by Mark Urban
What is clear is that Britain’s special operations task force in Baghdad provided the one clear success of the nation’s controversial involvement in Iraq. Task Force Black, then Knight, played a role completely disproportionate to its numbers in improving the security situation. For this reason the top American commander used clear language about UK special forces, words of a kind that he had hesitated to deploy with regard to his country’s own. General Petraeus, in an interview with The Times in August 2008, said the SAS ‘have helped immensely in the Baghdad area, in particular to take down the al-Qaeda car bomb networks and other al-Qaeda operations in Iraq’s capital city, so they have done a phenomenal job in that regard’. He added ‘they have exceptional initiative, exceptional skill, exceptional courage and, I think, exceptional savvy. I can’t say enough about how impressive they are in thinking on their feet.’ This praise gives some sense of how the small, secret British contingent in Baghdad counteracted the impressions some Americans formed in the south, preventing the UK’s involvement in Iraq from being seen as a debacle. Lieutenant-General Rob Fry, who had served as the Coalition number two in Baghdad in 2006, later described the role of British special forces in ‘defeating’ al-Qaeda as being of ‘an absolutely historic scale’.
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While the SAS role in taking down al-Qaeda was ‘phenomenal’, their campaign against the Shia Special Groups produced more problematic results. The arrest of the Khazali brothers and their Lebanese adviser by the SAS in March 2007 was an event of strategic importance. But it produced retaliation, both in the arrest of British naval personnel and the Finance Ministry kidnapping, that was hard for the British government to deal with. The wider JSOC and Counter Iranian Influence campaign against Shia militants demonstrated that Iran could be deterred from further escalation of its covert activities and the militias checked. But since Iran would continue to be Iraq’s neighbour and the Shia would form a majority of Iraq’s population, these efforts could only achieve containment rather than the knockout punch given to al-Qaeda.
During 2009 there were a series of developments that underlined the temporary effect that JSOC and its British allies were able to have on the Shia extremists. In May, the ‘Irbil Five’, the Iranian officials seized by Delta early in 2007, were released. A couple of days before the end of the year, Peter Moore, the surviving British hostage taken at the Finance Ministry, was freed. In return Qais Khazali, taken by the SAS in Basra in March 2007, was transferred from US to Iraqi custody with the understanding that he too would soon be released. Other veterans of the Special Groups had also been quietly let out. From the point of view of those who had masterminded the Counter Iranian Influence campaign of 2006–7, there were obvious risks with these deals that the fires of sectarian or anti-western violence would be kindled anew. But in truth, the Prime Minister was seeking to garner support with the Shia community prior to elections, the releases were a reminder of what those who sought Mr Maliki’s approval early in 2007 to move against these ‘irreconcilables’ had long understood, which was that the communal and political ties between elements of the Shia community were hard to break.
It was then in the role of Task Force Black, then Knight, in taking down so many members of al-Qaeda in and around Baghdad that Britain can find its ‘V word’. Guided by intelligence teams, and with considerable US assistance, British special forces waged a campaign against one of the most ruthless and violent enemies of modern times. Al-Qaeda in Iraq was a movement for whom killing a hundred shoppers in a busy market with a truck bomb or videotaping the decapitation of a western hostage was considered a good day’s work. By playing a key role in neutralising this network, the British task force helped to create an opportunity for peace.
On 2 October, an unseasonably warm autumn morning, a procession made its way into Hereford Cathedral. As the organist played a Bach fugue the city’s dignitaries made their way inside. The programme for that morning’s service read ‘A service of Thanksgiving to mark the completion of the Iraqi campaign by 22nd Special Air Service Regiment including an act of commemoration for those who were killed in action’. There were many members of the regiment lending their voices to the opening rendition of the national anthem. The lessons were read by the Director of Special Forces and the Commanding Officer of 22 SAS.
During the hymns and prayers there was plenty of time for contemplation of what had happened in Iraq and its human cost. The SAS prides itself on the dedication of those who embark on selection for and service in its ranks. Its soldiers sometimes refer to themselves as pilgrims because of the journey of faith this involves. Appropriately enough, the hymn of Bunyan’s ‘Monk’s Gate’ boomed out of the cathedral, ending ‘He’ll not fear what men say, He’ll labour night and day to be a pilgrim’. The regimental sergeant-major picked up this theme with a stanza from ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’:
We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further; it may be
Beyond the last blue mountain barred with snow,
Across that angry or that glimmering sea.
The cathedral service was followed by a special dinner in the sergeants’ mess at Credenhill. This gathering was addressed by General Stan McChrystal. Almost all of the key figures in the six-year drama of the regiment’s service in Iraq were there to hear him – directors of special forces, commanding officers, senior NCOs and old sweats. In all, something like 360 people were crammed into the mess for what McChrystal called a ‘unique gathering’. The commander of Delta Force was there too, and several other Americans. The general had taken time from directing Nato operations in Afghanistan and arguing the case with his President for more troops. It was a measure of the importance of his bond with the SAS that he kept his appointment to address the dinner. All of those who heard his oration were left in no doubt as to the respect in which he held the British contribution to the secret campaign and its importance in preventing Iraq’s descent into chaos.
One of those at the dinner gave me this epitaph for their struggle: ‘Al-Qaeda came to raise the standard of the caliphate in Iraq. We stood toe to toe with them. They were contested and found wanting. Their image, their franchise, got a bloody good shoeing.’
Just a few months after Operation CRICHTON ended, during the summer of 2009, Baghdad witnessed several bloody car-bomb attacks. The violence continued sporadically in the months that followed. Even if the scale of these incidents was far below that of the carnage of 2006, many people worried. Was the serpent of sectarianism raising its head again? Was the violence latent in Iraqi society bound to break out as soon as the Coalition’s special operators left? Did the renewed attacks demonstrate the futility of the UK–US onslaught against the bombers? Those involved in the secret struggle of 2005 to 2008 argue that it was precisely because their mission had ended that the bombers got a second chance. The special operations campaign in Iraq could never produce a final answer to the problems of Islamic militancy or sectarianism. It could, however, provide a breathing space, an opportunity for political resolutions or indeed for the Coalition’s withdrawal. That, with great secrecy, intelligence and ruthlessness, was what it did.
* Mark Bowden, ‘The Ploy’, The Atlantic, May 2007
* Thomas E. Ricks, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006–2008 (Allen Lane, 2009)
* This thinktank was the American Enterprise Institute.