Task Force Black (32 page)

The British army was entering its final and most controversial phase in southern Iraq. Those who watched from Baghdad were saddened or even disgusted. One SAS man quips, ‘Defeatist doesn’t quite cover it.’ A senior officer who worked in the capital reflects, ‘The British in Baghdad actually made the intellectual adjustment that MND South East never made.’ In his interpretation, those who acquired the Baghdad mentality had absorbed the American spirit of aggression, problem-solving and critical self-examination. The Basra crowd, by contrast, never escaped the collective cynicism of a professional group that had gone to Iraq thinking it knew better, and then blamed others for its failure.

Jonathan Shaw, in his defence, was operating under the directive of the Chief of Joint Operations back in the UK and indeed what happened next was simply the fruition of a plan laid out by the Prime Minister himself in February. The Old State Building (a small base right in the city centre) and the Shatt al-Arab Hotel were handed over to the Iraqi army and Provincial Iraq Control, or Pic, had been signed off in Maysan in April.

British troops left at the Palace became the focus of every militia mortar-man or IED-layer in search of a payday. Under constant bombardment, losses grew alarmingly as even supply runs produced intense street battles. The battlegroup based there was not supine: it mounted several strike operations, and one mission in April in which it had driven into the Hayyaniyah, effectively challenging the Mehdi Army to a fight. The British claimed to have killed two dozen militia without loss on their own side, but everybody in the city understood the way events were going and on 2 September Basra Palace was evacuated. The column of Warriors moving from the city centre to the airport flew British and Welsh flags as the Rifles and Fusiliers rumbled out.

For many Basrawis this withdrawal marked a final disappointment by the British. Places that had once been relaxed and secular, such as the university or the corniche, had fallen under the baleful influence of militia puritans during the preceding years. It was not as if this imposition of Islamic sobriety brought peace in its wake. Instead, Badr Brigade gunmen fought the Mehdi Army and the police often clashed with the army. Not long after the British evacuated the Palace the city Chief of Police lamented that ‘they left me militia, they left me gangsters and they left me all the troubles in the world’.

The controversy of the British withdrawal was succeeded by one concerning dealings with the militias. The SIS in Basra played a central role in this. As part of broader negotiations with the Mehdi Army, the British government agreed in August 2007 to release two dozen senior detainees after the Palace had been evacuated. These included Sajjad Badr, whose July 2006 arrest in a strike operation spearheaded by G Squadron had prompted a large-scale battle. The deal was allegedly negotiated with another man taken in an SAS-led strike from his prison cell at Basra airport. As part of a broader accommodation with the militias, the British agreed not to conduct further strike operations in the city in return for a ceasefire with militant groups there.

Some British officers had feared that, having left the Palace under a barrage of indirect fire, the militia would soon be rocketing the airport. However, once agreement was reached firing at the British base stopped almost completely. After years of intelligence analysis that described the insurgents in the city as splinter groups or offshoots, they almost all heeded an order to cease fire with remarkable discipline. Under these new arrangements the SIS had been withdrawn too, as had the SAS Task Force Spartan. With strike operations suspended there was little further role for special forces in Basra.

The story of that summer in Baghdad and the belt of communities around it was, by contrast, one of offensive action, spurred on by troops infused with new ideas of how they might beat the insurgency and backed up by considerable reinforcements. At MNF-I headquarters, Camp Victory or in the Green Zone there was quite a bit of disparagement of the British. The top British general in Iraq, taking part in the morning BUA and bereft of anything positive to report from the south, would refer day after day to the results produced overnight by Task Force Knight. ‘The SBMR-I would do anything he could each day to try and impress Petraeus,’ recalls a jaundiced SAS observer of the morning briefings. ‘We became his best card.’

These operations consisted of takedowns against Sunni and Shia militant targets. During May and June many Shia arrest operations were conducted by special ops units, including the SAS, but increasingly through TF-17’s Green Berets and the Iraqi commandos they mentored. The sense that the Prime Minister and the US were united against him caused Muqtada al-Sadr initially to flee to Iran, fearful for his own liberty and later, in August, to declare a Mehdi Army ceasefire with the Coalition. The fears raised by naysayers who had argued the folly of confronting Shia extremists were thereby shown to be groundless.

During those same summer months of 2007 Petraeus’s surge reached its climax. In Baghdad neighbourhoods including Adhamiya or Doura the erection of T-walls around particular
muhallas
allowed access to be controlled. This was followed by house-to-house sweeps. These had been done many times before, but this time with a difference, according to soldiers like those of the 2-12 Infantry in Doura. Insurgents who might previously have assumed themselves safe because they could escape over the back wall of a compound once the approach of Humvees was heard now calculated that they could not get across the new barricades. Afraid of getting cornered in the enclosed
muhallas
, many started to keep their distance. With this declining jihadist presence local citizens flocked to the Awakening forces and the success that had been achieved in rural Anbar was replicated in Baghdad. Many insurgents were hired in these days, turning for the princely sum of three dollars a day to fight on behalf of the Iraqi government rather than against it.

The toughest battle of that summer actually occurred outside Baghdad. It was in Baquba that many of the al-Qaeda men made their last stand. There had been bitter sectarian conflict in the city and the surrounding communities of Diyala Province for many months. It may be that the sense that they were all about to be murdered by the Shia made the Sunni population in that place harder to turn than they had been in Anbar or Baghdad. Jihadists had also declared Baquba to be the capital of the Islamic State of Iraq, having previously given that same distinction to Ramadi.

During early operations around the city’s outskirts in March and April US troops had got a taste of what was to come. In one two-kilometre stretch of road they discovered thirty IEDs. On 6 May a huge deep-buried bomb hurled a Striker armoured vehicle into the air, killing the six American troops and one journalist inside. Fighting their way into the narrow alleys of Baquba’s historic old city the American troops went house to house, finding hundreds of booby traps and running firefights. ‘It was like World War Two,’ says one senior American officer. ‘It really was that intense.’

With so many more US troops fighting, casualties mounted quickly. In April 104 US soldiers were killed, in May 124 and in June 101. By July and August, though, these shockingly high figures had started to drop.

In places such as Doura the change brought about by the summer’s fighting was dramatic. Dubbed ‘the worst place in Iraq’ by some earlier in the year, the streets had become quiet enough for the local battalion, 2-12 Infantry, to patrol by foot. One of the soldiers I had met during April’s embed sent me an e-mail saying that they had complete freedom of action on the streets.

As Doura became calmer operations were stepped up just to the south, in Arab Jabour. Here too conventional forces, setting up Joint Security Stations, worked in tandem with the special operators. One US special forces officer serving with the ground-holding troops gives this example of what happened:

The special ops people targeted Taher Razuq, one of the main leaders in Arab Jabour. They put two five-hundred-pound bombs through the roof of his house and killed him. There were two real consequences. Firstly, people felt more secure and that meant intelligence went up. Secondly it forced al-Qaeda underground.

In Washington the long-expected high noon between General Petraeus and the critics of the surge proved to be something of a damp squib in September. He and Ryan Crocker faced days of probing by Senate and House committees, leaving the latter to quip that it would be the first time he’d be glad to get back to Baghdad. But some of the fight had already gone from those who had previously condemned it all as ill-conceived. The indicators, in terms of falling violence in Baghdad and losses of US soldiers, were beginning to bolster General Petraeus’s narrative. Even the killing by al-Qaeda of Sheikh Sittar, the key Awakening leader in Anbar, just after the congressional hearings could not dampen the mood of cautious optimism. Sittar was soon replaced by one of his brothers on the Awakening Council and many more sheikhs who had previously backed the insurgency now seemed ready to turn their backs on it.

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.