Hunting Down Saddam

by Robin Moore

  25 March 2003

  —Maintained observation of TAI 2 and OP site. No air due to weather—overcast.

  26 March 2003

  —Maintained two OP sites—Hill 725 overlooking TAI 2 intersection and vic LF531707 overlooking north of Ayn Sifni. Targets have been plotted but still no air.

  27 March 2003

  —0500Z, CW2 [censored], SFC [censored], and SSG [censored] move off OP site, move back to 12th Supay Barracks for refit, still no air.

  28 March 2003

  —0600Z, went to Duhok to speak to the CDR about air and then back up to Hill 725.

  29 March 2003

  —1400Z, Still operating OP on Hill 725 and established a new OP site vic. Peshmerga checkpoint below Hill 725. Received CAS with 2 × F-18s at 2030Z (dropped 2× 500lb JDAMS & 6 × 500lb LGBU) on bunker complex N of Ayn Sifni. Then worked a B-52 w/ 12 × 2000lb JDAMS (dropped 6 bombs on EN positions at 2230Z, 24 EN KIA, 50 EN WIA and 6 bombs on a suspected logistics site).

  30 March 2003

  —1400Z, moved 3 man OP vic. 512673 still continue to observe TAI 2 from main OP on 725.

  31 March 2003

  —0400Z, CAS with 2 sorties; 2 × F-14s and 2 × F/A-18s 6 × 500lb bombs dropped vic. Hill 613 (5 KIA & 10 WIA).

  —1100Z, IZ moved two 57mm ADA pieces to the west of Ayn Sifni, OP on 725 worked 2 × F-14s dropping 8 × 500lb bombs—destroying 1 × 57mm. (AC[-130] had hard time identifying second 57mm and hit the destroyed 57mm 4 additional times).

  —1600Z, CAS with 2 × F/A-18s 2 × 2000lb JDAMS dropped on Hill 613, slightly off target.

  01 April 2003

  —0900Z, begin observation of what appears to be a withdrawal by the Iraqis from positions 5 kms south of OP 725, sent SALUTE to higher, requested CAS, “NO CAS” and then watched 500 Iraqi soldiers load 6 buses and safely depart area heading south towards Mosul.

  —1100Z, conducted recon along east ridgeline of Hill 725, for possible Raid.

  Kirkuk

  Route 4 runs from Chamchamal to As-Sulaymaniyah, going through a mountain pass with steep, near-impassable angles that are a fatal “choke point” to any attacking force. The Kurds had always held their ground here; the Iraqis had never made it up this far. If an armored force such as Saddam’s army ever made it as far as the pass on Route 4, it would be routed at once. The last great wide-open area was a ridgeline far to the south, which lay in front of Kirkuk. This was where the Iraqi Army had been massed for the last ten years.

  Oil-rich Kirkuk had been home to the Iraqi 8th Infantry Division and the Iraqi 5th Mechanized (Motorized) Infantry Divisions. Through the years of fighting against the Peshmerga, they had moved little by little up Route 4, all the way to the pass into As-Sulaymaniyah, where they could go no farther. What was now left was more a unit of stragglers than a combat-effective force. The Green Berets of 3rd SFG (A) made short work of the remaining Iraqi forces, with CAS in the first few days after they had arrived, though the Iraqis tried to hold their ground on Route 4. This showed the PUK that the operators were worth their weight in gold, and they took them up to where the real fight would be—Chamchamal.

  Chamchamal sat on the main road, some twenty-five miles east of Kirkuk City. The ultimate objective of seizing Kirkuk went hand in hand with 10th SFG (A)’s objective of liberating Mosul—the two northern cities would be used to resupply and reinforce army units in Baghdad once the ground war began to make its way northward from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

  Chamchamal was a far cry from As-Sulaymaniyah, which sat in the protected northeast corner of the Kurdish autonomous zone. In As-Sulaymaniyah, the city was clean. There were Internet cafés on practically every corner, satellite television was popular, and children attended schools in uniforms that reminded the Green Berets of American parochial schools. Chamchamal was the polar opposite. It was not in the safe haven of well within the no-fly zone. It was on the very fringes of Saddam’s Iraq, and here the Peshmerga people felt his brutality the keenest.

  The green line (the area that unofficially separated “Kurdish territory”) ran directly through the town of Chamchamal. A ridge to the immediate west of Chamchamal was home to a dug-in, completely fortified Iraqi Army battalion. That was their deliberate defense, and unknowingly their closest line of troops to the newly arrived Green Berets. These Iraqi positions had been manned for over a decade: well-reinforced bunkers, many trench lines, huge minefields, and one thousand five hundred meters of “no-man’s-land” directly in front of it.

  The Green Berets found a perfect home—a castle right in Chamchamal. The Special Operators watched the Iraqis across the flat, land mine–infested no-man’s-land from the parapets, and calculated their first moves. More soldiers watched from rooftops.

  No-man’s-land was ruined ground; sheep and cattle could not graze on it, and it was hated and feared as much by the people of Chamchamal as it was by the Iraqi soldiers who occupied the mountainside to the west. Not only did the minefields of the no-man’s-land frighten the people, but Iraqi troops had for years fired random shots from their trenches into the town on nothing more than a whim.

  Chamchamal was described by one of the Green Berets from ODA 083 as “comparable to ‘Barter Town,’” which was featured in the 1985 Mel Gibson film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. When the Special Operators arrived in the spring of 2003 it was nearly deserted, yet it had once been home to over fifty thousand inhabitants.

  By April of 2003, after a decade of constant threat, the number of inhabitants had dwindled to only a few hundred solemn-faced Peshmerga fighters, who walked the streets with AK-47s and other rifles slung on their backs. No one stood around idly, and the only event that happened like clockwork, sadly enough, was that the Iraqis shelled the town daily between 1700 and 1800 hours.

  The Peshmerga had set up a vehicle checkpoint right on the edge of town, fashioned out of an old Conex-style metal shipping container. In the words of one of the operators, “That [Conex] had been hit with so many mortars [rounds] … I don’t know what kind of crazy guys could use that [Conex] as a vehicle checkpoint, because basically it was used for target practice by the Iraqis.” It resembled Swiss cheese, totally mangled beyond recognition.

  The road from Chamchamal wound west to Kirkuk through a small mountain pass. On the other side of the pass, less than a thousand meters away, sat the Iraqi checkpoint on the Kirkuk side. The Iraqis could have rolled over Chamchamal at any point, but had chosen instead to keep the citizens of the Peshmerga town under constant threat.

  The condition of the Iraqi soldiers on the ridgelines, however, was worse than the condition of the Peshmerga. The bunkers the Iraqis were forced to live in as they held guard over the town and gateway to Kirkuk were “horrible … terrible,” according to a Green Beret who witnessed the spartan squalor of the Iraqi bunkers firsthand.

  Upon arrival, the Kurds of Chamchamal were wary of the Green Berets. “You never really could trust who was who in that town,” explained a Special Operator. The town’s population was made up of all male soldiers, so there was always the chance that one of the denizens was an Iraqi agent. If the word got out that there were American soldiers present in the town, it could spark an offensive by the Iraqi Army. Tensions ran extremely high.

  The members of ODA 083 dressed like Peshmerga, and were led at night to a rooftop where they could spot the Iraqi battalion on the ridgeline across the no-man’s-land. The next day, every Iraqi position was targeted. It was a free observation post, and the Iraqi emplacements were close enough to be visible to the naked eye.

  Coupled with NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) satellite imagery that the team had brought with them, the targeting process became very easy. Targeting enemy positions with just a map alone was far more difficult, and the chance of misreading the map or the terrain (especially in an area with similar landmarks) not only increased the chance of a miss, but could potentially increase the chance of friendly fire. Friendly fire had devastated the men of ODA 574 in Afghanistan, and accidentally killing
Kurds would be just as horrific. A rapport had not yet been developed, and as the 10th SFG were learning in their sector, a mistake of this kind could potentially be quite costly.

  What wasn’t clearly mapped out from NRO imagery was clearly explained by the Peshmerga HUMINT (Human Intelligence). They had been facing these Iraqis for more than a decade. The Pesh knew exactly what every building contained, and if one bunker looked like a company command post, but was virtually indistinguishable from the one next to it, the answer was given to the Green Berets. Whether it was water-pumping stations or anything else, the PUK militia knew the layout. Previously, the Kurds had been unable to act on their intelligence; now it was put to good use. The permanently fixed Iraqi targets wouldn’t know what had hit them when the Special Forces were through.

  Not only did the Pesh know every nook and cranny of the Iraqi complex, they knew every path that would take the Special Operators to whichever destination in the immediate area that they wanted, and safely. Trust and the initial rapport were forged with the Kurds, which was difficult. Though a little leery at first, the Pesh proved to be very helpful.

  The Kurds in the 3rd SFG (A)’s Area of Operations were right in the middle of Saddam’s “Arabization” Project. Most, if not all of them, were displaced refugees. They were very motivated to get back their land, and most importantly, their oil-rich city of Kirkuk. A tie to certain areas unfathomable to most people drove the Kurds to want their land back more than anything.

  At secret meetings with PUK representatives, the Special Forces were surprised by how Saddam’s legacy of brutality hit home for the Peshmerga in the region. Almost every single one of the Kurds sitting around the table had a story of how Saddam and his regime had killed a loved one. This war was personal.

  One Green Beret said it best: “I did not meet a single Kurdish male between the ages of fifteen and sixty that had not either been in prison and tortured, at one point in time or another, or that had a brother or father killed [by Saddam].”

  The same operator’s interpreter had been in prison four years, and tortured the entire time. According to Amnesty International reports, favored methods used by the SSS included beatings on the feet, extinguishing cigarettes on the soles of the feet and all over the body, beatings on the back with cables, hoses, canes, and other objects, pulling out fingernails and toenails, and applying electric current to the victim’s genitalia.

  The interpreter had scars all over his body from various torture methods, and both his father and brother had been murdered. Saddam’s SSS had found out that he was part of the resistance. That was the price he paid for wanting freedom and autonomy for his people. There was a brief amnesty period, where the Iraqi government was to treat the Kurds like “ordinary citizens,” but brief it was. Rumors abounded that it had been a ploy to gather intelligence on, and identify, Kurdish leaders who were then swept up and tortured.

  The goal of the “Arabization” Project was to concentrate the Kurds into several large population centers. Saddam’s regime had destroyed over a thousand villages in the Chamchamal sector alone. The usual method was for the Iraqi government to move all of the people out of their homes before bulldozing them to the ground. Nothing was left of the villages. Once a sector was razed and “cleared,” anyone caught back in the area of his or her village was immediately killed. With the Kurds concentrated in certain spots, they could be “killed wholesale.”

  The stories of torture and murder reminded the Green Berets of the genocide of the Jews in Nazi Germany. This included the infamous poison gas/chemical warfare attacks on entire populations, which were an experiment in the killing effectiveness versus the effort which Saddam’s forces wanted or needed to expend. The Kurds were so spooked by their experiences with gas attacks that any white smoke or dust caused them to panic. Lining up the Kurds in front of trenches and shooting them, or telling the Kurds to get into the trenches first, before shooting them, was also a common story. Later, when Kirkuk itself was liberated, one Green Beret described the city as being filled with mass graves.

  “Everywhere you went, you were tripping over a mass grave,” he said. The Kurds told the Special Forces that the toll stood at over 250,000 of their people killed by Saddam. At first, the operators thought that number might be inflated, but after seeing the mass graves firsthand, it was easy to agree.

  In 1991, after Saddam had beaten down the Kurdish people through “Arabization,” no-man’s-land zones were put up between the Kurdish autonomous zones and the borders of the Iraqi regime.

  The chance that the Kurds might seek vengeance was a real cause for concern with the Green Berets, so they explained that the United States, and its laws of warfare, did not permit or tolerate such atrocities. The Kurds agreed. On the whole, they did not want to sink to Saddam’s level, no matter how terribly they themselves had been treated.

  The more the newly arrived Green Berets learned of the Kurdish mind-set and their chief political party in that sector, the PUK, the more they understood. They wanted to take part in anything that was different from the Iraqi regime, and tolerated many different Islamic groups, Socialist groups, labor groups, and myriad others. With all of these parties, it wasn’t a true democracy—everybody had a gun, and many ruled by force, but it was as close as they could get. One operator reasoned that perhaps this haphazard governance was why extreme groups like the Ansar al-Islam flourished.

  But the PUK had an enemy in Ansar as well, because of the Ansar’s desire to get control over the area away from Jalal Talabani, so that they could operate without restrictions as a terrorist base in the region. The PUK had frowned on it, but had done nothing to stop them. Soon, there were car bombs exploding around As-Sulaymaniyah, and Katucha rocket attacks by the Ansar on likely PUK locations. The Ansar would be dealt with severely in less than a week—it would be called Operation VIKING HAMMER and the story is told in this book.

  The Kurds of Chamchamal respected the Green Berets immensely once the initial rapport was established. The older Peshmerga chastised the younger fighters by telling them that the Americans came from halfway around the world to fight their fight for them, so they had better be very brave in their presence. Also, they knew the high premium on American lives, and that the Special Forces needed the Kurds to watch their backs. In turn, fathers would instruct their sons to never leave the sides of the Special Operators when in battle.

  Many of the Special Operators had already spent a good deal of time with the Kurds during Operation PROVIDE COMFORT during the 1990s, and they knew both the Kurdish people and the stark landscape of northern Iraq very well. The Kurds came to feel that the Green Berets were brothers instead of outsiders.

  “Kak Salah,” short for Saladin, was the Kurdish leader in Chamchamal. He was named after a great Kurdish fighter. “Kak” meant “Mister,” but he was a lieutenant colonel as well as a worldly man who spoke Arabic like a true Arab. This was a great skill to have in Iraq as a Kurd so close to the green line.

  The first day, one of the PUK commanders told the Green Berets of a particularly brutal incident that had happened at the Iraqi checkpoint not long before the Green Berets arrived. An elderly Kurdish woman (reportedly eighty to ninety years old) approached the Iraqi checkpoint with a can of gasoline she was carrying back to Chamchamal from Kirkuk. Kirkuk is rich in petroleum products, but to the Kurds on the other side of the green line, gasoline was a luxury. The Iraqi soldiers snatched her gasoline can away, and poured the contents over her, igniting it and burning her alive.

  When the Green Berets heard of this, they dropped a JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munitions) on the guard shack, putting the five-hundred-pound bomb right through the roof of the little building during the first air strike the next day. The Iraqis responded with a rocket and artillery attack on the town. A thirteen-year-old boy died in the attack, and a Kurdish woman lost her legs.

  The Green Berets responded with “Game on,” and unleashed the full force of the USAF and U.S. Navy aviators on them the day after
. Even though the bombing of the guard shack resulted in several Kurdish deaths by retaliatory Iraqi shelling, it showed the Kurds of Chamchamal exactly what the Americans could do. It was not simply a lucky shot. These bombs could land with pinpoint accuracy—nothing the Kurds or the Iraqis could really fathom before seeing it firsthand.

  The first day on the rooftop in Chamchamal was spent targeting; the second day was spent calling in aircraft and dropping precision-guided bombs. The rooftop was less than twelve hundred meters from where the bombs were being dropped. The Green Berets could see Iraqi vehicles moving about in ignorant bliss, unaware that many of them would soon be vaporized. Due to the sloping topography, the ridgeline could only be seen from this distance, or from kilometers away, where the land sloped up.

  With the satellite imagery and the help of the Kurdish HUMINT, the targets of highest priority were taken out first. High above the earth, the faint vapor trails of a B-52 Stratofortress made such fine white lines in the atmosphere that one had to really squint to take notice. With an altitude of forty-five thousand feet, the nearly invisible heavy bomber let go a slew of twelve JDAM-equipped bombs; each one was locked onto its own target. The Iraqis would never know what hit them.

  The Green Berets were calling in air strikes on the bunker systems by the end of their second day in Chamchamal. They operated in split-teams, as they had done in Afghanistan and elsewhere, with a third to a half of an ODA on each shift. That way, the CAS missions could be called in without a break in their devastating torrent, and the men of 3rd Group were never too fatigued to carry out the CAS missions with anything but the deadliest of accuracy.

  The Iraqis who were left alive retreated back over the ridgeline and closer to Kirkuk. With the threat that had once been only twelve hundred meters away now on the other side of the mountain, Chamchamal became the new FOB (Forward Operating Base) for 3rd Group, moving down from As-Sulaymaniyah to the new front lines.