Task Force Black

by Mark Urban

  13

  CHOOSING VICTORY

  Late on Saturday 17 July 2006 British troops moved into one of the most hostile neighbourhoods of Basra in pursuit of Sajjad Badr Adal Sayeed, the leader of JAM ( Jaish al-Mehdi or the Mehdi Army) in the city. Warriors rumbled in to put in place a cordon while a storming party prepared to enter Sajjad’s house. His role and whereabouts had been identified during a lengthy intelligence operation. Having gathered their dossier, the experts referred it to their chain of command for action.

  Moving on a kingpin in the militia required a careful military–political judgement. Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader to whom Mehdi Army units in the city owed loyalty, had been drawn into powersharing arrangements with the new Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki. But securing a role in the Baghdad power game had little soothing effect on his movement; rather, their attacks on Coalition troops continued to escalate. Since direct confrontation with the Mehdi Army – the kind of bloodletting seen in al-Amarrah or Sadr City in 2004 – would have been politically damaging to the Maliki government, the Coalition had to go easy on the Shia militia. In its public pronouncements the British army explained the growing rain of rockets on its bases or IEDs against its vehicles as the work of ‘rogue elements’ or ‘splinter groups’. Certainly there were some Iranian-backed militants at work in many attacks, but the simple truth was that thousands of Mehdi Army foot soldiers were engaged in fighting the Coalition despite Muqtada’s political manoeuvres, or even perhaps as part of them, in an effort designed to enhance his bargaining position.

  As they considered the request to mount a major strike operation against Sajjad, British decision-makers knew there could be difficult repercussions. In the constant rotations of operational leaders within Iraq, however, the planets were aligned for tough action in a way that had rarely been before. There had, for example, been a brief window of opportunity ten months earlier when a significant Mehdi Army leader was arrested and Sajjad unsuccessfully targeted by the SAS. By the summer of 2006 the commander of 20th Armoured Brigade favoured an aggressive approach, as did Fry and Lamb, the senior British officers in Baghdad during that summer and autumn. Most important, the central figure in the UK national setup in the south, the commander of Multi-National Division South East, had decided to send a message to the militia. Cavalry officer Major-General Richard Shirreff had arrived in Basra with a sense that his division had lost the initiative to its enemies, and found it unacceptable that the British army had become so passive in the face of mounting casualties.

  Shirreff had been dispatched to Iraq with the words of the Chief of Joint Operations, his military superior in the UK, ringing in his ears: ‘We want no displays of military testosterone in Basra.’ The CJO at that time, Lieutenant-General Nick Houghton, was the officer who had preceded Rob Fry in Baghdad and who, prior to departing, had publicly declared plans to get the British Army out of Iraq by the summer of 2008. Shirreff was not interested in machismo, nor in keeping British troops in Iraq indefinitely. He was however determined to allow them to withdraw under conditions of their own making, hopefully having broken the Mehdi Army in Basra first. So he ordered the strike operation against Sajjad.

  The British troops that hit his house were men selected from the Brigade Reconnaissance Company, spearheaded by the HATHOR detachment. Although they succeeded in removing Sajjad without major difficulties, Mehdi Army militiamen were soon engaging the strike force cordon with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. Black-clad militants ran through the streets with RPGs on their shoulders or guns in their hands, keen to join in the battle. For two hours exchanges continued between the army and Sajjad’s men, during which it was estimated that the Iraqis fired 104 RPGs and thousands of small-arms rounds. Corporal John Cosby, a Team Leader in the Brigade Reconnaissance Force, was killed, as were four Iraqi militiamen.

  These battles became typical of the kind of reception that awaited large-scale strike operations in Basra’s militia strongholds. While SAS operations around Baghdad also required a cordon it was usually provided by paratroopers of the Special Forces Support Group. In Basra, companies of mechanised infantry in Warrior fighting vehicles had to be employed for the same purpose. This heavy presence could bring hundreds of armed militia onto the streets. Thus while the actual target building would often be entered without violence the reception awaiting a strike force in notorious Basra neighbourhoods like Hayyaniyah, Qibla, and Jumhuriyah was as violent as some of the toughest places the Americans operated.

  The Sensitive Site Exploitation at Sajjad’s compound produced a host of documents and other leads, triggering another operation in the city three nights later, in which two tons of weapons (mainly rockets and mortar bombs of the type used in the frequent attacks on British bases in the city) were seized. Back home, the Defence Secretary hailed the twin operations as causing ‘a very significant deterioration’ in the militia’s capability. Over the following days Mehdi Army supporters showed their anger with riots and further attacks on British bases.

  Under the UK’s plans to turn over the south to Iraqi control, Britain had moved to ‘operational overwatch’ in al-Muthanna Province on 13 July and was due to hand over Dhi Ghar in September. Of the four provinces originally under British control this left Maysan and Basra, both seats of major difficulties. Shirreff wanted to mount a big clear-and-hold operation in Basra that autumn. He christened his plan Operation SALAMANCA in honour of his hero the Duke of Wellington’s finest offensive victory. SALAMANCA, as planned, involved several extra battalions of British troops as well as Iraqi reinforcements. It would have thrown many thousands of security forces into battle to ‘isolate and destroy’ the city’s militias. Some British generals back home were alarmed because, as one of Shirreff ’s staff officers told me at the time, ‘it looked like he was going to do a Fallujah’. They denied him the extra troops he was looking for, instead giving him two battalions for a few weeks, citing the need to channel men into the burgeoning Afghanistan operation. The Iraqi government meanwhile refused to support such an ambitious operation because it could bring an open war with Muqtada al-Sadr.

  Faced with these obstacles, Shirreff ’s options were distinctly limited. He would boost the intelligence and special forces capabilities needed to mount more offensive operations; move an armoured battlegroup out of Maysan so it could join in the attempt to clear Basra; and accept Maliki’s suggestion that the Basra security drive be given an ‘Iraqi face’, with an Iraqi general notionally in charge, far more limited aims and the new Arabic-sounding codename Operation SINBAD.

  In pushing forward his strike operations, the commander of MND South East found the SAS supportive. Richard Williams had run Shirreff ’s staff in the Balkans when he was commanding 7 Armoured Brigade. The two men worked well together, unlike some previous high-ups in Basra who had cold-shouldered the SAS. Among the rank and file of the SAS some of the anger resulting from the Jamiat incident before had now dissipated, and they felt duty-bound to help their comrades as the situation deteriorated. As a result of this the SAS presence in Basra was later upgraded from the HATHOR detachment to Task Force Spartan, which was around twice the size. Spartan would be used to develop target intelligence and spearhead strike operations. The addition of several SAS operators might seem trivial in the context of the thousands of troops already involved, but one of the commanders who worked in the city says, ‘Those few men were the equivalent of a battalion.’

  During Richard Shirreff ’s command a detachment was also picked from the regular army garrison and given the job of supporting special operations. Armageddon Platoon, as it soon became known, was based at Basra Palace, providing a Quick Reaction Force for the intelligence people.

  In pushing ahead with SINBAD, despite all of the limitations placed upon it, the British divisional commander also needed to free up the armoured battlegroup deployed in Maysan Province. By the summer of 2006 their situation had become extremely difficult. Camp Abu Naji, the main British base, south of the provincial
capital al-Amarrah, was a constant target of indirect fire attacks, being hit almost every night and sometimes several times. In fact, by this point Camp Abu Naji and Basra Palace were two of the top three most rocketed or mortared bases in the whole of Iraq. Roadside bombs took a steady toll, including soldiers operating the army’s heaviest troop carrier, the Warrior. Resupplying this armoured force required frequent convoys of a hundred-plus vehicles from Basra, the protection of which could tie down an entire battalion. While many in the British Army would happily have handed Maysan over to its notoriously independent people, there was great pressure from the Americans to maintain a close watch over the 283 kilometres of the province that bordered Iran. American intelligence was convinced that a large number of the EFP bombs came from Iran via Maysan. In the ripe phraseology of one senior US officer, Maysan Province was ‘the sewer where all the shit was coming through’.

  Major-General Shirreff ’s solution was to abandon Camp Abu Naji, withdrawing the armoured battlegroup from the province while keeping a smaller force, using light armour, Land Rovers and other soft-skin vehicles to move around the desert and mount surveillance of the Iranian border. This solution, Operation VIDETTE (named after the cavalry observation outpost lines of Wellington’s day), seemed elegant but involved many difficulties. In the first place the Mehdi Army and Badr Brigade militias celebrated the abandonment of the camp as a great propaganda victory, announcing that they had ‘kicked out the occupiers’. Thousands converged on Abu Naji to strip the camp of facilities intended for the use of the Iraqi army. Pictures of the resulting scenes caused criticism of the British, both at home and from some Americans.

  The solution of mounting patrols along the border was hardly likely to stem any flow of EFPs either. In many areas the frontier presented a moonscape of earthworks from the Iran–Iraq war, where people trying to cross could easily be spotted. In others, such as an official crossing point and on certain waterways in the marshes, the volume of traffic was too large to be monitored effectively. Some even suspected that the new British operation along the border was little more than a demonstration, a ruse designed to impress both Americans and Iranians. If this was the intention it failed. ‘There was a lot of frustration from the American organisations as to what we were really doing out there,’ remarks one SAS man. British commanders, nervous about what the Americans were thinking, decided to step up special operations in Maysan. The regiment formed a Maysan intelligence fusion cell, mounting many surveillance missions in the desert during the summer of 2006. But these efforts produced little in the way of results.

  Having taken these steps in August, the British moved ahead with Operation SINBAD in September and October. In a series of ‘pulses’, each of Basra city’s districts was flooded with troops. With Warriors posted on corners, and frequent street patrols, the militia lay low while the British engaged in a variety of tasks from trying to improve schools to mentoring the police. Given most of the pulses lasted no more than forty-eight hours, the impact of the operation was bound to be limited. The intention was to establish Iraqi army positions in many areas, but by this juncture the soldiers and Iraqi Police Service were in almost open conflict.

  A visit to the Farahidi police station during SINBAD brought home the scale of the distrust. Farahidi was one of the difficult ‘new’ suburbs on the east of the city, close to the Jamiat district and the Hayyaniyah, the hotbed of militia activity. Inside there was tension as the British began biometrically logging officers at the station – the duty commander began shouting that he did not want it filmed. This registration showed how little the British thought of the police, suspecting them of a wide variety of misdemeanours ranging from paybook fraud to involvement in criminal acts using their police uniforms or militia membership. The IPS for their part returned the compliment. While the biometric team worked in one room, an officer outside denounced the British to me, saying that they had promised to leave but only seemed interested in talking about oil. In the station armoury a poster of Ayatollah Khomeini adorned the wall. As we left the patrol came under a hail of stones.

  Britain’s Chief of Defence Staff later said that the 2006 operation in Basra was ‘emasculated’ by the Iraqi Prime Minister. Equally, it is clear that Britain would not commit the troops necessary to confront the militias, or indeed to disband large sections of the police, and was fearful of the consequences if it did. And so, with this mutual failure of will, the city slipped deeper into the hands of the gunmen and the British Army’s opportunity to leave the inhabitants a reasonable degree of security disappeared. Even so, the strike operations went on, fed by a stream of good intelligence. But the aspirations of the British general in charge to break the power of the militias were not met. Instead strike operations continued with the aim of taking down mortar or IED teams and so trying to reduce British casualties as the army prepared for its exit.

  While SINBAD, also known as the Basra Security Plan, unfolded in its halfhearted way, the failure of the Baghdad Security Plan, even in its modified form, was evident by the October of 2006. So began the comings and goings at Camp Victory or the US Embassy compound, of consultants, policy wonks and congressmen. It was evident that the existing strategy upon which Casey had based the entire operation in Iraq, that of turning over security to the Iraqis as swiftly as possible, had, if anything, made the chaos even worse. What was to be done? A high-level panel of Washington’s great and good, the Iraq Study Group, began its deliberations. Their eventual recommendations – of beginning a phased US withdrawal, engaging the White House’s archenemies in Syria and Iran, and putting more effort into training Iraqi forces – formed a sort of counsel of despair.

  Behind the scenes, a lower-profile group started to think in very different ways. On 19 September, the retired general Jack Keane briefed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on a proposed new strategy for Iraq which involved suspending planned withdrawals and waging an ambitious US-led counterinsurgency campaign on the streets of Iraqi cities. Neither Rumsfeld nor General Casey, who only days before had told Congress that he did not need any more American troops, was ready to accept these ideas. Both men were, however, falling behind the Washington curve, for Jack Keane increasingly had the ear of the White House.

  When Keane and some civilian experts * eventually published their ideas they called their paper ‘Choosing Victory’. It provided a strategic blueprint for what was soon to unfold: the shift to a counterinsurgency strategy and the surge of US troops into Iraq. ‘Choosing Victory’ charted a way through the apparently hopeless mayhem that the US found itself in. Dividing the spectrum of violent groups it saw that Ba’athists and nationalists (much like those sheikhs already cooperating with the Strategic Engagement Cell) were ‘much more likely… to become open to negotiation and political persuasion’. If surge troops were used to secure Sunni and mixed neighbourhoods in Baghdad, deterring Shia death squads, then Sunni vigilante or self-defence groups would wither. Strike operations against al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups would have to continue in order to prevent them derailing this process. This defence of certain quarters required more American soldiers – the surge, which was initially estimated at twenty-one thousand and later nearly thirty thousand. It was only once the heat was taken out of the sectarian conflict, and therefore the Shia militias had been deprived of their pretext of operating as a defence force for their community, that the politically charged issue of confronting the Shia groups could be tackled. Keane and the others recommended that ‘clearing Sadr City is both unwise and unnecessary at this time’.

  This strategy, reflecting Keane’s consultations both with David Petraeus, the army’s leading counterinsurgency thinker, and with General Casey’s deputy Ray Odierno, the general running operations in Iraq, was to prove remarkably far-sighted. It secured the backing of a president desperate to avoid defeat and thereby cut the ground from beneath Rumsfeld and Casey. The US adoption of the surge strategy near the end of the year left Britain with great political difficulties. Opera
tion SINBAD underlined what the authors of ‘Choosing Victory’ knew only too well: that confronting Shia militants was the most difficult thing to do because of their political ties to the Maliki government. Britain could and would play its role in the Baghdad battle through Task Force Knight and the Strategic Engagement Cell, but as far as Basra was concerned the limits of Britain’s will to impose a security solution had been exposed. Down in the streets of the Shia Flats, the city was becoming increasingly dangerous for British troops and it fell to small teams of soldiers to retain the initiative.

  On a Sunday morning in November a ceremony of remembrance for Britain’s fallen was conducted at Basra Palace. Following this, a group of three patrol boats set out, heading north into the Shatt al-Arab waterway. Journeys by the river route were a welcome break from the routine of helicopter and were considered safe. Although there had been a few incidents of the craft taking fire, the trips normally provided a lighthearted distraction for those in the boats.

  That day a Field Humint Team (FHT) from the Defence Humint Unit was shuttling north. They were still successful in running agents in the city despite the growing lawlessness. One of their colleagues describes the mission as one of ‘ground familiarisation’ rather than an agent meet. It was very difficult to go out into the streets but fellow members of the unit say that they had acquired many different techniques for recruiting and meeting their sources. A surprising number of prospective agents simply approached Coalition bases offering information. ‘You pay them to get them under control but they usually acted through altruistic reasons,’ notes one agent runner. ‘They wanted to help Iraq become a better place.’