by Mark Urban
The Americans’ first target building sat among a group of rural dwellings close to a waterway. A line of electricity pylons and a road ran parallel to that water. Delta’s landing zone was thus in a pocket of open space near the road, flanked on one side by pylons and on the other by trees. Soon after they landed the Delta men started to take fire from a nearby house.
What followed was a rapidly escalating battle in which, at times, the al-Qaeda defenders of the area seemed to get the upper hand. One SAS man, recounting tales of the raid, says, ‘No sooner were they down, than the Indians were all over them!’ Hunkered down close to the road, the Delta soldiers came under small-arms and mortar fire. At one point three al-Qaeda fighters – one wearing a suicide vest – jumped into a truck and tried to mount their own attack on the special operators. The vehicle was hit by a hail of bullets and the vest detonated.
The helicopters that had dropped the Delta men circled, their door gunners using mini-guns to fire thousands of rounds into the neighbourhood below, but the assault force commander did not have the option of getting the choppers to pick him up – the firefight was simply too heavy and the landing zone too narrow. An already difficult situation was further complicated as the helicopters started taking heavy machine-gun fire from the ground. Two other machines from Task Force Brown, the small gunships called AH-6 Little Birds, made runs against the insurgents. Iraqi accounts suggest that al-Qaeda also used shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles against the Americans. Such was the intensity of the ground fire that one of these helicopters was shot down. Despite the attempts of Captain Morris and others to save the Little Bird crew, the two men inside died in the wreck.
Even though the fighting was ferocious, Delta succeeded in getting to its target and detaining four people. They also treated three injured women. During a lull in the shooting near dusk they brought in a casevac (casualty evacuation) helicopter to remove these locals but it too came under heavy ground fire as it left. Faced with such resistance after hours of fighting, the Americans hit several targets around their landing zone with air strikes.
The toll from this intense running battle was high. In addition to the shot-down helicopter, British sources suggest that three other machines were forced to land due to serious damage from ground fire. In the course of the fight, small arms, missiles, mortars, heavy machine guns and a suicide bomb had been used against Delta, killing two pilots and wounding five other men. For their part, the Americans said they had killed ‘more than twenty-five terrorists’. Resistance sources were to claim a toll of forty fatalities, mostly civilians. One tribal sheikh told the Washington Post, ‘We spent a long, scary night with our families and children.’
This battle was a bitter lesson for JSOC. The Delta Force B Squadron commander was relieved of his duties after the incident. The unfortunate lieutenant-colonel had also lost three operators in an IED blast on an earlier tour. Whether it was the whiff of Zarqawi’s presence in the area or the desire to roll up another AQI network, he had allowed aggression to get the better of him in mounting a daylight raid into a hornets’ nest of opposition. One SAS man concludes, ‘It all happened because someone got too cocky. It was a watershed because after that everyone went kinetic – they were less inclined to take chances.’
Between the neighbours at MSS Fernandez in the Green Zone such incidents caused serious reflection but also teasing banter. The British could not feel smug, since anyone scoring points from the American side could easily have reminded them of an incident in Basra four months earlier. A convoy of armoured SUVs carrying CIA officers had been hit by an IED on the outskirts of the city. As the incident developed into a complex attack, with Shia militiamen following up with gunfire, a British regular army Quick Reaction Force assigned to back up the CIA if necessary had failed to deploy fast enough. Two American guards were killed and another couple were seriously injured. JSOC people did not in general blame the SAS for this incident; rather, they considered it further evidence, after the Jamiat affair, of the British army’s lack of grip in the city. The gap between what Task Force Knight was achieving around the capital and the British army’s record in the south was growing ever wider. Underpinning this difference was a fundamental difference in approach, as one distinguished visitor to the Task Force discovered.
Late that May, as the interrogators worked away on the detainees in Balad and the bitter lessons of Delta’s raid in Yusufiyah were still being digested, Tony Blair flew into Baghdad. The Prime Minister had visited the SAS before, being photographed with G Squadron on the MSS helipad in 2005. By the time of his May 2006 visit, however, the security situation had acquired a more desperate complexion.
Blair was accompanied by senior officials and the Chief of Defence Staff. His briefers included Lieutenant-Colonel Williams and the then OC of Task Force Knight. More or less all of the key people in defining Britain’s Iraq policy, including the lieutenant-general resident in Baghdad, were in that air-conditioned briefing room.
The Prime Minister was shown video from surveillance aircraft of recent strikes, including LARCHWOOD 4. The briefers pointed out the running figures being pursued from one Alpha. They told him about the increasing ferocity of their encounters with al-Qaeda. According to one of those present, Blair was ‘gobsmacked’ by the briefing. What was scheduled as a one-hour meeting went on for more than twice as long as he asked a series of questions.
For the man centrally identified with Britain’s decision to join the invasion of Iraq, this briefing gave him an insight into the active tactics being used to neutralise al-Qaeda at a time when almost all of the news coming out of the country was dire. Perhaps it may even have given him hope. One of the men in the room says that the Prime Minister did not issue directives or attempt to shape the special operations campaign, ‘He regarded this as the professional preserve of the people doing it. He wanted a successful outcome to the campaign but he avoided prescriptive advice.’
The message that Blair took away was one of a strategy to defeat al-Qaeda that would be carried out with aggression and commitment. It characterised the SAS operation, but was absent in many of his visits to Basra. In one respect, however, the special operators may have miscalculated. All of the Task Force Knight briefers had that morning chosen to wear a patch that was a ‘must have’ item in JSOC at the time.
After the previous summer’s bitter battles in the Euphrates Valley, American operators had designed a badge that was run up by the tailors’ shop at the PX or military supermarket in Balad. It featured the Stars and Stripes with the words ‘Fuck al-Qaeda’ written across the top. Some British operators had acquired these and they were instantly judged so ‘ally’ or ‘warry’ that an order had soon been put in for a version featuring the Union Flag. One eyewitness said that Blair clearly saw these patches during the briefing but refrained from any comment. Some of his party did, however, later ask why the soldiers had worn them. One blade explains, a little self-consciously, ‘The guys had been brutalised by this point, many of them had been on hundreds of raids. The badge was about that experience.’
The ‘Fuck al-Qaeda’ patch also spoke of a US–UK camaraderie that went beyond any rivalry about particular ops. The British had cemented this when they started operations against the al-Qaeda target set. And late in May dramatic events unfolded as word emerged from the screening cells in Balad of a change of heart from their British-captured detainee Abu Haydr.
Under the US guidelines for initial holding of prisoners at the Temporary Screening Facility, Abu Haydr should have been released by early May. But the evidence of Zarqawi’s possessions and the general demeanour of the man made his interrogators reluctant to loosen their grip. They had been given more time. The original team, Mary and Lenny, had been bypassed by their supervisor Doc. He had established a rapport with Abu Haydr over the weeks of his captivity, flattering the prisoner on his insights about the Sunni–Shia schism and the American game in Iraq. According to Mark Bowden, who interviewed the gators, the key moment came
when Doc offered Abu Haydr an important role in the future of Iraq: ‘There was no sign that the detainee knew he was being played. He nodded sagely. This was the kind of moment gators live for.’ Doc sought the name of Abu Haydr’s senior contact in the organisation.
More days passed and it was around 20 May before Abu Haydr finally revealed his bombshell, that he was close to Sheikh al-Rahman, Zarqawi’s religious adviser. Abu Haydr knew where to find the sheikh and also something of the security routine he adopted when meeting his boss. Thrilled with their success, the gators passed their intelligence to Colonel Grist and his team at the Joint Operations Centre.
There are other versions of how the Coalition found Sheikh Rahman – for example that he had already been subject to a long surveillance operation in 2004, or that his whereabouts were revealed by a Jordanian al-Qaeda operative who’d been captured and sent back to his country in the spring of 2006. But multiple sources have confirmed to me the accuracy of Bowden’s article on the interrogation.
It seems there was a further aspect of British involvement too, in using Task Force Knight operatives to mark the sheikh’s location as surveillance picked him up in Baghdad. They even watched on Kill TV as he drove off in a small blue saloon on the afternoon of 7 June 2006. One observer relates, ‘It was handed over to the Americans because they wanted the kill. It was a matter of national pride.’ It was more than that for in truth, during these final days, the Americans were firmly in command of the evolving operation. A short way into his journey, Sheikh Rahman switched off his phone, ‘but by then that was irrelevant, we had eyes on anyway’. The sheikh was being tracked from a Predator high above the road north from Baghdad towards Baquba.
In the JOC at Balad, the progress of his car was monitored on the plasma screens at the front of the room. As the sense of anticipation built, McChrystal himself joined the audience. The sheikh drove to a remote farmhouse surrounded by date palm groves in Hibhib, a village outside Baquba, reaching it just before 6.15 p.m. A portly man in black appeared to greet Rahman. Those watching at Balad instantly recognised the figure from the video seized by the SAS.
The discussion in the JOC was brief. They had Abu Haydr’s intelligence and they had also done much pattern-of-life surveillance on Rahman. Then they had glimpsed the man in black. The discussion about releasing one of the two F-16s orbiting in a stack nearby was swift, remarkably so. The aircraft dropped first one five-hundred-pound bomb then another on the house.
US troops from a regular unit nearby were the first on the scene. They recovered Zarqawi from the rubble and restrained him as he tried to get off the stretcher. But whatever fight he had shown in those last moments, Zarqawi was soon dead. Sheikh Rahman, two women and two children were also killed by the American bombs. It didn’t take long for JSOC people to make the short flight from Balad to survey the scene. Zarqawi’s body was flown back to Balad where Lieutenant-General McChrystal himself went to look at it. The soldier-monk knew he had got his man at last.
Zarqawi’s body was packed off for formal identification. Meanwhile, a Sensitive Site Exploitation team went to work, sifting the debris in Hibhib. Based on their initial assessment of the intelligence gathered there, the Americans raided seventeen places in Baghdad that night. It was the following day before the momentous news was announced.
At the morning command conference, the BUA, news was given over the video circuit to commanders watching across the country. One reflects that the mood of the meeting was ‘Job well done. Well sighted, well conducted.’
Later that day, the Coalition announced its success to the world. Major-General William Caldwell, the Coalition spokesman, began his briefing with the words, ‘Today is a great day in Iraq.’ Given the time and money spent hunting Zarqawi, and the many lives snuffed out in that pursuit, the official presentation was sober. Caldwell even acknowledged the analysis of many, including British, colleagues that questioned Zarqawi’s centrality. He noted AQI’s capability for regeneration and accepted that ‘one man’s life does not signify an end to an insurgency’.
Speaking from Camp David, President Bush noted that Zarqawi’s death would not end the war: ‘It’s not going to stop the violence but it’s going to help a lot.’ He also told reporters that he had rung McChrystal to congratulate him. This presidential reference marked the first implicit acknowledgement by an official source that the Pentagon’s classified or black Joint Special Operations Command was centrally engaged in Iraq.
There was, as those in Baghdad or Balad congratulated themselves that night, an unanswered question. Zarqawi had put so many thousands into their graves, but where should one be found for him? Ideas such as repatriating the body to Jordan were swiftly dismissed. Iraqi graveyards did not seem suitable since they might become a place of jihadist pilgrimage. The task of implementing a burial plan eventually fell to special operators. The body was taken in the dead of night to a spot on the outskirts of Baghdad and dumped without ceremony in an unmarked grave.
11
THE BATTLE FOR BAGHDAD
It was around seven o’clock on the morning of 10 July 2006 when masked gunmen appeared on the streets of Baghdad’s Jihad neighbourhood. They gathered in groups at intersections, forming their own checkpoints. Drivers and passers-by were asked for their ID cards. Any Sunni males among them were taken to a bus where more gunmen were waiting. The neighbourhood, just a short distance from the airport and Coalition military headquarters, was a mixed one, but intercommunal tensions had boiled over. Samarra had its dread effect but the sectarian war in this area had really started the previous night. A suicide bomber had entered a nearby Shia mosque and blown himself up, killing eight worshippers.
The following day the Mehdi Army was out rounding up Sunnis. The bus drove to waste ground where the captives were all shot. By the end of the day local hospitals were reporting that thirty-six dead had been brought in, although the final total may have passed fifty. While the Mehdi Army were busy with their slaughter, two car bombs went off to the east, killing seven in Sadr city. That evening, the Sunni bombers were out again, mounting a double car-bomb attack on a northern Baghdad Shia mosque, killing nineteen and wounding fifty-nine.
Sunday 10 July was a bad day in Baghdad, but not exceptionally so. It did, however, mark the start of five days in which multiple suicide bombings and Shia retaliation claimed more than 150 lives in the city. It was bad enough to cause some Sunni leaders who had joined the long-awaited national unity government to threaten their withdrawal. Militant Sunnis had been trying to goad the Shias into sectarian conflict from soon after the Coalition invasion of Iraq. There had been countless car bombs and suicide attacks, many with this aim. But by the summer of 2006, spurred on by the desecration of Samarra, it was becoming clear just how bad things would get when Shia militias engaged enthusiastically in the cycle of bloodletting. And as the intensity of this slaughter increased so too did its depravity. Those sent to recover bodies dumped in rivers or on dusty street corners noticed more frequently signs of torture. Drills had been used on some victims, electricity or acid on others.
The violence of that summer was especially troubling because to those in command it seemed to make a nonsense of America’s grand strategy. Not only had the tardy formation of Nouri al-Maliki’s government, sworn in on 20 May, failed to have an effect despite the significant Sunni participation in the process, but new security measures were failing too. At the time of the Jihad murders, Operation TOGETHER FORWARD, also known as the Baghdad Security Plan, was nearly a month old.
For many months, senior British officers had been urging General Casey to make Baghdad the main focus of his operations. It seemed to many of the intelligence analysts that that was precisely what al-Qaeda had intended to do as well. A document seized in the raid near Yusufiyah by Task Force Knight had spelt out the organisation’s determination to give attacks on the capital a central role in its plans to undermine the new Iraqi government. For this and other political reasons, the Security Plan was described
by the Pentagon as ‘Iraqi-led’. It was all in keeping with its message of striving to turn over a growing part of the fight to them. Certainly, more than three-quarters of the sixty-one thousand security forces involved were Iraqi, but the ideas behind TOGETHER FORWARD were entirely American. They wanted to clear neighbourhoods of insurgents one by one before turning them over to Iraqi security forces.
As had often happened during the preceding two years, it fell to British officers with the Multi-National Force headquarters in Baghdad to be the purveyors of negative assessments. Casey nicknamed one UK colonel on the staff ‘the gloomy Brit’. During his morning BUA, the American general would often ask, ‘Has the gloomy Brit got anything to say this morning?’ At this time, a subtext of exchanges between these British staff and the Americans was that the junior partners felt Casey and his people were massaging figures about security incidents or the readiness of Iraqi forces in order to boost optimism. In some cases – for example the senior British officer in Baghdad’s 2004 warnings against storming Fallujah – these dissenting opinions were unduly pessimistic.
In the face of such a dire situation, had the British staff in Baghdad not become an irritant to the Americans? Some US military officers certainly say they had. ‘They were quite glad to have people around who weren’t a great challenge to their authority,’ counters one of the British who questioned Casey’s assessments of what was being achieved, adding, ‘A Brit can challenge them without any implications for their or someone else’s career.’ At least both sides could agree about the need to make Baghdad the focus of Coalition efforts. It was vital that the security plan succeed.
Clearance operations were already wearily familiar to many of the city’s inhabitants: they involved lockdowns, door kicking and the inevitable seizure of weapons. In this new operation, however, local troops were then meant to hold the neighbourhood. Within weeks of TOGETHER FORWARD getting under way it was obvious that it was not working. American commanders accused the Iraqis of failing to provide two promised brigades. Where units did appear, particularly those from the Ministry of the Interior, they were often blamed for making matters worse. Stories abounded of police acting as an arm of the Mehdi Army, using their freedom of movement to enter Sunni areas on murder missions.