Task Force Black (5 page)

The road running west through the Sunni heartlands to the Jordanian border had already proven thoroughly dangerous. Aid and news organisations had stopped using it after numerous brushes with armed men – bandits or insurgents, people weren’t quite sure what to call them – who robbed and sometimes killed passers-by. The convoy passed Abu Ghraib, where American guards had already taken over Saddam’s notorious prison, and over the Fallujah cloverleaf.

By late October, with the onset of Ramadan, something crazy had started in Iraq. The killing was soaring, as if open season had been declared on the invaders. Back in August there had been ten to fifteen attacks a day on Coalition forces across Iraq. By the end of October it had doubled, and by late November the shooting, mortars and car bombs would be running at around three times the figure of the summer.

In the weeks that A Squadron had been in Iraq there had been a distinct change in what the soldiers called ‘atmospherics’. Widespread unrest in Sunni areas – an insurrection, in fact – had broken out against the Americans. There had also been some spectacular attacks using huge truck bombs: the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad had been blown up on 7 August; twelve days later the United Nations compound had been flattened and their special envoy to Iraq among the twenty-two people killed; and on 29 August Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer Hakim, a senior Shia cleric, had been the victim of another massive blast. The hallmark of all three attacks was the use of what the Americans called ‘V-bids’ or VBIEDs – Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Devices, driven by suicide attackers against highly symbolic targets, which cause large numbers of casualties. In the case of the bomb that killed Ayatollah Hakim at the Shia spiritual centre of Najaf, more than ninety had been killed.

As the mercury of political killing had soared in autumn 2003, the Americans and their allies had struggled to understand it. There were so many different strands of violence that the intelligence analysts sent to Baghdad, few of whom had much experience of the Arab world, could not untangle them. The Bush Administration’s desire to force this mayhem into an ideological template had its own consequences. The orthodoxy coming down from the Office of the Secretary of Defence was that the violence must either be a product of Ba’athist ‘dead-enders’ trying to regain power or was being perpetrated by foreigners, fuelled up on Osama bin Laden’s international jihadism. Many in the Administration believed that Iraq fitted into the Global War on Terror, seeing the country as a great prize in the contest between the US – which was trying to turn it into a modern Middle Eastern democracy – and al-Qaeda, which could not allow this to happen. Some did disagree with this orthodoxy, for example General John Abizaid, head of Central Command, who had ruffled feathers in Washington in July 2003 by calling the situation a ‘classical guerrilla war’, but the idea that the violence resulted from a widespread Iraqi rejection of the invasion still rankled with Donald Rumsfeld and many others. Consequently, the tasking of critical intelligence assets and, through them, of Coalition special operations forces was closely linked to Administration ideology.

The special ops people had been steadily rounding up the former Ba’athists in the pack of cards. Late in July, Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay had been cornered and killed: the owner of the Mosul house in which they were hiding had sold them out for the reward money. Many of the intelligence people had, however, started to wonder whether rounding up the old leadership was going to get them out of trouble. Instead of the secular old Ba’athists, they worried about the new face of international Islamic militancy. Might they even be doing the jihadists a favour by removing the natural local leadership in many Sunni areas, creating a vacuum? Their answer was to pursue ‘transnational terrorists’ or foreign fighters at the same time as the Ba’athists. But if thousands of Muslims were heeding Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri’s appeal to wage jihad in Iraq against the infidels, then there was a shortage of actionable intelligence about what might be done to stop it. Delta Force had glimpsed this threat in the north, during its early confrontation with Ansar al-Islam, but months had gone by without hard leads. This Halloween, the American agencies had turned up something fresh – a tip about what they might find in Ramadi.

Meeting their colleagues from Delta in a laying-up point outside the city, the SAS received a briefing. The Americans were in pursuit of an important Sudanese jihadist believed to be facilitating the arrival of Islamic militants into Iraq and operating from a safe house in Ramadi. His work had required contact with brothers in other countries and the Americans had homed in on a satellite phone that he used. The operation, codenamed ABALONE, involved a series of assaults on a strip of dwellings on the fringes of Ramadi. The street faced onto open ground and it was across this sand that the main SAS assault would be delivered. Ramadi was already sufficiently dangerous that this operation might produce widespread resistance, so the local US unit, a mechanised infantry battalion normally based in Germany, had assigned a platoon of Bradleys to support the attack. The Bradley is a tracked and turreted heavy armoured vehicle – though many laymen assume it is a tank. It can carry infantry though, and its main weapon, a 25mm cannon, is much lighter than that of a tank.

So, on the evening of 31 October A Squadron prepared to assault a compound near the city, having turned up in Land Rovers and with the small number of night-vision goggles allocated to them. Fortunately the Americans were in support. The Bradleys and some of the Delta operators had gone into an ‘overwatch’ position, exploiting their vehicle-mounted weapons and night-vision equipment to observe what was going on at the target, and ready to give supporting fire from long range if it was needed.

Meanwhile, Major
Baker
, the OC of A Squadron, gave orders for the assault of two houses. Tall, fair-haired and bluff,
Baker
was respected by his blades as the kind of boss who kept his own ego in the background – his character fitted well with A Squadron’s image of itself. One of his call-signs, A20, would hit the first house, while A10 would hit the second. Delta had a couple of target buildings too. A20 entered without incident. A10, led by Captain
Morris
, a young commander who had only been with his troop a few months, prepared to force an entry into their compound. Like many of the larger houses in Iraq, it had high metal gates behind which were a main residence and some smaller structures. Other teams were ready both to block anyone trying to flee and to reinforce the assault as A10 and A20 went in.

SAS soldiers practise house assaults a great deal – it is one of the basic drills that they repeat ad nauseam. Live fire exercises in the ‘Killing House’ at their UK training area are performed so frequently that each man will know his place as the first trooper goes through a door and will be able to fire without hesitation at any threat they encounter but spare the innocent. During their time in Iraq, A Squadron had already performed several assaults on buildings or compounds with smooth precision. That night, though, things would be different.

When the SAS men burst through the gates of the compound they were greeted with a hail of fire from the windows of the building to their front. An RPG 7 rocket was fired straight at them, and assault rifles opened up too. Within seconds, all the members of A10 had been hit.
Morris
, who had taken a bullet in the backside, turned tail and hobbled out as fast as he could. Every SAS trooper is trained in battlefield first aid and as the captain dropped into cover his men went to work, surveying the wounds to him and the others. Major
Baker
, meanwhile, gathered several men and moved to the roof of a building further down the street, from which they could fire into the target compound.

After a head count he realised that two of A10’s men were probably still inside the target. His concern for them meant he could not simply ask Delta and the Bradleys to open up with everything they had. Instead he asked a couple of his men to approach the gate to see whether they could spot their missing comrades.

Inside that yard lay Corporal Ian Plank, blood pumping out of a bullet wound to his face. He couldn’t be reached for medical treatment, but in any case it was already too late. Nearby, Corporal
Saltash
was too badly hurt to get himself out. He had dragged himself into cover and lay just a few feet from the windows, where he could hear the insurgents. He scraped away at the sand with his hands to make himself a little lower in the ground then, fighting the pain of his wound, removed the magazines and grenades from his chest rig, laying them in front of him ready for immediate use. The darkness and the layout of the buildings meant that the OC and others firing from the nearby roof could not see the wounded SAS soldier.

Saltash
would later tell his mates that he could hear the people inside praying together, seemingly ‘they knew they were going to die’. But the wounded SAS corporal did not know whether the jihadists would find him first.

Spotting
Saltash
, his two mates – a sergeant and a trooper – made an immediate decision to rush into the compound and get him. Some might have argued it was too dangerous given what had happened to everyone who had gone through the gates before, but they ran in nevertheless. Perhaps those inside were still praying because as the rescuers ran in nothing happened. But their luck only lasted a few seconds longer. As they hauled
Saltash
to his feet an AK-47 opened up from one of the windows. The two rescuers dragged
Saltash
from the compound with bullets flying all around them and somehow none sustained further injury. The SAS trooper involved in rescuing
Saltash
would serve three tours in Iraq, gain promotion to corporal and become one of the most highly decorated men in the regiment.

With his men accounted for, Major
Baker
had to consider the bigger picture. There was fire coming from A10’s target and another as yet uncleared building. Conferring with the Americans,
Baker
’s men prosecuted an assault on their third house of the night, while Delta was given the task of hitting Captain
Morris
’s original target. The Bradleys opened up with their 25mm cannon and TOW anti-tank missiles, pummelling the house before Delta delivered its assault.

A Squadron’s third assault went in further along the street. Clearing the building room by room they met resistance and killed one man. Four foreign fighters – thought to be Yemeni or Saudi – were taken in this SAS target building.

Inside, the houses were strewn with rubble, spent bullet casings, and bodies. Outside the situation was difficult, with running contacts going on with Iraqi gunmen in the surrounding area. A Squadron’s Delta liaison had called up a medevac (medical evacuation) helicopter to lift out the more seriously wounded SAS soldiers.

Judging the difficulty of their situation, the SAS knew they could not dawdle. ‘Exploitation’, as the search of such an objective is called, would have to be done as swiftly as possible. Major
Baker
’s soldiers were not even sure of how many people they had killed. They were clear about the single fighter in the third compound, but suspected that their own and American fire might have killed as many as a dozen in the compound where Corporal Plank had been killed.

The glimmer of first light had appeared, and the scene of the shoot-out was ‘messy and pretty chaotic – it was a bloody dangerous place to be around daylight’. They had not caught their Sudanese target alive. Was he among several people believed to have died in the house initially hit by A10 and then by Delta? What they were sure of was that the SAS had detained four non-Iraqi volunteers. ‘There was some excitement about that,’ comments one special operator. ‘It was early evidence of foreign fighters.’

A Squadron and Delta withdrew, with hard lessons learned from that night’s operation. They had lost a man and three more had been wounded. Ian Plank, a Royal Marine from the Special Boat Service attached to A Squadron, was the UK special forces’ first combat fatality of the Iraq campaign. Some of the blades had plenty of experience of raiding houses in Northern Ireland and were hence used to being able to reach their target and prepare for the assault in comparative safety. Ramadi, however, had proven entirely different. The revolt there had produced risks to the attacking troops from small arms, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and roadside bombs before they even got near their objective. The British had felt ill-equipped in this fight, particularly in comparison to their American teammates. They needed more night-vision equipment and armoured vehicles. For Lieutenant-Colonel
Beaufort
running the SAS back in the UK, trying to get more resources for his men from an indifferent MoD, Operation ABALONE became an important part of the briefings he gave that autumn. It highlighted the risks faced by operators on the ground, as well as what was at stake as foreign mujahedeen flocked to the Iraqi battlefield.

Ramadi and Fallujah – urban centres with populations in the hundreds of thousands – had already gained a reputation for fearsome violence. But who was doing it and how could they be targeted? Reporters who braved the dangerous roads to talk to gun-toting figures hiding their faces with keffiyehs heard tell of a popular revolt by Iraqis against a blundering invader. One resistance fighter hinted at the panic shown by the foreigners under attack in these communities, telling the
Boston Globe
‘when we attack the Americans, they start shooting like blind people, in all directions’.

Outrage was so widespread that the fighting men received plenty of local backing. ‘We don’t like Saddam; he was a dictator,’ Osam Fahdawi, a businessman in Fallujah told an American reporter. ‘But the Americans, they handcuff us, they put us on the floor in front of our wives and children. It’s shameful for us.’

All of this meant that, by late 2003, the Americans could expect to be attacked pretty much every time they went into town from their Forward Operating Bases or ‘Fobs’. A Squadron mounted several missions in the two cities during October and November, often adopting a covert approach by donning local clothes and using civilian cars. But while during the 1991 Gulf War or Operation ROW some had simply put a woollen cloak over their combat rig and wrapped a keffiyeh around their heads, this would not do in the ferment of the Sunni Triangle. Instead local markets were scoured for suitable shirts or trousers, sunglasses were binned and skins often darkened. ‘We’ve had the SAS here a few times,’ the American ground commander in Fallujah told me at the time, adding with a knowing wink, ‘They’re wearing Arab clothes and they look pretty convincing… except their watches and boots give them away!’