by Mark Urban
It was not as if the foreign forces were setting a shining example either. News of the charges against the American soldiers involved in May’s Yusufiyah rape and murder broke. Accusations of setting out to kill people on the notoriously dangerous airport road were also levelled against American private contractors. The reliance on contractors was in itself an admission that the US forces in Baghdad could not achieve the kind of strength required to bring security to a city of five million souls.
What difference was the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi making to all this mayhem? It seemed that even those who had hoped his loss might lead to some temporary lull due to infighting or jockeying for position had been disappointed. But JSOC’s black war was continuing, intensifying even, and it played out to its own imperatives and timetable, impenetrable to those who were not cleared to know about it – that is, the great majority of soldiers as well as the public who heard only the daily dirge of mourning and body counts.
In May 2006, B Squadron had been replaced in Task Force Knight by D Squadron. The exhausted members of B Squadron had completed the first six-month SAS tour, an effort crowned by the success of rescuing Norman Kember, finding key evidence in the hunt for Zarqawi and earning their boss his gong. Some might have expected D Squadron to be even more aggressive – certainly its reputation within the regiment was as ‘the most intense of all the squadrons’. Some put this down to the dominant influence of Paras among its senior non-commissioned officer cadre, others to a tradition that it embodied most clearly the ‘green-eyed’ aggressive approach of the airborne forces.
The identity and indeed integrity of the different squadrons had, however, been progressively diluted. So many members had gone to specialist groups, such as the Surveillance Reconnaissance Cell, liaison jobs or detachments, that an SAS squadron might have fewer than forty men in Baghdad. In order to maintain the numbers, blades with special skills from other squadrons, or men from the SBS, or operators with the newly formed Special Reconnaissance Regiment might take their place in Task Force Knight.
In Northern Ireland the surveillance outfit known by such cover names as 14 Intelligence Company or JCUNI (Joint Communications Unit Northern Ireland) had attained a legendary reputation for stealth and expertise. They used unmarked cars or observation posts to mount eyes-on and technical surveillance, often finding themselves just feet away from the terrorists they tracked. This unit was expanded during 2004 and 2005 into the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. The idea behind the SRR was not that entire squadrons would rotate through operational theatres but that each one would specialise in a particular role, with sub-units doing tours there. The birth of the SRR was nonetheless far from happy.
Many in the SAS, including Commanding Officers such as Charles Beaufort and Richard Williams, were openly sceptical about the value of this new venture. ‘You could slink around a council estate in Northern Ireland because guys could blend in,’ explains one experienced SAS type. ‘They couldn’t do that in Baghdad and Kabul.’ The new regiment was given Portakabins in the SAS camp at Credenhill while it formed, leading the blades to deride them as ‘trailer trash’. They also jokingly referred to the SRR as ‘Tier 3 special forces’. After the capture of two of its own men in Basra the SAS was less able to insist its own surveillance skills were superior, but the incident hardly helped the SRR either. Nonetheless, by mid-2006 a handful of SRR operators were operating in Baghdad with Task Force Knight and an SRR officer had taken command of what was known as the ‘SpR Det’. This Specialist Reconnaissance Detachment of Task Force Knight made up of a variety of special forces soldiers undertook difficult observation missions on the streets of Baghdad.
Another respect in which these SAS tours were quite different from Northern Ireland was in the power and confidence of junior officers. With just a single troop commander resident in Ireland during the nineties, few officers had been exposed to daily operations and within this setup experienced NCOs often relegated the twenty-something ‘Ruperts’ to the background. It was still the case in 2006 that a captain commanding a troop or his boss, the major leading a squadron, might spend little more than a year in post. Old sweats like Mulberry, who had during his tours of Iraq gone from sergeant to staff sergeant and then sergeant-major, had vastly more experience than his commanders, and often took the role of Team Leader in an assault. In Iraq prospects for officers had changed.
Troop leaders such as Captain Morris, hit in Ramadi in 2003, demonstrated their courage time and again leading house assaults. Acting as liaison with US units (as that captain had been doing on Delta’s Yusufiyah mission) often allowed an officer to remain in Iraq, continuing to accumulate operational experience. By 2009, after three tours in Iraq and scores of raids, Morris had been promoted to major and given command of A Squadron. In the competitive world in which the SAS squadrons operated there was rivalry between Team Leaders – some young officers, others experienced senior NCOs – who vied to set up target packs for bigger and better operations. Liaising with intelligence organisations or absorbing highly technical information put more of an emphasis on brain power. ‘The concept is of the strategic soldier,’ explains one young officer, ‘that you need to have strategic effect, that you have to absorb a complex intelligence picture. You need the intellect and versatility to deal with that.’ In Iraq the old class-based battle between Ruperts and old sweats gave way to a more generalised rivalry. Naturally this also existed between squadron leaders, as one followed the next. Not only were they keen to outdo their predecessors, but were used to being given considerable latitude in how that might be done. As D Squadron replaced B this caused considerable tension.
The OC of D Squadron, Major Lavity, was a most careful operator who defied any ‘green-eyed Para’ stereotype that his unit might have built up. He considered his approach to be one of brain rather than brawn. Physically slight, Lavity had come to the SAS via the Royal Engineers. Under Lieutenant-Colonel Beaufort, Lavity had served as the regiment’s chief of staff, planning operations around the world. Those who watched him at work in Baghdad say that Lavity soon questioned the point of many of JSOC’s raids, arguing that they netted only ‘pipe-swingers’ or low-ranking street life. Perhaps, after watching B Squadron, he had concluded that some high-profile successes were more important.
During the early weeks of D Squadron’s tour Lavity frequently clashed with his boss, Richard Williams, over the squadron’s priorities. Their differences were aired during nightly Video Tele-Conferences (VTCs), as well as by e-mail and face to face, and soon became widely known among both British and American special operators.
Williams had his own doctrine and it was as important in shaping SAS operations in Iraq as anything handed down from JSOC. The CO told his squadron commanders that he expected three things of them: that they conduct an operation every night; that every operation be completed; and that every raid produce intelligence. These dictums fitted very well with Lieutenant-General McChrystal’s central idea – that the insurgency could only be overwhelmed by a relentless tempo of operations. Al-Qaeda had to be dismantled faster than it could regenerate itself. In order to maintain this pace of nightly activity, McChrystal sacrificed some target development in the interests of getting the raids themselves to produce intelligence. The Americans were also willing to launch their raids on a single ‘trigger’ or piece of intelligence. This philosophy played itself out with spectacular consequences in the Triangle of Death during May to July 2006, as one wave of strikes followed another.
There were quite a few on the British side of the operation who shared Major Lavity’s unease at launching nightly raids. After all, each Task Force Knight mission carried myriad risks: of losing a helicopter; of soldiers being shot; of hitting the wrong house and pointlessly killing Iraqis. The OC of D Squadron made clear he did not want to run them simply to lift pipe-swingers. The raids might simply be stirring up violence if the quality of those being taken had been sacrificed in the interests of quantity. He articulated what some felt was
the distinctive British approach. ‘We generally wanted two or even three indicators on a target, which was different to the Americans,’ comments one British intelligence officer.
Both McChrystal and Williams, it seems, felt there was a danger of Task Force Knight falling back into a slower and more deliberate pace of operations after the fireworks of B Squadron’s tour, almost a return to the old ‘Task Force Slack’ approach. When Williams put pressure on Lavity during the nightly VTC there was a wider audience in the special ops community watching the circuit. Eventually, after some bruising public airing of differences, D Squadron maintained the rate of operations. Those who disliked Williams considered that his pressure on squadron commanders formed part of a scheme of personal aggrandisement with McChrystal and the Americans.
The scope for discrete British operations in Baghdad was in any case decreasing. Sectarian strife created its own limits for Task Force Knight’s operations. Surveillance reconnaissance in cars by members of the SpR Detachment was largely a thing of the past: there were simply too many checkpoints, official and militia, on the city’s streets. The ability to gather distinctive British intelligence through agent networks was also limited. Both SIS and the Defence Humint Unit Detachment (also called the Field Humint Team) had already curtailed their missions due to the dangers involved. Their agents were still operating, but with less supervision – and therefore it was less likely that operations could be run solely on the basis of their information. It was a case of accepting American technical intelligence, often based on mobile phones, or losing one’s ability to operate, say some who were there.
Just as the dire security situation and personalities involved brought argument to the running of Britain’s secret campaign, so matters concerning the overt effort came to a head during the summer of 2006. Much depended upon the views of the generals holding the two key British positions, that of General Casey’s deputy, a lieutenant-general or three-star also referred to as the Senior British Military Representative in Iraq (SBMR-I), and the commander of Multi-National Division South East, Britain’s force in the south. Major-General Richard Shirreff was about to take over the latter post in Basra. On his reconnaissance he had become alarmed by how militia power had grown, hardly checked, in the south, but his attempts to challenge that would not unfold until later that summer.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant-General Rob Fry of the Royal Marines had taken over as SBMR-I in Baghdad that March. Some saw him as a typical ‘political general’ determined to drive through the British agenda of withdrawal come what may. Fry’s predecessor, Nick Houghton, gave a final interview in which he revealed that Britain would start turning over its provinces to Iraqi control that spring and be out of Iraq by the summer of 2008. ‘A military transition over two years has a reasonable chance of avoiding the pitfalls of overstaying our welcome,’ he said, ‘but gives us the best opportunity of consolidating the Iraqi security forces.’ Speaking about the Samarra bombing, Houghton commented that it had ‘not in any way altered the plan and its potential time-scale. The degree of restraint in the face of huge provocation was reassuring.’
Such words caused alarm among senior US officers. British leaders mouthed the American message that the withdrawal had to be ‘conditions-based’, but just how bad did things have to get for the UK to reconsider their plan? Up until around this time – July 2006 – there were also plenty in the US chain of command who saw their duty as driving towards withdrawal, whatever horrors were being perpetrated on the streets. But as the Baghdad Security Plan began to falter serious questions were being asked from the Green Zone to the White House about junking Plan A and finding a new way to deal with the worsening situation. It cannot be said that a new idea had crystallised, and General Casey stuck doggedly to his strategy of turning over the fight to the Iraqis. Senior officers and Washington policymakers were using the failure of the Baghdad Security Plan to open the debate about what needed to be done, and whether Casey was the right man to do it.
Rob Fry, an intellectual Royal Marine, absorbed these discussions in Iraq, undergoing what one observer termed a ‘Damascene conversion’. The general was unpopular within the SAS, having in his previous postings questioned the early special operations campaign in Iraq and been one of those UK-based officers whom the blades deemed to have moved too slowly when the Jamiat incident happened. Fry began to question the mantra he had previously believed, of moving to ‘operational overwatch’. The situation was one of the utmost seriousness. The Coalition was staring defeat in the face. Was Britain willing to do anything about it? UK domestic politics made it impossible for the British army to reverse and reinforce itself in Basra. It might even be impossible to abandon the withdrawal plan set out by his predecessor, so Fry concluded that they would have to bring something else to the party. It was vital that Task Force Knight keep up its contribution to the main effort, the battle for Baghdad.
In addition, Generals Casey and Fry agreed that the British team in the capital should spearhead F-SEC, or Force Strategic Engagement Cell. The intelligence people could join in this new effort to turn the Sunni community against the jihadists.
So Task Force Knight and the Strategic Engagement Cell were to become more important at a time when security was deteriorating rapidly and Whitehall wanted to stick to its withdrawal plans. Those who believed Britain should fight on could only try to stand in the way of the stampede for the exit. At this turning point, a handful of British soldiers effectively lost faith in their national plan, sharing the growing realisation among the American military that more force might be necessary before any drawdown could be resumed. These included not only one or two senior officers, but many of the blades in Task Force Knight. One British general who visited Baghdad in the early summer of 2006 gave me a stark example of the tensions at play:
The sergeant-major of the SAS squadron approached me and suggested we have a word in the garden. We pulled up a couple of chairs and then, as if pre-arranged, a couple of other senior NCOs appeared from various corners, as if by magic, to join us. They had a message and it was soon clear what it was. ‘The Americans say we’ve given up, that we don’t want to fight any more. Is that true, boss?’ It was a good question. And it wasn’t easy for me to answer.
As they spoke, beyond the manicured gardens of the Green Zone the murder and violence seemed to be unstoppable. Hundreds of thousands of Baghdadis had fled to Jordan or Syria.
By late July US senior officers, concluding that Operation TOGETHER FORWARD had failed, were setting in train plans to launch a new security drive for the capital using a higher proportion of US troops. But, given the dire nature of the national security situation and the apparent desire by those at the top of the Pentagon not to commit more troops to an increasingly unpopular war, nobody was quite sure how Baghdad Security Plan Mark II might work.
During the violent weeks following Zarqawi’s death, the atmosphere of the shop floor at the JOC in Balad remained one of intense focus. Responding to the haul of intelligence from the scene of his killing and from other sites raided in Baghdad, the Coalition had mounted 450 raids in little more than a week – operations on a scale far beyond the resources of JSOC and its small group of secret task forces. At the core of these raids was JSOC’s approach of attempting to exploit the killing of Zarqawi. A senior British officer who encountered General McChrystal frequently during these months noted that ‘he was… one of the coolest assessors of the situation, despite being involved in the hurlyburly he had a detached intellectual view of the overall picture’. McChrystal’s instinct was that, despite the failure of Zarqawi’s death to improve the surrounding Iraqi mayhem, and despite the faltering of the wider US military effort, JSOC was still doing the right thing.
‘We sensed that al-Qaeda was going to implode,’ McChrystal later told a journalist. ‘We were watching it, and feeling it and seeing it.’
The reasons behind him forming such views lie in part in the secret intelligence picture to which the JSOC commander and a se
lect few were privy. They had known about tensions in the Sunni resistance since the latter part of 2005. There was the letter from al-Qaeda leader Atiyah Abdel Rahman, thought to be hiding in the Pakistani tribal areas, criticising Zarqawi for stirring up sectarian hatred with the Shia. Atiyah had also argued that Zarqawi’s 2005 bombing of hotels in the Jordanian capital was a mistake. A great deal of intelligence supported the view that many Sunnis were heartily sick of al-Qaeda’s extremism. Other al-Qaeda assessments seized during the raids following Zarqawi’s death had shown the movement knew that the passing of months might be working against them because of the speed with which new Iraqi units were being trained. One read, ‘Time is now beginning to be of service to the American forces and harmful to the resistance.’
These scraps of information were obviously subject to differing interpretation, and there were still some who, working away in their air-conditioned headquarters during the summer of 2006, believed that events were working against the Americans and not for them. The costs of the war were enormous and public support declining. Nonetheless, McChrystal maintained his belief that it was possible to dismantle the AQI infrastructure faster than it could regenerate itself.
The question of who might be right was about to be answered, at least in part. It was to happen not in Baghdad, which everyone agreed had become the central battle of the insurgency, but to the west, in al-Anbar.