Task Force Black (22 page)

Sunday 10 July was a bad day in Baghdad, but not exceptionally so. It did, however, mark the start of five days in which multiple suicide bombings and Shia retaliation claimed more than 150 lives in the city. It was bad enough to cause some Sunni leaders who had joined the long-awaited national unity government to threaten their withdrawal. Militant Sunnis had been trying to goad the Shias into sectarian conflict from soon after the Coalition invasion of Iraq. There had been countless car bombs and suicide attacks, many with this aim. But by the summer of 2006, spurred on by the desecration of Samarra, it was becoming clear just how bad things would get when Shia militias engaged enthusiastically in the cycle of bloodletting. And as the intensity of this slaughter increased so too did its depravity. Those sent to recover bodies dumped in rivers or on dusty street corners noticed more frequently signs of torture. Drills had been used on some victims, electricity or acid on others.

The violence of that summer was especially troubling because to those in command it seemed to make a nonsense of America’s grand strategy. Not only had the tardy formation of Nouri al-Maliki’s government, sworn in on 20 May, failed to have an effect despite the significant Sunni participation in the process, but new security measures were failing too. At the time of the Jihad murders, Operation TOGETHER FORWARD, also known as the Baghdad Security Plan, was nearly a month old.

For many months, senior British officers had been urging General Casey to make Baghdad the main focus of his operations. It seemed to many of the intelligence analysts that that was precisely what al-Qaeda had intended to do as well. A document seized in the raid near Yusufiyah by Task Force Knight had spelt out the organisation’s determination to give attacks on the capital a central role in its plans to undermine the new Iraqi government. For this and other political reasons, the Security Plan was described by the Pentagon as ‘Iraqi-led’. It was all in keeping with its message of striving to turn over a growing part of the fight to them. Certainly, more than three-quarters of the sixty-one thousand security forces involved were Iraqi, but the ideas behind TOGETHER FORWARD were entirely American. They wanted to clear neighbourhoods of insurgents one by one before turning them over to Iraqi security forces.

As had often happened during the preceding two years, it fell to British officers with the Multi-National Force headquarters in Baghdad to be the purveyors of negative assessments. Casey nicknamed one UK colonel on the staff ‘the gloomy Brit’. During his morning BUA, the American general would often ask, ‘Has the gloomy Brit got anything to say this morning?’ At this time, a subtext of exchanges between these British staff and the Americans was that the junior partners felt Casey and his people were massaging figures about security incidents or the readiness of Iraqi forces in order to boost optimism. In some cases – for example the senior British officer in Baghdad’s 2004 warnings against storming Fallujah – these dissenting opinions were unduly pessimistic.

In the face of such a dire situation, had the British staff in Baghdad not become an irritant to the Americans? Some US military officers certainly say they had. ‘They were quite glad to have people around who weren’t a great challenge to their authority,’ counters one of the British who questioned Casey’s assessments of what was being achieved, adding, ‘A Brit can challenge them without any implications for their or someone else’s career.’ At least both sides could agree about the need to make Baghdad the focus of Coalition efforts. It was vital that the security plan succeed.

Clearance operations were already wearily familiar to many of the city’s inhabitants: they involved lockdowns, door kicking and the inevitable seizure of weapons. In this new operation, however, local troops were then meant to hold the neighbourhood. Within weeks of TOGETHER FORWARD getting under way it was obvious that it was not working. American commanders accused the Iraqis of failing to provide two promised brigades. Where units did appear, particularly those from the Ministry of the Interior, they were often blamed for making matters worse. Stories abounded of police acting as an arm of the Mehdi Army, using their freedom of movement to enter Sunni areas on murder missions.

It was not as if the foreign forces were setting a shining example either. News of the charges against the American soldiers involved in May’s Yusufiyah rape and murder broke. Accusations of setting out to kill people on the notoriously dangerous airport road were also levelled against American private contractors. The reliance on contractors was in itself an admission that the US forces in Baghdad could not achieve the kind of strength required to bring security to a city of five million souls.

What difference was the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi making to all this mayhem? It seemed that even those who had hoped his loss might lead to some temporary lull due to infighting or jockeying for position had been disappointed. But JSOC’s black war was continuing, intensifying even, and it played out to its own imperatives and timetable, impenetrable to those who were not cleared to know about it – that is, the great majority of soldiers as well as the public who heard only the daily dirge of mourning and body counts.

In May 2006, B Squadron had been replaced in Task Force Knight by D Squadron. The exhausted members of B Squadron had completed the first six-month SAS tour, an effort crowned by the success of rescuing Norman Kember, finding key evidence in the hunt for Zarqawi and earning their boss his gong. Some might have expected D Squadron to be even more aggressive – certainly its reputation within the regiment was as ‘the most intense of all the squadrons’. Some put this down to the dominant influence of Paras among its senior non-commissioned officer cadre, others to a tradition that it embodied most clearly the ‘green-eyed’ aggressive approach of the airborne forces.

The identity and indeed integrity of the different squadrons had, however, been progressively diluted. So many members had gone to specialist groups, such as the Surveillance Reconnaissance Cell, liaison jobs or detachments, that an SAS squadron might have fewer than forty men in Baghdad. In order to maintain the numbers, blades with special skills from other squadrons, or men from the SBS, or operators with the newly formed Special Reconnaissance Regiment might take their place in Task Force Knight.

In Northern Ireland the surveillance outfit known by such cover names as 14 Intelligence Company or JCUNI (Joint Communications Unit Northern Ireland) had attained a legendary reputation for stealth and expertise. They used unmarked cars or observation posts to mount eyes-on and technical surveillance, often finding themselves just feet away from the terrorists they tracked. This unit was expanded during 2004 and 2005 into the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. The idea behind the SRR was not that entire squadrons would rotate through operational theatres but that each one would specialise in a particular role, with sub-units doing tours there. The birth of the SRR was nonetheless far from happy.

Many in the SAS, including Commanding Officers such as
Charles Beaufort
and Richard Williams, were openly sceptical about the value of this new venture. ‘You could slink around a council estate in Northern Ireland because guys could blend in,’ explains one experienced SAS type. ‘They couldn’t do that in Baghdad and Kabul.’ The new regiment was given Portakabins in the SAS camp at Credenhill while it formed, leading the blades to deride them as ‘trailer trash’. They also jokingly referred to the SRR as ‘Tier 3 special forces’. After the capture of two of its own men in Basra the SAS was less able to insist its own surveillance skills were superior, but the incident hardly helped the SRR either. Nonetheless, by mid-2006 a handful of SRR operators were operating in Baghdad with Task Force Knight and an SRR officer had taken command of what was known as the ‘SpR Det’. This Specialist Reconnaissance Detachment of Task Force Knight made up of a variety of special forces soldiers undertook difficult observation missions on the streets of Baghdad.

Another respect in which these SAS tours were quite different from Northern Ireland was in the power and confidence of junior officers. With just a single troop commander resident in Ireland during the nineties, few officers had been exposed to daily operations and within this setup experienced NCOs often relegated the twenty-something ‘Ruperts’ to the background. It was still the case in 2006 that a captain commanding a troop or his boss, the major leading a squadron, might spend little more than a year in post. Old sweats like
Mulberry
, who had during his tours of Iraq gone from sergeant to staff sergeant and then sergeant-major, had vastly more experience than his commanders, and often took the role of Team Leader in an assault. In Iraq prospects for officers had changed.

Troop leaders such as Captain
Morris
, hit in Ramadi in 2003, demonstrated their courage time and again leading house assaults. Acting as liaison with US units (as that captain had been doing on Delta’s Yusufiyah mission) often allowed an officer to remain in Iraq, continuing to accumulate operational experience. By 2009, after three tours in Iraq and scores of raids,
Morris
had been promoted to major and given command of A Squadron. In the competitive world in which the SAS squadrons operated there was rivalry between Team Leaders – some young officers, others experienced senior NCOs – who vied to set up target packs for bigger and better operations. Liaising with intelligence organisations or absorbing highly technical information put more of an emphasis on brain power. ‘The concept is of the strategic soldier,’ explains one young officer, ‘that you need to have strategic effect, that you have to absorb a complex intelligence picture. You need the intellect and versatility to deal with that.’ In Iraq the old class-based battle between Ruperts and old sweats gave way to a more generalised rivalry. Naturally this also existed between squadron leaders, as one followed the next. Not only were they keen to outdo their predecessors, but were used to being given considerable latitude in how that might be done. As D Squadron replaced B this caused considerable tension.

The OC of D Squadron, Major
Lavity
, was a most careful operator who defied any ‘green-eyed Para’ stereotype that his unit might have built up. He considered his approach to be one of brain rather than brawn. Physically slight,
Lavity
had come to the SAS via the Royal Engineers. Under Lieutenant-Colonel
Beaufort
,
Lavity
had served as the regiment’s chief of staff, planning operations around the world. Those who watched him at work in Baghdad say that
Lavity
soon questioned the point of many of JSOC’s raids, arguing that they netted only ‘pipe-swingers’ or low-ranking street life. Perhaps, after watching B Squadron, he had concluded that some high-profile successes were more important.

During the early weeks of D Squadron’s tour
Lavity
frequently clashed with his boss, Richard Williams, over the squadron’s priorities. Their differences were aired during nightly Video Tele-Conferences (VTCs), as well as by e-mail and face to face, and soon became widely known among both British and American special operators.

Williams had his own doctrine and it was as important in shaping SAS operations in Iraq as anything handed down from JSOC. The CO told his squadron commanders that he expected three things of them: that they conduct an operation every night; that every operation be completed; and that every raid produce intelligence. These dictums fitted very well with Lieutenant-General McChrystal’s central idea – that the insurgency could only be overwhelmed by a relentless tempo of operations. Al-Qaeda had to be dismantled faster than it could regenerate itself. In order to maintain this pace of nightly activity, McChrystal sacrificed some target development in the interests of getting the raids themselves to produce intelligence. The Americans were also willing to launch their raids on a single ‘trigger’ or piece of intelligence. This philosophy played itself out with spectacular consequences in the Triangle of Death during May to July 2006, as one wave of strikes followed another.

There were quite a few on the British side of the operation who shared Major
Lavity
’s unease at launching nightly raids. After all, each Task Force Knight mission carried myriad risks: of losing a helicopter; of soldiers being shot; of hitting the wrong house and pointlessly killing Iraqis. The OC of D Squadron made clear he did not want to run them simply to lift pipe-swingers. The raids might simply be stirring up violence if the quality of those being taken had been sacrificed in the interests of quantity. He articulated what some felt was the distinctive British approach. ‘We generally wanted two or even three indicators on a target, which was different to the Americans,’ comments one British intelligence officer.

Both McChrystal and Williams, it seems, felt there was a danger of Task Force Knight falling back into a slower and more deliberate pace of operations after the fireworks of B Squadron’s tour, almost a return to the old ‘Task Force Slack’ approach. When Williams put pressure on
Lavity
during the nightly VTC there was a wider audience in the special ops community watching the circuit. Eventually, after some bruising public airing of differences, D Squadron maintained the rate of operations. Those who disliked Williams considered that his pressure on squadron commanders formed part of a scheme of personal aggrandisement with McChrystal and the Americans.

The scope for discrete British operations in Baghdad was in any case decreasing. Sectarian strife created its own limits for Task Force Knight’s operations. Surveillance reconnaissance in cars by members of the SpR Detachment was largely a thing of the past: there were simply too many checkpoints, official and militia, on the city’s streets. The ability to gather distinctive British intelligence through agent networks was also limited. Both SIS and the Defence Humint Unit Detachment (also called the Field Humint Team) had already curtailed their missions due to the dangers involved. Their agents were still operating, but with less supervision – and therefore it was less likely that operations could be run solely on the basis of their information. It was a case of accepting American technical intelligence, often based on mobile phones, or losing one’s ability to operate, say some who were there.