by Pete Hegseth
—TEDDY ROOSEVELT, 1910
Where is the urgency to win, at all costs?
—MY IRAQ JOURNAL, MAY 7, 2006
SPRING/SUMMER 2006 | SAMARRA, IRAQ
“Zero-Seven-Seven-Zero. Three-Seven-Three. Six-Six-Nine-Five.”
As we approached the front gate of the sprawling Camp Speicher base outside of Tikrit, I yelled at my driver to cut the noisy engine of our up-armored Humvee. I could barely hear the voice on the other end of the line, thanks in large part to the typically spotty Iraqi cell phone service. The voice was excitable, and I asked him to relay the phone number again. He did so in broken Iraqi English.
“Zero-Seven-Seven-Zero. Three-Seven-Three. Six-Six-Nine-Five.”
I passed the phone to our interpreter to make sure I had it right. I then made sure it was written correctly in my Army-issue green book, and immediately relayed it to my boss, Captain Chris Brawley, who quickly sent it up the chain of command. Later that night, the word came. Hamadi Al Tahki—the Al Qaeda “Emir” of Samarra—was dead, along with his cadre of heavily armed bodyguards. Iraqi men I would never meet had obtained his new cell phone number and shared it with a trusted Iraqi ally—and the signal the emir’s new phone gave off was his undoing.
Our unit had been looking for Al Tahki since we arrived in Samarra, just as previous units had. More a violent thug and profiteer than Islamist, Al Tahki was nonetheless responsible for numerous dead Americans, scores of dead Iraqis, and ongoing intimidation of anyone associated with U.S. forces or the Iraqi government. He was the Keyser Söze of Samarra—more a myth than a man—leaving a few of us to doubt whether he existed at all. Now he was dead as a doornail, killed by another set of men we never met.
Acting on signals from that cell phone number, Taskforce 77—an elite hunter-killer special operations unit—were the final arbiters of justice for Al Qaeda’s prince of Samarra. Operating swiftly and precisely above the bureaucracy and acting on highly sensitive intelligence, they not only killed Al Tahki that night, but also tracked the vehicles that picked up the bodies, lay in baited ambushes, and even raided his funeral. They didn’t just kill an Al Qaeda emir, they dismantled the core of his cell—killing those who resisted and detaining those who did not. That night, Team America delivered a gut punch to Al Qaeda insurgents in Samarra that would eventually lead to a precipitous drop in violence in that city. From the perspective of a rank-and-file infantryman, Taskforce 77 was by far the most feared element in Iraq. Arriving in the dead of night, with liberated rules of engagement, they knew how to kill with precision from the air and ground. While they sometimes created messes that land-owning units had to clean up, their impact was overwhelmingly positive—sowing fear in the hearts of flip-flop-wearing insurgents throughout Iraq. They had, and will always have, my unwavering admiration and respect. They were killers.
But that day, and in the months preceding and following it, the most potent weapon I carried was my Iraqi cell phone and the contacts it contained. Without those eleven digits of Al Tahki’s phone number, Team America never arrives on his Al Qaeda doorstep to deliver justice. The painstaking process that led to those eleven digits—and the cooperation that came with it—was an intensely human one, built on trust that was established over many months, many risks, and many late nights. Unless America is willing to level entire cities with bombs from the sky—which is an option we should never foreclose—ruthlessly killing an enemy that hides in the shadows and among women and children is not possible without the human relationships and resulting human intelligence that come from having boots on the ground. As any military or intelligence professional will attest, there are serious limits to what can be accomplished through drones, data, and signals intelligence alone. Ultimately, guys with guns alongside allies on the ground—properly supported and resourced—can build relationships, and dismantle an enemy, in a way drones simply cannot. As Roosevelt said, “war is a dreadful thing” but its effective execution will always be necessary—usually in dangerous places, at night, alongside a shady mix of characters.
One of those nights came on April 22, 2006, in the heart of Samarra, just six days prior to the killing of Al Tahki. That evening I received a frantic phone call from the same person who called with Al Tahki’s phone number—the eldest son of Samarra’s city council president and strong American ally, Assad Ali Yasseen (we affectionately called him “Haji Assad” or “Mr. Assad”). Two of Mr. Assad’s bodyguards had just been killed, shot execution-style in the head, while waiting in line to get a haircut. As we had on multiple other occasions when he and his family were under attack, our mishmash civil-military operations team geared up, grabbed a pile of AK-47s and crates of ammunition, and headed into the restive city. We dubbed our team “Taskforce 5-0,” after the “Iron 5” call sign of our fearless leader and battalion executive officer, Major Steve Delvaux.
Like Major Delvaux, Mr. Assad was—and is—a special human being. A soft-spoken businessman and devout Sunni Muslim, he and his family were forced to leave Iraq and flee to Dubai under Saddam Hussein—under suspicion of attempting to assassinate Saddam’s oldest son, Uday. Pro-Western, and pro-American, Mr. Assad and his family returned to Samarra after the 2003 U.S. invasion, in the hopes of a better life and building a business. As chaos grew around him, so did his recognition that a man of his stature could either succumb to it—or fight back. He did the later, in dramatic fashion. Declaring he would fight Al Qaeda “to the death,” he frequently called his men—and Taskforce 5-0—the “true mujahideen, fighting the real jihad.”
In his role as the Samarra city council president—and because of the bold manner in which he wielded it—he soon became a threat to, and therefore central target of, Al Qaeda and antigovernment forces. While other so-called leaders in Samarra stayed home or played double games, Mr. Assad traveled the city, worked on projects, met with tribal leaders and security forces, funded a newspaper, and eventually formed an extragovernmental intelligence network that temporarily became our battalion’s primary source for dismantling enemy elements in Samarra. As a result, Al Qaeda ruthlessly targeted him, his family, and his bodyguards—as they did that night.
While his leadership was natural, his boldness was also born of the earnest and active support of Taskforce 5-0. We worked to establish a baseline of trust that cut both ways. When he called for support, we came; when he provided us intelligence, we rolled out and picked up his ski-mask-wearing, AK-47-toting informants; when one of our soldiers was killed, he was the only Iraqi civilian at the ceremony paying his respects. This trust was established because our small civil-military element had been working with him closely, and mostly covertly, since the bombing of the Golden Mosque two months earlier, after which the city’s tribal leaders appointed him the new city council president. That bombing, which was a very negative, sectarian pivot point for the larger war, actually created a massive opportunity for renewed collaboration inside Samarra. As it turns out, the late Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill was right—all politics really is local.
Our humble Taskforce 5-0, often heading out on our own into the sprawling city of Samarra, held lengthy meeting after lengthy meeting, ate local meal after local meal, and initiated broad-daylight mission after late-night mission—forging a reservoir of trust with Mr. Assad, his family, his bodyguards—and, by extension, core elements of his Al Abassi tribe. We met with other city officials as well, but none of them remotely showed the same level of initiative, leadership, and sheer courage. He was fighting for his city, and we were fighting with him—side by side.
It all came to a head on that April night when his bodyguards were assassinated. When we arrived at Mr. Assad’s compound, it was no longer time to talk—they had decided it was time to act. His house was a frenzy of activity, with dozens of armed men crisscrossing the dimly lit courtyard as we approached. We knew his core bodyguards well, and they were there; but that night, as men came out to grab the weapons and ammunition we delivered, it was clear that reinforcement
s had arrived. These were not the regular bodyguards; these were the quasi-shady guys who knew a bit too much about the bad guys to not be involved in the insurgency at some level. Mr. Assad was clean, but there was no way these guys were. Two of their own had been killed in murderous fashion. The gloves were off.
When we entered the couch-lined, carpet-covered, vaulted-ceiling living area we knew well, his dinner table didn’t have the normal spread of lamb, bread, vegetables, and orange soda. This time it was covered with a city map and surrounded by armed men. By the time we arrived, he already had six informants and thirty targets picked out. For the next few hours, as night settled in and the neighborhood went to sleep, we worked through multiple interpreters to refine the target set. At one point, smoking a cigarette myself and feeling a bit like a cowboy, I stepped back and counted fifteen men poring over the maps—a mixture of AK-47s and M-4s slung amid a room filled with smoke . . . and purpose.
After passionate discussion, interpretation, and refinement, the targets’ locations were narrowed to eight, with three informants selected to accompany the raids. Pining for revenge, Mr. Assad’s bodyguards made the case for more targets, many of which didn’t meet our stricter sourcing criteria. Some of the newer bodyguards also appealed to Mr. Assad to execute the raids themselves—for all the extrajudicial reasons you might suspect. But Mr. Assad stepped in, saying, “Let the Americans handle it. That is the right way to do it.” When a few continued to push back, he quietly and definitively declared, “They are with us. They are Al Abassi.” With that, it was settled.
With targets and informants selected, we left all but a few overwatch vehicles behind and headed out on foot—doing our best to maintain the element of surprise in the back alleyways and dusty streets. In classic Taskforce 5-0 form, we utilized a Star Wars cantina-scene mix of characters that night, as we would many subsequent nights—a rank-heavy mixture of civil affairs elements, Bravo Company infantrymen, bodyguards, interpreters, and local informants. And on this particular night, we were also toting a Russian-born Wall Street Journal foreign affairs reporter who was brave enough to walk the streets with us. Any screwups could make front-page U.S. news in short order.
It was one of those moments you never forget. We stepped off that night, into an unknown and eerie Samarra night, led by three skinny informants in ski masks, flip-flops, and AK-47s. Looking back on it, we were leading with our guts; no Army school ever taught the planning process and motley formations we maintained. Our movements were not always precise, but they were decisive. With dogs howling, and daylight still hours away, our elements hit all eight of our targets in succession over the course of the night. Only two were dry holes; in the other six we found our men—stuffing detainees into the back of crammed Humvees as we rolled along.
At the last target house, purportedly an Al Qaeda–linked target, a nearby minaret alerted the neighborhood to our presence with rhythmic Arabic chanting—the most ominous sound I’d ever heard, a call to prayer—or call to action—of some sort. As we approached the house, it was clear there was movement inside the perimeter walls—which accelerated the pace of our actions. Normally our breach and assault elements waited for our perimeter to be set up, to make sure nobody squirted off the objective. But at this house, with our element of surprise blown, it wasn’t possible. Speed was our security, so we moved. As the lead element rammed the perimeter gate with a Humvee, I moved along the perimeter wall to cover the backside of the house. In my haste, I got ahead of my counterpart.
As I moved alongside a high perimeter wall, I could hear rustling in the back portion of the house. Because of the ambient moonlight and a smattering of dim lights in the area, my night-vision reticle was flipped up. The naked eye seemed the best way to go. As I tactically rounded the corner, I briefly caught a glimpse of two men sprinting through the rear street and around an adjacent corner. Not sure if we had an element on the other side yet, I gave chase to regain line of sight. But as I crossed some rubble and then the empty street with the typical open sewer gutters, I heard—and then saw—something on the rooftop next door. Unsure what to do—and frozen in the middle of the street—I first swung my head, and then my weapon. Two men in ski masks with AK-47s trained in my general direction popped up.
For a few of the longest seconds in my life, I trained my weapon on them—and they pointed theirs at me. It was dark enough that neither could fully recognize the other. Not knowing what else to do in such a vulnerable position, I yelled out to them, “Amriki!”—Arabic for American. They slowly lowered their weapons. They were allied bodyguards who, in zealous haste, had hopped onto the adjoining rooftop to overwatch our assault. Wanting to shit my pants, and with my heartbeat sky-high, I kept running across the alleyway. But I had lost valuable seconds, and by the time I hit the corner the men had rounded, they were long gone—lost in a maze of corridors and alleyways.
Frozen on that corner, and not looking to further overextend myself off that objective, I took a knee and faced back toward the house, in case more insurgents tried to squirt off the backside. By that time our elements were clearing the house. I was kicking myself, for multiple reasons—not getting there faster, shoddy tactics, and not being able to chase those guys down. It was not the first time a few runners had gotten away during my tour, and it irked me—as it did the other times. What if they went on to kill Americans? Or other members of Mr. Assad’s family? Or now they belong to Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi’s Islamic State army? (Al Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, hails from Samarra, after all.) I will never know, but will always contemplate.
Like my first firefight—an event that every soldier remembers—these moments are seared into my brain. And, ironically, most of them happened not while I was an infantry platoon leader on patrol, but instead during my six months as a civil-military operations officer. The majority of the tactical successes our Taskforce 5-0 element had, and in many ways our companies and battalion had, came through consistent interaction with the city council president, other city leaders, and regular citizens. When we patrolled the streets on foot—and took the time to take off our body armor and break bread with the local population—our interaction with the people was vital to our success.
This recipe—local interaction, constant presence, and rolling up lots of bad guys—was the secret sauce that all of Iraq needed, we just didn’t know it yet. And to think that, in Samarra at least, it pretty much happened by accident. As my platoon leader time came to a close halfway through our tour, our battalion commander pulled me aside and said, “You studied politics at Princeton, right?” I answered yes. With that I was reassigned from the great soldiers of Charlie Company to Captain Brawley’s civil-military operations element at battalion headquarters—charged with helping to revive the moribund governance in Samarra. We had no special training, and no manual, but because I had studied the likes of Cicero and Machiavelli in college (note, sarcasm), I was on the team. Taskforce 5-0 was soon born, and we made it up as we went along.
On the second day of that new job, I woke up to the Al Qaeda–backed bombing of the Golden Mosque. In many ways, this bombing was the ground zero—the 9/11—of the Iraq War, during which we had a front-row seat. I’ll never forget hearing the massive explosion and running into the tactical operation center, just in time to catch a live feed of a hollowed-out—in fact completely gone—Golden Dome. That night, after angling to join the patrol into the city, I was one of three Americans in the Samarra mayor’s office when the tribal sheiks designated Mr. Assad as the new city council president—a very positive development we didn’t fully understand at the time. I could spend a chapter recounting the back-and-forth that night between our battalion commander, the Golden Mosque imam (who was rarely seen), and all of the tribal sheiks. The room was full of anger, sorrow, and suspicion. In many ways, that is where my wider lens on the war in Iraq started—along with the lessons that came with it. Mr. Assad’s courage, our outreach (good and bad) in Samarra, and the realities of combat all forged a fi
rsthand view of war that informed, and still informs, every aspect of my postwar life. I saw what was possible, what was impossible, and what it takes—and what it means—to both win and lose. In nearly every way, the city of Samarra taught me more than Princeton and Harvard ever could.
• • •
Samarra, like all of Iraq, was a confusing product of historic and immediate circumstances. The redheaded stepchild of Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, Samarra lives with an inferiority complex, part of which comes from the overwhelmingly Sunni town hosting one of the most holy sites in Shia Islam; a point of pride, and contention. Like so many Iraqi cities, the town is controlled by a patchwork of tribes that fight like siblings. The town had been invaded and abandoned multiple times since 2003, with insurgents gaining control, losing it again, and waging a low-level insurgency throughout. Both urban and rural, an example of both Sunni-Shia cooperation and division, and skeptical of central governance—Samarra was a difficult problem set, and one that could head in any direction. If Samarra was hopeless, all of Iraq was hopeless. If Samarra could be won, so could Iraq.
The year 2006 was also a microcosm for the confusion of the entire Iraq War. The initial invasion had been swift and decisive, with Saddam’s capture in December 2003 wrapping up a hopeful year. The next year saw clashes with Sunni radicals in Fallujah and Shia Sadrists in the south, but also the transfer of authority to Iraqis. Violence continued in 2005, but two national elections and a constitutional referendum provided a glimpse of a post-American future. By 2006, the United States was ready to put Iraq in the rearview mirror . . . but Iraq was not done with us.
The bombing of the Golden Mosque, while a moment of opportunity in Samarra, ripped the seams off America’s extraction plans. Sectarian violence, and violence against U.S. forces, increased and Iraqi forces were not capable of handling it. Nonetheless, in the middle of a deteriorating situation in 2006, we continued to doggedly transfer responsibility to Iraqi forces. We held transfer ceremonies, but they were nothing but ceremonies and did not reflect real Iraqi capabilities. The Iraqis could not control the areas we were giving to them, and we all knew it. In 2006 we had one foot out the door of Iraq, which is what the insurgents wanted. The rest of the population—a silent majority—was still clinging to our other leg, hoping that we wouldn’t quit and leave them the resulting shit storm.
