We entered the house, which was split by a long central hallway. In the second room on the left, eight men were kneeling on the concrete floor. They were enjoying a comfortable conversation with Davila’s Marines. Then the scouts, with their black ski masks, entered the room. I watched the demeanor of each man on the floor rapidly change. Eyes grew wide. Mouths dropped.
Without asking any questions, Abu Tiba began to angrily address each man by name. He moved to an older teenager who sat only a few yards from me. He kicked the kid in the leg and pulled his hair. The scout looked at me and said the kid’s name over and over. I was about to tell him to stop, and then I realized I wasn’t hearing the name for the first time. Pulling out my list of terrorists of Julayba, I realized that the kid was Ali Siyagah’s personal driver.
“Davila, bag and tag this guy,” I said, pointing at the kid for the squad leader.
Abu Tiba went around the room. The driver and other young boys on the floor began to cry. The poor bastards knew the game was up. Two more of the men, who looked like they should have been in college, were Ali Siyagah’s bodyguards. I was amazed that these terrorists were openly admitting who they were to the scouts. Ali Siyagah, however, was not in the house. His loyal bodyguards and driver explained that he had fled across the river after Operation Churubusco.
Abu Tiba questioned all of the men but decided to take only four. He said the other four were locals who had been forced into performing small tasks for al Qaeda. As in the previous house, the women and the children, as well as the four males who stayed behind, received the propaganda speech from Abu Tiba.
I walked out of the house. Sergeant Sempert and a few of the scouts were pushing the parked vehicles down the dirt path, away from the house. Somebody informed the scouts that Sempert was an engineer because once the cars were far enough away, they all began to mimic Captain Smith’s previous gesture of an explosion. Sempert was initially amused but quickly grew annoyed.
Before the explosion, I headed back to the team guarding the chubby Iraqi who had led us to the house. When I got there, a scout was questioning him.
“Hello, Daly,” said the scout. I was surprised that he spoke English.
“Are we going to let him go?” I asked, recognizing the scout as the leader of the team with Holloway’s squad.
“No, no,” he replied. “He led us here because he knows very much about the terrorists because he is one. You must blindfold him so the others don’t think he worked with us. It is dangerous for his family.”
“Uh . . . okay,” I responded. I went back to the house and asked the general the same question about releasing the chubby kid, and he gave me the same response. Holloway bagged and tagged him.
Davila’s squad finished up with the processing and a detailed search of the home. When we were ready to go, Holloway’s squad removed the family from the home and brought them 200 meters north to their neighbors. We wanted them to be as far away from the exploding cars as possible. From their agonizing sobs, the family seemed to think they were about to be executed.
Sempert set the charges and began a short countdown. The two cars were destroyed in simultaneous blasts shortly thereafter. The thundering noise produced shrieks from the women. It looked like one had fainted, but I quickly decided that she was faking. A Marine helped her to her feet. Then she and the rest of the family walked back to the house.
The platoon was now in the vicinity of Gixxer, somewhere south of the Albu Musa mosque. We had hit only two houses and held five detainees. I wondered how the other squads were faring.
“Sir.”
“What is it, Eakin?” I asked.
“Battalion wants to know if we started the fires all over Julayba,” he said. I informed Rage 6 that the battalion was asking questions about fires being set across our area of operations. We were responsible for two: the burning remains of a couple Chevy Impalas. The other squads were probably setting their own. At least, it seemed that way; 1/9 INF was saying that they counted five separate fires from their UAV feed.
I snatched the handset from Eakin and listened to 1/9’s operations officer order Captain Smith to stop destroying private property without permission. Watching Abu Tiba coordinate with his scouts and a Marine team leader which houses needed to be hit, I heard the OPSO tell Captain Smith to “get your act together.” Rage 6 didn’t respond over the radio but chose his present company to express his thoughts.
“Fucking watch officers,” he said.
I took the opportunity to correct him. “You mean battle captains,” I said, referring to the proper terminology for the army’s desk jockeys. Watch-O was the Marine Corps version.
“Shut up, FO.”
Davila’s and Holloway’s squads split up, each led by their respective team of scouts. In a few hours, they cleared each target building within their objective areas. It was an unusual experience. The scouts led the platoons, based on their knowledge of the terrain, not on the best tactical route. On multiple occasions, we walked along the same road or alley, back and forth, searching for an al Qaeda’s home. The third time around, the scout would recognize the residence and direct the Marines to clear it. The result was a growing trail of detainees.
Around 0400, Rage 2 was finishing up with their assigned targets. We headed west toward the intersection of Gixxer and Route Nova to assist Rage 4. Lieutenant Grubb had the most targets and the largest objective area.
We cleared a string of houses and hit the fourth one in a row. It was unusual because no one was detained in the first three, and most of the homes we searched were spread out, never consecutive. When Davila’s squad made it into the fourth, Abu Tiba informed him, through Jack, not to bother with the clear. The squad was standing in Abu Tiba’s house, and he wanted some tea. He said we had cleared the previous three homes to make it look like we were searching for someone, rather than making a visit. Although it was a tactical waste of time, I found the event somewhat comical. The humor allowed me to join Abu Tiba in a cup of tea.
At the end of the break, we continued. With every house we entered, the night began to lose darkness. Soon I found myself half a mile away from COP Rage, standing in an alleyway fully illuminated by a rising sun. I was highly uncomfortable with the idea of having to drag the detainees back in the light of day. Al Qaeda was awakening on that particular morning to some bad news. If they knew we were still roaming the streets, they were going to try to find us.
Captain Smith emerged from the last house we had cleared, with the scouts in tow. The general was begging him to continue the search for a few targets. Rage 6 didn’t see any reason to. There were twenty detainees from the platoons, and Rage 3 was already back at the COP. He ordered Rage 2 and Rage 4 to the COP by the fastest route. The result was forty Marines and a dozen ski-mask-clad Iraqis walking down the middle of Route Nova. With the knowledge that six IEDs had been detonated along this stretch of Nova in the previous week, I wasn’t very happy about the route. I scanned the dirt more than usual. The scouts, on the other hand, conversed with one another and ignored their surroundings. They seemed to think there was nothing to fear. They were right. We made it back to the COP.
“Abu Ali was awesome,” said Lieutenant Jahelka. His comment was followed by stories from lieutenants Thomas and Grubb to the same effect. Three of the scouts were gaining notoriety among the platoon commanders: Abu Ali, Abu Tiba, and Salim.
The XO was less enthused. “Which one of you dingleberries is taking my place?” he asked. Trotter had been serving as the watch officer for the last eight hours and wasn’t involved in the mission. Boredom had overpowered his mind. Lieutenant Thomas took his post.
Captain Smith came into the COC, after rising from two hours of rest that followed the mission. He informed the group that the scouts were not going home yet. Rage 6 was going to use the same lie as before. Then that night he would take a smaller group to hit the dozen targets not yet actioned due to the lack of darkness.
“You think they are going to buy that truck
story again, sir?” asked Jahelka.
“Maybe.”
Maybe was good enough. The scouts might not have bought the story, but some of them executed the second mission and helped detain seven individuals. I stayed at the COP. The amount of paperwork required for the first twenty was overwhelming. To make matters worse, our one THT (tactical human-intelligence team) soldier refused to question the detainees. When I pressed him, his response was, “I can’t force them to say anything.” The nineteen-year-old specialist was a far cry from Sergeant Champion. The lack of initiative by this soldier sparked a bolder thought in my mind.
For the entire day, the general tried to get access to the detainees. Technically, I was not allowed to question the detainees, so I obviously declined his requests. But it was clear from working with the scouts that they would be capable of gathering significant information if given the opportunity. I remembered Sheikh Hatim, his son, and the other HVIs captured during Operation Churubusco and how they hadn’t been questioned by THT either. I brought it up in the form of a pointed question to Captain Smith when he returned from the second mission.
“Sir, what if the scouts question the detainees under my supervision?” I asked.
Twenty minutes later, I had convinced Captain Smith that it was a good idea.
11
RUNNING OUT OF LUCK
0700, January 27, 2007
I walked out of the mansion’s big red front door. What had been an Iraqi’s home just a week earlier now resembled a fortress. Hundreds of concrete barriers formed a perimeter around COP Rage’s two structures: the mansion and an unfinished house next to it. Thousands of sandbags lined the mansion’s walls, roof, and windows. The empty shell of a house next door offered no such protection. The only additions to its exterior were a few sheets of white cloth that covered the windows, preventing distant observers from seeing inside.
The fortification of COP Rage, which began when Sergeant Karras kicked down the mansion’s door, was continuous. A few hundred more sandbags were piled on the ground in front of me, awaiting their final resting place. This was in addition to the camouflage netting that covered the four wooden, sandbagged fighting positions on the roof and the two similar towers that stood over the compound’s two entrances. One gate was at the northeast corner of the compound, connecting to Route Nova; the second opened to the dirt-path access road that James Thomas had passed during Operation Churbusco. Both of them were blocked by vehicles and numerous strands of barbed wire.
Combat Outpost Rage: The Combat Outpost Rage and the immediate terrain around it.
Ambushed: The open field where Rage 1 was ambushed in early February 2007.
The defensive materials arrived from Camp Ramadi in daily convoys led by Lieutenant Trotter. Every night the XO drove through checkpoints 295 and 296. His trucks usually got shot up, but it was never anything serious. After one convoy, Trotter was supervising the unloading of the logistical vehicles carrying the company’s supplies. He watched as two female soldiers hopped out of their large truck and began talking about getting lit up by insurgent rifle fire at 296. “No, they didn’t!” said one of the women. I could see that the mere sound of a woman discussing the danger of combat made Trotter uneasy. I went down the three steps of the mansion’s front rotunda. The men walking behind me were thinking of ways to make the twenty-seven detainees sitting in the empty building next door uncomfortable. As I went through the COP’s parking lot, the size of two football fields, I could hear the general and his men discussing their plans in Arabic. Thirty minutes earlier, I had informed them they would be allowed to question the detainees. Now they were strategizing. The scouts had done this before. A few even admitted to being interrogators in Saddam’s army.
I walked into the tan cinder-block building. There were no doors and no glass in the windows. Only the central foyer had a real floor; the floors of rest of the surrounding rooms mostly consisted of broken pieces of concrete or rocks. On the first floor, three rooms faced the south, each opening to the foyer and isolated from the other neighboring rooms. On the northern side, a spiraling staircase rose to the second floor, which had no roof and was to be used only for firing positions in dire circumstances. Facing the parking lot out front was another large, elongated room full of plywood and two-by-fours. It adjoined a narrow hallway that led to an opening where a front door should have been, the same hallway the ski-mask-clad scouts and I had walked through.
I met the two Marines standing guard duty in the foyer and gave them an update on what was about to happen. The twenty-seven detainees were currently sitting in one room, each blindfolded and flexi-cuffed. Each of them had an index card draped around his neck with a number on it. The numbers went, logically, from one to twenty-seven and were written in both English and Arabic. The scouts would go into the room, identify which Iraqis they wanted to question, and place them in the middle of the three rooms. Then, one at a time, each detainee would enter the remaining empty room of the three that faced south. Roughly ten scouts would be waiting for him.
The general asked me to have the guards “play games” with the men who waited to be questioned. It took a translation from Jack until I realized that the general wanted to find out about the detainees’ personalities. One of the scouts would watch the games, nothing more than boot camp gimmicks of “get up, get down” scenarios. The scout would take note of the men who did what the guards said, essentially those who tried to please us, with the idea that they would be more likely to talk. This would also distract the waiting detainees, potentially allowing the individual being questioned to feel more at ease that no one would hear what he was saying.
I took a seat among a bunch of jagged rocks in the room where the questioning would be conducted. The scouts took about ten minutes to figure out who would be questioned first: they chose about a third of the twenty-seven detainees. In the middle room, the two Marines yelled at the detainees to stand up. Obviously, not many of the Iraqis understood English. Most of them remained sitting. So, the guards had to help them to their feet. Once all were standing, the guards yelled at them to get down. Again, the process of having to assist some of the men repeated itself. In the middle of the confusion, one scout snatched the first man to be questioned. It was Ali Siyagah’s driver.
They led the man into the empty room and pushed him into the far corner. The general sat down on my left. Jack, the interpreter, followed him seconds later on my right. The general held a black leather case with gold Arabic script lining the top flap. A map of Iraq was emblazoned on the cover. The general opened it and started to review a few pages inside. They appeared to be diagrams of various insurgent networks. The other scouts distracted me from looking at the pages, which I couldn’t read anyway. The questioning began.
The detainee was encircled by six or seven scouts, all of them leaning only inches from his face. One scout fired off questions. I could tell that he repeated the question when he got an answer he didn’t like. An older scout, with graying hair and a beard, took copious notes on a yellow pad. Sometimes he asked questions for clarification. The rest of the scouts simply listened. When the detainee said something they knew was false, the quiet men would lean over and tell the lead interrogator what they knew. The quiet men were the locals, the neighbors of the detainee, and knew everything about the man. For good reason they didn’t ask any questions. The detainee might have recognized their voices, placing the lives of the scouts and their families in danger.
I continued to sit on the jagged rocks, fascinated by the process. I could hear the Marines in the other room having fun by playing their own version of Simon says with the detainees. As the general had anticipated, most of the younger detainees were competing for the Marines ’ attention. Whoever did first what the Marines said, received shouts of praise. Most of the older detainees ignored the guards and still had to be manually picked up or sat down. In the room where I sat, Siyagah’s driver was blabbing on about something. I assumed it was good, because the scout with the ye
llow pad was writing furiously.
Then Abu Ali, who was one of the silent scouts, left the room. He sort of stormed off, which I found somewhat surprising. The lead interrogator began to repeat the same question over and over. He raised his right hand high above his head. I thought he was stretching or something. I was wrong. In one fell swoop the open palm went from high to low, smacking the detainee squarely on the side of the face. The sound of palm meeting skin was so loud, I could feel the stinging on my own cheek.
I looked at the general, whom I had specifically told not to let his men hit or manhandle the detainees. I was about to tell him to stop the questioning. The scouts were clearly not capable of containing their hatred for al Qaeda. But I noticed that the general wasn’t looking back at me; his eyes were searching the face of someone standing behind me who was the real decision maker. I turned around and spotted Captain Smith. As I did, Abu Ali walked back into the room with a green garden hose. Before I could ask him why he had such an object, he leaned over to Jack and whispered in Arabic.
“Daly, can he hit the detainee with the hose? It won’t leave any marks or bruises,” relayed Jack. It was the worst possible timing. I didn’t know how long Captain Smith had been standing behind me, but if he had just walked in, it would’ve looked as if I was complicit in the beating of our detainees. I motioned for Abu Ali to lean in closer to me. “Hell, no,” I said. I laughed ever so slightly and smiled at Abu Ali, attempting to minimize the effect of my denying his request. Then Captain Smith spoke up in a hushed tone: “General, if he hits him again, you are done.”
The general nodded in agreement. He got up and walked over to the lead questioner, the same scout who had hit the detainee. He grabbed his hand and waved it around so the other scouts saw what he was doing. Then he shook his head no. The group acknowledged the general’s directive and continued questioning. Captain Smith went back to the COC.
Rage Company Page 27