by Mark Urban
Task Force Knight and JSOC’s role while all of this continued was, to quote one American commander, to act as ‘a hammer which could be used to smash insurgent groups against the anvil of conventional forces’. Given the high pitch that the various agencies providing targeting information had reached, a steady stream allowed the SAS to make nightly excursions from the MSS.
One of the particular features of A Squadron’s operations under Major Kennedy was their tight focus. He did not have to worry, for example, about Basra since duties there were initially handled by Task Force Spartan, and after Britain’s withdrawal from the city centre there was no further demand for strike operations. Instead, he was given the absolute priority of targeting the remaining al-Qaeda VBIED – car or truck bomb – networks. The great majority of the leads prosecuted by Task Force Knight’s intelligence people proved to be in a triangle with Doura at its apex, Arab Jabour to the south-west and Salman Pak to the south-east. A Squadron’s battleground was therefore one of city muhallas in the north, market gardens and date groves further down, and open farmland along the banks of the Tigris in the south.
When I asked one participant in these operations to nominate the most spectacular or successful raid of Major Kennedy’s tour during the summer and autumn of 2007 he told me that it would not be possible because ‘it was probably the most mechanistic tour… what we were doing as an accumulator. It wasn’t about single operations but about their cumulative effect on the whole operation.’ As part of this, British humint teams worked up intelligence with the US ground-holding units, sometimes using small SAS squads farmed out to them in order to react rapidly, moving in to arrest bomb makers or others who emerged from intelligence analysis.
In many cases these takedowns were violent. Reservations that the UK might once have harboured about US rules of engagement had by this time been assuaged. Under certain circumstances Task Force Knight could use pre-emptive force against known insurgents. They were operating in the style of Delta, killing dozens during those summer months.
Inevitably, with operations at this intensity, there were casualties on both sides. On 5 September A Squadron went to hit a target in Baghdad. They were searching for a leading member of a Sunni group and the operation was carried out in the usual style by an assault team of SAS backed up by Paras from Task Force Maroon. Two teams assaulted the Alpha, one of them led by Sergeant Eddie Collins. The sergeant, thirty-three, had started his tour in Basra but ended up in Baghdad as operations there were wound up.
Having broken into the house, the two assault teams began room clearing. As in many Iraqi houses, there was a staircase to the roof and the task of scaling it was considered particularly dangerous. Going through a door laid you open to attack from one side or another, on a roof the danger could come from any angle. An insurgent was lying in wait as Sergeant Collins emerged, shooting him with a 9mm pistol. The round struck Collins’s neck and proved fatal. Other members of the team swiftly killed the gunman.
A Squadron’s pace of operations throughout the summer meant its people were often pitched into situations for which they were unprepared. This produced a major drama near the end of their tour, on the night of 20 November.
The mission selected for Task Force Knight that day was a typical takedown. The teams woke around 2.30 p.m. and prepared themselves during the afternoon. There would be four Pumas, two Lynxes and a couple of other aircraft taking part.
During the early evening everything the blades and their supporting aircrews had been told changed. They would now be going after a different target, a Sunni insurgent whose position had been fixed to a rural area near Salman Pak, forty-five kilometres south-east of Baghdad.
Setting off into the early evening darkness the choppers flew low over the city’s roofs. Two Lynx machines were in the lead, followed by two pairs of Pumas. In the first pair of troop transports were members of the SAS. The second wave carried Paras who could act as a Quick Reaction Force or cordon as required.
As with many of these missions around the city, the flight to the target area passed quickly and uneventfully – but then everything started to go wrong. One of the Lynxes flew too far ahead of the target grid reference and the formation commander, an RAF squadron leader in one of the Pumas, could not reach the Lynx by radio. Rallying the two SAS Pumas and the other Lynx he devised a new plan but the fix on their target now shifted. Information came from the orbiting command aircraft that the man was moving.
Down below, insurgents had been alerted by the arrival of the helicopters and their orbiting as new plans were put together and dictated over the radio. Through their night-vision equipment, the personnel in the circling aircraft could see men whom they believed to be insurgents moving in trees beside some fields. They illuminated these fleeting figures with one of the powerful searchlights carried for just such purposes. The door gunner of one of the Pumas opened fire. The air was crackling reports now – one pilot reported return fire from the ground.
Six helicopters and a number of other aircraft were wheeling over a moving target in a hazardous aerial ballet. So many of Task Force Knight’s operations were routine house assaults, but this was panning out very differently. As one of the special forces aviators reflects, ‘it’s when it goes hot and dynamic, that’s when it gets tricky’.
Major Kennedy, aboard one of the helicopters, decided to get his men on the ground. One chopper touched down; the other, dropping vertically from seventy-five feet, came close to the ground and was engulfed in dust. The Puma pilot decided to shift his landing position at the last moment, but with an urgent warning that a Lynx might be passing right over him he took the Puma up and then swiftly down again. The Puma hit the ground hard and almost immediately rolled on to its right side.
Just as with the April accident, men were thrown out of the chopper’s side door by the force of impact. Three were pinioned underneath it as it smashed into the ground. Two SAS soldiers and one RAF man were trapped.
Those who had got away quickly organised themselves for a rescue attempt. But as Major Kennedy rallied his men around the wrecked Puma flames started licking the aircraft’s gearbox. The RAF man was freed with SAS medics tending him and one of their own who had been hurt inside the aircraft. The two blades trapped under the fuselage, Sergeant John Battersby and Trooper Lee Fitzsimmons, could not be shifted.
In what seemed like moments the Puma was engulfed by fire. Rescuers facing into the heat soon heard rounds from the aircraft’s door-mounted machine gun cooking off, as well as the whoosh of burning flares. The subsequent inquiry noted that ‘the aircraft was completely ablaze and therefore unreachable within four minutes of coming to rest, with no further attempts being possible after this relatively short time’.
Even as the tragic outcome of this accident became clear Major Kennedy was talking to the surveillance aircraft overhead. The target had arrived at a second house in his car. One of the Puma crewmen piped up over the radio, disagreeing with the surveillance aircraft about which house he had entered. Kennedy made the decision to prosecute his original target. Organising his men away from the burning helicopter, the OC gave quick battle orders. There was a rapid house assault but the target had escaped.
With its mission over the team embarked on the remaining Pumas, returning to MSS Fernandez. Having recovered the bodies of Sergeant Battersby and Trooper Fitzsimmons, and having made attempts to sanitise the burnt-out Puma, an air strike was called in to finish the job.
This second helicopter incident caused some to question the way in which Task Force Knight did business. The inquiry flagged up the technical reasons for the pilot’s crash landing. It also alluded to many aggravating difficulties including the way army Lynx and RAF crews inter-operated, the fact that the SAS did not like to strap in and the pressures put on the helicopter operation by the operational tempo. Asked about the two Puma incidents of 2007, one Task Force Knight aviator blamed ‘toxic management’. Asked to elaborate, he explained that some of their commanders were �
��like baboons in a tree – seen from above they presented smiling faces but to those lower down they were arses’.
A Squadron’s tour ended on this difficult note. They had lost three men and several had been wounded. Nonetheless, its time was considered by JSOC and the SAS to have been outstandingly successful. Major Kennedy was decorated. One commander notes, ‘they took apart the al-Qaeda VBIED network’.
From May to November A Squadron had mounted raids almost nightly, during which it arrested 335 people and killed 88. The latter figure in particular marks a stark contrast from the squadron’s deployment of late 2005, when it took just one life. Few statistics demonstrate better the extent to which the SAS’s mission in Iraq had changed. By locking his task force tightly into JSOC’s operations, Lieutenant-Colonel Williams had succeeded in his ambition of raising the regiment’s speed, accuracy and effect. The sharp increase in lethality between these two A Squadron tours shows that due to the improvement of intelligence (achieved in large part by working so closely with the Americans), Task Force Knight was targeting the violent extremists rather than the old Ba’athists who had been led quietly from their homes in 2004 or 2005. For Williams personally, though, storm clouds were gathering. His period in command of the regiment was coming to an end and it was not destined to be a quiet departure.
19
THE V WORD
In the murky gloom of a C-130 high over Anbar an SAS assault force stood up and shuffled its way towards the aircraft’s tail ramp. Each blade had a parachute strapped to his back, a weapon to his side and his assault equipment to the front. With a mechanical squeal the ramp lowered and the men walked forward to its lip, peering into the Iraqi night below.
The soldiers were from B Squadron of 22 SAS and early in 2008 they were about to notch up a first for the regiment in its six-year campaign in Iraq: an operational high-altitude parachute assault. Their target was a man who was making money for al-Qaeda – literally producing counterfeit dollar bills – on a remote farm.
Stepping into the night sky the SAS soldiers experienced a brief freefall before opening their parachutes. The technique known as High Altitude High Opening or HAHO allowed them to glide many kilometres while keeping the noise of their Hercules far away from their intended target. The soldiers hit the ground, threw off their parachuting rig and moved on foot to assault the house. Once again the SAS got its man.
B Squadron’s stint in Baghdad generated some controversy within the regiment. ‘Each unit tries to demonstrate how it’s different from the one before,’ remarks one SAS officer a little wearily. ‘Well done for jumping, but was it strictly necessary? Isn’t that why helicopters were invented?’
Just a few months before A Squadron had achieved extraordinary impact, ‘smashing the Baghdad VBIED network’. The boss of B Squadron perhaps understood that with AQI reeling it would not be possible to achieve the same focus, geographically or in terms of the target set. The success of B Squadron’s previous tour (November 2005 to May 2006), in which the LARCHWOOD 4 operation gave a start point for the Zarqawi operation and Norman Kember had been freed, added to the pressure.
Early in March Task Force Knight’s intelligence team developed an operation against a bomb maker. He was believed to have fled Baghdad for a former powerbase of Saddam Hussein to the north of the capital in the so-called Sunni Triangle. SAS operations in this city were quite unusual, for Task Force Red, one of JSOC’s American units, was based nearby. But the British followed their leads to a substantial property in an affluent part of town: the bomb maker had none other than the police chief, a judge and the commander of the local police response unit as neighbours.
Having fixed their target, B Squadron hit his house at 2 a.m. on 26 March. They first called upon the target and another man to come out. After receiving no response the SAS stormed the house. But not for the first time during their years in Iraq was there someone lying in wait and the entry team stepped into a hail of bullets. Four men were wounded, one of them fatally. As the team dashed out of the house grenades were thrown and gunmen from a neighbouring building joined in the fusillade.
The SAS returned fire, with support from circling helicopters. Within moments a general firefight had developed with tracer zipping around the suburb’s streets. A missile was fired from a circling aircraft into one of the houses being used to fire upon the special forces. Following an explosion that brought down part of the building, the two targets of the operation ran from it into a neighbouring house where they either took hostages or persuaded several women and children to come with them. As they crossed open ground this group was engaged from the air.
Coalition spokesmen said that two suspected terrorists and seven civilians (three of them children) had been killed in the operation. Locals told the BBC that the civilian death toll was actually sixteen. The Ministry of Defence kept the dead SAS soldier’s name secret, along with where it had happened. During the days that followed local anger produced several gun battles with the American ground-holding unit. Its commander told BBC correspondent Paul Wood that the lesson of the raid was that ‘aggressiveness meets aggressiveness’.
In some respects this battle was regrettable but not unusual. The number of ‘Echos and Kilos’, or women and children, killed during SAS operations in Iraq is very hard to estimate because many raids had to be so fast there could be no waiting around for a definitive assessment of Iraqi casualties. It is safe to assume that by 2008 the total killed during the regiment’s years of operations may have been as high as fifty. Many in the special ops community would dispute that figure, arguing that it was significantly lower, but in truth the chaotic circumstances of many of these contacts makes hard and fast calculations difficult. The regiment also lost one of its own people there, the fifth to die in a house assault. The confusion about where the insurgents were at some times during the operation was another regrettable feature of assaults mounted at such short notice, with limited intelligence.
There was something else notable about the operation, and this was the regiment’s use of a specially trained dog to enter the Alpha at the start of the assault. Squadrons posted to Baghdad had in fact been using this technique since 2005, but when the inquest on the dead B Squadron man was held in the UK several months later it emerged as a significant issue. He had by this point been named as Sergeant Nick Brown. The dead soldier was what might in former times have been called a ‘child of the regiment’, having grown up in Hereford while his father was serving in the SAS. When his father, John, and his widow asked searching questions at the inquest they carried considerable weight.
The court heard that the 34-year-old sergeant in B Squadron had gone into the building after the dog sent ahead of the entry team had been killed. He had been shot in the back and mortally wounded by someone lurking in the building. His relatives wanted answers at the inquest about why the men had gone in when they already believed their search dog to be dead. In the end, with the coroner citing security concerns about not prejudicing operational techniques, the issue did not receive the full and open discussion that it might. But while the violence with which the special ops people had prosecuted their assault shocked many local Iraqis, the issue it highlighted for many in the regiment was quite different. They wondered whether, despite the gradual changes in British rules of engagement, the Americans would ever have assaulted under similar circumstances, or whether, instead, they would have hit the Alpha from the air once they had evidence that the people inside were willing to fight.
By March 2008 the climate for mounting aggressive special forces operations of this kind was changing. The Sunni insurgency was waning rapidly, and being hired to serve the government as Sons of Iraq. Stirring up communal anger with a raid of this kind damaged that process. One SAS operator remarked to me that after an operation, ‘We disappear into our helicopters and the local unit is left to feel the pain.’ This approach had been acceptable during the desperate months of 2006 and early 2007 when it felt as if all of society had become
unhinged by murderous violence. But by the summer of 2008 the American battalion or brigade commanders responsible for holding sectors of Iraq had been thoroughly inculcated in General Petraeus’s new doctrine, which stated that their primary mission was safeguarding the population. Patrol bases or Joint Security Stations were rapidly expanding the ground-level intelligence picture and helping to stamp out sectarian violence: if JSOC’s raids miscarried they could damage this progress.
So, just as British special forces had roamed far and wide in search of a target they might be able to prosecute during their early months in Iraq back in 2003, five years later they were trying to find places where they might do some good. During B Squadron’s tour their operations extended to Anbar and Tikrit. But whereas operations years before had been limited by the dearth of good intelligence, during the final period of the SAS’s stay in Baghdad the analysts sat within a sophisticated information-gathering web, but had to look harder and harder to find a target worthy of them.
The Americans had developed their mobile phone database into a fearsome analytical tool and fielded dozens of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Cover from Predators was supplemented by cameras mounted on tethered balloons or fixed on the roofs of buildings. Using gamma-ray imagery of cars, American analysts were able to study their ‘unblinking’ record of the city’s main thoroughfares.
About a hundred thousand defectors from Sunni militant groups enrolled in the Sakhwa or Awakening militias known as Sons of Iraq, giving what the intelligence analysts called granularity to their picture of militant activities in most of Iraq. Some pockets of AQI, including of foreign fighters, remained, for example in the northern city of Mosul where bitter intercommunal violence opened up a toehold in the community just as it had in Baquba in 2007. Overall, though, the picture of violence was one of steep decline, particularly in Baghdad. MNF Iraq’s Sigacts data showed bombings in the city down by 250 per cent in the summer of 2008. The graph of ethno-sectarian deaths showed a steady fall from its peak of more than two thousand in December 2006 (across Iraq, with Baghdad accounting for around 1600) to a few murders during April 2008 and a flat line thereafter.