Task Force Black (27 page)

At the Joint Operations Centre in Balad, JSOC’s commanders watched on their plasma screens as the Delta men went into the building. For months a debate had gone on, from the White House down to the JOC, about how to prosecute the Iranian target. Even on that night some of the arguments were unresolved. And so, remarkably, the special operators made their own decision, as someone who watched events develop in Irbil points out: ‘The general feeling in the JOC was “nobody can make their minds up… let’s just do it!”’

JSOC had not put themselves out on a limb policy-wise, but there were some difficult matters of interpretation. Since November 2006 a new directive sanctioned by President Bush had allowed US forces in Iraq to kill or capture Iranian nationals if they were engaged in targeting Coalition forces. This change in Washington tied in with wider international developments: Hezbollah’s success in the Lebanon war of June 2006, as well as Iran’s continued defiance on the nuclear issue. The new mission had its own acronym, CII – Counter Iranian Influence.

Many in Iraq felt action was long overdue. The British had seethed with frustration at the increasingly obvious signs of Iranian involvement in the south. Late in 2006 one officer in Basra told me, ‘Iran is at war with us here, killing British soldiers, and nobody seems to care.’ The flow of EFP bombs, started in 2004, had been followed by growing human intelligence about the training of Iraqi insurgents in Iran as well as financial backing for attacks on Coalition forces. Finds of mortar rounds or rockets with recent Iranian markings had multiplied. These realities did not just affect the British in the south; MNF commanders knew that, by early 2007, most of the indirect fire attacks on the Green Zone were coming from Sadr City and other Shia areas. US intelligence reckoned that Iranian support for Iraqi insurgents was so extensive that anything up to 150 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps or other special forces were in Iraq at any one time. For several months the Pentagon had kept quiet about its growing losses to the Iranian proxies; commanders knew that public accusations would create a demand for action.

The problem with trying to close down this Iranian operation was that many were afraid of fighting on two fronts at once. Al-Qaeda was far from broken, despite its rout in Ramadi. Nobody wanted to repeat 2004’s mistake of triggering a war with the Mehdi Army at the same time as the Fallujah operation. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had himself sought to embroil the US in a war with Iran as a means of further weakening the superpower. Wouldn’t targeting Iranians be doing exactly what he had wanted?

Of one thing they were sure at Balad: it was essential to maintain the pressure of nightly raids against AQI. The Pentagon’s solution was to keep the commander of Delta, working through the JOC, in charge of the fight against the Sunni jihadists. At this time this effort (formerly codenamed TF-145) was referred to as Task Force 16. A new command, based around the headquarters of an army special forces group (Tier 2 special ops), was designated Task Force 17 and given the mission of Counter Iranian Influence. TF-17 could, and did, draw on the same Predators or Delta squadron as TF-16. But putting these command arrangements in place was just a small part of the picture. The big question about killing or capturing Iranians was one of political judgement.

In Baghdad on 21 December the US had captured two Iranians it believed were senior officers in the Quds Force, the branch of the Revolutionary Guards that operated in support of Iran’s overseas allies. The arrests had produced a hue and cry from Iran, the State Department and some Iraqi leaders. Nine days later the Iranian prisoners had been released.

Three weeks on, the Delta commandos moving through the corridors of the Iranian Liaison Office in Irbil were under pressure to find compelling evidence of Iranian involvement in the insurgency. As they burst into rooms they found staff hurriedly trying to destroy records and, bizarrely, alter their appearance by cutting off hair. The men had fake ID cards and one would later test positive for handling explosives. The Americans were looking for two senior figures from across the border: Mohammed Jafari, the deputy head of Iran’s Security Council, and General Minjahar Frouzanda, head of intelligence in the Revolutionary Guards.

The Irbil raid had resulted from human intelligence. The CIA Station in the Kurdish region had learned about the visit of the two top Iranians from one of its agents. The British government did not want Task Force Knight to arrest Iranians and so they could only watch what was about to happen.

However, the ‘fixing’ of Delta’s targets was not all that it might have been. As the raid proceeded, failing to find the two senior officials at the Liaison Office, the Delta team moved swiftly to Irbil airport, a few miles to the north, in case they were trying to escape by plane. There was a tense standoff between the Americans and Kurdish troops. The Delta team was withdrawn, taking five arrested Iranian officials with them, and the recriminations started. The MNF press office in Baghdad put out a release better calculated to soothe ruffled Kurdish feathers than reveal anything of substance: ‘Coalition Forces conducting routine security operations in Irbil Jan. 11 detained six individuals suspected of being closely tied to activities targeting Iraqi and Coalition Forces. One individual was released and five remain in custody.’

Iraq’s President and Foreign Minister, both Kurds, knew that the operation was anything but routine. They considered the raid to be a humiliating violation of their authority. Some Iraqi Kurdish officials used a similar line to that adopted by Iran in response to the raid – one that had also been deployed after the 21 December arrests in Baghdad – that the Iranian officials had been there at the invitation of the Iraqi authorities on a mission to improve security cooperation between the two countries. Since the Kurds were the group usually most supportive of America’s mission in Iraq, this political blowback was particularly embarrassing. State Department officials were soon asking the army to release the five Iranians. The generals refused, producing a standoff within the US bureaucracy. Admiral William Fallon, running the wider Middle East theatre at Central Command, backed the decision in Baghdad. American commanders wanted Irbil to send a signal and they believed that it had got through, one telling me, ‘They realised we were coming after them. The Iranians didn’t like doing much dirty work or getting their hands dirty. A lot of them would prefer the Arabs to do the dying.’

TF-17’s early operations had netted an intelligence treasure trove. Analysts got to work using the same network mapping and phone record techniques that they were employing against the jihadists. But the evidence of official Iranian sponsorship of insurgent groups posed almost as many questions as it answered. Brigadier Mohsen Chirazi, the Quds Force officer arrested in Baghdad in December, had been found in the compound of Abdul Aziz Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Everyone had long believed that SCIRI and its armed militia, the Badr Brigade, were agents of Iranian influence because the movement had been exiled to Iran during the Saddam era. In fact, much of SCIRI’s middle management had grown up in Iran.

Analysis of papers and phones tied to Chirazi and the Irbil raid revealed that the Iranians were assisting a much wider variety of insurgent groups than many might have expected. Indeed, the Irbil raid produced evidence of connections with the Ansar al-Sunna, a Sunni jihadist group that happily killed Kurd and Shia alike. Connections similarly were charted between the Iranians and elements within the Mehdi Army, even though its leader Muqtada al-Sadr insisted he was an Iraqi nationalist and bulwark against Iranian influence. Furthermore, Muqtada’s people regularly clashed with the Badr Brigade in the south. Reviewing this material, British intelligence analysts came to the conclusion that Iran would back anyone who undermined the Coalition project in Iraq and produced a weak, compliant neighbour. The captured material could not answer questions such as whether Iran’s President Ahmedinejad or Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had directed the Quds Force to set up these networks.

The picture uncovered by these raids was so complex that it required new language among the Coalition intelligence analysts. If people within the Mehdi Army were taking Iranian money and weapons to carry out attacks on Coalition forces or elements from the Badr Brigade were doing the same, when the political line of both movements excluded direct confrontation with Coalition troops, how should they be categorised? The analysts initially called them Secret Cells, and later Special Groups, but the idea was that they were Iranian-funded extremists who had a parasitic existence within broader Shia political movements. They were, to coin the phrase applied to Sunni extremists at the time, ‘irreconcilables’. As such, the Special Groups were deemed suitable for the JSOC treatment – if, of course, they did not strike first.

It was a meeting typical of the security coordination machinery all over Iraq. An American police liaison team had gone to the Provincial Joint Coordination Centre in Kerbala, south of Baghdad. The soldiers came from an airborne artillery battery based at Forward Operating Base Kalsu, near Iskanderiyah. Their mission that day in Kerbala was to discuss security precautions for the forthcoming Ashura celebrations. As one of the main Shia pilgrimage sites, Kerbala could expect hundreds of thousands of visitors and with them the threat of al-Qaeda suicide bombing. The pattern was already too well established for such attacks, designed to sustain the outrage caused by the Samarra bombing and many other sectarian provocations, to be ignored. So the Americans were meeting Iraqi security chiefs to discuss what needed to be done. Places like the Joint Coordination Centre had sprung up all over Iraq and were a hallmark of the Coalition trying to concert a joint approach to security as they turned over authority for policing province by province. Sites like Kerbala were heavily fortified and the American soldiers, once they’d avoided the perils of the drive from the FOB, tended to relax.

It was around 5.45 p.m. when a convoy of black GMC Suburban SUVs came into the Centre, pulling up by the Americans’ parked Humvees. Movements by such vehicles were so routine in the comings and goings of contractors or the shadier US government types that the Iraqi guards simply waved them in. The impression of normality would only have been enhanced by the fact that the dozen or so men in the vehicles were wearing the new-pattern American combat clothing and carrying M4 assault rifles.

Acting on excellent information, a couple of the GMCs moved around to the back of the building closer to where the security meeting was taking place. On a signal, men moved from the vehicles to attack the building front and back, initially throwing in stun grenades. They swiftly took two American officers from the meeting, dragging them out to the GMCs while a second group assaulted an upper floor. A grenade killed one and wounded three other Americans meeting in a police office. A third group of gunmen attacked one of the parked Humvees, dragging two US soldiers from it.

Little more than ten minutes later the attackers, with their four captives bound, drove out of the compound. The Iraqi police were soon in pursuit, heading east across the Euphrates. The gunmen eventually took the decision to abandon their prisoners and vehicles in order to make good their own escape. Before they did so all four Americans were shot in the head.

The Kerbala attack came as a body blow to the Americans. Five soldiers had been killed. Its audacity and sophistication ranked far above anything the average Iraqi insurgent network was capable of. The US Army initially put out a story that the four men had been ambushed on patrol. But the real version – that they had been abducted and murdered, with suspected Iranian involvement – was soon being broadcast. A few days after the incident, the
Washington Post
was given a detailed briefing on the new CII mission, presenting the revelation to its readers with the shock headline ‘US Troops Authorized to Kill Iranian Operatives in Iraq’.

The
Post
article carried the unmistakable hallmark of an authoritative public warning to Iran. Less well-sourced articles appeared too, alleging the Kerbala operation was an attempt to kidnap counterhostages for the ‘Irbil five’, that a mock-up of the Joint Coordination Centre inside Iran had been used to train operatives for the raid and that two senior police officers in Kerbala were under investigation for tipping off the attackers about the meeting with the Americans.

In the aftermath of the Kerbala attack TF-17 were infused with an even stronger sense of purpose. But al-Qaeda and its jihadist allies demanded attention too. On 22 January multiple attacks killed 130 people in Baghdad. Early in February a huge truck bomb claimed 135 lives in the Sadriya district of the city. Intelligence analysts worried that the fighters driven out of Ramadi late the previous year had simply headed for Baghdad or the belts around the city, towns such as Yusufiyah or Baquba from which many of these attacks were launched.

The commander of Delta, Colonel
Grist
, still had the TF-16 mission of hunting down AQI and its associated groups. A new colonel, in charge of the ‘white’ or overt Special Force Group HQ posted to Iraq, ran TF-17. ‘It was an uncomfortable relationship,’ says one who watched them face off at Balad. ‘You got this competition for resources, scarce things like aircraft or detainee facilities.’
Grist
could hardly be expected to hand over his people or indeed the JOC at Balad itself to the CII team whenever they needed it.

Lieutenant-General McChrystal wasn’t comfortable with this arrangement either, and soon had the special forces colonel in charge of TF-17 replaced by someone from the inner team, a lieutenant-colonel from Delta Force. Although this rearrangement of command roles was achieved without too much ill will, the original arrangement lived on in one important aspect. The Tier 2 special ops units posted around the country, particularly the US Army Green Berets mentoring Iraqi elite units, became actively involved in the campaign against Iranian-backed Special Groups, whereas they had only occasionally supported TF-16’s fight against al-Qaeda. In this respect the widening of JSOC’s target set was at least accompanied by a significant increase in the number of troops available to conduct takedown operations.