The low stone walls and rocky outcrops around the advancing soldiers sparked and rang from the impacts of the 7.62mm bullets, but most of the rounds went high, completely missing their targets. The soldiers dived into cover and returned fire with their Colt M4A1 carbines, but the ISI fighter was hidden behind a broken section of wall and almost invisible from ground level.
But then the unseen defender switched his weapon to semi-automatic mode, pinning down the advancing soldiers. He could see them, but he himself remained almost invisible, only the muzzle of his Kalashnikov showing. All the coalition soldiers could do was concentrate their fire on the section of wall behind which he was standing, their bullets ricocheting off the old stones.
‘Take him out,’ Montana ordered.
The terse reply came almost immediately.
‘Already on it.’
The combined force didn’t include a dedicated sniper because they were expecting to carry out what amounted to a house clearance rather than engaging the enemy at long range, but two of the American soldiers had been detailed to take up static positions to provide covering fire. They had established themselves on slightly higher ground, one to the south of the building and the other over to the east, choosing locations that offered the best possible views of the target property.
One of them had no shot, because from his location the ISI fighter was shielded and invisible behind the boundary wall, but the other man could see him – just. To be exact, he could see the end of the muzzle of the AK-47 projecting towards the advancing troops, and he could both see and hear the weapon firing, the barrel moving as the unseen man altered his aim. Every time the ISI fighter fired a round, the recoil forced his upper body backwards and just into view from behind a section of the wall, but never far enough or long enough for the American to take a shot.
Then the Kalashnikov fell silent as the magazine was exhausted, and that was the best chance the coalition marksman had.
The ISI fighter took a half step backwards as he dropped the magazine out of his AK-47 and grabbed another one from a pouch strapped around his chest. As he did so, he also stepped back into the sights of the American’s Colt carbine.
Immediately the soldier squeezed the trigger. And then fired a second time. The first round missed the ISI fighter by a few inches, ricocheting off the stone wall beside him, but the second took him on the left-hand side of his chest and he dropped sideways and out of sight.
From his location Montana saw a bearded figure stumble into view and then collapse, a Kalashnikov falling from his hands. But he knew that wouldn’t be the end of the resistance.
As if on cue, about a dozen male figures, all with a similar appearance – bearded and wearing predominantly white and grey dishdashas, abas and keffiyehs – swarmed out of the building. Each man was carrying one of the ubiquitous Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles and each had a magazine pouch strapped around his upper body.
Despite the damage to the house and the casualties that would inevitably have been caused by the Warthog’s strike, the terrorists still had teeth.
A heavy barrage of shots rang out, the firing coming from both sides. The coalition troops were more exposed but they were all experienced in this kind of combat and were taking full advantage of what cover they could find. And they weren’t wasting their ammunition, only firing when they could acquire definite targets.
The ISI fighters, in contrast, were much less disciplined, many firing long bursts that sent bullets screaming into the air well above their targets, but they were also better protected by the stone wall surrounding the house and, probably, had far more ammunition at their disposal than the coalition soldiers.
The operation briefing had included all possible contingencies – or at least all those that Montana had been able to think of – and this kind of stand-off had been entirely predictable. No new orders were necessary.
Almost as soon as the ISI insurgents began firing, three of the coalition troops loaded M406 high-explosive rounds into their M203 under-barrel grenade launchers and fired them into the compound almost simultaneously, the clunk of these weapons firing completely inaudible against the rapid, hammering fire of the assault rifles.
Grenades are at their most devastating in a confined space. Three heavy explosions crashed out and instantly the small compound turned into a killing ground. The ISI fighters had nowhere to hide or take cover as the grenades, each with a kill radius of 5 metres and capable of causing injuries within 130 metres, detonated inside the boundary wall.
Screams of pain followed the explosions and, significantly, the firing from inside the compound stopped.
The coalition troops advanced in stages, still using fire-and-cover tactics, towards the target. The first of them checked what was waiting for them on the other side of the boundary wall, then scrambled over it.
About half of the ISI defenders were clearly either dead or badly wounded, but the coalition troops took no chances, eliminating every man who still showed signs of life, just in case any of them had decided that wearing a suicide vest made sense.
Then another two Kalashnikovs opened up, firing from a couple of broken windows on the ground floor of the house itself.
The coalition soldiers ducked into what cover they could find and returned fire. They were too close to the building to use grenades because the weapons wouldn’t arm in such a short distance, and in any case the M203 wasn’t accurate enough to fire a grenade through such small openings. So they were going to have to do it the hard way.
The soldiers inside the compound were pinned down and unable to do more than concentrate their fire through the windows and an open door of the house, to prevent the ISI fighters from accurately targeting them. But not all the coalition soldiers were inside the compound.
The NCO, a master sergeant, knew exactly what he had to do. With two other soldiers dogging his footsteps he ran along the outside of the compound wall, crouching down so as to be immune to the fire from the house. As soon as they got abeam the wall of the building, the NCO shouldered his Colt assault rifle, clambered over the wall and ran across to the left-hand side window. The besieging soldiers altered their aim to make sure none of their bullets went anywhere near him. He stopped a few feet short and pulled a small brownish spherical object from his utility belt.
Timing is important in life, but crucial in conflict.
The NCO removed the safety clip from the M67 grenade, changed his grip to remove the pull ring and almost immediately released the lever. That type of grenade explodes between four and five seconds after the lever is released, so the NCO counted to three before lobbing it through the open window and over the muzzles of the two Kalashnikovs that were still firing into the compound. He couldn’t allow time for one of the insurgents to grab the grenade and throw it back, because that would ruin the master sergeant’s whole day. And probably kill him.
He took a couple of paces back, knelt down and covered his ears. As he did so, he heard a shrill yell of alarm from inside the room, followed immediately by the crashing explosion as six and a half ounces of Composition B detonated. A mixture of RDX and TNT, Comp B is the workhorse explosive of the American military, used in everything from land mines to artillery shells.
The master sergeant jogged forward a few feet to the second window, priming another M67 as he did so, and repeated the treatment.
The moment the second grenade detonated, the coalition troops surged forward, streaming in through the half-open door between the two windows, clearing each room as they advanced. It was a case of overwhelming force meeting disorganised and demoralised defenders, many of them already wounded by the Warthog’s strafing run. It was more or less a mopping-up operation.
Ten minutes later Nick Montana and his Iraqi counterpart strode around the compound, Montana comparing the faces of the dead insurgents with printed images on half a dozen sheets of paper. Unlike the major players in the invasion of Iraq, who had merited their names and faces being included in the packs of playi
ng cards issued to front-line soldiers to identify them, Abū Omar al-Baghdadi’s face had just been provided as a monochrome image on a page spat out by a laser printer.
‘Nothing here,’ Montana said, using the toe of his boot to turn the head of the last corpse so that he could see the man’s face.
‘He was supposed to be at a meeting here,’ the Iraqi lieutenant replied in good English. ‘If he was, he’ll be somewhere inside the house.’
The master sergeant stepped out of the door of the property as Montana approached.
‘The building’s secure, sir,’ he said. ‘We’ve got sixteen men in cuffs, some of them wounded, plus a couple of women. All the others in the house are dead.’
Montana nodded and walked inside. The two women had been locked in one room and the surviving men assembled in another. The building reeked of cordite and he stepped over sprawled bodies and crunched over empty shell cases as he made his way from room to room.
None of the prisoners looked anything like Abū Omar al-Baghdadi, but Montana thought he recognised one of the corpses, one of two dead men lying sprawled on the floor in one of the smaller upstairs rooms. It looked as if the other man had been killed by shells from the Warthog’s Avenger cannon because of his appalling injuries, but the man whose face was familiar to the American officer had died from small-arms fire. He was also wearing a suicide vest.
‘I know your orders were to take as many of them alive as we could,’ the master sergeant said, as Montana looked at the body, ‘but when my men kicked down this door and they saw what he was wearing they took him down straight away.’
‘Good decision.’ Montana was looking at a different piece of paper and comparing the image printed on it with what he was seeing.
‘That’s not al-Baghdadi,’ the Iraqi lieutenant said. ‘He’s a much younger man, but he does look familiar.’
‘He should. Unless he’s got a double, that’s Abū Ayyub al-Masri. Until about ten minutes ago, he was ISI’s Minister of War and the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. He’s been on the wanted list for months, so this is a real good result.’
Montana led the way into the other upstairs room, where another dead terrorist lay in an untidy heap on the dusty floor. He hooked the toe of his boot under the shoulder of the corpse and flipped the dead man onto his back.
‘And I’m sure this is Abū Omar al-Baghdadi,’ he said, holding the sheet of paper next to the face of the corpse, ‘or at least this is the man in this photograph.’
Montana was right on both counts. Ten minutes later he called for extraction of his men and also a couple of trucks to haul away some of the stuff they’d discovered inside the property.
* * *
The raid was considered a massive success by the coalition forces. At a subsequent press conference in Baghdad the deaths of Abū Omar al-Baghdadi and Abū Ayyub al-Masri were hailed as a ‘most significant blow’ to the insurgency. As well as the two high-value targets, al-Baghdadi’s son had also been killed in the attack and one of the two women who had survived was al-Masri’s wife. Even more significantly, the coalition forces seized computers that had been used to communicate with Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri by email, producing an intelligence windfall of massive importance in combating the rebels.
But the mood of the press conference was tainted by the knowledge that in the hours after the raid at Tikrit, a series of reprisal bombings orchestrated by the ISI had taken place in the Shi’ite areas of Baghdad and had killed almost sixty people.
25 April 2010
Iraq
Early on the following Sunday morning, the Sharia Minister of the ISI, Abū al-Walid Abd al-Wahhab al-Mashadani, admitted on a militant website that the two leaders had been killed by enemy forces, but did his best to downplay the damage this had done to the organisation, claiming it was nothing more than an ‘illusory victory’, though he did not trouble to explain what that expression was supposed to mean.
What al-Mashadani didn’t say was that shockwaves had been driven through the whole of the ISI by the attack on the safe house, a house that had proved to be anything but safe. And while the insurgents believed themselves more than capable of facing the coalition forces in ground combat, the total air superiority enjoyed by the Americans was something they had no way of combating.
What they really needed to do, the ISI leaders admitted to themselves after the statement on the website had gone live, was to hit back at the Americans – and at the British, who had left the country almost exactly a year earlier – in a way that could not be countered by their military hardware. In short, they needed to move the battleground from the war-torn deserts of Iraq and Syria and away from the military superiority possessed by the West and into the heartlands of the countries of their enemies, which meant onto the streets of New York, Washington and London. They needed to change both the location of the battlefield and the type of combat, the glorious success of the World Trade Center attacks and individual acts of violence on the streets of Europe now almost forgotten. Instead of facing aircraft and tanks, the forces of radical Islam would cut a swathe through the soft underbelly of the enemy and hit the weakest and easiest of all targets, a target that was completely unprepared and utterly unable to defend itself: the unarmed civilian population.
And there was one very obvious way they could do that. It wasn’t even a new idea.
In November 1980, during the Iran–Iraq War, a thirteen-year-old Iranian boy named Mohammad Hossein Fahmideh lashed RPGs – rocket propelled grenades – to his body and detonated them and himself under the belly of an Iraqi tank. Fahmideh was hailed by the Iranian leadership as both a national hero and an inspiration for others to emulate.
That was considered to be the first istishhad attack in the modern era, the Arabic word translating as ‘martyrdom’ or the ‘death of a martyr’. Originally the word implied that the martyr was a victim, a person killed because of his or her religious beliefs or, quite often, a refusal to change to or to accept a different religion, but increasingly the term is now used to suggest an act of heroism and self-sacrifice. A martyr who kills himself in this way, by inflicting damage upon his perceived enemy as a consequence of his own death, is given the honorific title shahid.
In the West such actions are commonly referred to as suicide bombings, but in Arabic they are known as al-amaliyat al-istishhadiya, or ‘martyrdom operations’, because classical Islamic law forbids Muslims to commit suicide. Perhaps surprisingly to most non-Muslims, there is a body of Islamic law that governs the conduct of istishhad actions and operations and other aspects of warfare and jihad. In fact, embarking upon a jihad – the word translating literally as a ‘struggle’, though it is normally thought in the West to mean a ‘holy war’ – is not just an option for Muslims: it is both a religious requirement and an obligation. If a Muslim community of any size, from the smallest group up to an entire nation, faces danger or hostility, the members are required to resist. That is enshrined in Islamic law, and that is the basis of what radical Muslims consider to be their holy duty, to fight any and all oppressors by any and every means at their disposal.
However, those same Islamic laws are very specific with respect to how any such conflict is to be conducted. In particular, it is forbidden for women, children and non-combatants to be targeted, and residential areas and property are not to be attacked: the struggle is supposed to only be between the members of the Muslim community and those troops or forces that are seen to be actively oppressing or otherwise threatening them. Radical Islam has thoroughly embraced the concept of jihad but has clearly decided to ignore the other Islamic laws and rules of the struggle, preferring to direct most of their operations against the softest possible targets, the civilian populations of the countries with which they are in dispute or which they see as their oppressors.
The ISI leadership knew that finding people willing to make the ultimate sacrifice in support of their cause would not be particularly difficult. Recent history has clearly show
n that disaffected young men in many Western nations were prepared to concoct their own plans and strike at the heart of their adopted country, which in some cases was also the country of their birth. So providing the appropriate guidance, finance and equipment would ensure that devastating attacks could be launched comparatively easily. It would just be a matter of identifying suitable ‘volunteers’ and then executing the operation. And the elders planning and directing the ISI had every intention of doing exactly that.
Such terrorist attacks were easy enough to plan and, given the proper degree of commitment by the selected shahids, would always be successful. Attacks like these, mounted with no warning given and always aiming for the highest possible level of casualties, would be devastating. Every British and American death would be a cause for celebration and they would relish the chaos and carnage the attacks inflicted.
But the other thing the ISI leadership needed was a very different attack strategy. They wanted something as utterly devastating as possible and a lot more inventive than a shahid detonating a suicide vest on a crowded street or driving a truck into a mass of pedestrians.
At a hastily convened meeting held in the remaining ground-floor room of a ruined building – a building ruined by American bombing – the ruling council debated the options open to them. The air was dense with harsh and angry exchanges in Arabic, and made visibly thicker by what looked like cigarette smoke, though it was actually dust raised from the floor and the scattered tables by thumping fists and stamping feet. Although many Iraqis enjoy cigarettes, smoking had always been seen by the ISI leadership as un-Islamic and had been banned, with severe penalties meted out to transgressors. Many of the council members still smoked, but always in private locations where they knew they could not be observed. Most of them also preferred American cigarettes to any of the local brands like Sumer, Eridu or Baghdad, making their secret vice doubly anti-Islamic, and the avoidance of detection therefore doubly important.
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