My Share of the Task (44 page)

After seeing how Green had responded after I made them own TF 16, I thought it would be a mistake to graft the Shia target set onto an existing task force, diluting its focus. So I decided to create a new task force: Task Force 17 (TF 17) would focus entirely on the Shia target set. As with many things, it was easier said than done. We now had double the mission but not twice the ISR, helicopters, or detention facilities. We'd beg or borrow what we could, but the new mission would inevitably put Task Forces 16 and 17 in competition over the same resources.

The sympathy and active support that hard-line, Iranian-backed Shia militias enjoyed from Iraqi officials at the highest levels meant our raids sent us wading into a murky world of politics. On January 11, 2007, the day after President Bush's speech, TF 714 forces, acting on short notice, raided an Iranian facility in Irbil in northern Iraq, aiming to capture Mohammad Jafari, who we believed was guiding Quds Force activities in Iraq. Instead, our force detained five Iranians, later called “the Irbil Five,” judged to be members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The men were interrogated and ultimately held for the next two and a half years, pawns in a determined diplomatic struggle with Iran. Nine days later, perhaps as revenge, one of the most notorious Shia Special Groups staged a perfidious, goading attack.

In the early evening of January 20 a line of eight SUVs with thickly tinted windows stopped at the outermost gate of the Provincial Joint Coordination Center in Karbala, Iraq. Iraqis and Americans manned the small outpost and lived alongside one another. At the outpost's front gate, witnesses later said, some of the men inside the SUVs
wore U.S. Army uniforms and flashed fake identification. They were allowed in, and the vehicles rumbled past a further series of gates. Once inside the inner courtyard of the camp,
roughly a dozen militants bounded out. Some beelined it to the American soldiers' quarters and began firing their
weapons through the doors. Others set fire to the American Humvees. They killed one American in his room and gravely wounded three others. Within minutes, the attack was over and the assailants had sped away into the evening. No Iraqis on the base were harmed or, according to the Americans, showed any alarm, raising
suspicions about their involvement. As the Humvees billowed jet smoke into the sky above the courtyard, the Americans came to the sickening realization: The attackers had captured four Americans.

Later that night, Iraqi policemen who had given chase after the convoy passed one of their checkpoints came upon five of the SUVs. They were parked, doors ajar, about 20 miles from Karbala, in the
neighboring province of Babil. Inside, the four Americans were found handcuffed and shot, some point-blank in the chest, others in the limbs or head. Three were already dead, and the fourth, with a gunshot wound to the head, died as one of the Iraqi policeman attempted CPR. The attackers had stripped the men of identification. But in the dark, flashlights illuminated the name of one of the perished Americans: a young lieutenant, less than two years out of West Point, had in his final moments
scrawled his name into the film of Iraqi dust covering the SUV he had been left to die in.

We couldn't immediately identify who had directed or conducted the operation. I was determined we would find out.

| CHAPTER 15 |

The Long War

February 2007–June 2008

O
n February 10, 2007, General George Casey turned over command of MNF-I to General Dave Petraeus. Because I avoided public events in Iraq and Afghanistan while commanding TF 714, I didn't attend the morning ceremony. But I flew down in time to say good-bye to General Casey before he left the country. We met after the ceremony in a guesthouse he was using before departing for the States. After two and a half years together in Iraq, a bond had been forged between us through countless difficult moments. Ever balanced and upbeat, Casey expressed his appreciation for all our force had done. I presented him with a small memento from TF 714.

It was important for me to communicate my appreciation for his stoicism and support of my team. We both knew that in the years ahead he'd receive less credit and more blame than he deserved, but that often went with the territory. He had been rock solid—the epitome of a professional throughout his time in command.

A month later, John Abizaid ended his tenure as commander of CENTCOM, having served for nearly four years at the post. A narrative arose of a fresh start after failed leadership. Some press and pundits picked up on the theme as grist for the media mill.

That was a simplistic binary to which I couldn't subscribe. I tended not to personalize mistakes, as there were plenty to go around. I certainly had made my share. In hindsight, the strategy we'd all been executing was insufficient. John had long argued that the very presence of Americans in the country had instigated the violence, providing a nationalistic insurgency with a raison d'être. Based on my experience, this was hard to dispute. He felt that by limiting our footprint and accelerating our withdrawal, we
could avoid producing antibodies. Similarly, George Casey's strategy was to quickly raise the capacity of Iraqis to secure and govern their country. What few accurately anticipated was the devastating sectarianism that quickly contorted the conflict from a largely one-directional Sunni antigovernment fight to what became a brutal civil war. In the end, the surreal levels of violence that sectarianism produced were too much for the Iraqi government, which needed American force to subdue it.

Could things have been different? Of course. We learned and improved, but in February 2007, we had to navigate from where we were, not from where we wished we were.

Both John Abizaid and George Casey had guided the effort through difficult times, and both had given unfailing, critical support to TF 714. The incredibly lethal targeting machine that Dave Petraeus would soon have at his disposal would not have existed without their guidance. As I saw the often-simplistic criticism directed at them, I remembered what retired General Fred Franks, the one-legged general who led a corps in the first Gulf War, had once told me.

“Remember, no matter what you do during your service, or what you accomplish, your last interaction with the Army,” he said quietly, “will be one of rejection.”

For years I mistook Franks's comment as one of bitterness. Over time I realized he was admonishing me against looking for esteem in the wrong places. And he was reminding me whose respect was truly important.

*   *   *

T
hat month also marked the end of Sean MacFarland's tour commanding in Ramadi. I had returned regularly to the embattled city over the previous nine months, but during one visit I was struck by the feedback I received.

“Ethan,” I asked the SEAL squadron commander I knew so well, “how is it going now?”

“Sir,” he said passionately, “the change is eye-watering.”

I cocked my head. “In what way? Good or bad?”

“Eye-watering
good
, sir,” he said. Ethan outlined the changes he and his SEALs were seeing up close. “Colonel MacFarland and his guys are taking Ramadi back.”

The eye-watering changes there had come at a steep price. Five hundred of Sean's troops were wounded and
eighty-five of their comrades died in the fight to retake Ramadi.

As Sean and his troops left, having pried back the fingers of AQI's grip on the population, TF 17 was about to execute a mission whose intelligence harvest would, in the right hands, drive a growing wedge between the Maliki government and the Shia extremists who influenced it.

On the night of March 19, 2007, then-Commander John B. brought me pressing information. Since the previous September, he had commanded a squadron from SEAL Team 4 as part of TF 17, which had relied on TF 714's airpower and intelligence architecture throughout the fall. But to streamline TF 17's operations, by the beginning of January we formally placed it under TF 714's full tactical control.

Built like a logger, John B. had been one of the first TF 714 people I'd met in Afghanistan when I deployed to Bagram in May 2002 with Combined Joint Task Force 180. Wearing civilian clothes and an enormous beard, John B. initially struck me as one of a number of dilettantes I'd met. But he was different.

John B. lacked the crusty arrogance I'd always despised in some special operators and sought to eliminate in TF 714. We'd worked together when I joined the command in 2003, and it was reassuring to have a trusted partner in the new TF 17. He had been part of most of their operations into strongholds like Sadr City, Karbala, and Najaf, and he understood the political aftershocks that could ripple out from even the most precise of raids. That night, he was asking to conduct one that would, inevitably, upset a number of powerful Iraqis.

At the time, political sensitivity had created an unofficial list of Shiites whom we
could not knowingly target. One such no-go target was Qais Khazali, a thirty-three-year-old who had served as an aide to Muqtada al-Sadr's father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr, before he was killed in 1999. Khazali then assisted Muqtada in the first years after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, before splitting off to lead one of the designated Special Groups. His network was considered particularly dangerous, yet he also had powerful political connections and was periodically discussed as a potential alternative to Sadr.

But while Qais was off-limits, his younger brother Laith was not. That March night, John B. explained, Laith had popped onto the grid. The weather was particularly bad that evening and had grounded aircraft. But from intercepts, John B.'s team was confident they had found the younger Khazali brother. Then, and for the next few nights, they believed Laith was in a house in the heavily Shia port city of Basra. John B. proposed capturing him before we lost the scent.

The operation carried all kinds of risks. Launching a raid from Balad to Basra involved a lengthy flight down. More significant, we had a light presence that far south, and although we had good partnerships with the Brits, the operational infrastructure in and around Basra was unfamiliar. I knew we risked political backlash from inside Maliki's regime, but I gave John B. the go-ahead.

On the night of March 20, John B. climbed into the aircraft alongside his TF 17 operators for the almost three hour flight to Basra. There they would link up with British special operators who, augmented by conventional troops and intelligence partners, were moving. The Brits in Basra had played a vital role in the lead-up, helping with intelligence and planning and now in the coming assault. The British troops positioned themselves around the area in Basra as blocking forces, as the TF 17 teams approached by vehicle, quietly established a cordon in the dark, and took the house without fire. Elsewhere in Basra, British troops got into a series of gunfights, diverting the Shia insurgent groups, including Laith's own Asaib Ahl al-Haq, which might have turned the objective into a much more costly affair.

As expected, they found Laith Khazali inside the house, along with seven other men. After a few minutes, they realized that one of the men they'd captured on the target was about to complicate things.

“Hey, sir,” John B. called into our JOC. As usual, I had him on speakerphone. “We've got Qais.”

It was an interesting moment. Although we hadn't been targeting him, Qais' presence wasn't all that surprising, and his role as a Special Groups leader was something we already suspected. TF 17 was still relatively young, and some of the fallout from the January capture of the Irbil Five was still fresh in our minds. But given the other men on the target, we knew we had to hold him and quickly passed word to Dave Petraeus.

Soon after returning to the airfield in Basra, the teams gathered all the detainees—Laith and Qais, as well as an Arab who appeared to be both deaf and mute—and the sizable intelligence haul and flew north to Balad. Upon landing in the early morning, our teams spent hours
feverishly triaging the material. As they pored through the seized computers, a young Marine captain who spoke fluent Arabic came across a
twenty-two-page document. The document appeared to link Qais persuasively to the
attack on our outpost in Karbala, with details of the planning
as well as postoperation assessments. Included in the material were the
military IDs taken from the Americans left to die anonymously in the desert.

While the contours of the relationship would become clearer from subsequent interrogations of the Khazalis, the document showed clear support of their network from the Iranian Quds Force. Specifically, the Iranians had supported the Karbala assault by providing Khazali's men with details of
life inside the camp. We had long suspected Iranian involvement, but never had it been laid in such bare, unmistakable terms.

On previous raids, we had been forced to let well-linked detainees go, and I expected strong and
immediate pressure to release Qais. But I saw the twenty-two-page document as a smoking gun that made releasing Qais impossible. To argue our case, we sent one of our best analysts, a young army captain named Sara,
*
down to Baghdad in a helicopter to give the book of material and her analysis of its importance to Petraeus. In the rush to relay the material, the intelligence team had time to translate only parts of the document. Sara arrived in Baghdad, gave the material to Dave, and then, at his request, went with him to the palace to see the prime minister. Immediately upon sitting down, Petraeus decided to roll the dice. He handed Maliki a copy of the original document, seized only hours earlier. When he stuck the paper in front of the prime minister, Dave did not know everything it contained.

Dave steadily raised his voice as he explained to Maliki just what he should make of the document. We are here, he seethed, to help you, and these people are killing Americans. They are not on your side, Dave said, and you need to cut ties to them.

Maliki began to absorb the document and blanched. It showed clear disdain for him and his government. Its contents made painfully clear to the prime minister that the Khazali network, as a proxy for Iran, was undercutting him.

“Where did you get this?” he demanded.

Dave explained it had just been pulled off of the Khazali brothers, who were being held.

“We have to keep them; we have to hold them,” Maliki said emphatically.

The meeting ended, and Sara and Dave got into the SUV outside. Sara was shaken from the confrontation. The doors of the Suburban closed, and Dave turned to her.

“Well, I thought that went pretty well,” he said jauntily, and smiled. “Don't worry. That's the way it works.”

It was a gutsy move on Dave's part, and one that I respected. Barely a month into his tenure, he had
seized an opportunity to begin changing the paradigm of the man—Maliki—who stood at the center of Iraq's future. A Shia prime minister after generations of Sunni dominance, Maliki walked a tightrope of ethnic, religious, and political complexity. The last thing he wanted was more pressure from Shia groups or their Iranian supporters. But we had Qais, and the evidence was damning.

Dave's effort received a further dose of energy with the arrival, eight days later, of one of America's finest diplomats, Ambassador Ryan Crocker. I had known Ryan from Pakistan, where he was ambassador from 2004 until coming to Iraq.

Fluent in Arabic, Crocker managed an unusual personal connection with Maliki. After larger meetings, he would request to meet with the prime minister one-on-one, without a translator. Contrary to the hard-charging American inclination to slap down a list of requests when speaking with our counterparts, Crocker sat down without an agenda.

He talked to Maliki about the prime minister's past—about his life under Saddam and the danger of being a member of the Dawah Party, which he now led. Crocker had been in Iraq in 1980, when Saddam's thugs had murdered Baqir al-Sadr, the head of the Dawah Party. He had seen Dawah Party members hanging memorial posters of Sadr faster than the secret police could tear them down. It must have stirred deep emotions and opened new trust when the ambassador told Maliki that he recognized what a monumental act of courage it was for Dawah Party members to go out on the streets and hang those posters—one of which Crocker had kept and hung on his wall. At a time when America was desperate to know whether Nouri al-Maliki would have the will and desire to rebuff Iranian influence, these deeply personal discussions yielded clues. In a window to his feeling about Iran, Maliki once confided to Crocker, “You can't know what arrogance is until you are an Iraqi Arab forced to take refuge with the Iranians.”

On May 3 and 4, six weeks after we captured the Khazalis, Ambassador Crocker and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice traveled to Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to attend a regional conference, which included representatives of Iran, on the future of Iraq. In the building at the time was Mohammad Jafari, the Quds leader we'd
sought to capture in Erbil. Later that summer, an Iranian delegation met with Ryan to discuss the U.S.-Iranian relationship, especially as it regarded the future of Iraq. It was quickly apparent the Iranians were uninterested in substantive talk. The Iranian ambassador excused himself repeatedly. He appeared to have a weak bladder. In fact, he was calling back to his handler, Quds Force leader Qassem Suleimani, and, in later talks, meeting in a separate room with Jafari. While the talks yielded no ground with the Iranians directly, they were, like the Khazali documents, helpful with Maliki. The unseriousness of the Iranians in these talks did a lot to convince him that he could not dissuade them from their nefarious meddling in his country.