Down at Baghdad, J.C. was still up. He would be for a little while longer, until all the teams called in “objective secure” near 4:00 A.M. Only then did he retire for his first real night of sleep in weeks.
* * *
Just before noon the next day, June 8, George Casey, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, and Prime Minister Maliki held a press conference in Baghdad announcing Zarqawi’s death. Prime Minister Maliki began, speaking in Arabic in front of a glossy wood-paneled wall. In a scene that evoked the Saddam announcement two and half years earlier, members of the audience broke out in cheers and clapping, eventually together in unison, clap, clap, clap. But the triumphalism on the podium was far more muted this time around. “Although the designated leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq is now dead, the terrorist organization still poses a threat,” said General Casey. “Iraqi forces, supported by the Coalition, will continue to hunt terrorists that threaten the Iraqi people until terrorism is eradicated in Iraq.” Shortly after the press conference ended, dueling factions in the Iraqi parliament dropped their vetoes and approved Maliki’s outstanding cabinet nominations, putting the ministries of national security and interior under Shiites and the ministry of defense under a Sunni.
Later that day, Steve gathered everyone inside the JOC in our Balad hangar and gave much-deserved awards to five members of the task force screening facility—the three interrogators, Jack, Amy, and Paul, as well as two analysts who had worked side by side with them. The three interrogators continued to deploy back to Iraq for the rest of my time in command.
That night, I went from Balad down to meet with Tom D.’s squadron at their villa. A small group of us gathered in their conference room, a few paces from where J.C.’s team had spent the past few weeks watching Abd al-Rahman. Inside, I gave J.C. a bronze star medal. Everyone in the squadron liked and respected J.C. They knew how much he had contributed and how much he had staked his considerable reputation in the process. In many ways, his work and all the operations leading up to the strike was the culmination of what Steve and Wayne Barefoot had begun two years earlier in the lead-up to Big Ben, when they sat analysts and operators together to patrol the skies over Fallujah. He accepted the award in his typically humble, subdued way, speaking immediately of his team—who were at that moment riffling through the unprecedented trove of intelligence we had collected from the safe house in Hibhib and the seventeen other targets.
We then moved to the backyard, where the rest of the Green operators, pilots, intelligence officers, and other members of the task force who lived and worked at the villa gathered in a half circle. The grounds backed to the Tigris, the river’s slick black surface reflecting the orange-ish glow of nighttime. The backyard was otherwise unlit. I could make out only darkened features or pairs of eyes when they caught the ambient light from the house or the city across the river.
“Listen, a lot of people are talking about all of this, what a big deal it all is,” I said. “Let me tell you, I know what it took to get here. I know the price you have paid to do this. We have been at this a long time. We all know how important this was, and I just want to thank you.” I spoke about Tom D.’s leadership and that of Major Jason. I talked about the work of J.C. and his team.
In typically laconic fashion, no one cheered or clapped. Age and rank still separated me from them. But in that moment, in the dark, I sensed I was as close as I would come to being a brother and friend with the men half visible around me.
“Feel good about what you’ve done, but you know, and I know, we cannot let up,” I said. “This is far from finished.”
They knew this. Indeed, no one in our task force believed killing Zarqawi would be the end of Al Qaeda in Iraq or the insurgency it leavened. But his ability, for more than two years, to evade us had given Zarqawi a dangerous aura and handicapped the Coalition’s credibility.
His death was more than symbolically important. It was a trite reaction among some to point out that there were thousands of men ready to replace Zarqawi—or any leader we removed. It was of course true that the organization regained a leader: Within days of Zarqawi’s death, Al Qaeda in Iraq announced that Abu Ayyub al-Masri would head the group. And yet there were not, in fact, thousands of “Zarqawis.” He was a peculiar leader. His mix of charisma, brutality, and clear-eyed persistence was never matched by al-Masri or al-Masri’s successor. While Zarqawi’s leadership style had opened rifts within the insurgent movement in Iraq, he also had the ability to keep the insurgency largely congealed. Al-Masri lacked the magnetism or deep connections to marshal the factions as coherently.
Given how badly Zarqawi’s campaign of ethnic murder had eroded global support for Al Qaeda, it’s likely that the Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan just hearing of Zarqawi’s death that night were partially relieved to see him go. Indeed, Zarqawi’s final message—a four-hour-long anti-Shia screed recorded that spring but released four days before his death—again defied bin Laden and Zawahiri’s desire that he attack Americans, and not so many Shia. “We will not have victory over the original infidels,” Zarqawi preached, unless “we fight the apostate infidels simultaneously.” Some within our force made a convincing case that if we had not killed Zarqawi, he would have been retired from Iraq by bin Laden and given a top post in Al Qaeda’s central leadership from which to project violence in the Levant. Indeed, before Zarqawi’s death, Al Qaeda’s senior leadership sought to salvage their project in Iraq by dispatching Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, the Mosul-born operative who had helped broker the agreement between bin Laden and Zarqawi two years earlier. Our Afghanistan-based Task Force 328, however, monitored al-Iraqi as he grew restless in Waziristan, and when he set off for Iraq, Turkish authorities intercepted him on their soil and sent him back to Afghanistan, where he was detained.
And yet the more important, ironic point we understood even at the time of Zarqawi’s death was that the success of his campaign in Iraq had made him, or any leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, less relevant. While he did not do so single-handedly, Zarqawi’s focused sectarian killings helped inaugurate a system of violence that was, by the time he died, a self-propelling cycle. The antigovernment Sunni insurgency was no longer the sole furnace of violence—the ethnic killing was—and Iraqis’ fear of unbridled civil war was increasingly self-fulfilling. Across the Tigris from us, extremist Sunni and Shia factions contested Baghdad, while previously mixed neighborhoods drained of one ethnic group or the other, with Shia often fleeing to the south and Sunnis to Anbar. We were halfway through June, during which 3,149 Iraqis died from the war’s violence. That number would rise to more than 3,400 for July, when the coroner in Baghdad alone took in more than 1,855 Iraqi corpses, 90 percent of them executed. We had killed Zarqawi too late. He bequeathed Iraq a sectarian paranoia and an incipient civil war.
After I finished speaking in the backyard, I met individually with some of the men I knew well. I said good-bye and flew back to Balad, while the operators gathered inside the villa. There they lifted on their equipment—the thick canvas of the shoulder straps softened from years of use, the helmet padding carrying permanent indents—and went back out into the dark.
| CHAPTER 14 |
Networked
June 2006–June 2008
On June 5, 2006, two days before Zarqawi was killed, I went to Ramadi to go on a raid with the Rangers stationed there. I’d been there many times before, but Ramadi was now the worst city in Iraq. The Coalition and Iraqi government had largely ceded the city to the insurgency. Only one hundred policemen showed up for daily work in a city of four hundred thousand—and most holed up in their stations. A stoic company of Marines held the only ground there—a patch of buildings at the city center surrounded on all sides by neighborhoods where insurgents operated undisturbed. Absent a significant population of Shia they could target, the insurgents focused on the Americans, and our conventional-force casualty rates there were extraordinarily high.
The next twelve months would be
the most difficult we faced in our long war in Iraq, yet TF 714 was more capable than ever to contribute to the fight. Because I was so focused on the task, I was happy I’d been extended for a fourth year in command. But I knew that meant Annie had been extended for a fourth year alone.
While Iraq was our main effort and highest priority, TF 714’s role in what was then called the war on terror continued to mature and expand. I had the additional influence that came with my third star, and we had resources, from ISR aircraft to interrogators, that I’d only dreamed of in 2004. Across the embattled region, we continued to build a network that spanned more than two dozen countries at one point, with nodes ranging from full task forces capable of combat operations to single operators or intelligence analysts embedded in embassies.
While only two years earlier, in the summer of 2004, hitting the single Big Ben safe house in Fallujah had consumed most of our bandwidth, any given day during these final two years of command consisted of managing counterterrorist operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere; engaging with VIP visitors to the task forces; strategically coordinating in theater, including visits to Baghdad to meet with General Casey and his replacement, General Petraeus; and holding VTCs with D.C. to continue stoking our interagency partnerships. In spite of our breadth, if we still had real problems to confront, it wasn’t due to a lack of communication.
As I moved more frequently and more widely, I was naturally drawn to areas where we faced particularly tough fights or challenges. I aimed to assess invariably complex situations and to simply demonstrate my commitment. That summer, this led me to Ramadi. Although I went to Ramadi to show my support to a captain who, true to our decentralized culture, had made an on-the-spot decision suited to his situation, I encountered there a vision for part of TF 714’s role in the next stage of the Iraq war.
Our operations in Ramadi fell to a company of Rangers led by then-Captain Doug P., operating under a commander of a TF 714 SEAL squadron who had charge of Anbar. Unlike a few years earlier, having Green operators, SEALs, and Rangers integrated so seamlessly was becoming commonplace.
On the day I’d accompany his force on an operation in Ramadi, I met Doug and some of the Rangers at their base, called “Shark Base,” before we went out. At their outpost, on the southern edge of the Euphrates, fumes from garbage and sewage, stewing in the 120-degree sunlight, drifted across the compound, which existed under a permanent haze of suspended dust. It was hard to find a clean mouthful of air. From their location north of the city, they had been running raids into areas the conventional commander had told Doug were off limits as enemy territory.
But the enemy quickly learned and left the city at night. The Rangers were breaching the correct houses, only to wade through the dark rooms and find empty cots. So Doug decided to start running daytime operations into the city. Rolling in broad daylight into the city across the main bridge leading in from the northwest, the Rangers quickly learned contact was inevitable. The only question being how nasty the firefight would be as they fought their way into insurgent strongholds. AQI seeded the few roads the Ranger convoys could use with IEDs, and time and again as they left the wire, a Stryker in the line would disappear in a fount of dust and black smoke. As the Rangers aggressively prosecuted operations, casualties mounted.
As they did, other parts of the task force openly questioned Doug’s decision to assume the risk of daylight operations. Moving in the stark light of the Iraqi summer deprived his ground force of the speed, element of surprise, and cover of night that were hallowed tenets of our raids. It made close air support a less reliable option. But even with this added risk, I supported Doug’s decision. As we’d done in the early stages of our campaign in the western Euphrates River valley a year earlier, it was essential that we do what we could until a stronger conventional force could retake Ramadi.
After a few weeks of watching the progress of Doug’s operations and seeing the casualties, I decided to go out with them. When my aide called TF 16’s Anbar headquarters and told them I wanted to go on a daytime operation with the Rangers in Ramadi, they initially thought he was joking. No, my aide said, he’s serious. The Rangers could do the job without me, but I wanted them to know that I understood theirs was a perilous task and that I appreciated their courage.
At their base, as Rangers donned body armor and weapons for the operation, I spoke with Doug. He had an unlikely appearance for a Ranger commander. His lanky frame, thinning hair, and understated manner, however, overlaid a boiling energy that became apparent only after some time. When I asked him the purpose of the operation we were about to conduct, he paused as a slight smirk came across his face.
“I’m going to take a bite out of crime, sir,” Doug said drily. He was riffing on the tagline of McGruff, the cartoon hound featured in 1980s public service announcements aimed at kids. In the context of Ramadi, it was necessary gallows humor.
“Do it, Doug,” I said, chuckling.
Doug and his Ranger company weren’t trying to solve the problem of Ramadi by themselves. But even though they were getting hurt on nearly every raid, the Rangers felt good about their impact on the otherwise unpressured insurgents. Just before I arrived, they had waged a four-hour gun battle and taken down a huge IED factory whose bomb makers were stunned to see Rangers burst through the door in what they thought was a safe haven deep in Ramadi.
We left the building and emerged into the courtyard, hot under the sun and filled with the loud, low gurgling of Stryker engines. After the last of the forty or so Rangers loaded their vehicles, we departed. We received a few shots on the way to the target, but nothing dramatic, before stopping outside a rural Iraqi version of a strip mall—three or four low, one-story buildings, with a patch of concrete in front where vehicles parked.
As the Rangers bounded out of the Strykers, I took my usual position toward the back, watching them set a perimeter and begin a search of the buildings. As always, I didn’t insert myself into tactical decisions on the ground. It was their responsibility and, I felt, their right.
Instead, over the past three years, I had learned to carefully watch the operators at work: After years’ worth of daily raids, their instinctive movements and mood often told me more about the situation than they could describe back at base.
The Rangers moved quickly and gathered a group of local men from inside and around the buildings on the concrete parking areas in the front. To ensure security, as they moved to identify each man, they had him lie on the pavement with his hands behind his head. One Iraqi was notably older than the others, and a young Ranger, without instruction, retrieved a white plastic chair for him from an automobile maintenance shop. As was normally the case, even in daytime, there were no women in the immediate area. But I saw a boy, probably about four years old, standing near one of the men, no doubt his father.
As the Rangers motioned for the men to lie down on the ground, I watched the boy. He stood quietly, as if confused, then, mimicking his father, the child lay down on the ground. He pressed one cheek flat against the pavement so that his face was turned toward his father and folded his small hands behind his head.
As I watched, I felt sick.
I could feel in my own limbs and chest the shame and fury that must have been coursing through the father, still lying motionless. Every ounce of him must have wanted to pop up, pull his son from the ground, stand him upright, and dust off the boy’s clothes and cheek. To be laid on the ground in full view of his son was humiliating. For a proud man, to seemingly fail to protect that son from similar treatment was worse.
As I watched, I thought, not for the first time: It would be easy for us to lose.
The professionalism of the Rangers in the sweltering heat, paradoxically, suggested just how arduous our task was. As much as Doug and his Rangers were doing to keep the insurgents off balance, they couldn’t change the dynamics in Ramadi simply through raids—which, even when d
one as professionally as they were on that day, could produce enmity in the population. Absent a campaign to protect the people, we could only hope the residents understood these raids were necessary. But even then, the targeting operations could not address the deeper structural sources of the violence that only a fuller-spectrum counterinsurgency effort could. Doug and his Rangers could help, but it was going to take much more.
* * *
Within days of my Ramadi trip, Scott Miller brought an army colonel named Sean MacFarland to see me in the bunker at Balad. Sean was commanding the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Armored Division. Armed with ideas they had seen pacify Tal Afar under then-Colonel H. R. McMaster, MacFarland and his force—comprising five Marine and army battalions—were to take charge of Ramadi. I’d heard good things about Sean but was anxious to judge for myself.
Sean’s visit to our command was part of a concerted effort, on both sides of the fence, to lash our efforts tighter with conventional forces. It was working. Brigade commanders increasingly stopped through to see Scott, Mike Flynn, Kurt Fuller, and me. Conversely, I encouraged conventional flag officers and their commanders to embed for a day or two with our strike teams and to go on raids. Scott, meanwhile, established a weekly video teleconference with all the brigade commanders in Iraq. Far from its stereotype as an overly secretive unit running its own war, our task force, which was then hardwired to succeed through internal collaboration, worked hard to drive an all-of-military effort.
As Sean sat down, I took stock of the tall, soft-spoken cavalry officer. “I’m going to retake Ramadi,” he said quietly. “We’re going to reoccupy the city itself.”
I was skeptical, not because of Sean, whom I liked immediately, but because a number of brigade commanders had tried and been unable to root out insurgents in places less violent than Ramadi. Yet his firmness struck me.
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