Task Force Black (33 page)
Authors: Mark Urban
Six helicopters and a number of other aircraft were wheeling over a moving target in a hazardous aerial ballet. So many of Task Force Knight’s operations were routine house assaults, but this was panning out very differently. As one of the special forces aviators reflects, ‘it’s when it goes hot and dynamic, that’s when it gets tricky’.
Major
Kennedy
, aboard one of the helicopters, decided to get his men on the ground. One chopper touched down; the other, dropping vertically from seventy-five feet, came close to the ground and was engulfed in dust. The Puma pilot decided to shift his landing position at the last moment, but with an urgent warning that a Lynx might be passing right over him he took the Puma up and then swiftly down again. The Puma hit the ground hard and almost immediately rolled on to its right side.
Just as with the April accident, men were thrown out of the chopper’s side door by the force of impact. Three were pinioned underneath it as it smashed into the ground. Two SAS soldiers and one RAF man were trapped.
Those who had got away quickly organised themselves for a rescue attempt. But as Major
Kennedy
rallied his men around the wrecked Puma flames started licking the aircraft’s gearbox. The RAF man was freed with SAS medics tending him and one of their own who had been hurt inside the aircraft. The two blades trapped under the fuselage, Sergeant John Battersby and Trooper Lee Fitzsimmons, could not be shifted.
In what seemed like moments the Puma was engulfed by fire. Rescuers facing into the heat soon heard rounds from the aircraft’s door-mounted machine gun cooking off, as well as the whoosh of burning flares. The subsequent inquiry noted that ‘the aircraft was completely ablaze and therefore unreachable within four minutes of coming to rest, with no further attempts being possible after this relatively short time’.
Even as the tragic outcome of this accident became clear Major
Kennedy
was talking to the surveillance aircraft overhead. The target had arrived at a second house in his car. One of the Puma crewmen piped up over the radio, disagreeing with the surveillance aircraft about which house he had entered.
Kennedy
made the decision to prosecute his original target. Organising his men away from the burning helicopter, the OC gave quick battle orders. There was a rapid house assault but the target had escaped.
With its mission over the team embarked on the remaining Pumas, returning to MSS Fernandez. Having recovered the bodies of Sergeant Battersby and Trooper Fitzsimmons, and having made attempts to sanitise the burnt-out Puma, an air strike was called in to finish the job.
This second helicopter incident caused some to question the way in which Task Force Knight did business. The inquiry flagged up the technical reasons for the pilot’s crash landing. It also alluded to many aggravating difficulties including the way army Lynx and RAF crews inter-operated, the fact that the SAS did not like to strap in and the pressures put on the helicopter operation by the operational tempo. Asked about the two Puma incidents of 2007, one Task Force Knight aviator blamed ‘toxic management’. Asked to elaborate, he explained that some of their commanders were ‘like baboons in a tree – seen from above they presented smiling faces but to those lower down they were arses’.
A Squadron’s tour ended on this difficult note. They had lost three men and several had been wounded. Nonetheless, its time was considered by JSOC and the SAS to have been outstandingly successful. Major
Kennedy
was decorated. One commander notes, ‘they took apart the al-Qaeda VBIED network’.
From May to November A Squadron had mounted raids almost nightly, during which it arrested 335 people and killed 88. The latter figure in particular marks a stark contrast from the squadron’s deployment of late 2005, when it took just one life. Few statistics demonstrate better the extent to which the SAS’s mission in Iraq had changed. By locking his task force tightly into JSOC’s operations, Lieutenant-Colonel Williams had succeeded in his ambition of raising the regiment’s speed, accuracy and effect. The sharp increase in lethality between these two A Squadron tours shows that due to the improvement of intelligence (achieved in large part by working so closely with the Americans), Task Force Knight was targeting the violent extremists rather than the old Ba’athists who had been led quietly from their homes in 2004 or 2005. For Williams personally, though, storm clouds were gathering. His period in command of the regiment was coming to an end and it was not destined to be a quiet departure.
In the murky gloom of a C-130 high over Anbar an SAS assault force stood up and shuffled its way towards the aircraft’s tail ramp. Each blade had a parachute strapped to his back, a weapon to his side and his assault equipment to the front. With a mechanical squeal the ramp lowered and the men walked forward to its lip, peering into the Iraqi night below.
The soldiers were from B Squadron of 22 SAS and early in 2008 they were about to notch up a first for the regiment in its six-year campaign in Iraq: an operational high-altitude parachute assault. Their target was a man who was making money for al-Qaeda – literally producing counterfeit dollar bills – on a remote farm.
Stepping into the night sky the SAS soldiers experienced a brief freefall before opening their parachutes. The technique known as High Altitude High Opening or HAHO allowed them to glide many kilometres while keeping the noise of their Hercules far away from their intended target. The soldiers hit the ground, threw off their parachuting rig and moved on foot to assault the house. Once again the SAS got its man.
B Squadron’s stint in Baghdad generated some controversy within the regiment. ‘Each unit tries to demonstrate how it’s different from the one before,’ remarks one SAS officer a little wearily. ‘Well done for jumping, but was it strictly necessary? Isn’t that why helicopters were invented?’
Just a few months before A Squadron had achieved extraordinary impact, ‘smashing the Baghdad VBIED network’. The boss of B Squadron perhaps understood that with AQI reeling it would not be possible to achieve the same focus, geographically or in terms of the target set. The success of B Squadron’s previous tour (November 2005 to May 2006), in which the LARCHWOOD 4 operation gave a start point for the Zarqawi operation and Norman Kember had been freed, added to the pressure.
Early in March Task Force Knight’s intelligence team developed an operation against a bomb maker. He was believed to have fled Baghdad for a former powerbase of Saddam Hussein to the north of the capital in the so-called Sunni Triangle. SAS operations in this city were quite unusual, for Task Force Red, one of JSOC’s American units, was based nearby. But the British followed their leads to a substantial property in an affluent part of town: the bomb maker had none other than the police chief, a judge and the commander of the local police response unit as neighbours.
Having fixed their target, B Squadron hit his house at 2 a.m. on 26 March. They first called upon the target and another man to come out. After receiving no response the SAS stormed the house. But not for the first time during their years in Iraq was there someone lying in wait and the entry team stepped into a hail of bullets. Four men were wounded, one of them fatally. As the team dashed out of the house grenades were thrown and gunmen from a neighbouring building joined in the fusillade.
The SAS returned fire, with support from circling helicopters. Within moments a general firefight had developed with tracer zipping around the suburb’s streets. A missile was fired from a circling aircraft into one of the houses being used to fire upon the special forces. Following an explosion that brought down part of the building, the two targets of the operation ran from it into a neighbouring house where they either took hostages or persuaded several women and children to come with them. As they crossed open ground this group was engaged from the air.
Coalition spokesmen said that two suspected terrorists and seven civilians (three of them children) had been killed in the operation. Locals told the BBC that the civilian death toll was actually sixteen. The Ministry of Defence kept the dead SAS soldier’s name secret, along with where it had happened. During the days that followed local anger produced several gun battles with the American ground-holding unit. Its commander told BBC correspondent Paul Wood that the lesson of the raid was that ‘aggressiveness meets aggressiveness’.
In some respects this battle was regrettable but not unusual. The number of ‘Echos and Kilos’, or women and children, killed during SAS operations in Iraq is very hard to estimate because many raids had to be so fast there could be no waiting around for a definitive assessment of Iraqi casualties. It is safe to assume that by 2008 the total killed during the regiment’s years of operations may have been as high as fifty. Many in the special ops community would dispute that figure, arguing that it was significantly lower, but in truth the chaotic circumstances of many of these contacts makes hard and fast calculations difficult. The regiment also lost one of its own people there, the fifth to die in a house assault. The confusion about where the insurgents were at some times during the operation was another regrettable feature of assaults mounted at such short notice, with limited intelligence.
There was something else notable about the operation, and this was the regiment’s use of a specially trained dog to enter the Alpha at the start of the assault. Squadrons posted to Baghdad had in fact been using this technique since 2005, but when the inquest on the dead B Squadron man was held in the UK several months later it emerged as a significant issue. He had by this point been named as Sergeant Nick Brown. The dead soldier was what might in former times have been called a ‘child of the regiment’, having grown up in Hereford while his father was serving in the SAS. When his father, John, and his widow asked searching questions at the inquest they carried considerable weight.
The court heard that the 34-year-old sergeant in B Squadron had gone into the building after the dog sent ahead of the entry team had been killed. He had been shot in the back and mortally wounded by someone lurking in the building. His relatives wanted answers at the inquest about why the men had gone in when they already believed their search dog to be dead. In the end, with the coroner citing security concerns about not prejudicing operational techniques, the issue did not receive the full and open discussion that it might. But while the violence with which the special ops people had prosecuted their assault shocked many local Iraqis, the issue it highlighted for many in the regiment was quite different. They wondered whether, despite the gradual changes in British rules of engagement, the Americans would ever have assaulted under similar circumstances, or whether, instead, they would have hit the Alpha from the air once they had evidence that the people inside were willing to fight.
By March 2008 the climate for mounting aggressive special forces operations of this kind was changing. The Sunni insurgency was waning rapidly, and being hired to serve the government as Sons of Iraq. Stirring up communal anger with a raid of this kind damaged that process. One SAS operator remarked to me that after an operation, ‘We disappear into our helicopters and the local unit is left to feel the pain.’ This approach had been acceptable during the desperate months of 2006 and early 2007 when it felt as if all of society had become unhinged by murderous violence. But by the summer of 2008 the American battalion or brigade commanders responsible for holding sectors of Iraq had been thoroughly inculcated in General Petraeus’s new doctrine, which stated that their primary mission was safeguarding the population. Patrol bases or Joint Security Stations were rapidly expanding the ground-level intelligence picture and helping to stamp out sectarian violence: if JSOC’s raids miscarried they could damage this progress.
So, just as British special forces had roamed far and wide in search of a target they might be able to prosecute during their early months in Iraq back in 2003, five years later they were trying to find places where they might do some good. During B Squadron’s tour their operations extended to Anbar and Tikrit. But whereas operations years before had been limited by the dearth of good intelligence, during the final period of the SAS’s stay in Baghdad the analysts sat within a sophisticated information-gathering web, but had to look harder and harder to find a target worthy of them.
The Americans had developed their mobile phone database into a fearsome analytical tool and fielded dozens of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Cover from Predators was supplemented by cameras mounted on tethered balloons or fixed on the roofs of buildings. Using gamma-ray imagery of cars, American analysts were able to study their ‘unblinking’ record of the city’s main thoroughfares.
About a hundred thousand defectors from Sunni militant groups enrolled in the
Sakhwa
or Awakening militias known as Sons of Iraq, giving what the intelligence analysts called granularity to their picture of militant activities in most of Iraq. Some pockets of AQI, including of foreign fighters, remained, for example in the northern city of Mosul where bitter intercommunal violence opened up a toehold in the community just as it had in Baquba in 2007. Overall, though, the picture of violence was one of steep decline, particularly in Baghdad. MNF Iraq’s Sigacts data showed bombings in the city down by 250 per cent in the summer of 2008. The graph of ethno-sectarian deaths showed a steady fall from its peak of more than two thousand in December 2006 (across Iraq, with Baghdad accounting for around 1600) to a few murders during April 2008 and a flat line thereafter.
Among the blades the evaporation of worthwhile targets soon had an impact. ‘They got very low-level operations to go and get mortar teams and people who should have been the responsibility of the Iraqi Army,’ explains one former operator. ‘People got disillusioned.’ Smart young soldiers coming through special forces selection and hearing tell about the intensity of combat in southern Afghanistan started to gravitate towards the SBS which was operating there: ‘People want to go where the action is.’