Within the week, the PUK had forged a deal with Ali Bapir's Komala party, all the while apologizing that the American bombing had been a terrible mistake.8 Bapir didn't know whether to believe the PUK, but it hardly mattered—he had to get his people out.† On March 27, hundreds of Komala members convoyed from Khurmal to Qala Diza, where Talabani promised them a safe haven away from the action. The pesh merga shunted the wagon train around the city of Sulimaniya, lest a car should stray into town. Driving whatever they could find, including a few jeeps with plastic sheeting for windshields, the Komala men looked like they'd been through hell as they rolled through the PUK checkpoint below the city. Scraggly, filthy, and wide-eyed with fear, they peered out at the pesh merga, who in turn had their own concerns—each one of the vehicles screamed "car bomb" to their eyes, and more than once they couldn't help glancing around for something solid to dive behind. Later it appeared that some Ansar members managed to slip out within the ranks of Komala members. But the PUK didn't mind—the cavalry had finally arrived, though it was hardly a smooth ride in.
THE U.S. ARMY'S Tenth Special Forces Group (Airborne) had been sitting in Constanta, Romania, since January, packing and repacking their bags each time it looked as if Turkey might let them fly through to land in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurds in Erbil and Sulimaniya had arranged to receive them and prepared Kurdish troops to work with the Green Berets, even tailoring Kurdish pesh merga costumes for them (but with elastic waistbands, since the Americans could never seem to get the hang of the cummerbund). By March the men were itching to go, and despite the Turkish no vote, they continued to plan a deployment into bases in southeastern Turkey, figuring that Ankara would relent. For several days running after Bush's ultimatum on March 17, the Americans boarded their planes and waited for the order to go, only to be stood down. Five days of getting psyched up and disappointed took its toll, and the Tenth Group's commanding officer, Colonel Charlie Cleveland, decided to switch to plan B. Instead of making the easy flight across the length of Turkey into the north, the first teams would fly for two days, secretly stopping twice in countries that didn't want their role publicly acknowledged. The last four and a half hours they would fly right across Iraq's western desert over batteries of enemy artillery. One of the noncommissioned officers quipped, "That's an ugly baby," and the route had its name: Operation Ugly Baby.9
The Special Forces, despite their confidence, had plenty to give them pause. As the U.S. Marines rolled up the highway in southern Iraq, they found the Iraqi army was not surrendering en masse, as many experts had predicted it would, and the irregular forces called Saddam Fedayeen were showing their zeal at setting urban ambushes.10 U.S. Marines had seized oil fields in the far south of the country easily on March 21, and found the Iraqi army's marksmanship laughably poor. But the next day was a disaster for the Americans, when an antimissile maintenance company, the 507, somehow got ahead of the U.S. Marines and cruised through the unconquered city of Nasiriya. The mechanics were never meant to get so close to combat and had driven blind into a shooting gallery. Iraqi ambushes killed eleven Americans, and seven were captured, including two women, Specialist Shoshana Johnson and Private Jessica Lynch, who was knocked unconscious in a collision with a U.S. Army truck. It was a terrific propaganda victory for Saddam's forces, and Iraqi television aired interviews with the clearly shaken American prisoners.
On the same day as the disaster in Nasiriya, March 22, American bombs in the north rained down on Mosul and Kirkuk. With the scant cover provided by darkness and increasing bad weather, the Tenth Special Forces Group started barnstorming into Iraq, dodging Iraqi antiaircraft fire and throwing off chaff and countermeasures. The Iraqis, who had practiced shooting at the jets flying in Operation Provide Comfort for a dozen years, found the slow, fat troop transports a better target. They tagged three of the planes—one so badly it had to peel off to Turkey and beg for an emergency landing, while the other two made it to Kurdistan and touched down in a frightening state.
"Naturally, we fired an RPG at them," Bafel Talabani said with a grim laugh, recalling the Americans' arrival at Bakrajo airstrip. It was an accident—one of the pesh merga's rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) went flying over the weary soldiers' heads, hardly a warm welcome. After the initial shock, everyone got down to business—they had only forty-five minutes to unload an entire C-130 cargo plane before the next flight would land. The flights stuck to a tight schedule to get all the Special Operations troops on the ground and into a PUK warehouse at the military base across the highway without being noticed by the sleeping inhabitants of Sulimaniya. The following day Turkey finally relented and allowed the rest of Tenth Group to fly directly, happily discontinuing the "Ugly Baby" route. Soon all fifty-two hundred military personnel were in place. They faced the thirteen divisions of Saddam's army still arrayed along the green line, about a hundred thousand men. On the LT.S. side were about seventy thousand pesh merga—roughly the same number of men who would have come through Turkey in the Fourth Infantry Division. But working with pesh merga would be a bit different.
The Kurds harbored doubts even after the first Americans arrived. The CIA team had doled out money but hardly ever left their barracks in Qalaat Chowlan, and never delivered the weapons and ammunition they had been promising.11 The leader of the Tenth Group's Third Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Ken Tovo, had come early to plan the attack on Ansar al-Islam, but the PUK soldiers didn't really believe he was serious until they saw the Tomahawk missiles hit the mountain. On the night of the first barrage, Tovo invited a few Kurdish commanders to go up on the roof of the command post at Halabja at the appointed hour. Bafel Talabani acted as interpreter.12
"Colonel Tovo told me the Tomahawks were coming, and to look over the horizon, the sound will come first," Bafel said. An awkward quarter of an hour passed with no sound or light on the mountainside. As it crept toward a half an hour, Bafel turned to Tovo and joked, "If these missiles don't come . . . you've got to get out of here."
Finally they heard an intense humming sound pass overheard and then saw a flash, and finally a loud boom and another and then another echoed down the valley. The pesh merga commanders watched, awestruck that the Americans could really call in such precise destruction from a thousand miles away in the Persian Gulf, all with a little laptop computer in the bunker in Halabja. The missiles crashed into the hills all night, but at dawn the Kurds were dismayed to look through binoculars at Ansar militants fleeing by truck, many of them crossing the border to Iran. As anxious as they were to attack, they had to wait until the rest of the Special Operations Forces battalion arrived over the following two days.
The pesh merga and the Special Ops made a good fit. Across Kurdistan many people who call themselves pesh merga are minutemen, to be called up every time Kurds flee into the mountains. For this mission the PUK had gathered its best professional soldiers, many from Halabja with personal scores to settle with Ansar al-Islam. The Americans impressed them with their high-tech gear—heading into battle with a heavy load of body armor, communications equipment, sleeping bags, and the most amazing thing of all, the meal ready-to-eat. The small, brown plastic MRE bag held enough calories for a whole day in combat, and the Americans could even heat up the little foil packet entrées by adding water to a chemical solution that came in the bag. It wasn't good Kurdish food, but still, it was terribly convenient for a guerrilla fighter.
Gadgets aside, the pesh merga liked the Special Forces work ethic. Most of the Kurds had at one time or another served mandatory stints in Saddam's army, where they were treated like dirt by Arab officers. The Kurds feared the Americans might condescend or order them about, not realizing that pesh merga see themselves as patriotic volunteers. Instead the American officers ate on the ground right beside their soldiers, just like the Kurdish officers.
"Iraqi officers consider themselves God's deputies on earth," said one of the Kurdish translators. "Seeing that an American colonel is so simple and modest with his own soldiers—that increased
their honor in the eyes of the pesh merga."
Mustafa Sa'id Kader, a PUK general, offered up a plan to Colonel Tovo, trying to mesh the fighting styles of the Kurds and the Americans. The major difference in philosophy centered on loss of life. The Americans planned to attack, secure a position, and then dig in to wait for air support to soften up the next target. Kader told Tovo that pesh merga don't fight that way—once they have momentum, they push the advantage without giving the enemy time to regroup, even if it costs some casualties. They agreed on a three-pronged attack, with two units coming in through Komala's old territory to the north of Ansar al-Islam, two traveling along the mountain ridge to Biyara from the south, and two going right up the gullet of the valley to the towns of Golp and Sargat. They gave the units color-coded names, yellow, blue, and green. When they finished planning, they realized that Tovo was working on the assumption that the battle would take several days. The pesh merga hoped to win it in thirty-six hours.
Eight thousand Kurdish soldiers began the assault on Friday, March 28, at seven in the morning, which was as close to "predawn" as the Kurds could assemble the division. Each prong had a dozen or so Americans along to communicate with Major George Thiebes, the company commander, who stayed back at Girda Drozna with Colonel Tovo calling in air support.13 Throughout the preceding night, U.S. bombers and jets—including an AC-130 Spectre gunship, the Air Force's armored cargo plane, a flying pincushion of gun barrels—had pummeled the Ansar targets and minefields.
The Americans soldiers hung back as much as they could, letting the Kurds do the heavy fighting. They wore no helmets so they wouldn't stand out among the Kurdish fighters, who went into battle with little more than running shoes and a few magazines of ammunition stuffed in their cummerbunds. Now it was the Americans' turn to be impressed. The pesh merga moved through the terrain at what would have been a dead run for the heavily loaded Americans and controlled the first six kilometers in about an hour. A stable of Kurdish university students had volunteered to act as translators for the Special Forces, fortunately, because on the eve of the assault, the chief liaison told Colonel Tovo that he couldn't work for him that day at Girda Drozna.
"I know you need a good translator," Bafel Talabani told Tovo, "but there's absolutely no way I'm going to miss this."
Bafel swapped out with an interpreter from PUK security and joined the yellow prong, which would be led straight down the throat of the battle by Sheikh Jafar Mustafa, the gray-haired military commander of Halabja. Bafel's cousin Lahor joined the green prong, which would pass through Khurmal and move along the high ridge north above the towns of Golp and Sargat to Biyara. Lahor's group aimed to harass the Ansar mortarmen from high in the hills and allow Bafel's troops some cover as they charged into the towns. Both cousins had been too young to fight against Saddam during the 1980s, and their parents had kept them safe in England during the uprising and the civil war. They believed the American campaign against Saddam Hussein this time was going to be a pushover. The fight against Ansar al-Islam might be the last chance for the young men to prove themselves in a culture that still valued combat skill above all other qualities. This might be Bafel's best opportunity to step out of his father's shadow.
On the night before the battle Bafel didn't even try sleeping. He forced down several MREs to make sure he wouldn't run out of energy the next morning. Lahor couldn't sleep either—he was busy helping unload the last of the C-130S landing at Bakrajo until three A.M., and Bafel kept calling on the satellite phone to tease him that he would miss the fight. Lahor finally showed up at about five A.M., wearing a big Kurdish turban on his head like the one his father, Sheikh Jengi Talabani, used to wear. At dawn thousands of Kurds in baggy trousers and sash belts poured into the valley in cars, pickups, and even school buses. A few fingers of sunlight reached from the mountains behind Halabja, and the men in the yellow prong cast long shadows as they ran up the valley toward the town of Golp—in plain view of the deadly mortars Ansar had used so well from the peaks above.
The green prong moved ahead and to their left, hoping to close within shooting distance of Sargat before yellow prong made its headlong charge. The blue prong sped through the villages to the south, where the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan, like Komala, had cut a deal with the PUK after seeing the American firepower. American air strikes should have helped to brush back the Islamists' mortars, but just to be sure, the green prong started mortaring and firing artillery at Ansar's positions. As the yellow prong, about a thousand men, pushed toward Golp, no shots fired from the hills. The Islamists had perhaps decided to pull back into their caves and bunkers—or maybe they had fled to Iran or been killed in the bombardment.
I snuck into Halabja that morning, though the roads into the city had all been shut to civilians for the assault. A Kurdish friend directed me to an unguarded route across the top of Darbandikhan Lake, on a rickety ferry that seemed likely to sink under the weight of my car. Spring weather had finally kicked in a few days before, and each day seemed to yield a new color of flowers alongside the roads. Early morning lifted a mist off the surrounding farmlands, and the countryside felt perfectly tranquil south of Halabja. Then I began to hear booms in the distance. On the spiral road up to Girda Drozna a strange mosquito noise caught my attention, and I turned around to see an oversize model airplane—a small "unmanned aerial vehicle"—buzz by on its way back from spying on the Ansar troops up the hill. At the bunker the Americans used laptop computers and small, collapsible satellite dishes, calling in air strikes on the mountains with the click of a mouse. In a brief conversation with one of the Special Operations soldiers I got the idea that things were going well and that the Kurdish fighters had made a real impression—especially the first wounded man of the morning.
One of the Kurds had come back from the battle, walking alone with labored gait. "He walked in, and everybody though he had an ankle problem. It turned out he'd been shot in the chest," the American said, adding, "these are hard people."*
"Look around—could you be in Ireland or something?" he said. It was about ten o'clock, and the low sunlight showed the green of the valley with a frosting of white nasturtiums and bloodred poppies. The American looked up at the snowy mountains and some of the little waterfalls running down. "I had no idea," he said. "It's well worth fighting over. If I lived here, I'd want to own it too." ANSAR AL-ISLAM still wanted to own some of it as well, if only as burial plots. As the yellow prong reached Golp, the Islamists lit them up with sniper fire and heavy machine guns from the hills above. Grenades rocketed down and Sheikh Jafr called back to Bafel, who translated for the Americans that the front of yellow prong was completely pinned down a mile ahead. They radioed the company commander at Girda Drozna and before long saw tiny specks in the sky, the sound following as they approached. A pair of F/A-18s dropped two five-hundred-pound bombs, guided by lasers on the ground, to pulverize the Ansar machine gun nests.14
For the first time in the PUK's thirty-year history, airplanes dropped bombs on the other side. The pesh merga, accustomed to being underdogs, let out a cheer and charged up the open valley as if they were bulletproof. A few of the militants had survived the bombs and started shooting, but the momentum of the air strikes swung the battle. Sheikh Jafr's men sprinted the last mile into Golp and recaptured the town at nine A.M., fighting through the village house by house. The Special Forces colonel had planned the battle for Golp to last all day. The Kurds wanted to push on to the next target, Sargat, but the Americans insisted on securing the main road so supply vehicles and artillery could get to the front and take wounded to the rear.
"For us, in the mountains that's not the way to fight—move and then dig in again," said Bafel. "The way you fight is just speed and violence of action. Once we have them on the move, our job is keep them on the move. We're not used to air support."
The Kurds soon lost most of the advantage the air strikes had provided as they swarmed ahead of the Americans up the valley toward Sargat. Ansar fighters opened up with
heavy machine guns from the hills, catching the pesh merga force in the cemetery just outside town. Grenades and Katyusha rockets also funneled down on the yellow prong from the surrounding hills. Bafel and an American captain found themselves huddled behind rock walls and tombstones. The captain called for artillery support and discovered that he had advanced well ahead of Sheikh Jafr and the Kurdish mortars. Close air support was impossible, with Kurdish soldiers scrambling ahead into the same hills around the Ansar positions. Then the enemy mortars began—the militants must have been saving them up. The eighty-two-millimeter shells Ansar lobbed down into the valley would kill everything in a huge radius of the impact, and they started to zero in.
Back at Girda Drozna the Kurdish and American commanders called the yellow prong and heard a storm of explosions crackle over the radio. They had discovered the problem with supporting the pesh merga with air strikes as well. At one point when the Special Forces commander started to call in a bomber, a Kurdish interpreter rushed up to him stuttering. The message was so urgent that the young man had forgotten his English. After a pause the translation came through—one of the prongs had moved into the kill zone for the next air strike. The American called off the drop in time, but the air advantage had been largely neutralized.
Bafel and the Special Forces captain had also outpaced green prong, which was supposed to get in position first to provide cover for them from the ridge, as Lahor discovered when his satellite phone rang. Bafel shouted at him down the line. "He said, 'We're in the shit!' and I said, 'So am I,'" said Lahor, each of them shouting in excitement over gunfire. Lahor told his cousin not to go into Sargat, advice Bafel hardly needed at the moment.
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