On the night of March 19, 2007, then-Commander John B. brought me pressing information. Since the previous September, he had commanded a squadron from SEAL Team 4 as part of TF 17, which had relied on TF 714’s airpower and intelligence architecture throughout the fall. But to streamline TF 17’s operations, by the beginning of January we formally placed it under TF 714’s full tactical control.
Built like a logger, John B. had been one of the first TF 714 people I’d met in Afghanistan when I deployed to Bagram in May 2002 with Combined Joint Task Force 180. Wearing civilian clothes and an enormous beard, John B. initially struck me as one of a number of dilettantes I’d met. But he was different.
John B. lacked the crusty arrogance I’d always despised in some special operators and sought to eliminate in TF 714. We’d worked together when I joined the command in 2003, and it was reassuring to have a trusted partner in the new TF 17. He had been part of most of their operations into strongholds like Sadr City, Karbala, and Najaf, and he understood the political aftershocks that could ripple out from even the most precise of raids. That night, he was asking to conduct one that would, inevitably, upset a number of powerful Iraqis.
At the time, political sensitivity had created an unofficial list of Shiites whom we could not knowingly target. One such no-go target was Qais Khazali, a thirty-three-year-old who had served as an aide to Muqtada al-Sadr’s father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr, before he was killed in 1999. Khazali then assisted Muqtada in the first years after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, before splitting off to lead one of the designated Special Groups. His network was considered particularly dangerous, yet he also had powerful political connections and was periodically discussed as a potential alternative to Sadr.
But while Qais was off-limits, his younger brother Laith was not. That March night, John B. explained, Laith had popped onto the grid. The weather was particularly bad that evening and had grounded aircraft. But from intercepts, John B.’s team was confident they had found the younger Khazali brother. Then, and for the next few nights, they believed Laith was in a house in the heavily Shia port city of Basra. John B. proposed capturing him before we lost the scent.
The operation carried all kinds of risks. Launching a raid from Balad to Basra involved a lengthy flight down. More significant, we had a light presence that far south, and although we had good partnerships with the Brits, the operational infrastructure in and around Basra was unfamiliar. I knew we risked political backlash from inside Maliki’s regime, but I gave John B. the go-ahead.
On the night of March 20, John B. climbed into the aircraft alongside his TF 17 operators for the almost three hour flight to Basra. There they would link up with British special operators who, augmented by conventional troops and intelligence partners, were moving. The Brits in Basra had played a vital role in the lead-up, helping with intelligence and planning and now in the coming assault. The British troops positioned themselves around the area in Basra as blocking forces, as the TF 17 teams approached by vehicle, quietly established a cordon in the dark, and took the house without fire. Elsewhere in Basra, British troops got into a series of gunfights, diverting the Shia insurgent groups, including Laith’s own Asaib Ahl al-Haq, which might have turned the objective into a much more costly affair.
As expected, they found Laith Khazali inside the house, along with seven other men. After a few minutes, they realized that one of the men they’d captured on the target was about to complicate things.
“Hey, sir,” John B. called into our JOC. As usual, I had him on speakerphone. “We’ve got Qais.”
It was an interesting moment. Although we hadn’t been targeting him, Qais’ presence wasn’t all that surprising, and his role as a Special Groups leader was something we already suspected. TF 17 was still relatively young, and some of the fallout from the January capture of the Irbil Five was still fresh in our minds. But given the other men on the target, we knew we had to hold him and quickly passed word to Dave Petraeus.
Soon after returning to the airfield in Basra, the teams gathered all the detainees—Laith and Qais, as well as an Arab who appeared to be both deaf and mute—and the sizable intelligence haul and flew north to Balad. Upon landing in the early morning, our teams spent hours feverishly triaging the material. As they pored through the seized computers, a young Marine captain who spoke fluent Arabic came across a twenty-two-page document. The document appeared to link Qais persuasively to the attack on our outpost in Karbala, with details of the planning as well as postoperation assessments. Included in the material were the military IDs taken from the Americans left to die anonymously in the desert.
While the contours of the relationship would become clearer from subsequent interrogations of the Khazalis, the document showed clear support of their network from the Iranian Quds Force. Specifically, the Iranians had supported the Karbala assault by providing Khazali’s men with details of life inside the camp. We had long suspected Iranian involvement, but never had it been laid in such bare, unmistakable terms.
On previous raids, we had been forced to let well-linked detainees go, and I expected strong and immediate pressure to release Qais. But I saw the twenty-two-page document as a smoking gun that made releasing Qais impossible. To argue our case, we sent one of our best analysts, a young army captain named Sara,* down to Baghdad in a helicopter to give the book of material and her analysis of its importance to Petraeus. In the rush to relay the material, the intelligence team had time to translate only parts of the document. Sara arrived in Baghdad, gave the material to Dave, and then, at his request, went with him to the palace to see the prime minister. Immediately upon sitting down, Petraeus decided to roll the dice. He handed Maliki a copy of the original document, seized only hours earlier. When he stuck the paper in front of the prime minister, Dave did not know everything it contained.
Dave steadily raised his voice as he explained to Maliki just what he should make of the document. We are here, he seethed, to help you, and these people are killing Americans. They are not on your side, Dave said, and you need to cut ties to them.
Maliki began to absorb the document and blanched. It showed clear disdain for him and his government. Its contents made painfully clear to the prime minister that the Khazali network, as a proxy for Iran, was undercutting him.
“Where did you get this?” he demanded.
Dave explained it had just been pulled off of the Khazali brothers, who were being held.
“We have to keep them; we have to hold them,” Maliki said emphatically.
The meeting ended, and Sara and Dave got into the SUV outside. Sara was shaken from the confrontation. The doors of the Suburban closed, and Dave turned to her.
“Well, I thought that went pretty well,” he said jauntily, and smiled. “Don’t worry. That’s the way it works.”
It was a gutsy move on Dave’s part, and one that I respected. Barely a month into his tenure, he had seized an opportunity to begin changing the paradigm of the man—Maliki—who stood at the center of Iraq’s future. A Shia prime minister after generations of Sunni dominance, Maliki walked a tightrope of ethnic, religious, and political complexity. The last thing he wanted was more pressure from Shia groups or their Iranian supporters. But we had Qais, and the evidence was damning.
Dave’s effort received a further dose of energy with the arrival, eight days later, of one of America’s finest diplomats, Ambassador Ryan Crocker. I had known Ryan from Pakistan, where he was ambassador from 2004 until coming to Iraq.
Fluent in Arabic, Crocker managed an unusual personal connection with Maliki. After larger meetings, he would request to meet with the prime minister one-on-one, without a translator. Contrary to the hard-charging American inclination to slap down a list of requests when speaking with our counterparts, Crocker sat down without an agenda.
He talked to Maliki about the prime minister’s past—about his life under S
addam and the danger of being a member of the Dawah Party, which he now led. Crocker had been in Iraq in 1980, when Saddam’s thugs had murdered Baqir al-Sadr, the head of the Dawah Party. He had seen Dawah Party members hanging memorial posters of Sadr faster than the secret police could tear them down. It must have stirred deep emotions and opened new trust when the ambassador told Maliki that he recognized what a monumental act of courage it was for Dawah Party members to go out on the streets and hang those posters—one of which Crocker had kept and hung on his wall. At a time when America was desperate to know whether Nouri al-Maliki would have the will and desire to rebuff Iranian influence, these deeply personal discussions yielded clues. In a window to his feeling about Iran, Maliki once confided to Crocker, “You can’t know what arrogance is until you are an Iraqi Arab forced to take refuge with the Iranians.”
On May 3 and 4, six weeks after we captured the Khazalis, Ambassador Crocker and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice traveled to Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to attend a regional conference, which included representatives of Iran, on the future of Iraq. In the building at the time was Mohammad Jafari, the Quds leader we’d sought to capture in Erbil. Later that summer, an Iranian delegation met with Ryan to discuss the U.S.-Iranian relationship, especially as it regarded the future of Iraq. It was quickly apparent the Iranians were uninterested in substantive talk. The Iranian ambassador excused himself repeatedly. He appeared to have a weak bladder. In fact, he was calling back to his handler, Quds Force leader Qassem Suleimani, and, in later talks, meeting in a separate room with Jafari. While the talks yielded no ground with the Iranians directly, they were, like the Khazali documents, helpful with Maliki. The unseriousness of the Iranians in these talks did a lot to convince him that he could not dissuade them from their nefarious meddling in his country.
* * *
That spring, two new TF 714 people had joined Graeme’s reconciliation cell. In February, John Christian—the Green colonel who had earlier commanded TF 16, including during its push into the western Euphrates River valley—returned to Iraq. With considerable time in Iraq since the summer of 2003, and trained as a foreign area officer, he was well suited for the task. He now came to work on a movement he’d seen the early glimmers of firsthand on the upper Euphrates, where the Albu Mahal had turned, unsuccessfully, on Al Qaeda in Iraq in the summer of 2005.
Having John Christian on the cell was crucial to me. He had commanded in the same squadron that had picked up many of the guys now being considered for release, and he could pose the problem to colleagues in stark terms. “I’ve done the math,” John would say, “and it’s going to take us two hundred and forty-seven years to kill them all.” Reconciliation was the alternative. While most in the task force quickly grasped the logic, stomachs turned when it came to actually freeing terrorists. John’s history of shared sacrifice gave the project essential credibility.
John came to me that spring as he started work with Graeme.
“You know, sir,” he said, “this involves meeting with a lot of generals. I don’t like talking to generals or dealing with their offices.”
“Neither do I, John,” I joked.
So John proposed bringing on an experienced Department of Defense civilian, Anne Meree, who had impressed me when I had met her two years earlier and—to Graeme’s marvel—was able to get just about anyone in D.C. on the phone. With the addition of John and Anne Meree, the team—which also included an SAS officer, picked by Graeme, and an American intelligence representative—became, in Graeme’s words, four blokes and a bird. The cell was small and, during the crescendo of the war, demanded improvisation. Their office was a small plywood cube accessed by a flimsy molded-wood door, which sat like an island in the middle of the ballroom on the east side of the embassy. Every morning, the team gathered in Graeme’s office and combined the intelligence reports from their respective organizations—TF 714, the Coalition, and the British and American intelligence agencies.
Between these meetings, whenever he could manage a moment free, Graeme stole away from his office and went to the area across from the MNF-I headquarters in the Green Zone, where, behind tall blast walls, lay the combat support hospital. Called “the cash” from its acronym, it was the Coalition’s main emergency room. Helicopters descended and departed throughout the day and night as nurses and medics waited on the edges of the helipad poised with stretchers. Inside, its hallways were filled with the injured, beneath blankets and clear plastic tubing that snaked around them like vines. Graeme spent time with the young medics and staff, men and women with thousand-yard stares. Their long days and nights were spent taking in the ruined frames of young people who had come to Iraq in the peak of their physical fitness. Graeme met men and women with everything to live for who arrived at the hospital, quite literally, in bits.
Graeme carried that emotional weight into the room each time he sat down across from men whose groups were fighting our own. These meetings were not negotiations—no rewards were offered. Graeme tried instead to slowly forge a mutual respect—even a contemptuous one—based upon an understanding of the other’s character and motivations and a recognition that both men were trying to do right by their clans. This meant getting beyond the bluster of who could outlast the other, whose force had more men and limbs to sacrifice in the contest.
In the case of Ansar, FSEC sought to convince its leadership of the truth from the Coalition’s perspective. First, the Coalition was not there to convert them to Christianity, as they had feared. Second, Ansar would be better off the further they were from Al Qaeda, which had shown a disregard for Iraqi aspirations and a contempt for Iraqi life. Third, AQI was one of the main reasons that the Coalition remained in Iraq. Finally, in the sectarian war AQI continued to provoke, the Iranian-backed militias—or “Safavids,” as the Sunni insurgents sneeringly called them—were going to win, and the Sunnis faced potential slaughter. The sooner AQI was neutralized, the better it would be for Iraqi Sunnis and the quicker Ansar would see the Coalition leave.
Ansar would not turn and fight with the Coalition. But leaders who had seen the light might lead the group to downgrade from an AQI-allied jihadist force to another insurgent organization with political demands. Short of that, these leaders could sow doubt and discord.
Graeme’s discussions had already showed promise, and given greater latitude by Petraeus, the reconciliation cell pressed hard on other fronts. Graeme expanded his efforts wider than the Ansar leadership. Among others, Graeme contacted and vetted Abu Azzam, a former Sunni insurgent leader who wanted to partner with the Iraqi government; by July, Azzam had twenty-three hundred men patrolling the streets of Abu Ghraib city. Graeme met that winter and spring with the mayor of Sadr City, Rahim al-Daraji, working to check the sectarian killing emanating from the slum and seeking to win safe passage for Coalition forces to enter in advance of the surge campaign to control Baghdad that summer. Their talks were cut short when Daraji was ambushed on March 15, 2007, near Habibiyah Square in Baghdad, leaving the Sadr City police chief dead and the mayor riddled with shrapnel.
The Ansar efforts, meanwhile, continued to show promise. So it fell to John Christian to meet with a particularly unsavory leader of Ansar captured the previous November. An avowed enemy of our task force, Abu Mustafa was a founding member of Ansar and the leader of its operations in Iraq. Most notorious, he masterminded the suicide attack two years earlier on the mess tent in FOB Marez that had killed an operative from our task force. John flew regularly to Camp Cropper, where he met with Mustafa—a big, smelly man with a large head, thick mustache, and bulbous nose. And yet in spite of everything unseemly about this man, FSEC became convinced that Abu Mustafa, like Abu Wail, believed and could in turn convince a core mass of AAS that AQI’s program would ultimately spell disaster for Iraqi Sunnis. Thus, FSEC worked to prevent a potential merger of the two groups.
Because Petraeus, as MNF-I commander, had the sole authority to release prisone
rs, FSEC would need to present its case to him at our weekly meetings. It would be a difficult decision.
* * *
As I had done with Casey, I flew down to Baghdad every Friday that I was in Iraq to meet with General Petraeus and the other senior commanders. Part of the battle for Baghdad had already been fought, without the Coalition. By the spring of 2007, Shia militias methodically pushing westward had ethnically cleansed many of the neighborhoods. Flags of different colors flapped on rooftops of different neighborhoods. In an attempt to stem the violence, long lines of tall blast barriers segmented neighborhoods as the Coalition walled off the city into a honeycomb of cement-encircled enclaves to immobilize the roving militias and cars packed to the brim with bombs. The city felt like it was slowly dying.
Upon arrival at Camp Victory, we drove to the Water Palace, headquarters of both MNF-I and its subordinate command Multi-National Corps–Iraq, or MNC-I. Al Faw was an imposing marble structure perched in the middle of a turquoise man-made lake. As we passed armed guards and entered the cool, cavernous foyer of polished marble floors, I often had images of General Allenby in Cairo, a soldier on the edge of the empire.
As George Casey had done, Dave met with key subordinates for an informal lunch discussion. Around a rectangular table with Dave at the head sat his deputy, Graeme Lamb; his senior enlisted adviser, Command Sergeant Major Marvin Hill; three-star operational commanders Ray Odierno leading MNC-I, Jim Dubik at the Multi-National Security Transition Comamand–Iraq, and me at TF 714; and the key one- and two-star generals responsible for contracting, public affairs, engineering, detainee operations, and other functions. The talk was all business, but unscripted. It was an important time to bring busy leaders together.
As was evident in our weekly meetings, one facet of Dave Petraeus’s genius was to scan an often-cluttered field, recognize a good thing or an able commander, and throw his personal energy and hunger and the brunt of his organization behind it. He scrambled to capitalize on the emerging Awakening movement, creating the Sons of Iraq program and giving Graeme greater latitude. In a campaign where demonstrable progress was essential, Dave’s ability to create or harness energy was indispensable.
My Share of the Task Page 39