by Mark Urban
So, on the evening of 31 October A Squadron prepared to assault a compound near the city, having turned up in Land Rovers and with the small number of night-vision goggles allocated to them. Fortunately the Americans were in support. The Bradleys and some of the Delta operators had gone into an ‘overwatch’ position, exploiting their vehicle-mounted weapons and night-vision equipment to observe what was going on at the target, and ready to give supporting fire from long range if it was needed.
Meanwhile, Major Baker, the OC of A Squadron, gave orders for the assault of two houses. Tall, fair-haired and bluff, Baker was respected by his blades as the kind of boss who kept his own ego in the background – his character fitted well with A Squadron’s image of itself. One of his call-signs, A20, would hit the first house, while A10 would hit the second. Delta had a couple of target buildings too. A20 entered without incident. A10, led by Captain Morris, a young commander who had only been with his troop a few months, prepared to force an entry into their compound. Like many of the larger houses in Iraq, it had high metal gates behind which were a main residence and some smaller structures. Other teams were ready both to block anyone trying to flee and to reinforce the assault as A10 and A20 went in.
SAS soldiers practise house assaults a great deal – it is one of the basic drills that they repeat ad nauseam. Live fire exercises in the ‘Killing House’ at their UK training area are performed so frequently that each man will know his place as the first trooper goes through a door and will be able to fire without hesitation at any threat they encounter but spare the innocent. During their time in Iraq, A Squadron had already performed several assaults on buildings or compounds with smooth precision. That night, though, things would be different.
When the SAS men burst through the gates of the compound they were greeted with a hail of fire from the windows of the building to their front. An RPG 7 rocket was fired straight at them, and assault rifles opened up too. Within seconds, all the members of A10 had been hit. Morris, who had taken a bullet in the backside, turned tail and hobbled out as fast as he could. Every SAS trooper is trained in battlefield first aid and as the captain dropped into cover his men went to work, surveying the wounds to him and the others. Major Baker, meanwhile, gathered several men and moved to the roof of a building further down the street, from which they could fire into the target compound.
After a head count he realised that two of A10’s men were probably still inside the target. His concern for them meant he could not simply ask Delta and the Bradleys to open up with everything they had. Instead he asked a couple of his men to approach the gate to see whether they could spot their missing comrades.
Inside that yard lay Corporal Ian Plank, blood pumping out of a bullet wound to his face. He couldn’t be reached for medical treatment, but in any case it was already too late. Nearby, Corporal Saltash was too badly hurt to get himself out. He had dragged himself into cover and lay just a few feet from the windows, where he could hear the insurgents. He scraped away at the sand with his hands to make himself a little lower in the ground then, fighting the pain of his wound, removed the magazines and grenades from his chest rig, laying them in front of him ready for immediate use. The darkness and the layout of the buildings meant that the OC and others firing from the nearby roof could not see the wounded SAS soldier.
Saltash would later tell his mates that he could hear the people inside praying together, seemingly ‘they knew they were going to die’. But the wounded SAS corporal did not know whether the jihadists would find him first.
Spotting Saltash, his two mates – a sergeant and a trooper – made an immediate decision to rush into the compound and get him. Some might have argued it was too dangerous given what had happened to everyone who had gone through the gates before, but they ran in nevertheless. Perhaps those inside were still praying because as the rescuers ran in nothing happened. But their luck only lasted a few seconds longer. As they hauled Saltash to his feet an AK-47 opened up from one of the windows. The two rescuers dragged Saltash from the compound with bullets flying all around them and somehow none sustained further injury. The SAS trooper involved in rescuing Saltash would serve three tours in Iraq, gain promotion to corporal and become one of the most highly decorated men in the regiment.
With his men accounted for, Major Baker had to consider the bigger picture. There was fire coming from A10’s target and another as yet uncleared building. Conferring with the Americans, Baker’s men prosecuted an assault on their third house of the night, while Delta was given the task of hitting Captain Morris’s original target. The Bradleys opened up with their 25mm cannon and TOW anti-tank missiles, pummelling the house before Delta delivered its assault.
A Squadron’s third assault went in further along the street. Clearing the building room by room they met resistance and killed one man. Four foreign fighters – thought to be Yemeni or Saudi – were taken in this SAS target building.
Inside, the houses were strewn with rubble, spent bullet casings, and bodies. Outside the situation was difficult, with running contacts going on with Iraqi gunmen in the surrounding area. A Squadron’s Delta liaison had called up a medevac (medical evacuation) helicopter to lift out the more seriously wounded SAS soldiers.
Judging the difficulty of their situation, the SAS knew they could not dawdle. ‘Exploitation’, as the search of such an objective is called, would have to be done as swiftly as possible. Major Baker’s soldiers were not even sure of how many people they had killed. They were clear about the single fighter in the third compound, but suspected that their own and American fire might have killed as many as a dozen in the compound where Corporal Plank had been killed.
The glimmer of first light had appeared, and the scene of the shoot-out was ‘messy and pretty chaotic – it was a bloody dangerous place to be around daylight’. They had not caught their Sudanese target alive. Was he among several people believed to have died in the house initially hit by A10 and then by Delta? What they were sure of was that the SAS had detained four non-Iraqi volunteers. ‘There was some excitement about that,’ comments one special operator. ‘It was early evidence of foreign fighters.’
A Squadron and Delta withdrew, with hard lessons learned from that night’s operation. They had lost a man and three more had been wounded. Ian Plank, a Royal Marine from the Special Boat Service attached to A Squadron, was the UK special forces’ first combat fatality of the Iraq campaign. Some of the blades had plenty of experience of raiding houses in Northern Ireland and were hence used to being able to reach their target and prepare for the assault in comparative safety. Ramadi, however, had proven entirely different. The revolt there had produced risks to the attacking troops from small arms, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and roadside bombs before they even got near their objective. The British had felt ill-equipped in this fight, particularly in comparison to their American teammates. They needed more night-vision equipment and armoured vehicles. For Lieutenant-Colonel Beaufort running the SAS back in the UK, trying to get more resources for his men from an indifferent MoD, Operation ABALONE became an important part of the briefings he gave that autumn. It highlighted the risks faced by operators on the ground, as well as what was at stake as foreign mujahedeen flocked to the Iraqi battlefield.
Ramadi and Fallujah – urban centres with populations in the hundreds of thousands – had already gained a reputation for fearsome violence. But who was doing it and how could they be targeted? Reporters who braved the dangerous roads to talk to gun-toting figures hiding their faces with keffiyehs heard tell of a popular revolt by Iraqis against a blundering invader. One resistance fighter hinted at the panic shown by the foreigners under attack in these communities, telling the Boston Globe ‘when we attack the Americans, they start shooting like blind people, in all directions’.
Outrage was so widespread that the fighting men received plenty of local backing. ‘We don’t like Saddam; he was a dictator,’ Osam Fahdawi, a businessman in Fallujah told an American reporter. ‘But th
e Americans, they handcuff us, they put us on the floor in front of our wives and children. It’s shameful for us.’
All of this meant that, by late 2003, the Americans could expect to be attacked pretty much every time they went into town from their Forward Operating Bases or ‘Fobs’. A Squadron mounted several missions in the two cities during October and November, often adopting a covert approach by donning local clothes and using civilian cars. But while during the 1991 Gulf War or Operation ROW some had simply put a woollen cloak over their combat rig and wrapped a keffiyeh around their heads, this would not do in the ferment of the Sunni Triangle. Instead local markets were scoured for suitable shirts or trousers, sunglasses were binned and skins often darkened. ‘We’ve had the SAS here a few times,’ the American ground commander in Fallujah told me at the time, adding with a knowing wink, ‘They’re wearing Arab clothes and they look pretty convincing… except their watches and boots give them away!’
The SAS’s attempt to raise its game was, as the year closed, just a small part of what was going on in Iraq special ops. Britain’s presence was dwarfed by the American laydown. The players in that world of classified units, barely acknowledged by the Pentagon, were trying to get a slice of the action in Iraq. There was a marked lack of coherence or purpose in their early operations. However, an officer had been sent to take charge and he would soon make his presence felt at every level of the secret war.
3
THE SOLDIER-MONK
‘The first thing that struck me about him was how absurdly young he looked for a general.’ Honed by his early morning eight-mile run and a single proper meal each day, Major-General Stanley McChrystal was physically greyhound-like, and his manner projected intellectual intensity. He had been appointed in September to take over the Tier 1 classified force – Joint Special Operations Command. One of McChrystal’s JSOC colleagues describes him as ‘Jesuit-like, ruthless, brilliant’. Often referred to by his SAS colleagues as ‘a soldier-monk’, he would prove the single most important figure in the cast of characters who defined the secret war in Iraq.
McChrystal’s upbringing was typical of the army brat who follows his father around the world, from one military post to another. That officer fought in Korea and Vietnam. Young Stanley graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point in 1976, a member of a class full of later generals. Those who know him say McChrystal disliked intensely the bullshit and limited intellectual horizons of that institution. His ability to think outside the box was evident as he climbed the promotion ladder. ‘I first worked for him in the Gulf War,’ Graeme Lamb recalled, ‘and General McChrystal was the fastest, sharpest staff officer I had ever come across.’
After that first Iraq war, McChrystal returned from the staff to a prestige field role commanding a paratroop battalion in the 82nd Airborne Division in the early nineties. He tried to find the right outlet for his fierce intellect while dealing day to day with those who could not match it. ‘He doesn’t suffer fools gladly,’ says a fellow officer from his battalion, adding – apparently without irony – ‘which must have made it really hard for him to stay in the army.’
McChrystal’s turning point came in the mid-nineties, first as a battalion commander and later as overall head of the 75th Ranger Regiment. On the spectrum of military otherness, the Rangers stand about halfway between the paratrooper battalion he had left and the covert non-conformists of Delta Force. Rangers are used for assault missions, often backing up the Tier 1 special operators. McChrystal thrived in the Rangers, and this produced the glowing reports and testimonials required to take him to higher command.
As a one-star or brigadier-general, the rising talent was given another staff job where he encountered more British officers. One, who worked for McChrystal in Afghanistan in 2002, described with wonder the change wrought in corps headquarters by the soldier-monk. McChrystal did not like the hierarchy of information going up the chain of command from battalion to brigade to division and so on. He preferred ‘agile groupings’ of people to share it, a McKinsey management science approach of de-layered authority over data. His two hundred staff in Afghanistan used an intranet that permitted all, regardless of rank, to have access to the same information. They worked from a common homepage on their screens and communicated via headsets. It was not a free-for-all, since McChrystal still expected to be in charge, but he wanted to bypass the structures, hierarchies and procedures that he felt stopped the efficient flow of information as well as his people giving their best. The mantra heard repeatedly by a British officer from his American brigadier in Afghanistan would prove central to everything McChrystal did in Iraq: ‘you’ve got to build a network to defeat a network’.
Before arriving in Iraq, the up-and-coming general served briefly at the Pentagon. The byzantine office politics and turf wars there appalled him, and his role in briefing the press on the progress of the Iraq campaign could hardly have sat easily with someone more used to the shadows. People who know McChrystal suggest he disliked the Pentagon almost as much as West Point, but in September 2003 he was able to leave. He returned to the fight leading one of the most prestigious but secret commands open to him.
Heading up Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), he would face an unenviable challenge. Given the difficulties of operating in places like Ramadi or Baghdad, the task of gathering intelligence about who exactly was behind the rising tide of violence and quelling it in a targeted way – by mounting precision special forces raids – was going to be extremely difficult. For troops such as the SAS or US Tier 1 special ops, results required timely and accurate intelligence, but the methods for gathering secret information were rudimentary to say the least. This shortcoming was to prove critical in the matter of how the elite forces might pick out the foreign fighters swimming in the sea of popular Sunni resentment of the invasion.
McChrystal knew only too well that the campaign against the insurgency had so far produced precious few moments when the intelligence picture was of a really high quality. When the Americans had hit the Ansar al-Islam jihadists in the spring of 2003 they had been directed to their target by allied Kurdish groups, who provided information through their longstanding CIA liaison. This had given the Americans the confidence to know that they were striking a major concentration of foreign fighters. Travelling in the north of Iraq shortly after these events, Arab journalist Zaki Chehab found plenty of evidence of the international militant brotherhood. Sheikh Ali, the leader of a Kurdish Islamist party opposed to the jihadists, told Chehab, ‘We know for a fact that they have Arab foreigners with them from Jordan, Palestine and al-Ahwaz [the Arab majority area of Iran].’ Finding a jail run by one of the Kurdish peshmerga, or militia groups, Chehab, himself a Palestinian, met Mohammed, a countryman from Gaza who had been captured after the US onslaught against Ansar al-Islam in April. Chehab asked the prisoner why he had travelled to Iraq when there were plenty of opportunities for jihad back home. The Palestinian fighter replied, ‘They are one and the same enemy, and if we succeed in defeating the US here, it will be the end of the Jewish state.’
What could be found in the Kurdish north, which for years had been outside the control of Saddam’s mukhabarat (secret police), was to prove elusive elsewhere. Even late in 2003, when Operation ABALONE turned up evidence of foreign fighters, finding actual proof of an internationalist jihadist movement channelling people into Iraq was proving elusive. The CIA and military intelligence had no mature networks of agents outside the Kurdish north. There was no mobile phone network to speak of either. This left the questioning of prisoners as one of the only viable means of intelligence-gathering.
When it came to interrogation, however, basic language barriers and the absence of any proper system for collating the information hamstrung operations. Just entering information from Iraqis, translated into English, onto computers caused difficulties. ‘Transliteration was a huge problem,’ explains one MI6 veteran of those early days. ‘We didn’t even have a common way of writing “Mohammed”. W
e literally had no idea who we had in prison.’ During those first months, interrogation had provided plenty of leads in chasing down the old Ba’athists, but the jihadists were to prove a far tougher target. Being bundled into prison was a novel and highly unpleasant experience for many of the displaced Iraqi elite who had enjoyed a comfortable life prior to the invasion. Many of the religious militants, on the other hand, had already had experience of detention and torture at the hands of secret police across the Arab world, so they were hardly intimidated by the Americans.
Given the paucity of solid information about who was orchestrating the violence – particularly the car bombings – there were heated debates among the intelligence people. Under the American special operations hierarchy, the best targets were to be prosecuted by units variously referred to as ‘Tier 1’, ‘classified’, ‘special mission’ or ‘black’ SOF (special operations forces). This differentiated them from the so-called ‘white SOF’, publicly acknowledged Tier 2 units, such as the US Army special forces groups – or Green Berets – which also operated in the region. The SAS were the British equivalent to the American Tier 1 units. The Pentagon’s elite within an elite were grouped together as the Joint Special Operations Command or JSOC. Being at the top of the secret pyramid, JSOC was most interested in the links between foreign fighters in Iraq and the al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan. Their command, codenamed at that time Task Force 121, was set up in such a way that Delta and other elements of JSOC could be switched between Afghanistan and Iraq as required. They saw it as a joined-up struggle, part of the Bush Administration’s War on Terror. British experts – from both MI6 and military intelligence – preferred to stress the home-grown nature of most of the Iraqi resistance. In this barely coded way, those who had been convinced by the White House’s justifications for invading Iraq, and those who had not, continued to argue it out.