembled, “We fundamentally do not understand what is going on outside the wire.”
The second scene addressed torture head on. I believed that—even with the heated post-9/11 outrage felt by Americans—such a tactic would be self-defeating, and the film opened a window for me to address concerns I had about our nation’s detainee operations since I had taken command. I had been deeply unimpressed with the interrogation facilities at Bagram when I first deployed to Afghanistan in 2002. Our nation’s lack of institutional wisdom gnawed at me. In preparing for the conference, I distilled two thoughts. First, how we conducted ourselves was critical, and the force needed to uniformly believe that. Doing less would dishonor the service of those I led. Second, I was convinced that detainees presented an operational risk: If we got it wrong, TF 714 would be taken out of the fight and might even be disbanded. Three weeks after our conference, we saw the pictures CBS broadcast of Americans abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. The rest of the world, of course, saw them as well.
As we were meeting, events in Iraq were altering the course of the war and TF 714’s relationship to it. On the day the conference began, then-Colonel Bennet Sacolick, the commander of Green, called from Baghdad. He needed to stay in Iraq, he explained, because four American contractors had been ambushed and killed in Fallujah, which was then beginning to tremor with widespread violence.
When I had made the decision the previous fall to hold the April commanders’ conference at Bagram, our main focus had been in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan, where the primary Al Qaeda threat was amassed. The events in the weeks that followed the contractors’ killing would change all that. The grisly images from the Fallujah attack—and the convulsive violence they augured—soon made the purse bombs and chicly dressed Algerian terrorists from The Battle of Algiers seem quaint.
| CHAPTER 9 |
Big Ben
April–June 2004
In early April 2004, the meltdown in Fallujah cut short my stay in Afghanistan. Until that time, my command group and I had largely flown around theater on scheduled conventional military flights. Now we summoned one of our MC-130 special operations aircraft in the middle of the night. Listening to the throaty rumble of the planes’ engines across the darkened tarmac, I was anxious to get to Iraq. I sensed that the tenor of the war had changed and that a critical point in the fight against Al Qaeda was waiting for us there.
A week earlier, a very public horror show in Iraq had prevented Bennet Sacolick from attending our commanders’ conference in Afghanistan. The previous Wednesday, three trucks with empty flatbeds had driven down Highway 10 into Fallujah, en route to the American base west of the city to pick up kitchen equipment. This was more dangerous than it sounds. Four American contractors, working for the private security firm Blackwater, split between two unarmored Mitsubishi Pajeros, escorted the trucks. At the entrance to the city, a group of Iraqi national guardsmen joined the convoy. The vehicles were stopped at a checkpoint on the east side of the city and apprised of the Marines’ assessment of the dangerous situation. But they continued on. Already, insurgents had planned an ambush. That morning, shop owners along the route had reportedly shuttered their storefronts and terrified residents hid indoors, while the insurgents had prepared the emptied street for the assault.
The American convoy drove along the main road through Fallujah. It continued past the corner where, weeks earlier, our TF 714 vehicles had taken a right into the residential neighborhood where we had searched houses, looking for Zarqawi, and found glaring faces. Once into the denser commercial center of town, the contractors entered the kill zone. The cars in front of the second American SUV halted, boxing it in. Insurgents rushed toward the car from the sidewalks, firing AK-47s, perforating the Pajero’s red doors and windows. With the pop of gunfire behind them, the lead SUV tried to maneuver, accelerating, then leaping the raised median. But insurgents were quickly only feet away from the vehicle’s windows, raking the car with bullets. They fired until the Pajero slammed into another car and juddered to a stop, its driver slumped over. The four Americans died in their seats.
With camcorders rolling, a crowd rushed to the car
s and set them ablaze. When the flames subsided they dragged the bodies onto the pavement. They beat the corpses with sticks until they fell apart and trailed the bodies, or parts of them, behind cars. A maroon sedan honked playfully as the crowd—which reportedly included Iraqi police, children, and women—circled around the back bumper and shouted, “Fallujah is the cemetery of the Americans!” Paper fliers saying the same had been printed and distributed to the crowd to hold up in front of news cameramen. The crowd and cars moved to the southwest edge of town, where they tied the charred remains of two Americans to the beams of the green trestle Old Bridge. Men and young boys climbed the supports in order to reach out with sticks and shoes to hit the blackened, deformed corpses swaying over a crowd assembled and chanting below. One Baghdadi told the Los Angeles Times “with disbelief” that in Fallujah he saw “adolescent boys . . . carrying pieces of charred human flesh on sticks ‘as if they were lollipops.’”
This was the most grievous display of overt resistance to American control since the war began. It hit close to home: One of the contractors was a former Navy SEAL, and the other three were former Rangers. Wes Batalona, who had been our operations sergeant at the 3rd Ranger Battalion in 1988 and 1989, was in the driver seat of the lead vehicle. The images recalled the decade-old videos showing the bodies of men from our command being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.
My Share of the Task Page 19