Task Force Black (23 page)
Authors: Mark Urban
Just as the dire security situation and personalities involved brought argument to the running of Britain’s secret campaign, so matters concerning the overt effort came to a head during the summer of 2006. Much depended upon the views of the generals holding the two key British positions, that of General Casey’s deputy, a lieutenant-general or three-star also referred to as the Senior British Military Representative in Iraq (SBMR-I), and the commander of Multi-National Division South East, Britain’s force in the south. Major-General Richard Shirreff was about to take over the latter post in Basra. On his reconnaissance he had become alarmed by how militia power had grown, hardly checked, in the south, but his attempts to challenge that would not unfold until later that summer.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant-General Rob Fry of the Royal Marines had taken over as SBMR-I in Baghdad that March. Some saw him as a typical ‘political general’ determined to drive through the British agenda of withdrawal come what may. Fry’s predecessor, Nick Houghton, gave a final interview in which he revealed that Britain would start turning over its provinces to Iraqi control that spring and be out of Iraq by the summer of 2008. ‘A military transition over two years has a reasonable chance of avoiding the pitfalls of overstaying our welcome,’ he said, ‘but gives us the best opportunity of consolidating the Iraqi security forces.’ Speaking about the Samarra bombing, Houghton commented that it had ‘not in any way altered the plan and its potential time-scale. The degree of restraint in the face of huge provocation was reassuring.’
Such words caused alarm among senior US officers. British leaders mouthed the American message that the withdrawal had to be ‘conditions-based’, but just how bad did things have to get for the UK to reconsider their plan? Up until around this time – July 2006 – there were also plenty in the US chain of command who saw their duty as driving towards withdrawal, whatever horrors were being perpetrated on the streets. But as the Baghdad Security Plan began to falter serious questions were being asked from the Green Zone to the White House about junking Plan A and finding a new way to deal with the worsening situation. It cannot be said that a new idea had crystallised, and General Casey stuck doggedly to his strategy of turning over the fight to the Iraqis. Senior officers and Washington policymakers were using the failure of the Baghdad Security Plan to open the debate about what needed to be done, and whether Casey was the right man to do it.
Rob Fry, an intellectual Royal Marine, absorbed these discussions in Iraq, undergoing what one observer termed a ‘Damascene conversion’. The general was unpopular within the SAS, having in his previous postings questioned the early special operations campaign in Iraq and been one of those UK-based officers whom the blades deemed to have moved too slowly when the Jamiat incident happened. Fry began to question the mantra he had previously believed, of moving to ‘operational overwatch’. The situation was one of the utmost seriousness. The Coalition was staring defeat in the face. Was Britain willing to do anything about it? UK domestic politics made it impossible for the British army to reverse and reinforce itself in Basra. It might even be impossible to abandon the withdrawal plan set out by his predecessor, so Fry concluded that they would have to bring something else to the party. It was vital that Task Force Knight keep up its contribution to the main effort, the battle for Baghdad.
In addition, Generals Casey and Fry agreed that the British team in the capital should spearhead F-SEC, or Force Strategic Engagement Cell. The intelligence people could join in this new effort to turn the Sunni community against the jihadists.
So Task Force Knight and the Strategic Engagement Cell were to become more important at a time when security was deteriorating rapidly and Whitehall wanted to stick to its withdrawal plans. Those who believed Britain should fight on could only try to stand in the way of the stampede for the exit. At this turning point, a handful of British soldiers effectively lost faith in their national plan, sharing the growing realisation among the American military that more force might be necessary before any drawdown could be resumed. These included not only one or two senior officers, but many of the blades in Task Force Knight. One British general who visited Baghdad in the early summer of 2006 gave me a stark example of the tensions at play:
The sergeant-major of the SAS squadron approached me and suggested we have a word in the garden. We pulled up a couple of chairs and then, as if pre-arranged, a couple of other senior NCOs appeared from various corners, as if by magic, to join us. They had a message and it was soon clear what it was. ‘The Americans say we’ve given up, that we don’t want to fight any more. Is that true, boss?’ It was a good question. And it wasn’t easy for me to answer.
As they spoke, beyond the manicured gardens of the Green Zone the murder and violence seemed to be unstoppable. Hundreds of thousands of Baghdadis had fled to Jordan or Syria.
By late July US senior officers, concluding that Operation TOGETHER FORWARD had failed, were setting in train plans to launch a new security drive for the capital using a higher proportion of US troops. But, given the dire nature of the national security situation and the apparent desire by those at the top of the Pentagon not to commit more troops to an increasingly unpopular war, nobody was quite sure how Baghdad Security Plan Mark II might work.
During the violent weeks following Zarqawi’s death, the atmosphere of the shop floor at the JOC in Balad remained one of intense focus. Responding to the haul of intelligence from the scene of his killing and from other sites raided in Baghdad, the Coalition had mounted 450 raids in little more than a week – operations on a scale far beyond the resources of JSOC and its small group of secret task forces. At the core of these raids was JSOC’s approach of attempting to exploit the killing of Zarqawi. A senior British officer who encountered General McChrystal frequently during these months noted that ‘he was… one of the coolest assessors of the situation, despite being involved in the hurlyburly he had a detached intellectual view of the overall picture’. McChrystal’s instinct was that, despite the failure of Zarqawi’s death to improve the surrounding Iraqi mayhem, and despite the faltering of the wider US military effort, JSOC was still doing the right thing.
‘We sensed that al-Qaeda was going to implode,’ McChrystal later told a journalist. ‘We were watching it, and feeling it and seeing it.’
The reasons behind him forming such views lie in part in the secret intelligence picture to which the JSOC commander and a select few were privy. They had known about tensions in the Sunni resistance since the latter part of 2005. There was the letter from al-Qaeda leader Atiyah Abdel Rahman, thought to be hiding in the Pakistani tribal areas, criticising Zarqawi for stirring up sectarian hatred with the Shia. Atiyah had also argued that Zarqawi’s 2005 bombing of hotels in the Jordanian capital was a mistake. A great deal of intelligence supported the view that many Sunnis were heartily sick of al-Qaeda’s extremism. Other al-Qaeda assessments seized during the raids following Zarqawi’s death had shown the movement knew that the passing of months might be working against them because of the speed with which new Iraqi units were being trained. One read, ‘Time is now beginning to be of service to the American forces and harmful to the resistance.’
These scraps of information were obviously subject to differing interpretation, and there were still some who, working away in their air-conditioned headquarters during the summer of 2006, believed that events were working against the Americans and not for them. The costs of the war were enormous and public support declining. Nonetheless, McChrystal maintained his belief that it was possible to dismantle the AQI infrastructure faster than it could regenerate itself.
The question of who might be right was about to be answered, at least in part. It was to happen not in Baghdad, which everyone agreed had become the central battle of the insurgency, but to the west, in al-Anbar.
On 17 August 2006 a Marine Corps colonel named Peter Devlin fired off a secret assessment entitled ‘State of the Insurgency in al-Anbar’. His job, as the top intelligence officer for the US force operating in the west of Iraq, meant that he was party to the most sensitive information at his country’s disposal. His first paragraph concluded, ‘The social and political situation has deteriorated to such a point that MNF and ISF are no longer capable of defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar.’ The colonel’s stark judgement shocked many, and was promptly leaked to the press, feeding a sense in Washington that President Bush’s great project in Iraq had been defeated.
Who, then, had won? ‘AQI is the dominant organisation of influence in al-Anbar, surpassing nationalist insurgents, the Iraqi government and MNF in its ability to control the day to day life of the average Sunni,’ wrote Devlin. But if he was party to much of the same intelligence reporting as Lieutenant-General Stan McChrystal, how had they reached such different conclusions about the ability of Coalition forces to prevail against al-Qaeda?
At the time of his report, and despite British encouragement to shift the focus of US operations to Baghdad, al-Anbar Province was still the most difficult and bloody part of Iraq for US forces. In August 2006, for example, thirty-two of the seventy Americans who lost their lives across the whole of Iraq perished in Anbar – twice as many as were lost in the greater Baghdad area. Al-Qaeda cells that mounted bombing attacks into the capital from towns like Abu Ghraib or Yusufiyah in fact relied upon a secure line of communication through Anbar, and the organisation viewed the province as central to its project of declaring a caliphate. Between February and August 2006, violent attacks in Anbar increased by 57 per cent.
For anybody trying to secure it, the province presented a host of challenges. Its main cities, Fallujah and Ramadi were, like the US bases, islands of population in a sea of desert. The back-streets of the provincial capital, Ramadi, were probably the toughest urban environment that any Coalition troops faced in Iraq. As for the human geography, there were stark contrasts between the civic divisions of districts or ministries so important to soldiers with a western mindset and the tribal identities that defined so many Anbaris.
Since 2004’s crescendo of violence in Fallujah, the centre of militant resistance had been displaced to Ramadi. American intelligence estimated that around five thousand al-Qaeda fighters lurked among the city’s population of four hundred thousand. American patrols into the city were usually attacked, and the local resistance groups were reckoned to be setting eight IEDs per day for them. A systematic campaign of assassination against those who sided with the Baghdad government had by mid-2006 left the province almost without leadership. As for the police, it illustrated well the hollowness of many of the statistics about Iraqi forces reeled off by Coalition spokesmen. The city had posts for 3386, of which only 420 were filled and most of them did not turn up for work. On a normal day, there were around a hundred police on duty in Ramadi.
On 18 June the Americans had launched a concerted attempt to ‘retake’ Ramadi. A new commander, Colonel Sean MacFarland of the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the Germany-based 1st Armoured Division, had come in with a bold plan to wrest control from the militants. He intended to establish combat outposts across the city in order to challenge AQI. Their fighters picked up the gauntlet and Ramadi was soon the scene of intense daily firefights in which the Americans, with their Predator drones, armour and Humvees, were pitted against snipers, roadside bombs and suicide bombers driving trucks full of high explosive. MacFarland’s 1st Brigade Combat Team was equipped for heavy armoured warfare on the plains of Germany, fielding Abrams tanks and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles – the most heavily protected types in the US inventory. Bitter experience had however shown that even this level of armoured protection was not always adequate when faced with a hail of RPGs or huge IEDs buried under the roads in Anbar.
The intensity of the combat can be judged by two medal citations for US Navy commandos killed at the time. They belonged to Seal Team 3, a special operations force used to stiffen Iraqi troops in the fighting. One was killed on 2 August after evacuating a wounded team-mate during fighting that involved dozens of insurgents and American tanks. Another, Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael Monsoor, was nominated for his country’s highest bravery award after falling on 29 September. Monsoor’s citation for the Medal of Honor noted that the 25-year-old special operator had been in a rooftop position with three other American commandos and eight Iraqi soldiers during operations in Ramadi. They were providing sniper cover to American troops fighting their way through the city. Monsoor’s position became a target for the insurgents, who first fired an RPG at it before closing in with small arms. One threw a grenade onto the rooftop. According to an internet source, ‘Monsoor yelled “Grenade!” and dropped on top of the grenade prior to it exploding. Monsoor’s body shielded the others from the brunt of the fragmentation blast and two other SEALs were only wounded by the remaining blast.’
That Seal team operating in Ramadi was part of the Tier 2 effort, bolstering local Iraqi forces, rather than McChrystal’s Tier 1 JSOC. It had a stake in the battle in the form of Task Force Blue, based at al-Asad airbase. Like Green, the Delta operators, the Seals from Task Force Blue mounted takedown operations against al-Qaeda targets on the basis of high-level intelligence. Neither Blue nor Britain’s Task Force Knight, which rarely ventured into Anbar, were to have much of a part to play in MacFarland’s plan for Ramadi. For, alongside the visible axis of his advance – the city’s main thoroughfares, such as Route Michigan – was his operation based on social lines – his plan to turn the tribes. Many had tried and failed to enlist the support of Anbari tribal sheikhs but the effort was about to produce dramatic results. Like many a success, this one has many fathers – or those who would claim credit – but the British role in this secret business is little understood.