by Dan Mills
We had to keep up our watch over Aj Dayya for the rest of the day, in case of a counterattack from the estate. Unexpectedly, the five of us on my roof ended up celebrating our success with some very rich homemade Arabic coffee.
Just after the OMS building was stormed, a set of keys went into the padlock on the other side of the sheet metal door that led down into the house whose roof we were on. We all spun round just in time to point our longs at the door. It opened slowly, to reveal a chubby bloke in his forties with a bushy Saddam Hussein moustache. He had a grin on his face from ear to ear, and clasped his hands together as he addressed us in fluent English.
'Not to be afraid. You are most honoured guests in my humble home. We heard you shouting in middle of night after airplane strike. Now we must make you feel welcome. You like Arabic coffee?'
'Err, well . . .'
'I am number one fan of British Army. Mehdi Army are scum. My father in England in 1950s. He was pilot in the Royal Air Force.'
With that, he puffed out his chest in pride. Extraordinary. We had managed to pick the house to sit on that belonged to the one person in Al Amarah who loved our country as much as any of us did. His name was Abdul, and his old man really had been in the RAF. After he invited a few of us down for coffee that was so thick you could stand a spoon up in it, we had to inspect all his father's old squadron photos. He had flown Canberra bombers out of RAF Cottesmore in Rutland. All of a sudden, his two best friends appeared. They too were huge British patriots, and shook our hands incessantly.
After half an hour of glad handing, I got sudden inspiration for a brilliant tactical move.
'Ads, I've got an idea. Come with me. Excuse us for a minute, Abdul, but where's your toilet?'
We found it on the bottom floor of the house.
'Right, Ads. What I'm about to do in there is top secret. It's vital you stand here and cover for me. Understood?'
'Sure, Danny.' He wore a frown of utter concentration. 'I'll follow you anywhere, mate.'
Not in here you won't.
I went inside the toilet and closed the door. Presented with a nice clean porcelain toilet cistern and wooden seat, I pulled down my trousers and pants and sat down in some considerable comfort. It was a tactical bowel move. Having been up on the roof all night, I hadn't been able to manage the morning constitutional. It was a shame to let such a good opportunity go to waste, and who knew when I might get it again? I needed Ads there just in case some mean-spirited OMS man ran in off the street and slotted me on the shitter.
'You sneaky bastard,' he said, shaking his head as I emerged. So I stood guard while he dropped the kids off at the pool too.
The great counterattack from Aj Dayya never came, so we took it in turns for one pair to do a stint on the roof while the other four spent the rest of the day watching TV with Abdul in his nice air-conditioned sitting room.
We were called back to Cimic at sunset. That evening, Operation Waterloo's second phase began. The two armoured Warrior companies and the attached company of Royal Welch Fusiliers had moved into the town's main police stations. At a synchronized time, all four companies in the city pushed out patrols to re-establish law and order on the streets.
The OMS scored an early success with an attack on Sgt Adam Llewellyn. A ten-year-old boy on a rooftop chucked a petrol bomb into his Warrior turret. The top half of his body was engulfed in flames and by the time they had got him out, there was skin hanging off all over him. His burns were awful, but the fact that it was a ten-year-old that had done him was most shocking.
Apart from that, the patrols met little resistance. The few other individual lunatics who took us on were shot dead on the spot. But there weren't many who tried. The OMS had been given a thorough kicking. Dozens of their men lay dead and they had little ability left to fight.
We had proved two important things: we had the bigger stick and we were prepared to use it. It wasn't a trick we could pull every day. The Spectre gunships and A Company's Warriors together were a rare treat that we would be lucky to get again. But the OMS didn't know that, and we weren't going to tell them.
We'd also won the town back for the price of just three serious injuries: Sgt Llewellyn, a corporal shot in the foot, and a private fragged by a grenade hurled from a passing motorbike.
The cherry on the cake for Y Company was found in what was left of a school classroom on the north bank. A muzzle flash had been spotted from a top window in the school during the battle. So a Challenger II put a shell from its main gun straight through it. The body of an OMS sniper was found under the rubble. Next to him was a Draganov sniper rifle. It had been the fucker that shot Baz Bliss.
*
A few days later, it was considered calm enough for the armoured companies to pull out of the police stations and leave it to the local cops to get on with it again. The chief of police was called in by our CO and Molly Phee for a delicate fireside chat.
'Your men have had all the training, we've cleared up the enemy for you, so, with respect sir, is there any reason why they can't start earning their fucking pay now?' the colonel asked him. And for a few days, they even did.
Out on patrols, we learnt what had been happening while we were locked down in Cimic. The OMS had enforced strict Islamic law on Al Amarah's streets. Women who dared to show their ankles underneath their long black veils had been beaten. A man had been shot in the mouth for drinking whisky. Normal people came up to us quite openly to thank us for doing something about it. Many seemed delighted the OMS had been forced to wind their necks in.
It was important to keep up the momentum and build on what we had achieved. Basic security on the streets allowed us to go after a number of smaller targets that we'd wanted to have a crack at for some time. We carried out a series of raids, smashing doors down with a heavy metal thumper. In one house near the OMS building, we found a massive arms stash inside a false wall in the garden. RPGs and boxes of ammo were stacked from the hide's floor to the top of the six-foot wall. The buffoon owner inadvertently put Pikey's well-honed street antennae on to it by standing right in front of it and looking deeply uncomfortable.
Prodding him in the chest with a finger, Pikey demanded: 'Oi jackass, why the fuck is you standing in front of that wall all the time we've been here?'
'What wall mister?'
That sealed it.
14
The success of Waterloo also saw the mortaring on Cimic drop off a little bit to just a strike every couple of days. The OMS had been badly winded, and it took them a few days to get their breath. They were soon back though. Events elsewhere made that a cert.
There was still no sign of any end to the standoff between Moqtada al-Sadr and the Americans. If anything, it was getting worse. Moderate Shia leaders and tribal chiefs were still trying to negotiate a peace between the two sides. But neither seemed particularly interested. There were only two months to go before the CPA was due to hand power back to the Iraqis, and both al-Sadr and the Yanks were desperate for victory before that. Continual fighting in or around Iraq's two holy cities, Najaf and Kerbala, threatened to spread mayhem across the country.
More than 2,000 US soldiers were now encamped on the edge of Najaf. With the threat of an all-out assault ever present, troops made regular incursions into the city's outskirts. As May went on, US tanks were sent for the first time into Kerbala, where a Polish soldier had been killed in the Mehdi Army uprising. The tanks destroyed an al-Sadr office with heavy machine-gun fire and then took up positions just 500 metres from the gold-domed Imam Hussein shrine, the second holiest Shia site of all. In retaliation, Moqtada called for his followers everywhere to launch a new wave of attacks on coalition troops.
The national picture was leapt on afresh by the OMS, and they used it to renew their rabble rousing in Al Amarah. They were short of new recruits, after folk had seen what mincemeat the Spectre made of the last lot. Instead, they did a bit of thinking and changed their tactics. They came back out in smaller but more lethal packages.<
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As the battle group had learnt from Op Pimlico, the OMS learnt valuable lessons from Op Waterloo too. To take us on head to head was futile, and the battle proved to be their last big set piece. Until later, of course. From then onwards it was to be high-intensity guerrilla warfare. That meant fewer open assaults and less of a will to hold fixed patches of ground, but more hidden bombs and far cleverer ambushes. Now they'd only confront us on their terms when they knew they had more firepower than us, or could catch us unaware. It became a regular pattern of combat for the next six weeks.
We fought the OMS's new warfare with the usual counter-insurgency tactics: arrest operations, searches, unpredictable patrols, random vehicle checks.
On the streets, we indulged in a new game of cat and mouse. The OMS watched us carefully. When we came back into camp, they would go out and do their own patrols. The kids that had been chatting to us half an hour before were slapped about. Some poor sod who'd been drinking would get shot again.
Half of it was a cold war for the city's hearts and minds. That was just as important as the physical stuff. If we could get the local population on our side, it would deny the OMS friendly territory from which to operate. To do that, the battle group tried to keep Warriors off Al Amarah's streets as much as possible. People hated the Warrior. It was a beast of a thing, it knocked down their buildings, churned up their tarmac and made a hell of a din. I couldn't blame them.
As time went on, it wasn't just the OMS that we were going up against either. They began to get help from some very dark quarters. With the Najaf standoff well into its second month, the foreign extremists who'd previously concentrated their efforts on Baghdad and the north saw a good opportunity in the south to wreak further havoc. Al-Qaeda had come to town.
Their help came in the form of tactics, expertise and equipment, and a lot of it was highly professional. Al Amarah was too small and poxy to be a major destination for world jihad. But it was the closest city to the Iranian border. That was the transit route into Iraq that most of the holy warriors were using. Al Amarah also had Route 6 running through it which would take them all the way up to Baghdad, so many used the city as a convenient stop-off. The temptation to have a crack at us while they were here proved too strong to resist.
Intelligence briefings revealed that as well as Iranians, now Syrians, Yemenis and Jordanians were all making the trip and were operating for short periods in Al Amarah. They ranged from individual untrained fanatics to large and highly professional groups.
Sadly we never caught any, and it was hard to tell them apart from other religious-looking Arabs at distance. But you could tell if you got into a gunfight with them. They were particularly resilient, and unlike many Iraqis they had been trained to use their rifles properly too. Division HQ in Basra was so worried about their increasing numbers, that Recce Platoon was deployed along the Iranian border for a while to join an operation to catch them. We'd heard that the Americans in western Iraq had even captured some British jihadis from Birmingham. If only the little toerags had come to Al Amarah.
The foreign fighters brought their very own novel brands of killing with them too. We were told of the increased threat of Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices (VBIED). That's military speak for car bombs.
Another of the foreigners' tricks was to strap old Soviet-made tank mines underneath road bridges so their shrapnel would come down like lead hailstones on anyone who drove underneath them. We kept a wide berth of bridges for a fair while after hearing that.
A specific warning was made at the end of May that sent a chill down all our spines. Featherstone explained all the information that had come through.
'Guys, we've had some pretty nasty intelligence about which I want you all to be particularly aware. Three cars rigged up with high explosives are going to attack coalition troops or bases on Route 6 somewhere between Al Amarah and Baghdad. They're being driven by three suicide bombers, who are also wearing explosive vests. They'll detonate them if they're stopped.
'Vehicles they are using are . . .' Featherstone looked down at his notes to read off a list. '. . . a black BMW, a white Toyota Christa and a red Toyota Corolla. Each car has a support team of nine or ten fighters travelling alongside it. They will launch an RPG and small arms assault once the cars have exploded. The whole team was trained in Iran for a week before they set off.
'That's all, I'm afraid. Targets and timings unknown.'
In other words, we didn't know where this little package of misery was going, or when they'd get there. But we knew they were on their way.
'The greatest threat to us will obviously be at vehicle checkpoints. Be very careful indeed please, guys, and make sure everybody's wide awake 110 per cent of the time when you're out over the next few days.'
Car bombs we knew all about from Northern Ireland. But suicide bombers was a brand new one on us. We were extra careful when we went out. Beyond that, there's little more you can do.
Suicide killings are the hardest concept for western soldiers in Iraq to deal with. Blokes firing machine guns at you are fine, because you can shoot back at them. But people who are prepared to die to kill you in an everyday situation are almost impossible to prevent. You stop the wrong car at a vehicle checkpoint, you're going to get yourself blown to fucking bits. It's just pure chance.
It took the Slipper City desk jockeys longer than us to clock onto the changing shape of the war. We were up close and personal to them every day, so we could pick up the telltale signs. In one house search we found a couple of mercury tilt switches used to detonate bombs. Now they are smart pieces of kit. As soon as you move the device, the mercury moves, connects the electrical circuit, and boom. So when someone in Abu Napa came up with the bright idea of allowing our Snatch Land Rovers back on the streets, we were more than a little pessimistic.
Major Featherstone told us about the decision in an O Group. The first Snatch patrol would even go out from Cimic that very night. This was going to be interesting. I went back up to the roof and told the five members of the platoon up there.
'Bloody hell. They're mad,' observed Fitz.
Everyone else shook their heads. But Ads had an idea.
'How about this, lads: why don't we do a sweepstake on how long it takes for them Snatches to get smacked? We could all put in a tenner.' The time closest to the inevitable attack on the Snatches after leaving base would win. Ads plumped for 22 minutes. Sam had it at 17, Chris at 31, Smudge at 25 and I fancied it at 24. Fitz went for the lowest, at 11 minutes. Smudge gave his bet short shrift.
'Don't be silly, Fitzy. It takes just about ten minutes to get out the chicanes and off fucking Tigris Street. That's a wasted orange one.'
Two hours later, two Snatch Land Rovers left Cimic. With the stopwatch running, we watched them go. Just after they turned out of our sight, bang. An explosion echoed out over the night sky, followed by a long burst of AK fire. The Snatches came screeching back to Cimic. Nobody was hurt, but one of the vehicles was decorated with long scorch marks on its rear where the roadside bomb had caught it. They had been out for only eight minutes. Fitzy had won by a country mile.
The penny dropped in Abu Naji after that. The Snatch ban was reimposed immediately.
Light-hearted distractions were essential in dealing with the tense atmosphere and helped lighten the mood. But the funny thing about combat is you can never predict how people are going to react until they're in the middle of it. The hardest bloke in the company could become a bag of nerves, and the smallest runt could end up fighting like a possessed banshee. Appearances and reputation count for nothing. Everyone goes through the wringer equally.
Some took a bit of time, like young Sam who had frozen up inside my Snatch during our first and major contact on 18 April. He was full of apologies to me the next day, and felt awful about it.
'There's nothing to apologize for, Sam,' I told him.
'I just wanted to get the fuck out of that vehicle, Danny.'
'I understand. We
're through that now, mate. I know you'll come good the next time.' And he did. Sam was a different person in the next scrap we had, and went on to become one of the platoon's most ballsy warriors. I was hoping against hope that the same would happen with Gilly.
There were also a few who just couldn't deal with it at all. One of those was Taff. What happened to him was an awful thing to witness. Taff was a 32-year-old corporal in Recce Platoon, and a bloody good NCO at that. He had a great sense of humour and was very chatty. A typical Welsh Taff in an English regiment.
He'd also been in the thick of the fighting on 18 April. That evening, Chris had pointed out to him that he had a lump of sharp shrapnel the size of a pen lid still sticking out of his breast plate. The implication was obvious. If he hadn't been wearing body armour, he'd be brown bread.
Taff didn't like this one little bit, and it had scared the hell out of him. Back in England, his girlfriend was pregnant with his first child. From that night onwards, he started to go downhill. His behaviour changed immediately and he was no longer the same person. He wouldn't leave hardened accommodation unless there was a military reason. Blokes had to bring his meals to him there, because he didn't want to go to the cookhouse. He refused to take his helmet and body armour off ever, even in bed. It meant he couldn't shower either.
For a while, Taff tried to carry on as usual. To begin with people let him be because we didn't want to hurt his pride. He'd been in for years and he had a load of blokes under him. He didn't want to turn around after all of that and announce he hated it there. But it was obvious he did.
All the senior NCOs tried to talk to him quietly. We were his mates, and we wanted to help. I found him sitting in a doorway of the main house one morning staring up at the sky. He was slowly rocking backwards and forwards.
'All right, Taff?'
