by Mark Urban
Even so, al-Qaeda’s strength in places like Doura or indeed Baquba in the Baghdad belt posed some disturbing questions. If, as many people accepted by the spring of 2007, the extremists had been dealt with a few months earlier in Ramadi, was it not the case that they had simply shifted to Baghdad and Baquba? Some analysts wondered whether Petraeus would just be playing whack-a-mole, hitting al-Qaeda in one place only to see them pop up elsewhere.
For those waging the secret war of intelligence-gathering and strike operations, this new phase of the conflict required them to increase their tempo still further. If al-Qaeda could be defeated in Baghdad, just as they had been defeated in Ramadi, then the Coalition could claim a strategic victory. In mid-February 2007 Petraeus had launched a third version of the Baghdad Security Plan, called this time Operation Fardh al-Qanoun, or Law and Order. The al-Qaeda upsurge of April was clearly designed to break this new initiative, but could the organisation sustain its own surge?
During those early months of 2007 the organisation had shown its continued ability to perpetrate murder on a massive scale: a huge truck bomb in Tal Afar on the Syrian border had killed 152 people in late March; two days later eighty-two had died in multiple bombings of Shia neighbourhoods in Baghdad; a further wave of bombings claimed two hundred lives in the capital on 18 April; four days later eighty perished in a VBIED attack in Kerbala. Perhaps only a fool or an incurable optimist could have detected signs of hope in this. Yet among the intelligence analysts there were some who eschewed the apocalyptic.
In the first place, although some al-Qaeda cells still showed themselves capable of multiple suicide bombings or complex attacks the scale of these did not seem to match some of the earlier ones – for example the fourteen car bombs of 29 April 2005 or the huge attack on Abu Ghraib prison in the same month. Secondly, some began to wonder whether the new peak in activity of April 2007 carried an element of ‘use it or lose it’ among the car bombing cells. Their infiltration routes had become more difficult due to the large number of Sakhwa or Awakening groups mushrooming across Anbar. These groups were also being established in the Baghdad belts. On 2 May one of these Awakening groups, operating near Taji, had eliminated a minister in the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq. Jihadists driven out of Ramadi or other parts of Anbar appeared in places like Doura and they did not make themselves popular. Anxious to step up attacks on US forces and for the implementation of strict sharia, they soon alienated many of the city dwellers.
There were also those at Camp Slayer, where MNF Iraq’s intelligence chief sat, and in the spooks’ talking shops around the green zone who began wondering whether April’s high levels of violence disguised an important underlying trend, which was that while the totals might still be going up, it was Shia militants who accounted for a growing proportion of this. Were attacks by Sunni jihadists actually falling while those by Shia were going up, boosting the aggregate total? Some American commanders in Baghdad were by that spring saying openly that Shia militants were responsible for the majority of attacks on Coalition forces.
Regardless of who was killing whom – and the issue was complex when US lives were taken by EFP bombs or other weapons supplied by Iran to extremists on both sides of the sectarian divide – the trend was still depressing. During the early part of 2007, anxious lest domestic support collapse, JSOC had briefed certain senior visitors on its covert campaign and Lieutenant-General McChrystal’s view that al-Qaeda could not carry on taking this level of damage. Visitors were given JSOC’s estimate that by early 2007 it had killed two thousand members of the Sunni jihadist groups as well as detaining many more. TF-16 was often mounting six raids per night. TF-17 could produce something similar. The effectiveness of these raids was increasing too.
McChrystal’s high-tempo onslaught had begun in earnest barely two years earlier. JSOC’s intelligence database had grown with each network it rolled up. ‘The campaign matured,’ argues one SAS officer, commenting that agent networks among the AQI cells were at last delivering good information. In fixing these targets, the growth of Iraqi mobile phone use to millions of subscribers and a steady increase in the number of drones available for surveillance meant time was on JSOC’s side. The real issue, then, was whether the US political will to keep going with the surge would falter before JSOC’s takedowns, the Awakening and the activities of ground-holding troops like 2-12 Infantry could exhaust al-Qaeda’s supply of people and bombs.
From the parochial viewpoint of Task Force Knight, it entered May with new kit and new people. A Squadron was taking over from G, after its exhausting tour. The troops had been given new transport, an armoured vehicle far better protected than its old Humvees. Improved night-vision aids had come into use during the preceding months.
The SAS also donned new combat uniforms. They had for years been free to adopt a wide variety of camouflage, depending upon where they were operating. The new clothing, made by a firm called Crye Precision, was quite distinctive – darker than standard British desert camo and browner than the American combat uniform. Quickly dubbed Crye Kit by the blades, it was also used by Delta Force. The switch to these darker uniforms stemmed largely from a realisation that the sand-coloured desert uniforms used by both the US and British military made them too visible at night, when most of their operations were conducted.
As G Squadron quit the MSS for home, a new tour was starting. A tour that was to coincide with a new chapter in Iraq as a whole.
18
THE TIDE TURNS
The arrival of A Squadron at MSS Fernandez produced a certain nervous tension among the supporting players of Task Force Knight. ‘The rivalry between squadrons was massive,’ explains one intelligence specialist. ‘They were obsessed with the tally they had achieved and outdoing the previous squadron.’
In truth, the kind of start that A Squadron wished to make depended to a considerable extent on the target packs that had been nurtured but not executed by G Squadron and other predecessors. One SAS operator notes, ‘We inherited a very well-developed intelligence picture. It had become a well-functioning factory by that point and one squadron fed off the work of another.’
When one outgoing squadron departed, exhausted after six months of adrenaline-fuelled contacts, the new men would arrive full of enthusiasm. One intelligence operator who saw them come and go records: ‘The squadron would turn up in country and say, “We’re going out tonight, what have you got?” They would actually want a job on their first night. They would put the most intense pressure on for the intelligence needed to maintain their strike rate.’
This aggression was felt in the Task Force Knight helicopter detachment too. They had been chastened by April’s fatal accident. However, as one pilot notes, ‘the SF guys are hard people to say no to. They are charismatic. People don’t want to say no because they want to be part of that legacy.’
Some, like D Squadron’s OC the previous summer, tried to stand back a little and reflect on their target sets before throwing themselves into the fray, but the OC of A Squadron was cut from different cloth. Major Kennedy was the first squadron commander to come back into Iraq after serving there as a troop leader a few years earlier. He had been with Richard Williams’s G Squadron as the insurgency got under way during the summer of 2003. Having been guided by the hard-fighting Williams at that formative stage, both men had gone up a step in rank.
‘[Kennedy] had been brought on by Richard Williams… when he went back in command of A Squadron he proved to be even more operationally aggressive than Colonel Williams,’ comments one of those who served under Kennedy in 2007. Another frontline observer remarks that A Squadron arrived with a highly competent, experienced selection of Team Leaders, making it ‘a dream team across the board’. These five or six captains and staff sergeants worked away on target packs and missions – sometimes more than one a night – were cued up for the blades. With Task Force Knight operating as a highly tuned machine under a hard master, the contrast with the British effort in southern Iraq could n
ot have been greater.
*
Back in February Tony Blair had confirmed in the House of Commons that Britain’s plans to turn over security in southern Iraq would proceed apace. He justified this partly in terms of the success of Operation SINBAD. The military officers who sought to move on to Afghanistan and close the Iraq chapter as swiftly as possible deployed other arguments. The presence of British troops in the centre of Basra was itself attracting a great deal of militia activity. So many rockets or mortars were fired at the Palace or the Shatt al-Arab Hotel, with so many missing and falling into neighbouring civilian areas that, to quote one officer at the time, ‘consent is evaporating’.
If this smacked of capitulation, SINBAD had at least demonstrated that the British army could not do much more, since the UK chain of command would not commit additional troops and the Iraqi security forces were keen to get the British out of the way too. All of this informed the appreciation of Major-General Jonathan Shaw, the commander of Multi-National Division South East for much of 2007. A senior American tells the following anecdote:
I went down there because the situation in Basra was dire. I asked him [Shaw] ‘What can we do to help?’ He told me that he didn’t need any help, that he had decided to withdraw his division to the airport where it would wait the decision to pull out. I looked at him and said, ‘Well, thank you for your clarity. You have at least told me exactly what you are going to do.’
The British army was entering its final and most controversial phase in southern Iraq. Those who watched from Baghdad were saddened or even disgusted. One SAS man quips, ‘Defeatist doesn’t quite cover it.’ A senior officer who worked in the capital reflects, ‘The British in Baghdad actually made the intellectual adjustment that MND South East never made.’ In his interpretation, those who acquired the Baghdad mentality had absorbed the American spirit of aggression, problem-solving and critical self-examination. The Basra crowd, by contrast, never escaped the collective cynicism of a professional group that had gone to Iraq thinking it knew better, and then blamed others for its failure.
Jonathan Shaw, in his defence, was operating under the directive of the Chief of Joint Operations back in the UK and indeed what happened next was simply the fruition of a plan laid out by the Prime Minister himself in February. The Old State Building (a small base right in the city centre) and the Shatt al-Arab Hotel were handed over to the Iraqi army and Provincial Iraq Control, or Pic, had been signed off in Maysan in April.
British troops left at the Palace became the focus of every militia mortar-man or IED-layer in search of a payday. Under constant bombardment, losses grew alarmingly as even supply runs produced intense street battles. The battlegroup based there was not supine: it mounted several strike operations, and one mission in April in which it had driven into the Hayyaniyah, effectively challenging the Mehdi Army to a fight. The British claimed to have killed two dozen militia without loss on their own side, but everybody in the city understood the way events were going and on 2 September Basra Palace was evacuated. The column of Warriors moving from the city centre to the airport flew British and Welsh flags as the Rifles and Fusiliers rumbled out.
For many Basrawis this withdrawal marked a final disappointment by the British. Places that had once been relaxed and secular, such as the university or the corniche, had fallen under the baleful influence of militia puritans during the preceding years. It was not as if this imposition of Islamic sobriety brought peace in its wake. Instead, Badr Brigade gunmen fought the Mehdi Army and the police often clashed with the army. Not long after the British evacuated the Palace the city Chief of Police lamented that ‘they left me militia, they left me gangsters and they left me all the troubles in the world’.
The controversy of the British withdrawal was succeeded by one concerning dealings with the militias. The SIS in Basra played a central role in this. As part of broader negotiations with the Mehdi Army, the British government agreed in August 2007 to release two dozen senior detainees after the Palace had been evacuated. These included Sajjad Badr, whose July 2006 arrest in a strike operation spearheaded by G Squadron had prompted a large-scale battle. The deal was allegedly negotiated with another man taken in an SAS-led strike from his prison cell at Basra airport. As part of a broader accommodation with the militias, the British agreed not to conduct further strike operations in the city in return for a ceasefire with militant groups there.
Some British officers had feared that, having left the Palace under a barrage of indirect fire, the militia would soon be rocketing the airport. However, once agreement was reached firing at the British base stopped almost completely. After years of intelligence analysis that described the insurgents in the city as splinter groups or offshoots, they almost all heeded an order to cease fire with remarkable discipline. Under these new arrangements the SIS had been withdrawn too, as had the SAS Task Force Spartan. With strike operations suspended there was little further role for special forces in Basra.
The story of that summer in Baghdad and the belt of communities around it was, by contrast, one of offensive action, spurred on by troops infused with new ideas of how they might beat the insurgency and backed up by considerable reinforcements. At MNF-I headquarters, Camp Victory or in the Green Zone there was quite a bit of disparagement of the British. The top British general in Iraq, taking part in the morning BUA and bereft of anything positive to report from the south, would refer day after day to the results produced overnight by Task Force Knight. ‘The SBMR-I would do anything he could each day to try and impress Petraeus,’ recalls a jaundiced SAS observer of the morning briefings. ‘We became his best card.’
These operations consisted of takedowns against Sunni and Shia militant targets. During May and June many Shia arrest operations were conducted by special ops units, including the SAS, but increasingly through TF-17’s Green Berets and the Iraqi commandos they mentored. The sense that the Prime Minister and the US were united against him caused Muqtada al-Sadr initially to flee to Iran, fearful for his own liberty and later, in August, to declare a Mehdi Army ceasefire with the Coalition. The fears raised by naysayers who had argued the folly of confronting Shia extremists were thereby shown to be groundless.
During those same summer months of 2007 Petraeus’s surge reached its climax. In Baghdad neighbourhoods including Adhamiya or Doura the erection of T-walls around particular muhallas allowed access to be controlled. This was followed by house-to-house sweeps. These had been done many times before, but this time with a difference, according to soldiers like those of the 2-12 Infantry in Doura. Insurgents who might previously have assumed themselves safe because they could escape over the back wall of a compound once the approach of Humvees was heard now calculated that they could not get across the new barricades. Afraid of getting cornered in the enclosed muhallas, many started to keep their distance. With this declining jihadist presence local citizens flocked to the Awakening forces and the success that had been achieved in rural Anbar was replicated in Baghdad. Many insurgents were hired in these days, turning for the princely sum of three dollars a day to fight on behalf of the Iraqi government rather than against it.
The toughest battle of that summer actually occurred outside Baghdad. It was in Baquba that many of the al-Qaeda men made their last stand. There had been bitter sectarian conflict in the city and the surrounding communities of Diyala Province for many months. It may be that the sense that they were all about to be murdered by the Shia made the Sunni population in that place harder to turn than they had been in Anbar or Baghdad. Jihadists had also declared Baquba to be the capital of the Islamic State of Iraq, having previously given that same distinction to Ramadi.
During early operations around the city’s outskirts in March and April US troops had got a taste of what was to come. In one two-kilometre stretch of road they discovered thirty IEDs. On 6 May a huge deep-buried bomb hurled a Striker armoured vehicle into the air, killing the six American troops and one journalist inside. Fighting their way into the
narrow alleys of Baquba’s historic old city the American troops went house to house, finding hundreds of booby traps and running firefights. ‘It was like World War Two,’ says one senior American officer. ‘It really was that intense.’
With so many more US troops fighting, casualties mounted quickly. In April 104 US soldiers were killed, in May 124 and in June 101. By July and August, though, these shockingly high figures had started to drop.
In places such as Doura the change brought about by the summer’s fighting was dramatic. Dubbed ‘the worst place in Iraq’ by some earlier in the year, the streets had become quiet enough for the local battalion, 2-12 Infantry, to patrol by foot. One of the soldiers I had met during April’s embed sent me an e-mail saying that they had complete freedom of action on the streets.
As Doura became calmer operations were stepped up just to the south, in Arab Jabour. Here too conventional forces, setting up Joint Security Stations, worked in tandem with the special operators. One US special forces officer serving with the ground-holding troops gives this example of what happened:
The special ops people targeted Taher Razuq, one of the main leaders in Arab Jabour. They put two five-hundred-pound bombs through the roof of his house and killed him. There were two real consequences. Firstly, people felt more secure and that meant intelligence went up. Secondly it forced al-Qaeda underground.
In Washington the long-expected high noon between General Petraeus and the critics of the surge proved to be something of a damp squib in September. He and Ryan Crocker faced days of probing by Senate and House committees, leaving the latter to quip that it would be the first time he’d be glad to get back to Baghdad. But some of the fight had already gone from those who had previously condemned it all as ill-conceived. The indicators, in terms of falling violence in Baghdad and losses of US soldiers, were beginning to bolster General Petraeus’s narrative. Even the killing by al-Qaeda of Sheikh Sittar, the key Awakening leader in Anbar, just after the congressional hearings could not dampen the mood of cautious optimism. Sittar was soon replaced by one of his brothers on the Awakening Council and many more sheikhs who had previously backed the insurgency now seemed ready to turn their backs on it.