by Robin Moore
The entire Iraqi front collapsed around Kirkuk after four or five days of heavy bombing. Altogether, it was a total of about ten days of dedicated CAS missions, and the Iraqi units were overwhelmed with the intensity. There was no time for them to regroup or think of a strategy—the bombing never ceased, and they could not even fall back in an organized manner. It was “cut and run,” every man for himself as they raced to make it to Kirkuk for a last stand with the Green Berets and the Kurds.
The 3rd SFG ODAs moved toward Kirkuk with thousands of Peshmerga soldiers. At a certain point, one operator commented, they had to finish off the Iraqis with a conventional attack. By this time, Saddam’s forces were too few and too scattered to be bombed anymore. “It was like, we bombed them, we bombed them, and we bombed them.… The ones who were left were not giving up, so we knew it was time for a ground assault.”
The Green Berets had planned to perform ground assaults on the Iraqi Army all along—it was standard practice. Once a target is destroyed, the SOP is to clear the objective before continuing onward. But before the Special Operators and their Pesh fighters could get there, the Iraqis who had not been killed in the bombing had already retreated. Only when the last of the die-hards remained, and there was nowhere to retreat, did the Green Berets launch a ground attack.
It wasn’t easy for some ODAs, however, and there was some steady resistance among the Iraqis. It was never anything the Green Berets couldn’t handle, but rather it was a little surprising, considering that the intelligence they had received had indicated that the Iraqis were ready to give up.
The ground attacks were organized by the Green Berets in what they deemed “textbook Ranger School assaults.” This included two assault lines and at least one support-by-fire position to cover the assaulters while they moved across their objective. The discipline of the Ranger-style strikes eliminated the chance of fratricide among the normally wild Peshmerga, and maximized the chances of success with minimum casualties.
The PUK were broken down into 150 to 200–man assault teams, and mortar teams were organized for support-by-fire positions. The Green Berets supplemented this with vehicle-mounted MK-19 automatic grenade launchers. The Iraqis had never been on the business end of an automatic grenade launcher before, and it “really spooked them,” said one operator. They either ran or stayed in their bunkers until the bunkers were destroyed by CAS. The CAS was provided by “fast movers” as well as a B-1, a B-2, and a B-52 bomber. The B-1 and B-2 flew even higher than the B-52, with nearly invisible contrails. The only way the Green Berets could tell the bomber had dropped its payload was to count the seconds on their watches after the “Bombs Away!” command had been heard over the radios. Almost to the second, the calculations of the Air Force crews matched up with the resultant explosions.
The Iraqis that were captured and became POWs were deathly afraid of the Americans. “They thought we were going to execute them,” one Green Beret recalled.
Kirkuk fell quickly. The city, essentially a military depot because of its strategic importance, was so well equipped that every Kurd was literally driving around in a new army vehicle after the city fell. Everything had been abandoned—hundreds of T-55 and T-72 Russian tanks, ammo depots full of every imaginable weapon and corresponding ammunition, even uniforms. Thousands of Iraqi uniforms lay in heaps in locations all over the city, as the soldiers stripped and melted into the population. This virtual osmosis would play a big part in the insurgency later in the war, pro-Saddam and otherwise.
Operation VIKING HAMMER
Perhaps the largest Special Operations assault in history occurred a stone’s throw from the Iranian border, east of As-Sulaymaniyah, the 3rd Special Forces Group’s FOB. The massive uphill battle, through rocky, rough terrain and sometimes ankle-deep mud, was done under some of the most intense enemy fire imaginable.
The battle lasted for two days and ended with the destruction of the largest terrorist camp in the world. The incident has remained in the shadows of the war, however, and has received virtually no press coverage at all. Until now, the “Quiet Professionals” of Special Forces have been silent about what may have been the biggest victory in the Global War on Terror since vanquishing the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
On March 28, 2003, at 0600 hours fifty of the Green Berets from 3rd BN, 3rd SFG (A) and between eight to ten thousand Peshmerga fighters moved east along two “prongs,” toward their objective: the secret mountain base of the terrorist organization known as Ansar al-Islam. Intelligence indicated that the area off the roads had been heavily mined—and the Green Berets weren’t about to test the accuracy of those reports. Even if the intel turned out to be off, as it often turned out to be, there was no need to venture there unnecessarily.
The fear of treading through minefields kept the Special Operators and their massive Peshmerga force strictly to the roads and mountain trails, where they moved as “ducks in a row” instead of in the wedge-shaped assault formations typically used when engagement with enemy forces is likely or imminent.
The twin prongs of the assault force were broken up into fast-moving advance elements, which could move at a high rate of speed as they engaged the enemy terrorists with assault rifles and light machine guns. The Pesh guerrillas in the lead elements were lightly armed with AK-47s and PKs (Pulemyot Kalashnikova—Russian general-purpose machine guns with between 100 and 200 rounds of ammunition per man). The Green Berets had their M-4 carbines and M-240B SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon) light machine guns, but they were never ones to go easy on the ammo, regardless of how fast they needed to move.
Three hundred meters behind the lead force of each group was the support force: Green Berets in trucks with .50 caliber machine guns and MK-19 belt-fed grenade launchers, and Peshmerga heavy weapons men with ZSU 23mm Soviet anti-aircraft machine guns and mortar tubes on wheeled trailers. On this mission, there was no dedicated CAS, so if there wasn’t an aircraft in the area, the Green Berets and their new allies were going to be on their own.
The northern prong included ODA 093, while the southern one, which ran two kilometers south, and parallel to the northern prong, contained the men of ODAs 094 and 095. The fight began just after 0600 hours, as they drew closer to the edge of the mountains. Here, the enemy would always have the high ground, and in the early morning light, the first sporadic bursts of light machine gun fire started to rain down on the advancing Peshmerga—a drizzle at first.
The drizzle quickly turned into a downpour as they drew closer. The fire came from members of Ansar al-Islam, and they were heavily defended. The popping of light machine gun fire turned into the clang, clang, clang of 23mm ZSU fire and the whoosh of Katucha rockets. The Peshmerga and their Special Forces comrades had no choice but to charge forward up the hill, straight at the terrorists, as the fire rained down around them. Here and there a Kurdish soldier fell on the battlefield.
The support elements began launching their own Katuchas and ZSU fire. Then to that they added the force of the American .50 cals (fifty caliber) and the devastating fire of the MK-19 automatic grenade launchers. The MK-19 is particularly effective because it covers what is known in the military as “dead space”: those areas unseen, such as behind berms or ridges and in low-lying depressions an enemy force may use for potential cover and concealment.
When an MK-19 is fired, the 40mm High Explosive (HE) projectiles look a great deal like baseballs, moving at about the same velocity as a pop fly to center field. The Green Berets of 3rd Group arced those 40mm rounds right into the nests of the terrorists, and within thirty minutes, the first ridgeline was seized and the PUK militiamen stormed the hilltop in victory.
It was too soon to celebrate, however. This was only the beginning, and the first ridgeline was only the initial outlying enemy position. Now came the dangerous part: they would first have to move down the road toward the tiny village of Dekon, where part of the Ansar al-Islam was headquartered. After that first lookout post was destroyed, there was no doubt that the enemy
camp was gearing up for a desperate last stand.
Once Dekon was seized, they had to take a road north to the second objective, a village called Gulp. To get to Gulp, the attackers would have to continue climbing into the mountains, and navigate a switchback in the road that looked on the maps like a textbook “ambush alley.” If they made it that far, there would still be the final approach to the third village, named Varogat.
Varogat itself would be even more hazardous, as it sat in a bowl-shaped depression surrounded on three sides by steep, high ground that would obviously be used for defensible positions by the Ansar. As it happened, it would turn into the enemy’s “Alamo,” as one Special Operator described it.
The assault on Gulp itself, along narrow footpaths, became harrowing as the combined force swept into the village and across the objective. The enemies had retreated onto the high ground again, where their weapons were trained down upon the advancing force. If the rain of fire had been a downpour before, it was now an absolute deluge.
The Green Berets and the PUK guerrillas were pinned: they could do nothing but lie there and hope that the support teams behind them could suppress the torrent of enemy fire that blasted all around them. It was 0715 hours.
Luckily, an Air Force Combat Controller attached to one of the ODAs was able to locate a Navy F/A-18 Hornet streaking by in the distance. On command, the pilot loosed two five-hundred-pound bombs on the hilltops, and the fire let up a bit from the enemy emplacements. Not good enough for the Green Berets—the now sporadic fire had to be entirely stopped. Not one of the Americans had been hit yet, but the erratic fire was deadly serious, nonetheless.
The adept Navy pilot ignored the SOP of maintaining thirty-five-thousand-foot ceiling, and dropped in fast and low for a Vietnam-style gun run on the last remaining enemy pockets on the high ground northeast of Gulp. His 25mm auto cannons ripped through the terrorists with a pinpoint precision that amazed the Peshmerga assault force. The battle was effectively over, forty-five minutes after it had begun.
The Pesh took the high ground, and the village of Gulp was swept through and cleared. The remaining stragglers from the Ansar dropped their weapons and feigned surrender—but the Green Berets knew their schemes from their Afghan experience only a year earlier. From a safe and armed distance, they instructed those who remained to drop to their knees and begin disrobing.
The few outwitted terrorists who were left detonated their hidden suicide vests, evaporating in a puff of smoke and a rooster tail of wet dirt, leaving behind nothing but a small pothole in the mud of the village. These fanatics would not be taken alive: they were a different breed of men than the virtual cowards of Saddam’s army, and it sent a chill through the Kurdish line.
The Ansar defenders who had not been captured or killed in the gun run disappeared over the crest of the hill, toward the Iranian border, and toward the third and final objective, Varogat. Varogat was more or less saddled across the border between the two nations. This was no doubt the ideal spot for a terrorist camp.
The dangerous trek along the road and up through the switchback began about a mile from the edge of Gulp. Just as the Green Berets had anticipated, they were attacked right in the center of the switchback, with a volley of fire even more ferocious than before. They had no choice but to dig into the mud of the trail, and hope for the best.
The enemy began lobbing mortar rounds down on the attackers—an effective meteor shower of shells, which blasted clumps of mud high into the air all around the pinned-down lead force of about fifty Pesh and seven Green Berets.
One Special Operator recalls lying face-down in the mud, looking over at his medic, Bobby, who was crouched in a small bit of cover nearby. The fire continued—more than ten minutes of absolutely the most intense fire they had ever seen. A mortar round hit the earth right in front of the Special Operator, and a clod of wet mud hit his face squarely like a pie in a slapstick comedy routine.
The medic and the mud-covered Special Operator looked at each other and began laughing out loud—there was nothing else they could do until the support forces could get around the switchback or the Ansar ran out of ammunition altogether.
The Green Berets finally began to suppress the enemy with their M-240B SAW light machine guns and a few MK-19s that had been carried into the switchback under direct enemy fire. The enemy were suppressed just enough for the Peshmerga to make a run for the side of the switchback and begin a flanking maneuver.
It worked. The Ansar al-Islam fighters withdrew around the switchback, and into their Alamo, where they would rearm and await their fate. The Special Operators and their battle-weary guerrilla fighters reloaded their magazines and readied for another battle charge. This time it was around the hairpin and into the bowl-shaped village of Varogat, where they no doubt would make easy targets.
Miraculously, there were hardly any casualties for the eight- to ten-thousand-man force. Somehow, luck was on their side this morning. What had taken the Special Operators and their Pesh only two and a half hours had been estimated to take from six to twelve in their pre-battle calculations. Things were looking good.
Around the switchback, the Green Berets and the Pesh began taking sporadic fire as they were within eyesight of Varogat. By this point, the combined forces were so desensitized to the heavy fire they had been taking all morning that they moved on unflinchingly. To the terrorists on the high ground surrounding their Alamo, it must have been horrifying. The Americans and the Peshmerga just kept advancing and advancing, and now they were simply ignoring the bullets that cracked by their heads.
“We literally didn’t think much of it at all,” one Green Beret recalled. “Being shot at was normal to us at that point. We thought, ‘Hey, maybe this will just be a little burst of fire, and be over in ten minutes.’” Ten minutes of heavy enemy fire was no big deal at that point.
Coolness under fire was nothing new to the battle-hardened Green Berets, who came around the switchback ten feet tall and bulletproof, doing three- to five-second rushes (also known as IADs, or Immediate Action Drills) as they gained the ground a few feet at a time.
The first truck had come around the switchback at this point. While under heavy, direct enemy fire, the Special Operators unloaded the fifty-caliber M2HB, walked over to a suitable location, and began setting it up.
Soon, the machine gun was “rocking and rolling,” piling up brass casings as its barrel began to smoke, and the enemy fire died down. It grew eerily quiet, with only small bursts of fire here and there in the distance. It reminded one of the operators of training back in Fort Carson, where the still air of the Rocky Mountains would echo with the distant fire from shooting ranges and exercises that dotted the landscape of the Army post.
The Pesh took advantage of the lull in return fire that the .50 cal created, and swarmed up the hill like angry hornets. It was almost noon, and they wanted to get this over with. But it was clear that it couldn’t be over: they could see small mud huts dotting the hillside and cresting the mountain, right over the top and over the downslope, where the Iranian border intersected the side of the mountain.
The Green Berets and the PUK fighters took shelter under a cliff face, and ate lunch. The SF medics dressed wounds, water was chugged, and faces were stuffed. All this fighting burned calories! The whole day seemed surreal—hands down, this was certainly the most horrific, intense firefight that anyone had ever been in. Spirits were high and the men felt invincible as they laughed, rested, and finally got ready to finish the fight, before the terrorists could escape across the border.
They would have continued sooner, but the intensity of the enemy fire had been so ferocious that the Green Berets felt the Ansar al-Islam would rather die than to retreat past the end of their encampments, and it gave the Green Berets time to regroup. Perhaps there was something here that they knew they would have to die for, and it was becoming obvious to the Special Operators that this was the largest terrorist camp they had ever heard of. According to Special Forces, it
was the largest known in the world.
The mass of soldiers and Pesh guerrillas began the climb up the final slope on the Iraqi side of the border. This was the heaviest territory they had seen thus far; the Green Berets were now so far ahead that the heavy weapons force behind them hadn’t yet been set up. But they wanted to get this over with, and pushed on.
Once again they faced the heavy enemy fire, but now for the final time. The Green Berets of 3rd SFG (A) took cover behind mud huts as their .50 cals and MK-19s began to suppress the last of the terrorists. The Pesh unloaded their heavy-barreled DHSK (“Dishka”) Russian machine guns, and they lobbed mortar rounds up the mountainside, ignoring the terrorists’ last stand as if they were invisible, or just annoying mosquitoes.
The enemy fire ceased, this time for good. It was now after sundown, and the mopping up began. The entire objective was swept over, and intelligence gathered. Only a handful of Ansar al-Islam had been captured alive—the rest had either fought to the death or blown themselves up.
As the Special Forces swept through the village, the size and scale of this multinational terrorist stronghold became evident, and it sent a chill up the spine. One of the few terrorists left alive was a Palestinian, another reportedly a Syrian. Identification found on the scores of bodies pointed to almost every country in the Middle East: IDs, passports, and plane tickets from Yemen, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and several undisclosed European nations were found on the bodies or left inside of the crude huts.
Links to HAMAS, Abu-Sayaaf in the Philippines, and potentially Al Qaeda were found, along with stacks of documents that linked the camp to a web of terrorism that stretched all over the globe. The Green Berets, then the Peshmerga commanders, interrogated the few prisoners. Then the POWs were zip-tied, sandbags pulled over their heads, and they were escorted back down the mountain in trucks to the FOB at As-Sulaymaniyah. They were imprisoned in what one Green Beret described as a “Mini Guantanamo Bay” they had hastily constructed in the FOB for just this purpose.