Task Force Black (31 page)
Authors: Mark Urban
Those on errands darted from one doorway to another and civilians with gunshot wounds were frequently brought into the Cop for treatment by its medics. Both al-Qaeda and some of the police, whom the locals considered a uniformed branch of the Mehdi Army, seemed to shoot people at random. The soldiers in Gator Cop reacted with gallows humour, having T-shirts printed with the slogan ‘Doura Market – Shop ’til You’re Dropped’.
In a place like this, both the ground-holding force, 2-12 Infantry, and special operations forces were free to mount operations in the
muhallas
or city blocks. But there was inevitably a hierarchy in the way these were applied. The infantry operating out of Gator Cop were under pressure to mount a raid every night, just as the OC of Task Force Knight was. But going out was so risky nobody wanted to do it for dry holes or to pick up an innocent man. Undoubtedly, though, they sometimes did, even if their record was generally a good one.
Accompanying Gator Company one April night we were joined by an NCO from the brigade’s Tactical Humint Team – the equivalent of British Army Field Humint Teams run by the Defence Humint Unit. He brought with him an agent from one of the
muhallas
who was dressed up as an Iraqi interpreter, complete with balaclava to disguise his identity. Once inside the target house this agent discreetly identified two suspects. One proved to be a suspected bomb maker who had been organising IED attacks, the other was an innocent man who was released a couple of hours later with an apology.
At the same time that operations like this were being prosecuted every night, outfits like Delta and Task Force Knight, with their responsibility for the Baghdad area, were also free to work up target packs on networks in neighbourhoods like Doura. While this might have seemed like a recipe for conflict, it actually allowed ground-holding troops to exploit the special operators’ natural competitiveness to their own advantage. In this situation, says one Task Force Knight veteran, ‘liaison officers and OOB [out of bounds] boxes became the order of the day’. When a takedown operation was planned the liaison man would arrive with the local unit, install himself in their ops room and keep routine patrols out of their area of interest.
Members of the FHT attached to Task Force Knight therefore made it their business to cultivate the intelligence officers of the various American battalions around Baghdad. ‘Delta thought it was beneath them but we were absolutely ruthless,’ says one British humint operator. ‘We would talk to anyone who could give us the information to get started.’ Thus the arrival of Pumas became a regular event at FOB Falcon, a couple of miles to the south of Doura. There the British met the intelligence officers of US units operating in the Rashid District of southern Baghdad, which included such al-Qaeda strongholds as Doura. Task Force Knight also started to focus its attention on Arab Jabour, an area of farms and market gardens several miles further south, and another al-Qaeda bastion. If the American officers were agreeable, an agent meet would go ahead with the British there too. In this way the British developed takedown operations that had a direct impact on the fortunes of the ground-holding unit here, and therefore of the tentative progress of Petraeus’s new approach.
The picture of al-Qaeda that emerged through humint operations in places such as Doura or Arab Jabour was of a very different organisation from the one that had baffled the spymasters in 2003 and 2004. It had gone from a small conspiracy dominated by foreign fighters into a widespread franchise, growing rapidly as the mercury of sectarian conflict had risen. In many places AQI used its reputation, money and profile to swallow up groups that had previously been loyal to less militant nationalist parties. One British officer comparing the intelligence he read in spring 2007 with that of an earlier tour notes the reporting featured ‘the same tribal names, and the same towns on the outskirts of Baghdad were targeted – but they had changed allegiance from the Ba’athists to al-Qaeda’. During late 2005 and early 2006 this shift of tribal allegiances had in many places made life hell for Coalition troops and non-Sunni families because it added to the ranks of the militant organisation faster than JSOC could take people down. But this growth also opened greater possibilities for the penetration and neutralisation of al-Qaeda cells. This applied not only to humint organisations but to the burgeoning Awakening operation. For just as tribal sheikhs had switched the allegiance of their followers from the Ba’athists to the jihadists, so they might be persuaded to rent them en masse to the Awakening.
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.
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 not 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.’
