“The solution is simple,” he said. “Disband the sherta [police] leadership and completely retrain the IP force.”
It was an impossible solution, but he was convinced there was no other way. Ayad wouldn’t be satisfied until the IP was either dissolved or subordinated to the army, and the IA was back and operating in the cities permanently. I left the meeting deeply troubled, relieved that I wouldn’t have to deal with Ayad and his skewed reality for ten days.
The next evening, however, I actually wished Ayad had been around. As I joined several members of the team in the MWR hut to watch a movie my radio crackled to life with the voice of Capt. Jason Rehm. The team’s personnel advisor, Rehm was an F/A-18 Hornet fighter pilot from Connecticut and a graduate of North Carolina State. A late-join to the MiTT, he had replaced the hole left by Captain Flynn’s departure and had arrived at COP South several weeks earlier. Burly, yet unexcitable, he had quickly found his place among the Marines.
“COC, this is One,” he radioed from somewhere on the compound. “Did you just hear shots being fired?”
“What the . . . ?” I said to no one in particular.
Captain Hanna stood and poked his head outside the MWR hut, and just as he did so a second staccato burst of AK-47 fire echoed from the camp’s north. We jumped to our feet and walked quickly across the compound to the northern ECP, each Marine chambering a round in his pistol in unison. I keyed my radio.
“Nine, this is Six,” I said, summoning Doc Rabor. “Prep your med bag. We don’t know what’s happening out here.”
“Roger, sir,” he replied. “I’m Oscar-Mike [on the move].”
I rekeyed my radio. “COC, tell everyone to grab their rifles from the armory and stand by until we know what the hell’s going on.”
We arrived to confusion at the ECP, where a dozen junood stood around jabbering back and forth and pointing to the north. I turned to Mason.
“Hey, find out what the hell’s going on.”
After a moment of talking with the soldiers Mason spoke.
“The jundi who was on guard said he noticed something moving around about three hundred meters outside the wire,” he said, pointing north. “They say it was a car, and when it turned on its headlights it lit up two other cars near it. The jundi started firing warning shots at them, and the cars sped off.”
It didn’t make any sense. The northern ECP was an unmanned post. What was the soldier doing there in the first place? And why had he fired warning shots? As we asked ourselves those questions Lieutenant Grubb appeared with his night-vision goggles and knelt down on the berm next to us.
“I can’t see shit out there,” he said, the optic pressed to his eye. “There isn’t enough illum outside right now.”
He handed the goggles to me, but he had been correct. There wasn’t enough ambient illumination in the night sky to get a clear picture through the NVGs.
“Hang on, sir,” he said. “I’ll get Wardle out here with the PAS.”
Minutes later Wardle came running up, the bulky shape of a PAS-13 thermal viewer tucked under his arm. We continued to scan the horizon, but even the viewing power of the thermal sight couldn’t locate anything to our front. Whatever had been out there—if there had even been anything at all—had long since left the area.
Once we returned to the COC and accounted for everyone, the Marines stood around and speculated about what had actually occurred. While it was possible that some locals had gotten lost in the dark and the Iraqi sentry had fired on them, it was equally feasible that the jundi had merely been spooked and fired off his weapon into the darkness. It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had happened.
Speculation aside, the episode revealed holes in our defensive plan for the compound as well as in our own internal security procedures for such an event. After a brief after-action review we developed a set of security posture levels for the team, codes that could be succinctly announced over our team radio net. We also resolved to force—not recommend—an adjustment to 3rd Battalion’s security plan, including insisting that the battalion equip the tower guards and sentry posts with radios, NVGs, range cards, and signaling pyrotechnics. The new security procedures would include random inspections by the MiTT to ensure the junood were manning their posts properly. We knew our demands would be met with resistance by the battalion staff, but it was our security we were talking about. The team’s small size made the prospect of providing our own constant, vigilant security unrealistic, and like all MiTT teams we were forced to rely on the Iraqis to safeguard us. Although we seemed to have dodged a bullet during the episode at the ECP, it was a somber reminder to all of us how isolated we were out there. Everyone knew that if the shit hit the fan we would be on our own for some time until the Marine task force’s QRF could make its way to us. But it was a risk that had to be accepted; there was no other way for the MiTTs to operate.
Sometime shortly after midnight on 2 May a team of insurgents approached the Bagooz IP checkpoint in an area named Ar Rabit just north of the Euphrates River. The men were clad in American tricolor desert camouflage uniforms and, posing as a Special Forces team, they told the IPs that they wanted to conduct a combined patrol with them. The ruse lasted long enough for the insurgents to overpower the policemen at the checkpoint without firing a shot. After binding the IPs and placing them on their knees, the insurgents moved down the line of men one by one, cutting their throats from ear to ear. Several of the IPs’ throats were hacked to the bone, nearly beheading them. One IP, however, who had been inexplicably cuffed with his hands to his front, managed to raise his hands to his neck at the last second and instead received a nonlethal slash to his neck and hands. Somehow managing to escape his would-be killers, the IP began to make his way to a nearby fort that overlooked the Syrian border from a cliff along the Euphrates.
The insurgents grabbed one remaining policeman and forced him to drive them in his pickup truck to the Ramanah IP station, where they then convinced the station’s intelligence officer to come outside. After slaughtering him the group proceeded to the home of the Ramanah IP station chief. Kicking down the door, the team entered the home and kidnapped the IP chief and his thirteen-year-old son.
The group made their way back through the early morning darkness to the Syrian border and subsequently executed the driver they had pressed into service, the IP captain, and his son with single shots to the head. They quickly shed their uniforms and equipment and retreated across the border into Syria. The wounded IP, who earlier had escaped death, arrived at the border fort and begged the border guards to open fire on the attackers as they stole across the border. Although the border guards would later claim to have fired thousands of rounds at the withdrawing enemy, the wounded IP insisted that they did nothing to halt the getaway of the insurgents.
Suspicion and speculation abounded, and at the regional security meeting that was convened the next day at the border fort every agency of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) adamantly insisted on a different version of what actually happened. Charges were leveled that the wounded IP was left alive on purpose; that the border guards had been paid off to look the other way; and that the attack had been planned and orchestrated by the Syrian intelligence agency. A report even surfaced that a Syrian antiaircraft gun had fired skyward as a homing beacon to direct the attackers’ movement across the border. Throughout the three-hour meeting the army, police, and border guard officers all angrily pointed fingers at one another, and the atmosphere in the crowded meeting hall seemed electrically charged. The summit ended with nothing resolved, and once more I sensed a deepening chasm of mistrust between all agencies of the ISF.
Later that night our team received a nervous call from 3rd Battalion’s COC. The tower guard posted at the camp’s southern ECP had reported that four vehicles resembling Humvees and MRAPs (mine-resistant, ambush-protected armored trucks) had approached the ECP, paused briefly, then turned around and made a hasty departure. We began radioing Coalition units throughout the Al Qa�
��im area, trying to determine if the vehicles had been friendly or not. When we kept coming up with nothing the team and the battalion went on alert until the situation could be resolved. No Coalition vehicles appeared on the BFT’s digital map readout, and no unit could account for vehicles in 3rd Battalion’s AO.
In the end the Marine task force finally relayed to us that one of their units had been in our sector conducting a battlespace tour with Marines from the oncoming task force. Their failure to properly coordinate their movement through our area of responsibility could have had disastrous consequences. The shock of the attack on the IPs in Ar Rabit had placed the soldiers of 3rd Battalion on a hair trigger, and the possibility had existed that they could have opened fire on the Coalition patrol. The Marines breathed a collective sigh of relief once the situation was defused.
Like the shooting incident at the northern ECP a week earlier, the episode emphasized the difficulties inherent in coordination between American and Iraqi units. Third Battalion “owned” the significant battlespace that surrounded COP South, and it was the Marine task force’s responsibility and obligation to coordinate movement through it. The frequent failure to do so was a trend the team had noticed as far back as our time at Mojave Viper, when the Marine forces routinely traveled through the Iraqi unit’s area without any prior coordination. Such disregard for the boundaries of the IA units was not only dangerous to the Marines traveling, it was also an insult to the IAs. It implied that the Americans did not recognize IA ownership of battlespace, and it polarized Coalition and Iraqi units. If the Marine task force and the Iraqi army could not coordinate with each other, if they could not truly conduct combined operations together, the Marines would never be able to fully hand over the responsibility for security to the ISF. This would prove to be a recurring theme, and at the risk of appearing parochial or of being apologists for the Iraqis, both my team and the brigade MiTT continued to browbeat the task force about coordination requirements.
There was no doubt about it: the executions in Ar Rabit had thrown 3rd Battalion into a deep state of paranoia. The fact that the IPs’ assassins had attacked under the guise of being American forces had petrified them, and nowhere was this more prevalent than at the camps of 1st and 2nd companies. Days later, when the Outlanders made a trip to Okinawa and Vera Cruz, I was met by an agitated Major Muthafer. Third Battalion’s COC had failed to inform his company that we were coming, and when our vehicles appeared at Okinawa’s gate the soldiers had freaked out. Upset that we had showed up unannounced, Muthafer anxiously expressed his fear of an attack like that the one that had occurred in Ar Rabit. Despite my profuse apologies he remained on edge until I promised him that all future visits by Coalition forces would be properly coordinated. I realized that the coordination problem was not the Coalition’s alone; the Iraqis too seemed to have difficulty applying the basics of battlefield tracking and deconfliction.
The fallout from the Ar Rabit massacre continued to snowball, and numerous investigations were initiated at all levels. The reporting of the incident eventually made its way up the chain to MNF-W, and a week after the attack I read with interest the commanding general’s comments in his daily situation report (SITREP). Maj. Gen. John Kelly—the commander of MNF-W, who had also been the assistant division commander of 1st Marine Division and the commander of Task Force Tripoli during the invasion five years earlier—was not a man given to hyperbole, yet his words in the report were raw and emotional, betraying his feelings of deep frustration with the Iraqi government. He discussed the IP attack at length, indicating that he was considering pulling the Marine border transition teams (BTTs) from their outposts for their own personal safety. I had never read comments from a general officer that were so personal and that cut through all the bullshit, and I wondered just how much success we were really having there in Iraq. How much would we really be able to influence the Iraqi agencies to mend their infighting? It had been a confusing, frustrating week, and as my team approached the three-month mark of its deployment I realized just how little we understood about that country, and how much further we had to go.
The long week of confusion and tensions in the wake of the Ar Rabit killings culminated in the early hours of 9 May. In a haze of sleep I heard Master Sergeant Deleon’s voice crackle over our team radio net.
“Three, this is Eight,” he said from inside the COC. Moments later a groggy-sounding Lieutenant Bates answered.
“This is Three.”
“There’s something here you need to see.”
I drifted off back to sleep but was awakened minutes later by Bates knocking loudly at my door.
“Uhhnn,” I said, sitting up from my bed. “What’s up?”
“You need to know what’s going on, sir,” Bates said, holding a scrap of paper in his hand. “Something’s happening with Second Company.”
Just before midnight three unidentified civilian vehicles had sped past 1st Company’s position at BP Okinawa and continued west along the highway. The company’s sentries had radioed 2nd Company about the three vehicles’ approach, and the soldiers at Vera Cruz had gone on alert. The speeding vehicles eventually came to a stop at Vera Cruz’s unmanned checkpoint along the road, and as they attempted to navigate around the coils of razor wire blocking their path a tower guard from the battle position began firing warning shots at them. The vehicles’ occupants, startled by the small-arms fire coming at them, returned fire in Vera Cruz’s direction until they could push their way through the barricade and escape to the west. The officers of 2nd Company alerted the Joint Coordination Center (JCC) and the Saffrah IP station, which lay farther west and directly in the path of the escaping automobiles. But the vehicles never arrived at Saffrah, having somehow melted into the night. A report had also filtered in that 2nd Company had launched its QRF to chase down the vehicles, but once the soldiers closed in on the IP station the policemen had opened fire on the IA vehicles with warning shots until the IAs could prove their identities. It was a miracle that none of the 2nd Company soldiers had been killed or injured in the confusion.
“The battalion’s gone on high alert,” Bates continued. “They’ve gone to ‘stand-to’ on all posts and the junood are ready to repel boarders.”
But holes riddled the story, and Bates spent the rest of the evening trying to get the facts straight from the recently returned Captain Al’aa. We all knew that following any incident the first reports were usually unreliable, and this occasion was no exception. At first the IAs reported that the vehicles had been three black Opels—compact sedans common throughout Iraq—but later that report changed to one Opel and two Land Cruisers. Debate stirred about whether the policemen at Saffrah had actually fired upon the 2nd Company QRF. And some unverified witnesses had claimed that the vehicle drivers were wearing American flight suits and tricolor desert camouflage. The Ar Rabit massacre still fresh in their minds, the Iraqis latched onto this last report, fearing that they were under attack once again by insurgents posing as Americans.
When I spoke with Ayad the following evening he was highly agitated by the episode, claiming the vehicles had been filled with Americans.
“No way, sadie,” I protested, attempting to dissuade him. “American forces would never drive around in uniform in civilian vehicles.”
He waved his hand, dismissing my explanation.
“I have directed all of my guard posts that if a vehicle approaches at night and does not stop, flash its lights, and wait to be cleared by my soldiers, then they are cleared to open fire.”
His orders, fueled by emotion, were potentially dangerous to Coalition forces, especially in light of the fact that there had been so much recent confusion with American units traveling around at night without coordinating their movement with the Iraqis.
“Okay, sadie,” I told him. “I’ll relay your intent to the brigade MiTT and the other Coalition forces in the AO. But it is important that your junood not be too quick on the trigger, or else they might shoot up a friendly vehicle.
”
I left Ayad’s office nervous about his new orders to his battalion. A real possibility of friendly fire suddenly existed, and unless I could convince him to ease up on his orders the outcome could be catastrophic.
The next morning I received a call from the brigade MiTT’s operations officer.
“Hey, you’re not gonna believe this,” he said. “You know those vehicles that got shot up at Vera Cruz last night? It was the SEAL team.”
“What?” I exclaimed. The Navy SEAL detachment had just recently arrived at Camp Al Qa’im. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Nope,” he replied. “It was them all right.”
“Well, shit,” I said, my irritation bleeding into the phone. “Now I’ve got to eat crow with Ayad tonight.”
“Why?”
“Because if I don’t tell him and he finds out later—which he will—he’s gonna accuse me of covering up for the Americans.”
“Have fun,” he said, hanging up.
And so, swallowing my pride, I walked across camp to explain to Ayad what had happened. His answer caught me off guard.
“Yes,” he said, nodding knowingly. “We knew it all along. Our sources and witnesses said from the beginning that it was Americans.”
Sources? I thought. Witnesses? It was the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere! I doubted that Ayad’s sources had actually reported anything, instead thinking that he was using the incident as some sort of leverage against me. But then I remembered him telling me the previous night that the personnel had been wearing American uniforms. It was a nowin situation for me, and I left our meeting embarrassed for the Coalition forces and unsure of Ayad’s reaction. More important than my embarrassment, however, was my concern that Ayad had ordered evening training for his guard posts. They were directed to rehearse procedures for defending the compound in the event of an attack.
In the Gray Area Page 16
