My Share of the Task (27 page)

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his market we sought to create yielded a product that came online that August and allowed us to curb the growth of Zarqawi's metastasizing network.

The product in question was, that August, being installed to a group of aircraft whose motley appearance belied their importance. On the cement runways north of our Iraqi hangar, past the sleek black helicopters of the Night Stalkers lined neatly nose to tail, lay our fleet dedicated to intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, or ISR.
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For months I'd been fighting to get more ISR aircraft, and we soon resorted to buying, borrowing, leasing, and modifying an odd array of substitutes to create what we dubbed the Confederate Air Force for the amusing diversity of aircraft types. After a visit to Israel in February, I'd wanted SOCOM to bypass the creaky acquisitions process and buy ready-made Israeli models. The air force had objected and promised to field remotely piloted Predators quickly. Frustrated when the air force didn't follow through, my boss at SOCOM, Doug Brown, suggested that as a near-term fix we buy manned aircraft and retrofit them with the ISR packages.

We purchased six commercial single-engine, turboprop planes. We gutted the insides of amenities, stripping them down to the metal frames to reduce needless weight—every ounce consumed fuel and shortened the time they could spend over targets—and filled them back up with the necessary communications and surveillance equipment.

The piece of equipment added that August was the product of the two operators trying not to merely fight the war but to win it. The previous spring, they had come to my office at BIAP and briefed our command that a technology they'd encountered, if slightly tweaked, could prove game changing by allowing us to capitalize on our enemy's own increasing use of technology—particularly communications devices. Indeed, Zarqawi and his group were the first insurgents in history whose rise and success was inextricable from the emergence of
broadband Internet and cell towers. When Zarqawi first arrived in Iraq in 2002, there were hardly any cell phones in use (they were
technically illegal under Saddam) but they had quickly
spread after the American invasion. They relied on high-speed bandwidth to upload propaganda films to the Internet, as did the recruits and funders who watched these videos. In Iraq, they used cell phones to communicate internally and to terrorize Iraqis by sending gruesome clips of executions and torture phone to phone.

The potential the two operators described was obvious, and I directed that we develop the capability. After a few short months coordinating with interagency partners and technology experts, our operators had the product in the field. It lacked the elegance of the all-knowing systems depicted in movies, but in the hands of talented operators, it could lead to Zarqawi's leaders and key lieutenants, who relied on communications to remain networked. To my amazement, the operators invented software that revealed relationships among the owners of captured equipment, giving us a vivid understanding of the enemy's organization. In short order, it was an accelerant to F3EA and had a distinct impact on those in Zarqawi's network, forcing them to modify how they communicated and making it much harder to hide in the expanses of Anbar.

These operators' mentality and sense of ownership of the outcome in Iraq had also taken root on an organizational level. Shortly after my first visit to the Green compound during the fall of 2003, I had “given” Iraq to them. My guidance was simple: Green would be in charge of TF 16 until we won. They could rotate squadrons and alter deployment schedules, but no outside unit would replace them.
We're not here to fight; we're here to win
. This put whoever was the Green commander in operational control of all TF 16 forces in Iraq—at the time, primarily Green, Rangers, and Special Operations Aviation units. (At the same time, I put TF 328 in Afghanistan, under the rotating command of the Rangers and the SEALs.) Giving the Iraq fight to Green led them to tap their best talent in a way a higher headquarters could not: They brought top officers and NCOs, even when they were technically on their three months of rest, to Iraq to serve in odd but important jobs before returning a few months later to their normal positions within their squadron.

Our command had come to accept our central role in the fight against Al Qaeda. The next round of that fight was heating up again in Fallujah. Ever since the United States had lost control of the city, Coalition leaders had known we would have to wrest it back. After a long summer, that operation was imminent.

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n September 12, 2004, Lieutenant General John Sattler assumed command of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, and I felt like I had another close friend in a key role. John had been General Abizaid's operations chief at CENTCOM the previous year, and I was fortunate that he was now overseeing Anbar at such a critical moment.

Beginning with John's arrival, each Friday I would helicopter down from Balad to Camp Fallujah, southeast of that city, to meet with him and his Marines for informal dinner meetings. I was normally accompanied by T.T., Mike Flynn, and the Green planners and commanders who operated in that area. After landing in a dry field inside their base walls, I met John outside the mess hall. With him was usually a mix of his chief of staff, his director of operations, the regimental commander responsible for Fallujah, and his battalion commanders.

Inside the mess hall, our group snaked past flimsy white plastic chairs and folding tables covered in Marine Corps–red tablecloths where British and American service members ate dinner. These men and women, bent over their food in conversation on those nights, would in a few weeks take Fallujah block by block. I knew they and their comrades would bear the burden and costs. But I also sensed the cloth from which they were cut, and in their faces I saw the same fortitude and heroism of those who had gone before, at Okinawa, Inchon, and Khe Sanh.

At the time, the relationship between the Marines and our TF 16 forces remained cool, which was understandable. The Marines had the difficult job of containing and eventually clearing Fallujah, and the value of our operations and air strikes—which had continued steadily since Big Ben—was not always clear to them. Much of the Marine leadership we dealt with that summer
had not been convinced that Al Qaeda or Zarqawi was active in Anbar. But the offensive to recapture Fallujah was to be bigger, faster, and nastier than the April operation, and we needed to build relationships in the lead-up. John and I hoped our warm friendship would cascade down the ranks. He made this easy and was an ideal partner. Although a tough Naval Academy wrestler who would soon oversee the bloodiest battle of the Iraq war, John was deeply humble and quick with self-effacing humor. With his friendly, coarse voice, he set a warm atmosphere and had a knack for disarming any stink eyes.

Designed to build trust, these dinner meetings were low-tech affairs without computers or slides. We talked about the previous week and coordinated upcoming operations. Members of TF 16 distributed targeting folders, which were becoming increasingly advanced. These could consistently show where targets were in the city as well as when and how they moved. As we discussed how to shape the battlefield prior to the inevitable ground assault, the tabletop became Fallujah's neighborhoods—we turned saltshakers and napkin dispensers into buildings, while knives, laid end to end, became roads that needed to be blocked or taken.

While our meetings were upbeat, they were not cavalier. TF 16 had accrued a reservoir of credibility from over two months of strikes—so far, a perfect record except for the one bomb diverted into an open field. John knew this. Before he arrived in Iraq, John's previous post at CENTCOM had made him our point of contact when we sought approval for strikes. But like me, he also understood the stakes: A bungled strike with significant civilian casualties could cause us to lose the independent authority to conduct air strikes—which remained the sole means of interfering with insurgents in what was otherwise an internal safe haven.

The growing rattle of insurgent bombs—like the one that exploded the afternoon before one Friday meeting with the Marines—was an urgent reminder that a sovereign Iraq could not allow Fallujah to be a staging area from which insurgents were able to prepare increasingly sophisticated and sinister attacks. On Thursday, September 30, a suicide car bomb exploded half a block down the road from a new sewage facility in Baghdad. The families who had just attended the facility's opening ceremony wandered over to the cordoned-off area. As they often did, children crowded near the site to pick up debris and greet American soldiers. While they loitered, a second car, black, sped down the street. Thirty-five of the curious children were killed when the driver detonated his payload. Ten Americans and more than
140 Iraqis were wounded. In addition to Shia civilians and Americans, reconstruction projects and the contractors building them were targets of Zarqawi's suicide bombings.

Between our Friday-evening dinners throughout September and October, TF 16 commanders went to Camp Fallujah to coordinate their targeting with the Marines, who lent key support—providing cordons, putting doctors and triage hospitals on standby, and offering spare
barracks for our operators. This level of coordination and cooperation eventually became routine, but in the fall of that year it was not.

Even as our task force attacked the insurgent nodes in Fallujah, John Sattler wisely
enlisted Prime Minister Allawi to exhaust all opportunities to negotiate with the insurgency to turn over the city without an assault. But the negotiations broke down, the insurgents ignored Allawi's ultimatums, and the Coalition scheduled the invasion for the
first week of November.

With the date set, the task force went into high gear at the end of October. TF 16's full focus turned to Fallujah, and we transitioned from hitting targets every couple of nights to striking multiple targets throughout the day. We targeted leaders, trainers, and mortarmen in order to eliminate their skilled labor. We knocked out key command-and-control centers and barriers the insurgents set up to channel American vehicles and foot patrols into ambushes and traps. At the same time, then–Major General Rich Natonski, commanding the 1st Marine Division, ran feints at the south of the city, while the Marines planned to bring the
real attack from the north. As the British had done there in 1941, the Marines dropped leaflets urging civilians to leave Fallujah. Most did, while the jihadists entrenched and
fortified the terrain.

John later recounted one of the strikes on these insurgent traps that reflected why our continued efforts at partnership were so important. One night just before the offensive, a group of Marine leaders, including John and the ground division commander, gathered in their combat operations center, where they watched videotape from one of the targets hit that day. After the air strike destroyed the initial target, smaller explosions cascaded down each of the roads leading away from it: pop, pop, pop, like chains of fireworks or lines of electrical charges. These were
daisy-chain IEDs the insurgents had buried under the road, stringing together bombs for meters on end that would explode together. As the charges continued exploding on the soundless video, the room was silent. The hushed commanders watched, imagining what would have happened had a file of Marines attacked that position with the IEDs still unexploded, waiting in the packed dirt beneath their feet.

In an effort to ensure that no targets went unserviced, strikes continued up until the Marines' ground assault. That invasion began when Iraqi commandos and Marines seized the main hospital just before midnight on November 7. Air strikes continued throughout the following afternoon, the Marines
cut the power at 6:00
P.M
., and later that night they crossed the berms and railroad tracks at the city's northern edge. Accompanying them were TF 16 operators.

Zarqawi's jihadists who fought in the streets during the battle were doing so under a different name. On October 17, three weeks before the Fallujah offensive began, Zarqawi's group posted a message to its website declaring that
Zarqawi pledged
bay'ah
—swore allegiance—to Osama bin Laden. The message hinted at Al Qaeda's senior leaders' unease with Zarqawi's campaign design. After eight months of back-and-forth messages, Zarqawi's group explained, “
our most generous brothers in al Qaeda”—the upper echelon of leadership, mostly in Pakistan—“came to understand the strategy of the Tawhid wal-Jihad organization in Iraq, the land of the two rivers and of the Caliphs, and their hearts warmed to its methods and overall mission.” While tensions would remain, Al Qaeda blessed the decision on one of its
websites a few days later. Zarqawi's group now went by “Al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers” or “Al Qaeda in Iraq” (AQI), the latter being the name we had already called the group since Zarqawi first emerged into the fray the previous January.

Less than a year after writing to bin Laden and Zawahiri for support, Zarqawi was quickly eclipsing Al Qaeda's patriarchs as the most active, violent, energetic commander of jihad—especially for a younger generation of aspirants who were less theologically minded and more violent. The United States was partly at fault, as the constant chorus of blame assigned to Zarqawi in the press—much of it warranted, some of it misappropriated—had inadvertently inflated his stature. But the ruthlessness and ambition he would continue to display in the years ahead convinced me he would have grabbed the spotlight anyway.

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hat fall, as bin Laden accepted, however reluctantly, Zarqawi's strategy, I was thinking hard about our own. Unless we developed a more effective Coalition program, working with credible Iraqi security forces, we would have limited options. I had already concluded that a strict decapitation strategy was unlikely to work. Top Al Qaeda leaders were well hidden, and their capture or death was rarely decisive. Moreover, a string of effective operations could give us a false sense that we could slowly grind Zarqawi's network out of existence.