by Peter Nealen
It was vaguely fascinating. I can’t say I’d ever been a spectator to a firefight before. I’d been in plenty, and was about to become a participant in this one, but I’d never just watched two groups try to kill each other before. It was weird. I saw another PPF trooper dash from cover only to be cut down in a hail of gunfire that kicked up a furious storm of dust around him as he crumpled face-first in the dirt, blood soaking his abdomen.
Finally, I set my crosshairs on Abu Falah, who was crouched in the shadow of a larger brick grave, and pushed the PTT. “Execute, execute, execute,” I sent, and squeezed the trigger.
The M1A bucked into my shoulder. My position was solidly behind it, so the crosshairs hardly moved as the bullet smacked into Abu Falah’s back, right between his shoulder blades. He rocked forward, then slid down into the dirt, leaving a smear of blood on the bricks from the exit hole. Scratch one terrorist facilitator. Good riddance.
Larry’s FAL cracked next to me, the muzzle blast throwing up some dirt and grit in front of us, and another fighter plowed his face into a headstone, a pair of matching 7.62 holes in his back. I shifted to a man in jeans and a yellow soccer jersey with a SIG 550, and cut him down with a fast pair of shots that smashed him on his side in the dirt, sending up a large puff of dust as he hit.
As Larry and I engaged the Ansar Al Khilafah fighters, there was a roar of full-auto fire as Jim opened fire with an M60E4, raking the PPF vehicles. Under cover of the storm of fire, Bryan and Juan started gunning down the PPF troops with carefully aimed shots. Tan-uniformed gunmen started dropping, starting with the other PKP gunner. I took my attention off the Salafists long enough to see another PPF man clambering into the back of the first pickup, reaching for the PKP. My shot was high, catching him right around the collarbone, above the sternum. He fell backwards over the edge of the bed, his legs flying up in the air as he went down.
By now, the kill zone was complete chaos. Both sides had realized that they were taking fire from at least two directions, and were scrambling for cover, exposing themselves to each other in the process. More PPF and Salafi fighters went down, both to our fire and each other’s. They were down to only a handful of shooters apiece now.
“Move in,” I sent. Larry and I got up, rather more laboriously than I would have liked under the circumstances, heaving the tarp and its concealing carpet of dirt and dust off. We were both caked in dust and mud. I stayed on a knee, lining up a Salafi who was peeking around a headstone, looking the wrong way, and shot him through the head. “Go!” I barked. Larry got to his feet in a half crouch, and dashed toward the nearest gravesite, where he dropped down behind it before just barely exposing his head and rifle over the top.
The crack of his shot was the signal. I moved, angling away from him to get us some dispersion, throwing my rifle up to snap two shots at a running figure in a soccer jersey with an AK. I missed, but he ducked away, and by the time he might have gotten another shot at me, I was already making myself as small as possible behind a fairly ornate grave.
AK rounds snapped overhead and smacked into the bricks of the grave, showering me with more dust. I dropped down and cranked myself around the side of the grave, and fired two snap shots at him, but he’d ducked back as soon as his rifle fell silent. I stayed where I was, waiting, and sure enough, he popped back up in the same spot, his AK reloaded, and stuck it out almost at arm’s length. I shot him twice, high in the chest, and he toppled backward, red splashing across his chest.
Larry popped up to my right, his FAL hammering out nearly an entire mag. “We’ve got company!” he yelled. I fired at another Khilafah fighter, winging him and sending him spinning into the dust, before looking.
Sure enough, there were more black and white trucks closing in, along with two tall, lumbering ILAVs. I didn’t know how the PPF had gotten their hands on ILAVs, but those were not going to be easy to take down, even with some of the heavier firepower that Paul had in the van. Unfortunately, the plan pretty well depended on putting the fear into the PPF, and that meant nobody but us was walking away from this graveyard. “Apostle, can you take those ILAVs?” I sent.
“One at a time, but I’ll have to move as soon as I fire,” he replied. “Kemosabe, can you shift fire onto the newcomers as soon as I’ve engaged?”
“Roger, Apostle,” Jim replied. “Do it. I’ve got you.”
There was a bang and cloud of dust and smoke from near the van, quickly eclipsed by the bone-jarring explosion as the RPG-27 warhead smashed into the lead ILAV and detonated. The ILAV was a version of the US MRAP that had been developed during the Iraqi occupation, and was pretty close to mine- and IED-proof. That did not make it proof against an RPG that was rated to blow up tanks.
The ILAV rocked under the impact, and the rear hatch popped open from the overpressure. Flames shot out of the turret and the open hatch. Several PPF bodies were scattered on the ground nearby, their organs pulped by the blast.
I couldn’t dwell on it; we had to finish the guys in the cemetery. Between us and the PPF, there weren’t many of the Khilafah fighters left. I could only count four or five, and they were huddled near a larger grave at the northwest corner of the cemetery, trying to make a last stand. They had a decent position, and they weren’t exposing themselves much; it was going to be difficult to crack them out of there while still worrying about getting shot in the back by the PPF.
I could hear the rapid, thumping rattle of Jim’s M60, as he kept the second ILAV gunner’s head down with short, tight bursts. The air was crackling with weapons fire, and the dust and smoke from the burning ILAV was starting to make things a little hard to see. I dashed from cover, aiming to get a better angle on the surviving Salafists, and barely got there, throwing myself flat behind a gravestone as gunfire shredded the air over my head with a series of painful cracks. That was a little too close, and I realized I didn’t even know who had shot at me. Not that it mattered.
I rolled out just far enough to clear the headstone, and found I didn’t have a shot. There was too much earth, graves, and low shrubs between me and the bad guys. I tried to get up on a knee, but a storm of fire blasting overhead and pulverizing the top of the headstone force me back down.
Okay, motherfuckers. If you want to play that way… I started to crawl, moving laterally and forward toward another, larger, brick grave. I heard Larry shooting, the heavy crack of his FAL drowning out a lot of the lighter AK fire. I scrabbled over to the next grave, my elbows and knees screaming in pain from the rocks and hard ground. Pulling my knees up under me, I popped up out of cover, bringing my rifle to my shoulder as I moved.
One of the Salafist fighters was up, his AK held almost over his head as he sprayed fire at my last position. He caught a glimpse of me out of the corner of his eye, and had just enough time to look surprised before I shot him twice, sending him sprawling back into his fellow jihadi, who was just finishing reloading his own AK. I fired two more shots at him, and then ducked back behind the grave.
Larry had moved while I was shooting, and his fire picked back up as I got back in cover. I stripped the nearly-empty mag out and rocked in a fresh one before popping back around the other side of the grave, just in time to catch a man in a light green shirt and black pants leveling his SIG 550 in Larry’s general direction. I hammered him down with three fast shots, walking them up his side.
Everything seemed to pause for a split second again, as there was another bang, followed almost immediately by the earth-shaking thump of Paul’s second RPG-27 shot killing the second ILAV. A glance in that direction showed that the vehicle had moved, trying to get away from the kill zone where the first one had died. It hadn’t helped, as Paul had circled around through the side streets, and come out in a completely different location, with just the right angle to put the PG round right in the rear hatch.
The momentary distraction was enough. Larry and I opened fire at the same time, from two different directions, and cut the last two Khilafah fighters down in a welter of blood and dust.
The PPF had apparently decided that discretion was the better part of valor, especially after their second ILAV went up in smoke. The remaining tan-uniformed troops were piling on the two black-and-white pickups that hadn’t been thoroughly filled with bullet holes, and were starting to fall back toward the city. About half of them were still dumping fire indiscriminately into the cemetery.
“Apostle, are you clear?” I called out.
“Roger, Hillbilly, I’m out of the zone,” Paul replied. “Standing by at Point X-ray to pick you guys up.”
That meant he was out of our line of fire, having circled back to a point off to the southeast of Zubayr. “All stations, shift your fire to the PPF trucks. Lane is clear,” I sent.
The cacophony of weapons fire increased, as we unloaded on the fleeing trucks. Dust flew, glass shattered, and I saw several more PPF troopers who were riding in the backs fall, bloody holes blown in their bodies. The volume of fire aimed at the cemetery slacked off, as they either died or ducked for cover.
One of the trucks was done, smoking and still, riddled with holes and splashed with blood. The second was running for it, sparks starting to fly up from the road as it drove on two completely blown-out tires. It fishtailed, but made it around a corner, and none of us had a line of fire on it anymore.
The shooting stopped abruptly, and it was as though everything had gone deathly silent. It hadn’t, but the contrast was stunning. My ears were ringing, in spite of the low profile earpro/radio headset I was wearing.
“Fast SSE and then we’re out of here,” I ordered. I wasn’t expecting much of intelligence value from the bodies and vehicles the PPF had left behind, but the Ansar Al Khilafah goons might have something useful. We were equal-opportunity jihadi killers. We’d take intel that would lead to dead Salafists just as gladly as any that led to dead Iranians.
The Khilafah fighters were piled in a fairly central location. We found a few papers and a couple of thumb drives, most of them fouled with blood, but the thumb drives at least would hopefully yield some information. We left the weapons; we needed to move fast to get out of there, preferably before anybody tumbled to the fact that a bunch of Americans had just ambushed the PPF and Ansar Al Khilafah at the same time. To the best of our knowledge, the PPF, and by extension the IRGC, didn’t know we were a player in Basra. I wanted to keep it that way for as long as possible.
I had a small digital camera in a pouch on my belt. I took hasty photographs of each of the Ansar Al Khilafah fighters, as well as any PPF with any kind of serious rank. They weren’t going to be the best photos, but we didn’t have a lot of time. I was hoping to get a picture of just who we’d shwacked here. We’d go over them all in the post-op data dump, and see if we could figure out how it might affect the overall situation.
We were shielded from most of Zubayr by the trees that grew on the north side of the cemetery, so we were actually able to do most of our site exploitation completely unobserved. I kept an eye on my watch. It was only a matter of time before the PPF responded in force, at a level we couldn’t deal with. We’d pulled this off through the sheer element of surprise; I was pretty sure neither side had had the slightest clue what was going on.
Ten minutes had passed. It was time to go. I circled my hand over my head, and pointed east, toward X-ray, the van, and our extract. It was time to get the hell out of Dodge.
I led off at a fast trot. The cemetery wasn’t walled, so we didn’t have to worry about going out the gate. We might attract attention moving so fast, but I wanted to be away from the scene as soon as possible. I hate doing these sorts of operations in daylight.
Paul had actually brought the van closer in that he was supposed to, which I’d chew him out about later, but right at the moment, it meant we could get out of there more quickly. I was willing to cut him some slack as far as that went, as we piled in the back and pulled the doors shut.
Paul slammed the van in gear, and started us moving south, toward Route 8. From there, we’d head north back to Basra. Ahmed would meet us just outside the city, and get us through the checkpoints.
“So now we wait and see how Qomi reacts to this,” Jim said, already running a bore snake through his 60.
“Specifically, we see how his bosses in Tehran react to this,” Larry pointed out.
I shook my head. “I doubt Tehran is going to step in directly just yet,” I said. “They’ve been trying to pull this off through patsies and agents so far. Yeah, they’ve moved their own people into leadership positions in the PPF, and who knows where else in Basra, not to mention moving facilitators in to support terrorists all over the country, but there hasn’t been any sign so far that they’re taking more of a ‘hands on’ stance than that.” I ran my hand through my hair, which was now greasy and crusty with sweat, salt, and dust. “We’ll have to see, of course, but I’m hoping that it throws Qomi for a loop. If he panics, we might get a shot at him.”
“And if he doesn’t?” Juan asked.
I grimaced. “Then we come up with a different plan. It’s possible that this might backfire, and they just turtle more. That would help, as they wouldn’t be as effective in taking over, but it would only slow them down. But we knew that things might not go according to plan before we left the safehouse.”
“Nothing goes according to plan,” Bryan said. “A plan is just a list of shit that ain’t gonna happen.”
I looked over at him. “First Jim, now you. Is everybody determined to take over my place as Voice of Doom?”
“Hey, it’s a fun gig,” Jim said.
It may seem callous, joking right after killing so many people. The fact is the joking helped cope with the adrenaline letdown. As for the killing, we were all pretty hardened to it by that time. It was combat. They would have killed us just as quickly as they’d been trying to kill each other. It’s a level of do-or-die existence that most people back home had never experienced, and thus could never understand.
Chapter 21
Well, that did not turn out the way we’d hoped.
Within days, the PPF had gone to ground, while beefing up checkpoints. Qomi hadn’t showed his face even on TV; he’d just ordered his goons to crack down. Our plan to try to draw him out had backfired. He’d turtled instead.
We were still snooping around, looking for targets of opportunity, but our movement had been severely curtailed by the checkpoints. Unless we just started knocking off PPF patrols, we were getting down to only one option left.
“Security or no security,” Jim said, “we’re going to have to go into that station after him.”
“He can’t be staying every single fucking night in there,” Nick said. “He’s got to go home sometime.”
“That’s assuming he has a home in Basra,” Haas pointed out as he came into the room. “We might have another option.”
Everyone turned to look at him. “Gilani talked?” I asked.
“A little bit,” Haas replied, as he grabbed a bottle of water and sat down against the wall. “Maybe enough.
“The operations we ran into up north were a diversion; they were trying to sow enough chaos, using whatever hardline Islamist elements they could, to keep Baghdad’s attention there. The main power play is here, in Basra, though he thinks they could be extending operations to Sadr City in Baghdad itself.
“While the country is predominantly Shi’a, and the government in Baghdad now reflects this, it’s still too secular for the Mullahs’ tastes. They’re cracking down on their own people again; the Basij is apparently going Taliban-style in some places in Iran. There’s more unrest than there has been in a few years, but the Mullahs aren’t having any of it. The last thing they want is a successful secular state next door, much less one set up by the United States.
“Furthermore, while they have more influence with a Shi’a-dominated government, especially since the US pulled out, the parliament is still too Iraqi nationalist. People in this part of the world have long memories.” He grunted at the looks we gave h
im. “Of course I don’t need to tell you guys that. Anyway, there are still people who remember the Iran-Iraq war back in the ‘80s, and still hold grudges. They don’t like Iranians on general principles, and vice versa.
“In order to get the kind of ally/puppet state they had in Syria before the civil war, the Iranians have to increase their influence, and the way they’re doing that is by taking over the south, province by province. They want a buffer between them and the Salafists in Syria and Saudi, and Iraq is going to be it. They also want a puppet within striking range of Israel. Now that Hezbollah is barely holding on in Lebanon, and has been forced out of Syria, again, that’s Iraq.
“Meanwhile, Al Nusrah, Ansar Al Khilafah, and Jund Al Sham are pushing into Al Anbar, extending their reach into the ‘Sunni Triangle.’ It sounds like some of the tribal militias are resisting them, but they’ve been severely weakened at government insistence, since the Shi’a-majority government doesn’t want Sunni tribes to be armed.”
“What a fucking mess,” Bryan said. “Still, how does it affect what we’re trying to do?”
“I’m getting to that,” Haas said, sounding a little annoyed. “The Iranians, namely the Council of Guardians and the IRGC, are getting nervous about the increased activity out in Ramadi and Fallujah. From what Gilani told me, they’re aiming to move up the schedule. That means more Qods Force personnel, and their supposedly bringing in Hezbollah fighters who escaped from Syria. He doesn’t know exactly when, but supposedly they’ve been waiting in Bushehr for the go. He hadn’t sent it yet, but after the ambush in Zubayr the other day, I wouldn’t be surprised if they are on their way, along with a sizeable number of Basij.”
“Where are they landing?” I asked.
“It sounded like they were supposed to come straight up the Shatt al Arab and dock right here in Basra,” he replied. That presented problems in trying to hit them. We hadn’t decided on that course of action, but every one of us was thinking about it anyway.
