My Share of the Task (35 page)

At the conclusion of the investigation, we acted swiftly. Included in the punishment of those responsible was expulsion from the unit, a uniquely difficult blow for soldiers whose very identity relied upon being part of the finest unit of its kind in the world. They weren't the first to fall short of our standards and values, nor were they the last. But
each time we acted.

Over time, as our experience and expertise grew, detention operations became a noted strength for the TF 714. They had to be. For operators, risking their lives night after night, capturing insurgents was not a theoretical undertaking. A calculus that felt self-evident in a classroom in Connecticut was more difficult in blood-drenched Baghdad, when Zarqawi's bombers were wreaking havoc on innocent civilians. Finding themselves face-to-face with a person they believed was an insurgent who might have killed comrades and who might possess the information needed to help end the fighting, our operators had to have confidence that capture and exploitation would help us stop the violence. I could never have sent our forces out every night, pushing hard for more and more raids, without a screening facility that produced results in a manner that stood up to rigorous scrutiny and, even more important, to the values we sought to embody.

*   *   *

T
rue to form, in January 2006 the men and women at the task force screening facility got valuable information from Abu Zar. Shortly after being picked up, he identified a grouping of buildings in Yusufiyah that he told interrogators Al Qaeda in Iraq periodically used for meetings. Specifically, Abu Zar said, Abu Ayyub al-Masri used the houses for shelter. Al-Masri was an Egyptian who had previously been part of Zawahiri's al-Jihad organization before its union with Al Qaeda. His relationship with Zarqawi reportedly stretched back to 1999, when they met in Afghanistan. Now he was the second-in-command of Al Qaeda in Iraq, running its daily operations. He did so as the emir of the foreign-fighter network, which, together with car-bomb operations, was the bread and butter of Al Qaeda in Iraq. They filmed the suicide and car attacks for propaganda, which created revenue and more recruits for the wider network.

Lying on the southwest outskirts of Baghdad, Yusufiyah was a largely rural area that Al Qaeda used as a staging ground for attacks in the capital. It sat in what the enemy called the Baghdad “belts”—the suburbs and cities ringing Baghdad. Beginning the year earlier, as we had seen the ratlines from Syria pouring violence into Baghdad, captured documents, detainee interrogations, and other sources had allowed us to refine our understanding of Al Qaeda's strategy in operation. While a network, its campaign increasingly reflected a geographic overlay. It used the ratlines from Syria, west along the Euphrates and southwest through Ar Rutba, to move foreign fighters. A third ratline ran north into Mosul, which AQI used as a rear support area, raising money and building cells but committing relatively fewer operations there. While Al Qaeda never tried to hold terrain in Baghdad itself, it increasingly sought to control the belts around the city—more sparsely populated, with less Coalition troop density. It aimed to funnel violence into Baghdad, the country's seat and most visible city, in order to demonstrate the futility of MNF-I's efforts, paralyze the government, and
help spur civil war.

When our intel team in Baghdad first surveyed the buildings Abu Zar had identified, they saw nothing—no abnormal security measures, no enemy movement to and
from or around the sites. But the squadron's top intel analyst, a sergeant major named Allan,
*
was convinced the site was important. When unused ISR orbits were available, he directed the aircraft toward what became known as Named Area of Interest 152 (NAI 152), monitoring for activity until the ISR was needed for more urgent tracking. At first, NAI 152 was just another plot point among a country's worth of locations we kept tabs on, some of them for years.

During Allan's eighth week of directing spare ISR toward Yusufiyah, two explosions one hundred miles to the north, in Samarra, rerouted the war. Before dawn on Wednesday, February 22, 2006, attackers had placed bombs inside the huge gilded dome of the Askariya shrine. Although in a city with a roughly
90 percent Sunni population, the shrine, known as the Golden Mosque for its glistening teardrop-shaped dome, was one of Shiism's holiest sites. Shiites believed that two of the main sect's twelve revered imams were buried beneath the dome and that the Mahdi—now namesake to Muqtada al Sadr's extremist militia—had visited the site
before his disappearance. At around
seven o'clock that morning, the bombs inside the dome exploded it like an eggshell, leaving behind a stump of crumbled cement and twisted rebar.

Within hours, spontaneous sectarian killing broke out through most of Iraq.
Thousands of men gathered outside of Muqtada's headquarters in Sadr City, loading onto the
backs of flatbed trucks and slinging weapons. Sunni mosques were
torched or strafed with bullets. Hundreds of Iraqis died in ethnic violence in the days following the attack, and perhaps
a thousand Iraqis were killed in the five days after the bombing.

Although shocking, the full implications of the destruction of the Golden Mosque were not immediately obvious to me. The first spasm of Shiite reaction was predictable, but it took a number of weeks before the full scope of the Shia counterattack was clear. We'd watched Zarqawi's cruelty for more than two years, but now the violence went both ways, as Shiite militias acted with brazen impunity. The ethno-sectarian targeting campaign waged in the following weeks and months was methodical, appearing to reflect the cold-blooded release of frustration and hatred. But some deaths reflected emotional, intimate methods of murder. Bodies arrived at morgues melted by acid or were found with their heads still covered in the plastic
bag used to suffocate them, one by one. Sunni bodies were found with their kneecaps drilled hollow, while severed heads of Shia were carefully spotted for public view and horrific videos were circulated.

Throughout March the violence emanating from Samarra rippled through Baghdad and into the belts like Yusufiyah as Al Qaeda sought to expel Shia from these suburbs. And yet amid this simmer, NAI 152 remained unperturbed.

The Green squadrons were set to rotate out in early April. The new squadron's intel team arrived in Iraq before the assault forces to reimmerse themselves in the effort. The team was led by the squadron's J2, Sergeant First Class J.C. I knew J.C. and much of his team well from regular visits with them. Throughout my command, I scheduled chunks of time—usually two or so hours at a shot—to sit down with intel teams. Like hounds on a scent, by 2006 they didn't need much encouragement. In a community of impressive intelligence talent, J.C. was one of the best. He was tall, but not bulked out like the operators he worked with. His slightly shaggy hair and slow, calm cadence begged you to dismiss or underestimate him. But his muted appearance and delivery betrayed intensity and strong opinions formed over years of hunting Zarqawi. When you got him going, he could rattle off connections (“and his sister is married to . . . ”) and names, the Arabic
kunyas
twisted a bit by his slight southern accent. J.C. and the other intel men and women working for the unit had spent more than two years doing nothing but studying and hunting the Al Qaeda in Iraq network. Zarqawi was an obsession.

J.C. and his team had seen the Samarra bombing and its aftermath from the States and sensed the stakes were now higher. After digesting the current intelligence traffic and digging up some past leads, they identified a number of intelligence lines to pursue. Before they deployed, J.C. had given his team a challenge: This would be the rotation on which TF 714 got not only Zarqawi but also the man we thought would replace him, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the second-in-command. The TF 714 machine, he felt, was simply too proficient to allow Zarqawi to survive their three-month rotation. The information being pumped through it was richer than it ever had been. The capacity to exploit intelligence had taken another huge leap in the six months since his last rotation. The hard bargaining of the previous two years had won us more surveillance assets. And Zarqawi was getting sloppy.

When J.C.'s team arrived, they developed a set of targets for the squadron to hit at the beginning of their rotation. By the spring of 2006 this was a standard, if unstated, practice in our task forces. Striking a series of targets in the first days after arrival would shake any cobwebs off the operators, but more important, the strikes could yield a wealth of intelligence leads that could then guide follow-on operations. This fight was about gaining and maintaining momentum, and our forces sought to grab it immediately.

On that target list the task force added NAI 152. Allan remained convinced that it was an important site, and his assessments were respected. Even though it was squarely in the middle of AQI territory, it had been quiet. This made it a good target for the new squadron, coming in cold, to warm up on.

They wouldn't get the chance. In the late morning of Saturday, April 8, before the squadron assault teams rotated, Allan saw a convoy of vehicles approach NAI 152. After three months of monitoring the target, he knew the activity merited a strike. The operators trusted him, boarded helicopters in Baghdad, and launched a daytime assault.

A short time later, just before 1:56
P.M.
, the Green
teams landed at NAI 152. In the firefight, five insurgents were killed. The Green team suffered no fatalities. Inside the house, the teams found suicide vests and an explosives-laden van with a huge tank inside—likely
bound for Baghdad's streets. The operators who entered the house, like TF 714's SEALs and many of the Rangers, had been trained in forensic techniques at our Sensitive Site Exploitation (SSE) course, one of a number of schools we set up to develop in-house expertise. There in Yusufiyah that afternoon, they meticulously searched the house, tagging each item of intelligence value and recording exactly where in the house it had been found. They transmitted any key data back to the headquarters in Baghdad and the Iraq task force's headquarters in Balad. As had become the norm, analysts there immediately began exploitation, while pumping both the raw information and their initial assessments to the wider intelligence community.

As the assault teams were airborne toward NAI 152, the Baghdad outstation monitoring the operation had seen a car drive to a second location up the road. Soon the task force picked up more vehicles approaching the follow-on target. Helicopters went airborne, and the second target was hit at 4:11
P.M
. Two hours and fifteen minutes had elapsed since the assault teams first landed in Yusufiyah earlier that afternoon.

The second target, now named Objective Mayers, went down more quietly than the first. The operators arrested all twelve of the men they found at the mud-and-brick farmhouse. In the backs of the helicopters that lifted off from Yusufiyah a short time later, the assault teams squeezed in next to the flexi-cuffed men and returned to Baghdad.

*   *   *

“W
e picked up twelve guys at Mayers last night,” Wayne Barefoot said, bringing up a slide on-screen in an intel brief the next day, April 9. Wayne was in Iraq coincidentally. He was in transition to a new job, but Scott Miller had asked him to come back to Iraq and make any final adjustments, now that Wayne was free of the time constraints that came with being the TF 16 intel chief. That role was newly filled by Major M.S., Wayne's deputy at the time and a seasoned intelligence officer. An avid athlete, M.S. had the combination of intellect, common sense, and people skills necessary to succeed in the traditionally all-male community of special operations. She was serious, unflappable, and demanding.

Immediately sensing the importance of these new captures and concerned something might fall through the cracks, Wayne had flown down to Baghdad to ensure everything was properly sorted out, and that a plan was in place to prioritize the detainees and work through the extensive material found on the target. Now, he briefed Scott, M.S., J.C., C.M., who was the officer in charge of the screening facility, and me on his initial conclusions.

The one-page slide he showed had a map and a few bullet points summarizing the target. Also on the slide were pictures of each of the captures. Their faces were those of older men, not twenty-year-old thugs.

“This is
very
interesting,” Wayne continued. “Only one phone.” To find twelve Iraqi men in 2006 with only one phone among them was nearly impossible. One of the many irrigation canals that crisscrossed Yusufiyah's lush farmland passed along the edge of the objective where they were captured. We later surmised that they must have thrown all the phones into the water when they heard our team approach. Or all but one of them was smart enough not to show up with a phone. In either case, it indicated savvy.

“This is not just a bunch of fighters,” Wayne said. “These guys are different.”

It wasn't just the age of the detainees that piqued the interest of interrogators and analysts. By 2006, most of our intelligence people had been working Al Qaeda in Iraq for two years. Many had prior experience in Afghanistan, some in the Balkans. The best had made an art form out of reading detainees. While at the time still hindered by an almost complete lack of Arabic skills within our force, many had learned to quickly parse demeanor and came armed with enough understanding of the environment to recognize inconsistencies or holes that detainees deliberately left in their accounts. Almost immediately that night, those skills paid off. During the detainees' initial questioning, the intel teams
knew something was awry. The team could see them thinking at a higher level. In some the team sensed a stubborn but concealed professional pride, as if they wanted the Americans to recognize they were not mere thugs but had tradecraft.

Within a couple of days, all the Yusufiyah captures had been brought from Baghdad up to Balad. That week, the second of April, I walked over to the screening facility for one of the multiple meetings they held each day to review the current evaluation of each detainee. The pace of the meeting was rhythmic. With the detainee's name, biographical information, and picture displayed on a large screen, the lead interrogator would make the case for why a detainee should be retained for another day in the task force screening facility, turned over to the larger Coalition-run facilities, given to the Iraqi court system, or released. The Department of Defense and CENTCOM had set firm policy limits on how long we could keep captives for screening. Outstations, like those in Fallujah or Mosul, could hold detainees only briefly before either releasing them or sending them up to our Balad screening facility, where we could keep detainees for only days before having to submit a written request to CENTCOM. When detainees were thought to be especially important, we could request authorization from the secretary of defense to hold them longer. The approval process was bureaucratic but necessary to ensure that detainees were not held for inappropriate times in temporary facilities and that every detainee was properly accounted for throughout the process.