Task Force Black

by Mark Urban

  In their communiqués the kidnappers did not refer to themselves as Special Groups, a term developed by US intelligence, but as a resistance group called Asaib Ahl al-Haq or the ‘League of the Righteous’. The League was in fact a name used by associates of Khazali, fellow breakaways from the Mehdi Army who were firmly in the pro-Iranian extremist camp. After initial public demands for the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq, the kidnappers revealed their true purpose. In return for the hostages they sought the release of the Khazali brothers and other named individuals detained under the Counter Iranian Influence raids.

  Over time, the Finance Ministry kidnap affair showed the dangers of Britain adopting the CII mission, and specifically of G Squadron’s raid in March. The Asaib Ahl al-Haq, like Iran itself, appeared to see the British as a softer touch than the Americans. Having detained the Khazalis and others, Task Force Knight had handed them over to US custody. The issue of whether the Special Groups or Quds Force prisoners should be freed therefore became a tricky bilateral question for America and Britain.

  These political hazards were far from the only difficulties confronting G Squadron during the final weeks of its tour. The dangers of the job itself, particularly at the breakneck pace demanded by JSOC in confronting both Sunni and Shia extremist threats, carried plenty of risks of its own.

  Task Force Knight had by early 2007 conducted so many takedowns that it had considered pretty much every aspect of the risk involved. It had lost just two men in Iraqi house assaults but had a great many more wounded, some seriously. Different methods were open to an assault force in hitting their Alpha, ranging from fast roping from a helicopter on to the roof to blowing their way in through walls with explosive charges. In most cases, particularly once a compound had been breached, there was no choice but to go from one room to another.

  One veteran of many such assaults sums up the matter with dry fatalism: ‘Going in, the bad guy is not going to be straight ahead of you. He is either to the left or to the right. At that point it’s fifty-fifty really. You cannot look both ways at once, so you take your choice. If you enter and look left and he’s on your right, you’ve got a problem.’

  The regiment had done what it could to mitigate the risks, and body armour had been upgraded. Since 2005 the SAS had tried something quite new too. On certain assaults specially trained dogs had been sent into the Alpha. Those outside would then wait to see if the dogs flushed anybody out. But despite these new techniques the dangers of assaulting could not be eliminated. During the spring and summer of 2007 the regiment had several men seriously wounded, as it extended its operations into Sadr City, a particularly dangerous environment where, due to its built-up nature, it was harder to employ heavy weapons.

  One issue thrown up in these months was the difference between UK and US rules of engagement, as well as in their general approach. The Americans, after some costly setbacks assaulting houses, were quite ready to drop a bomb, as in the Zarqawi case, or strafe a car from a helicopter gunship if their intelligence told them that the person inside had a history of taking life and could be about to do so again. One SAS officer characterises with brutal frankness the JSOC practice for dealing with its targets by this time: ‘The only reason to capture someone in those circumstances was for intelligence. We were beyond the martyrdom argument, it had become an attritional campaign – we had to take them apart.’

  British special forces went into Iraq with rules of engagement closer to those of their ‘green army’ colleagues. For a long time the DSF and CJO would not authorise the bombing of a house unless its occupants had shown signs of resistance, most obviously by shooting at Coalition troops but even, in some cases, simply by revealing weapons. Even then, if an assault had been ordered for intelligence-gathering purposes they could not necessarily shoot anyone inside who offered resistance. This produced much negative comment from Task Force Knight operators. Over time, Task Force Knight’s rules of engagement had in fact been brought closer to those of the Americans. By 2007 they were, under certain circumstances, allowed to attack a house or car if they believed those inside to be terrorists about to perpetrate an act of violence. Even so, the anecdotal impression given by some British operators is that the Americans were more ready to authorise pre-emptive use of force in this way, and that the gap between approaches was never completely closed, despite changes to the Task Force Knight rules of engagement.

  If the risks of storming an Alpha were greater for the British than the Americans, the odds of getting there unharmed were, some felt, better. Between January and April 2007 eight US military and two civilian helicopters had been shot down. This brought inevitable questions about whether the Iranians were supplying insurgents with new shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles or whether they were coming from some other source, since those left over from Saddam’s army were by this time considered quite out of date.

  In the first months of 2007 a series of complex ambushes had been laid for American helicopters. This produced some understandable nervousness in the RAF, but their pilots generally retained a confidence that their Pumas had superior defensive aids – countermeasures against the missiles – and their flying routines were constantly varied. ‘If the Americans flew the same way, same day, same height, they were asking for it,’ observes one Task Force Knight aviator. But the business of manoeuvring up to a dozen aircraft, at night, in unregulated airspace was inherently dangerous. On 15 April the Baghdad Puma detachment discovered just how risky it could be.

  Task Force Knight’s operation that early morning was a standard house assault against a suspected Sunni insurgent leader near Taji, twenty kilometres north of Baghdad. Taji was one of the classic Baghdad belt al-Qaeda strongholds and the scene of several previous raids. Because of the semi-rural nature of the target it had been decided to prosecute it with an air assault force. Both the blades and their support platoon from Task Force Maroon were to be landed in fields near the Alpha, a task requiring several Pumas.

  The crews had a midnight briefing at MSS Fernandez and the mission got under way at 00.40 on 15 April. Eighteen minutes later the aircraft made their final approach to the landing zone. Or at least to the ground identified by the lead Puma’s skipper as the landing zone. Dropping down from three hundred feet after crossing over some power lines, the first two helicopters, flying side by side, began their landing.

  At this point the crews realised that they were off target, about to land in the wrong field. They had to make a snap decision. They could have flown forward, circled around and come in again. But the lead aircraft went into a hover and then began to fly backwards. It didn’t go far, only about fifty metres, but it backed into the dust cloud billowing up just behind it. As the aircraft beside the lead ship executed the same manoeuvre the two helicopters lost the normal safety distance that ought to have separated them.

  The first aircraft touched down and the SAS men started to leap out, but at that moment the rotors of the second Puma touched theirs. The tail boom of the first aircraft collapsed as a rotor sliced into the Puma’s side and it tipped over. The second aircraft, just above the ground at the moment of the rotor strike, yawed violently.

  Watching from above through his night-vision goggles, the pilot of the third helicopter in the operation was shocked to spot ‘two people fall out of the right-hand door… it was very quick, just a flash’. In fact, three people had been flung out of the second helicopter: Sergeant Mark McLaren, one of the RAF Puma crew, Staff Sergeant Mark Powell, and another SAS soldier. The men had unclipped from their safety harnesses knowing they were about to touch down. The Puma crashed the last few feet to the ground and immediately tipped over, on top of the three men.

  The shower of shattered rotor blades and other debris injured several other men on the ground. As the comms came alive with a mayday, soldiers from the first helicopter combined with survivors from the second to try to help their crushed colleagues. In the cases of McLaren and Powell, they struggled in vain. The other SAS soldier,
seriously wounded, was flown to the Combat Support Hospital in central Baghdad where his life was saved.

  Incidents like this during the final stage of G Squadron’s tour showed how difficult the SAS’s task had become. Its commanders had longed to operate at the same level as the Americans, out every night against a variety of targets. But Task Force Knight was operating with far less back-up against enemies hundreds of miles apart in Basra and Baghdad. The squadron had lost a man and had a dozen wounded – casualties amounting to around one third of those who embarked on the tour. And as their successors in A Squadron began to deploy, the pace of operations seemed to be increasing still further.

  17

  AL-QAEDA’S SURGE

  The Iraqi parliament building is in fact an old conference centre from the Saddam era. In its central hall a band of murals looms high above those who enter. It shows doves of peace and stylised scenes from Iraqi history, a little like a Bayeux tapestry of Ba’athist cliché. On the first-floor mezzanine is a cafeteria where MPs gather for coffee and gossip.

  By April 2007 the country was in a state of governmental and parliamentary gridlock. Nouri al-Maliki’s national unity government appeared to form and dissolve, baffling the American diplomats who tried to bring the different sides together. For the lawmakers chewing over issues in the café, bills such as those to govern the extraction of the country’s oil wealth or regulating militias became interminable struggles. At stake were sectarian, party and regional advantage.

  Life as an Iraqi MP was, it can be imagined, hardly a bed of roses. Some had been murdered in their homes. Others faced constant threats. In the parliament building at least they could turn their minds to the job they had been elected to do. Entry to the Green Zone required special screening and, even once through that, there were two more security checks to get into the building itself.

  Despite this, on 12 April a suicide bomber made his way up the stairs to the cafeteria. Finding a group of parliamentarians sitting at the tables he moved purposely onwards and detonated his device, killing himself and three MPs. Elsewhere in the city that day so many bad things were happening people dubbed it Black Thursday. Al-Qaeda destroyed a bridge at Sadriya that day too, killing eleven people and disrupting communications on a key Baghdad artery.

  Strikes like the suicide bombing in parliament or the Sadriya bridge suggested to the Sunni militants that they could hit people pretty much wherever they wanted and that they could target national infrastructure too. Far away on Washington’s Capitol Hill, Senator Joe Biden pronounced ‘This war is lost.’ The surge, he added, was not achieving anything. But the surge had barely begun, and in certain places al-Qaeda’s power had been hardly touched.

  The southern suburb of Doura had in its time been one of Baghdad’s playgrounds. It was multi-ethnic, home to many professional families, thriving markets and restaurants. Doura’s cafes had been choked with customers on spring evenings, smoking the nargila or hubble-bubble pipe while playing dominoes and watching the world go by. The area had even boasted some nightclubs.

  By April 2007 it had been the scene of full-scale sectarian warfare for many months. Most of the Shia had been driven out and many Christians had taken their cue to leave when a suicide car bomb had been driven into one of their churches. The Mehdi Army retaliated by dumping murdered Sunnis outside one of the schools. One local man told me that he had stopped sending his children to school when the appearance of bodies, some with their eyes gouged out or showing signs of torture with electric drills, became an everyday occurrence.

  Among the Sunnis, extremism was the order of the day. Reviewing security across the capital that summer, an Iraqi blogger described the situation: ‘Doura is not under the authority of the Republic of Iraq. It is currently an Islamic emirate with its own departments and ministers.’ Those who tried to contest al-Qaeda’s power, like one local 1920 Brigades commander, were swiftly murdered.

  Into this maelstrom were sent soldiers from 2-12 Infantry Battalion. They were ordered to establish a combat outpost (or ‘Cop’) in the heart of what had once been Doura’s flourishing market. Fuelled by the new doctrine that security required American troops to live among the people and not ‘commute to war’ from the FOB, a few dozen soldiers camped out in abandoned shops, where I joined them as an embedded journalist in late April. Defended by little more than a few concrete blast walls and some razor wire, their situation felt intensely vulnerable. An Iraqi police station a few hundred yards away had been hit by a truck bomb, killing more than a dozen officers. General Petraeus’s new ideas about securing the population required his men to take great risks. When a Cop outside Baquba was hit by a complex al-Qaeda attack on 24 April, nine American soldiers were killed.

  Petraeus chose Doura as an early test ground for his new doctrines. By late April a few dozen shops had opened (although commanders claimed it was two hundred) and some at headquarters were hailing signs of progress. Any success at that moment seemed tenuous because al-Qaeda was conducting its own surge in the area.

  The soldiers at Gator Cop, as Alpha Company’s base in the market was called, were hit every day. Their Humvees got blasted with IEDs, RPGs were dropped into the base and snipers tried to pick off anyone who showed themselves in the streets. The market really only operated for two hours a day and once people had scurried home with the essentials they needed to subsist, the streets were largely deserted. Under strict Islamic law there was no question of the restaurants opening or men meeting to smoke and play dominoes.

  Those on errands darted from one doorway to another and civilians with gunshot wounds were frequently brought into the Cop for treatment by its medics. Both al-Qaeda and some of the police, whom the locals considered a uniformed branch of the Mehdi Army, seemed to shoot people at random. The soldiers in Gator Cop reacted with gallows humour, having T-shirts printed with the slogan ‘Doura Market – Shop ’til You’re Dropped’.

  In a place like this, both the ground-holding force, 2-12 Infantry, and special operations forces were free to mount operations in the muhallas or city blocks. But there was inevitably a hierarchy in the way these were applied. The infantry operating out of Gator Cop were under pressure to mount a raid every night, just as the OC of Task Force Knight was. But going out was so risky nobody wanted to do it for dry holes or to pick up an innocent man. Undoubtedly, though, they sometimes did, even if their record was generally a good one.

  Accompanying Gator Company one April night we were joined by an NCO from the brigade’s Tactical Humint Team – the equivalent of British Army Field Humint Teams run by the Defence Humint Unit. He brought with him an agent from one of the muhallas who was dressed up as an Iraqi interpreter, complete with balaclava to disguise his identity. Once inside the target house this agent discreetly identified two suspects. One proved to be a suspected bomb maker who had been organising IED attacks, the other was an innocent man who was released a couple of hours later with an apology.

  At the same time that operations like this were being prosecuted every night, outfits like Delta and Task Force Knight, with their responsibility for the Baghdad area, were also free to work up target packs on networks in neighbourhoods like Doura. While this might have seemed like a recipe for conflict, it actually allowed ground-holding troops to exploit the special operators’ natural competitiveness to their own advantage. In this situation, says one Task Force Knight veteran, ‘liaison officers and OOB [out of bounds] boxes became the order of the day’. When a takedown operation was planned the liaison man would arrive with the local unit, install himself in their ops room and keep routine patrols out of their area of interest.

  Members of the FHT attached to Task Force Knight therefore made it their business to cultivate the intelligence officers of the various American battalions around Baghdad. ‘Delta thought it was beneath them but we were absolutely ruthless,’ says one British humint operator. ‘We would talk to anyone who could give us the information to get started.’ Thus the arrival of Pumas became a regular e
vent at FOB Falcon, a couple of miles to the south of Doura. There the British met the intelligence officers of US units operating in the Rashid District of southern Baghdad, which included such al-Qaeda strongholds as Doura. Task Force Knight also started to focus its attention on Arab Jabour, an area of farms and market gardens several miles further south, and another al-Qaeda bastion. If the American officers were agreeable, an agent meet would go ahead with the British there too. In this way the British developed takedown operations that had a direct impact on the fortunes of the ground-holding unit here, and therefore of the tentative progress of Petraeus’s new approach.

  The picture of al-Qaeda that emerged through humint operations in places such as Doura or Arab Jabour was of a very different organisation from the one that had baffled the spymasters in 2003 and 2004. It had gone from a small conspiracy dominated by foreign fighters into a widespread franchise, growing rapidly as the mercury of sectarian conflict had risen. In many places AQI used its reputation, money and profile to swallow up groups that had previously been loyal to less militant nationalist parties. One British officer comparing the intelligence he read in spring 2007 with that of an earlier tour notes the reporting featured ‘the same tribal names, and the same towns on the outskirts of Baghdad were targeted – but they had changed allegiance from the Ba’athists to al-Qaeda’. During late 2005 and early 2006 this shift of tribal allegiances had in many places made life hell for Coalition troops and non-Sunni families because it added to the ranks of the militant organisation faster than JSOC could take people down. But this growth also opened greater possibilities for the penetration and neutralisation of al-Qaeda cells. This applied not only to humint organisations but to the burgeoning Awakening operation. For just as tribal sheikhs had switched the allegiance of their followers from the Ba’athists to the jihadists, so they might be persuaded to rent them en masse to the Awakening.