by Ed Darack
That intel trickle would roar to a torrent of information—actionable, specific information—that would allow Wood to finalize his plan within just a few weeks. ⅔’s main element had wasted no time jumping into the campaign throughout their respective provinces as they arrived in Afghanistan, keeping at least 50 percent of the Marines of each base on patrols at all times—through the mountains, in the towns and villages of the provinces, sleeping, eating, and living with the Afghans themselves. And while sophisticated SIGINT mechanisms churned away for Westerfield, his big payoff came as a dividend of this outside-the-wire mind-set when Second Lieutenant Regan Turner, commander of Whiskey Company’s Second Platoon, ventured into the village of Khewa, about ten miles northeast of Jalalabad in the Kuz Kunar district of Nangarhar province in mid-June, just after the official turnover of authority to ⅔ from 3/3. Turner, a quick-witted and disarming officer whose natural charm transcends pretty much all language and cultural barriers, scored what would be the first of a small number of pivotal interviews with credible intel sources during a meeting with elders in the small village. Removing his flak jacket, ballistic glasses, and helmet to best engage the elders at the shura meeting through eye contact and nonintimidating body posturing, Turner and his interpreter sat and drank tea with the locals as the group went through rounds of introductions.
About thirty minutes into the meeting, Turner met a man named L.C. (his actual name omitted for security reasons) who proudly stated that he fought the Soviets as a mujahideen and then took up arms against the Taliban—whom L.C. despised so much that he sacrificed three years with his family in order to fight against the much-hated group. Regan, a diligent student of the region’s history, smiled that he was now sitting face-to-face with a warrior who not only helped fend off the Communists, but fought against those who willfully harbored Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks. Taking a very easy, relatively passive approach to his HUMINT work (at first), Turner didn’t ask L.C. a single intel question during their introduction—and as it turned out, he didn’t have to: within a minute of their meeting each other, the former mujahideen uttered the words that Regan wanted to hear more than any others: Ahmad Shah. Westerfield had instructed Turner to be on the lookout for anything and everything on Shah, whom the intel officer personally considered to be a high value target, but warned the lieutenant that he might not hear as much as a peep about him from anyone. L.C. seemed to know everything that Westerfield didn’t—information that the intel officer desperately yearned to uncover. “His family is here, in Khewa. Right here!” Turner’s interpreter, “Bobby,” yelped—not just translating L.C.’s words, but emulating his enthusiasm. “L.C. has nothing personally against Ahmad Shah—really, he just hates the Taliban and the al-Qaeda guys and these other azz-holes.” Turner laughed at Bobby’s reference, which he took to mean HIG and other extremist types. Regan burned through pages in his notebook as L.C. rattled off the vital details to Bobby. “Ahmad is a real azz-hole. Really. He killed another man just because he wanted his wife—and then he stole her and now she’s his wife! No shitting, Commander Regan! Really, this big azz-hole, he works with the Taliban, and the al-Qaeda guys.”
“Calm down, Bobby. I know. He’s an azz-hole,” Turner carefully enunciated. “But just give me the facts. This is important.”
“Right. My sorries.” Bobby then continued, “Shah and his three brothers, Muhummad Azam, Ruhola Amin, and Palawan, all sell opium and have illegal weapons throughout the area, and that supports Ahmad Shah’s fightings. And the people around here don’t like him, especially for murdering the man for his wife.”
“Bobby, ask L.C. where Shah is actually from, any other names he uses, and where he operates.”
“Right, sir.” The normally soft-spoken interpreter jumped back into the Pashto intel dump with L.C. “He is from the Dara-I-Nur, north of here, this means ‘the Valley of Light.’ This is the area that was the Kafirs’, but now enlightened. His full name is Ahmad Shah Dara-I-Nur, Ahmad Shah of the Valley of the Enlightened Ones.”
“Wow.” Turner shook his head, “Is he a Nuristani?” Westerfield’s gonna flip when he hears all this, he thought.
“No, not from Nuristan itself, but almost Nuristan. He looks Nuristani. Thin, light-colored eyes, and has an orange beard. He is midthirties-years-old. He speaks in the Pashto, the Dari, and the Pashai—he is a Pashai. He is the only person in this entire area to have really supported the Taliban. He is such an angry man, that is why. He went to seek Mullah Omar, and he fought for the Taliban, and then also the al-Qaeda.”
“And where does he do his attacks, his ambushes,” the second lieutenant asked, inciting a further spate of L.C.’s hand gesturing and pointing, speaking so fast that Turner, who knew a little Pashto, couldn’t pick out a single word.
“The Korangal. High in the Korangal, he has people up there who protect him, they hide weapons and supplies for him up there. It is the village of Chichal mostly, but also the lower village of Korangal, far up the valley. They are Pashai, too, and he pays them. He ambushes the Marines in the Korangal, and he sets off IEDs on the Pech Road against the Marines and the police. From the top of the Sawtalo Sar mountain he can see everything. He has a small team of about ten to twenty men with him who he directs during ambushes, using the ICOMs for communication, as he is often not part of the actual attack—but sometimes he is, and he always carries a PK machine gun. He also has phones, the Roshan cellular for when he is in the cities and the Thuraya satellite for when he is in the Korangal and on Sawtalo Sar, to talk to his contacts in eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
“Pakistan? Does he ever go into Pakistan, and if so, where?” Turner leaned in, sipping tea with his left hand as he shook out his right from all the note taking.
“The Shamshatoo camp. By Peshawar. He lives there much of the time when he is not out here.”
“Bobby, has L.C. ever told this to anyone else from coalition forces?”
“No. He says that you are the first. And one more thing.” Bobby turned to listen to L.C. speak. “He says that Ahmad Shah is calling himself a Taliban commander, and intends to destroy the elections in September. He has hired people to watch the roads for him, build the remote bombs, and bring in rockets and mortars and guns and RPGs. He is very hungry for the power. He wants many people for his army, but he only has ten or fifteen men with him now.” Shah seemed to be leveraging his local ties to influence people in the high Korangal who resisted all outside influences, even the early Taliban.
“Can anyone else confirm what he is saying. I believe him—but I need to confirm with another source.”
Shaded relief map of the Sawtalo Sar region, including the Korangal Valley, the Shuryek Valley, the Chowkay Valley, the Narang Valley, the Pech River Valley, and the Kunar Valley
Bobby and L.C. continued talking, then the former mujahideen gestured for Regan to jump into his truck. L.C. drove the lieutenant to the home of another man who was involved in security of the region. He confirmed everything L.C. had told Regan, adding also a list of Ahmad Shah’s relatives who didn’t support the terrorist, and told Regan two of Shah’s aliases: Molawi Ibrahim, Ismael, Mullah Mohammed Ismael, and Commander Ismael. “Thank you, thank you both, I’ll see you again.” Turner noted a list of the village’s needs to pass to battalion HQ, then headed back to brief Westerfield.
“You’re amazing, Turner. Absolutely amazing.”
“Thanks, sir. Just doing my job, though.”
“Get a picture of him?”
“No. They didn’t offer one.”
“That’s fine. What you’ve given me is what we need to proceed, it’ll get Tommy Wood rollin’ on the final op plan.”
Westerfield pored over Turner’s notes, compiling a detailed picture of Shah, his small cell, and his area of operation. To Westerfield, the terrorist leader clearly was using his Pashai background to co-opt the locals in the Korangal, who clung to their Safi beliefs. But Shah’s connections seemed to span a broad fundamentalist spectrum, fro
m the Pashtun-dominated Taliban to the Arab-rooted apocalyptic al-Qaeda. But because he spent time—actually lived in—Hekmatayar’s Shamshatoo, Westerfield believed that Shah’s primary allegiance, and substantial financial, personnel, and armament support, came from HIG or associated Pakistani connections. Hekmatyar, who was known in the late sixties to throw battery acid on women who dared to show their wrists and ankles while walking down streets in Kabul, proved to be a continuing thorn in the side of democratic evolution well into the twenty-first century in the region. Far more important—from a tactical standpoint—than his specific connections, Shah seemed to have established a firm network: safe houses, financial aid, arms caches, paid runners and observers, which he intended to utilize to dash the prospects in the Kunar that the Marines had come to secure: the upcoming safe, unfettered democratic national elections.
Gazing at 1:50,000 scale maps of the specific region where Turner reported the location of Shah’s operations—in and around the village of Chichal and the summit of Sawtalo Sar—Westerfield immediately realized that he was staring at the catbird seat for any insurgent or terrorist cell in the region. Sawtalo Sar is a domineering massif, a north-south-trending five-mile-long phalanx of twisted, dark earth that rises over 6,000 vertical feet from its water-lapped base on the Pech River to its apex at 9,282 feet above sea level. Chichal village, a loosely defined medley of stone houses and large timber smuggler-built mansion compounds, lies near the very summit of the peak. An extensive trail network, splaying out from the main “Super Highway” trail that runs along the crest of the peak’s north ridge, interconnects the village’s houses, pastures, and terraces. The mountain is densely covered in Himalayan deodar cedar and broad-leaf ferns on its upper shoulders; numerous rock outcroppings grant vistas of the Pech Valley, the Korangal Valley (of which the peak defines the eastern wall), and the Shuryek Valley, of which Sawtalo Sar forms the western periphery. From Chichal and Sawtalo Sar’s summit, Westerfield noted that Shah could control a number of small units of his team, ambushing convoys, emplacing rocket attacks, and lobbing mortars into villages, through his ICOM two-way radio.
Topographic map of the summit region of Sawtalo Sar
Needing further detail than his maps supplied, Westerfield studied oblique (sideways, as opposed to orthogonal, or “straight down” view) submeter resolution MQ-1 Predator UAV imagery of the upper Korangal, upper Shuryek, and Sawtalo Sar summit region taken just hours earlier. Wood and Westerfield, having compiled a complete vetted intel set, noted a series of “Named Areas of Interest” (NAIs), numbered one through four where they felt Shah would most likely locate himself and his cell. They designated Korangal Village as NAI-1 (while this location represented the least likely location for Shah and his men to be found, they believed that villagers might hide weapons for him there); they denoted Chichal village as NAI-2; the duo marked a network of terraces and small structures of and around the Northeast Gulch of the Peak as NAI-3; and they designated a small section of the north ridge of the peak just to the north of NAI-2 and NAI-3 as NAI-4. SIGINT hits that continually rolled in off Shah’s Thuraya and Roshan phones indicated that the cell leader and his men had the highest probability of locating themselves at NAI-3, with NAI-2 a close second.
With the target areas identified, Wood and Westerfield set out to locate observation posts (OPs) that would grant the clearest, most direct views of the NAIs, yet allow a small reconnaissance and surveillance team to remain well concealed from any roving timber harvester, goat herder, village traveler, or bad guy meandering along any of the countless trails the duo noted on the “Pred” feed. While more difficult to identify than the relatively large NAIs, the high-resolution black-and-white imagery did provide just enough detail for the two to identify two observation posts: OP-1 would lie within some dense trees at the top of the peak’s Northeast Spur just over a half mile to the northeast of Sawtalo Sar’s main summit, granting a view of NAI-3 and
Topographic map of the summit region of Sawtalo Sar, showing named areas of interest, insertion point, designated helicopter landing zones, and designated observation posts for Operation Red Wings
NAI-4; and they chose a point about a mile due north of the peak’s main summit directly off the Super Highway to be OP-2, which would give a view of NAI-1 and NAI-2. Wood and Westerfield then chose four helicopter landing zones (HLZs) for the insertion of the force that would cordon and strike the NAI the reconnaissance and surveillance team positively identified as Shah’s: HLZ Shar Pei, on a broad terrace in NAI-3; HLZ Swift, just to the east of the Super Highway inside NAI-4; HLZ Navajo, also just to the east of the Super Highway but north of NAI-4; and HLZ Blown, which the two saw as tactically advantageous—except for the trees growing from the well-positioned, flat parcel of land; those trees would need to get blown (with satchel charges) should the reconnaissance and surveillance team deem that location necessary for the main cordon and strike phase of the op, hence the name.
Wood, intent on using the battalion for the entire ground portion of the op with attached Afghan National Army soldiers for its latter phases, now needed to get buy-in from CJSOTF-A to allow TF-Brown to insert the main strike and cordon teams. He and First Lieutenant Rob Long, the Scout/Sniper Platoon commander who was “double-billeted” as Westerfield’s primary assistant (known as the S-2 Alpha) ventured to Bagram to meet with the CJSOTF-A commanders and Kamiya himself to pitch the mission. But no dice. Any SOF elements, even support elements like the 160th, couldn’t be employed by conventional forces—those were the rules, mandated by doctrine. For the mission to proceed with the pivotal TF-Brown support, Wood was told, CJSOTF-A would require ⅔ to utilize a SOF ground element—either Special Forces, Rangers, or Navy SEALs—for the direct-action phase of the mission. Although the Marines developed the op, CJSOTF-A would force ⅔ to designate SOF ground units as the supported, main elements; in return, CJSOTF-A would allow the 160th to support the Marines by inserting them for the cordon of the NAI inside which the direct-action team was taking down the targets. Once the direct-action team completed the hit, the Chinooks of the 160th would pull the SOF team out, and at that point, the Marines would be the “supported” element. Furthermore, CJSOTF-A mandated that the initial, shaping phase of the op be conducted by a SOF team, and not by Ronin, as they considered those first hours so critical to the subsequent direct-action team’s actions on the objective in phase two of the plan that they simply could not trust a conventional team, regardless of that individual team members’ capabilities, skill sets, and experience. Eggers and Team Ronin were out—without even the slightest hint of a review of their qualifications.
“This is fucking outrageous, Long. Unbelievable. They have us hamstrung. Have you ever heard of such nonsense? All these rules . . . if only we were a MEU, or some type of fucking MAGTF.” The young lieutenant stared blank-faced at Wood. “If we were the BLT [Battalion Landing Team] on a MEU, the Fifty-threes [CH-53E/Ds] would fly no matter what—zero illum. Colonel would say do it and they’d fly,” the major roared.
“Sir, can’t Eggers and his team at least go in with their initial reconnaissance and surveillance team?”
“It’s out! Eggers and his team are already out. They don’t think that our scout/snipers are good enough to lay the tactical groundwork for their main element. And they got the rules on their side. We have to get air support to make this work, and this is the only way. We bring in SOF—and give them the C2 of our op—just to get the hand-me-down use of the air primarily tasked to their teams. What a system. We’re at the mercy of SOCOM rules.”
Wood took a step back and tried to calm himself. “Okay. Basically, they want us to split the C2, they got command and control for our mission for the first part of the op, then we’re supposed to be ‘supported’ by them once they exfil . . .” Wood pondered the March 2002 Operation Anaconda—which he’d studied in depth—where the C2 was virtually nonexistent as was SOF-conventional-forces integration. Wood, who’d been raised as an enlisted grunt and then a
s an infantry officer to strictly adhere to the concept of unity of command/effort, couldn’t comprehend how such a convoluted structure ever enveloped his battalion. “We got no choice. We do it their way or we don’t do it at all. If we choose the latter, then we might as well be sitting back in Oahu sucking down Mai Tais at Duke’s.”
“Roger, sir.” Long tapped his wrist slowly . . . rhythmically—forebodingly.
“We get the air we need, we get the op done, and they get their rules fulfilled. And hopefully things don’t go haywire like they did in that goat-rope masterpiece Anaconda,” Wood seethed.