Task Force Black (9 page)

As several teams from B Squadron approached the ‘Alpha’ – target – building they were spotted by locals. Whistles, torchlight and gunshots soon disturbed the night air. The assaulters pressed on, breaking their way into the house. Inside the jihadists opened fire from a distance of a few feet. One of the SAS Team Leaders, Sergeant-Major
Mulberry
, was hit in the face by an AK-47 round but had a lucky escape because it was deflected by his equipment, leaving him with only light injuries. In a short-range firefight as the building was cleared, two men were killed. Both were later assessed to be foreign fighters. Some of the insurgents were captured. One of these proved to be Pakistani and another a Qatari national of Pakistani origin. Coalition intelligence assessed the Pakistanis to be members of Lashkar-e-Taiba or the LeT, a Kashmiri militant group. Operation ASTON was therefore judged a great success: it had shown how the British could develop transnational counterterrorist work. In fact, it was precisely the kind of synergy that Major-General McChrystal was hoping to develop within the wider JSOC network, exposing the rat lines from Syria or Saudi Arabia, but, for reasons that did not become apparent for a few weeks, Operation ASTON was to have a negative effect on UK–US cooperation in Iraq at a time when wider developments in the country put great strain on the Coalition. It would also embroil the UK in legal difficulties over the identity of the two men who had been taken to Bagram. Critically, the difficulties about the UK handing over detainees would build during 2004 as rising levels of violence were causing the Americans to lash out, in turn damaging public support back in Britain.

On 31 March 2004 two SUVs drove around one of the US Marine checkpoints outside Fallujah and into the town. Inside the vehicle were four members of Blackwater, a private security firm that liked to project a badass reputation. They were there to liaise with the local police about the contractor convoy coming into Fallujah the following day, but Blackwater appeared completely ignorant of some important changes that had occurred in the preceding week, and would come to pay for their mistakes.

Four days earlier a JSOC surveillance team had been compromised in the town, shooting its way out of trouble. The US Marines, who had taken control of the area from the 82nd Airborne on 24 March, were drawn into running gun battles with insurgents in the hours that followed. Rather sooner than they’d expected, the Marines found themselves using these firefights to test the strength of the resistance in various neighbourhoods. Then the Blackwater men appeared.

Insurgents, apparently tipped off about the contractors, hit them with RPGs and gunfire. The two vehicles were soon ablaze and the men killed. Two charred bodies were dragged through the streets, spat upon, hacked, trampled and finally hoisted up onto a girder of the old Euphrates bridge. These scenes were recorded and soon playing around the world. Fearing a ‘Mogadishu moment’ in which national confidence faltered as it had during the
Black Hawk Down
incident in Somalia in 1993, senior US officers promised immediate action. The guilty would be found and punished.

The best laid plans of the Marine commanders, a blueprint for how they intended to eat away at the resistance, were junked. Instead, on 5 April, 2500 Marines and the full panoply of destructive power at their disposal were unleashed on Fallujah: tanks, helicopter gunships and air strikes. TV pictures showed automatic grenade launchers sputtering 40mm rounds into the sides of houses, which burst in showers of shrapnel, but the American troops encountered heavy resistance and in little more than forty-eight hours it became clear that their advance into the town was stalling.

As if this wasn’t enough to worry the British watching in Downing Street and the military, the Coalition’s problems suddenly multiplied. Under orders from Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, troops moved to arrest a senior member of the Mehdi Army – a Shia militia – and close down its newspaper. This touched off an insurrection by thousands of Shia gunmen loyal to a radical preacher, Muqtada al-Sadr. What became known as the First Sadrist Rising marked the awakening of a sleeping giant of Shia militancy. Although many of the Shia, who were the clear majority of the Iraqi population, did not like al-Sadr’s party, support for it would soon spiral upwards if it was seen to be taking on the goliath of the US military, or venting national frustration with the failure of the American project. The Sadrist Rising had grave implications for the British, not least because of the Mehdi Army’s strength in Basra, Nasiriyah and other places under the control of the British-led Multi-National Division South East. In the south, large-scale gun battles with the Sadrists marked the definitive end of the honeymoon that many of the British military felt they had enjoyed.

In a few days in April hundreds of people died as the Coalition tried to escape a disaster of its own making: a two-front fight. The Sunni revolt was already well established, with Fallujah as its symbolic centre. By triggering a national rising by a powerful Shia militia the Americans ran the risk of alienating the community that was emerging as dominant in the new Iraq. If there was any silver lining for those watching from Downing Street, it was that international attention focused more on Fallujah than on the crisis facing British troops in the south. Having entered the war feeling the need to stand shoulder to shoulder with the US, even Tony Blair began to doubt the wisdom of being too closely associated with operations like those in Fallujah.

Bremer and his military chiefs knew they could not sustain a confrontation on this scale. On 9 April they ordered a halt to the Fallujah operation and the gunmen on the city’s streets proclaimed victory. The violence with the Sadrists was far from over. Heavy fighting involving British troops erupted in al-Amarrah, the capital of Maysan, and the following month US troops confronted the Mehdi Army in its centres of resistance: Sadr City in east Baghdad, and the holy city of Najaf.

If Bremer and his commanders had reeled from this battering, there was one more body blow for them to absorb that April. On the 28th the American television programme
60 Minutes
showed pictures of detainees being abused by American guards at Abu Ghraib. The resulting furore produced a crisis of confidence in the US and yet more damage to the country’s reputation in the Middle East. It was at this moment that Zarqawi, sensitive to the propaganda value of the moment, chose to dress Nick Berg in a Guantanamo-style orange jumpsuit for his last video appearance, and said he was being killed in revenge for the abuse of prisoners at the Iraqi jail. The video of Berg’s last moments hit the internet just a fortnight after the Abu Ghraib pictures emerged, with the story still running high in the global news agenda.

The combination of these setbacks, as George Bush campaigned for re-election, proved terminal for Bremer and his military chief Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez. By June the latter had been replaced by General George Casey, and Bremer signed off to the Interim Iraqi Government. The US–UK occupation authority, the CPA, vanished. With this change, the military gained a legal fig leaf through an authorising United Nations Security Council resolution sanctioning their operations. The good news – that Coalition forces had a legal mandate – was balanced with a difficult new reality: US and British commanders found themselves in a new world of political management, one in which they increasingly had to take account of what Iraqi politicians wanted. This was to prove particularly difficult for ground-holding commanders like Britain’s in Basra, where a testy governor and provincial authority second-guessed their operations.

As for British participation in the Coalition, it was profoundly affected by these simultaneous crises. With growing public hostility to the war, Downing Street could hardly blame the press for ignoring ‘all the good news coming out of Iraq’ as it had throughout 2003. The blistering fighting experienced in the south, where the British had briefly come close to running out of ammunition, had its effect on many at the divisional headquarters at Basra air station. One colonel told me, ‘Since the Sadrist rising, we’ve basically been looking at our watches and asking “can we go now please?”’

The special forces further north, operating as Task Force Black, took a more aggressive attitude. JSOC’s operation had, through its intense secrecy, gained a large measure of exemption from the hostile public scrutiny that now focused on the visible Coalition effort. Task Force Black could see the militant Islamists gaining power by the day in the resistance, and they knew their mates in JSOC were increasingly hard-pressed in the struggle against them. But April’s crises had produced intense unease in Whitehall. It made ministers wary about being seen to do too much to back the Americans. What was more, Abu Ghraib had also made them extremely sensitive to the issue of detention. At a time when the need for a coordinated Allied response to these crises was at its peak, the UK started trying to distance itself from its faltering ally. This affected even traditionally intimate areas of cooperation such as special ops. It was to be on the rock of the detention issue that UK special forces operations in Iraq foundered later in 2004.

The Abu Ghraib scandal came not long after British intelligence and Task Force Black discovered what had happened to the two Pakistanis whom they had captured on Operation ASTON. It was standard procedure, on returning to the MSS after an operation, to turn over prisoners to the Americans. It had happened that way since soon after the invasion.

In the case of the suspected Pakistani militants dark rumours soon began to circulate. After being handed over, they had been put on a plane to Afghanistan for interrogation at the US facility at Bagram airbase. By detaining them, the British had played a part in this rendition. Campaigners would later argue that Amanatullah Ali, the Pakistani national, was a Shia who had gone to Iraq on a pilgrimage and who could not, by virtue of his religious confession, have been a member of the Sunni militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba. At the time of writing, more than five years after their arrest, those same campaigners have not yet established the identity of the Qatari national picked up with Ali, such was the secrecy surrounding the Bagram detention facility and its inmates.

Defending their actions, the Americans argued that their interrogators in Iraq did not have the linguistic skills to screen the men so it had to be done elsewhere. Unaware of this, the SAS had passed on the prisoners and London was unhappy. The British told JSOC that they could no longer hand over detainees if they were going to be flown elsewhere. The creation of this ‘national caveat’, as such restrictions are known in Coalition operations, was not to be the last of 2004, nor was it the most damaging to Task Force Black’s relationship with the Americans. The vast majority of those taken were, after all, Iraqis and there was no need to send them to Bagram or a ‘black prison’ in some other land for interrogation. The events in Fallujah, however, were acting as a catalyst, accelerating the change towards an insurgency dominated by Islamists rather than nationalists. And the way in which the US had chosen to deal with Fallujah was simply feeding this trend.

Throughout the summer of 2004 Fallujah operated as a ‘liberated zone’ for the Iraqi resistance groups. The CIA’s formation of the Fallujah Brigade, a Sunni security force under a former Republican Guard brigadier, in April proved to be a costly and divisive miscalculation. Rather than holding the ring and providing the US with a dignified way out of the confrontation, the brigade’s soldiers soon declared for the resistance, either handing over their weapons or signing up with the association of jihadist and nationalist groups that vied for authority in the town.

Fallujah had long been a bastion of conservatism. It revelled in its reputation as a city of two hundred mosques. Perhaps inevitably, when credit was being claimed for halting the US Marines in April increasingly it was the Islamist voices that drowned out the others. As to who was leading this chorus, one intelligence figure remarks, ‘All the reporting suggested Zarqawi was in Fallujah.’ Armed men walked the streets in the white robes and headdresses of Salafist purists, while in the bazaar, DVDs of Hindi musicals were replaced by snuff movies showing members of the new Iraqi army, or terrified men who identified themselves as spies, being murdered on screen.

According to some who served in Baghdad that summer, the CIA used its new Iraqi partners, the INIS, to provide agents for infiltration into the city. All of the men sent in were apparently tracked down, tortured and killed. Others suggest that this version of events was put around by the Agency because it did not want to admit that it had no human sources in the city. Instead, ‘there was 24/7 Predator coverage of Fallujah and a huge amount of movement analysis’. Watching their screens at Balad, the analysts tracked patterns of car movements, pinpointing certain properties as the places where car bombs that ended up in Baghdad originated. JSOC was soon directing the Air Force to drop bombs on these places. The analytical work at Balad also extended to identifying movements of people or vehicles that revealed the ‘apparent signature’ of Zarqawi’s presence.

Several of the British who watched this say they were very uneasy about what was going on. From the Blackwater and Berg incidents onwards, Zarqawi began to grow in importance in US public pronouncements. His elimination replaced the capturing of Saddam as the prime focus of JSOC’s daily operations. This played well with the Bush re-election campaign’s message about international terrorism, and it also served the Iraqi politicians of the interim government, who liked to blame the country’s difficulties on foreigners. Political considerations – US and Iraqi – also meant that the US military could not go back into Fallujah to confront the militants. Everybody understood this would entail a huge battle, and while the politicians shrank from it during the summer the situation inside Fallujah became steadily more extreme, playing into the hands of Zarqawi.

‘Fallujah became al-Qaeda’s FOB [Forward Operating Base],’ says one intelligence officer. Car bombs were being sent out, and hostages brought back in through the security cordon that supposedly surrounded the city. As the US bombing of targets inside became increasingly frequent, scores, perhaps hundreds, of civilians were killed. Many ordinary people chose to flee, seeking safety with relatives. Foreign fighters in search of martyrdom found their way in, and the complexion of an already angry city changed markedly. As the waiting game went on, by September 2004 the number of US dead in Iraq topped one thousand. General Casey’s British deputy meanwhile penned a memo for his boss giving seven reasons why an assault on the city could prove counterproductive.