by Mark Urban
The SAS bashed a hole in the wall separating their property from Delta Force, and soon there was frequent two-way traffic between the neighbours. The British settled into the habit of Thursday night barbecues, raucous occasions that included beer, something forbidden to their Delta or Rangers neighbours. Each unit naturally equipped itself with an operations room, a gym and a television room. A landing pad big enough for several helicopters was laid out at the back of the row of houses. The whole complex was christened Mission Support Station (MSS) Fernandez, in memory of Master Sergeant George Fernandez, a Delta Force operator who had been killed in April fighting members of the jihadist group Ansar al-Islam in northern Iraq. The battle in which Fernandez died was a portent of the struggle that Task Force Green, as Delta was often called, and the rest of the special operations community in Iraq would face.
Having found a home at the MSS, G Squadron initially kept its HQ element and much of its gear at BIAP. Both the OC and the sergeant-major judged it better to keep their heavy stores in position there, ready for rapid deployment anywhere in the country. During the early months of the SAS operation in Baghdad, there was frequent shuttling between the airport and the MSS several miles to the east, in what soon came to be known as the Green Zone. The airport road would become one of the most dangerous stretches in Iraq, but as one SAS man said of those early months, ‘I used to be able to drive on that road, on my own, at night’.
For G Squadron, the first significant operation of their tour came on 16 June. The US had issued its deck of cards of wanted Ba’athists and Lieutenant-General Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, a key associate of Saddam Hussein, ranked as the fourth most important. He was indeed a High-Value Target, and British intelligence had picked up a trace of him. The takedown in Tikrit that night was a joint UK/US operation. A couple of dozen men from G Squadron sped north in their Land Rovers, meeting up at an airbase near the city with operators from B Squadron of Delta Force. They formulated an attack plan in which one group would be landed by helicopters while others assaulted on the ground. The place was taken without resistance and, after a brief comedy in which Tikriti had been identified wearing a bad wig, the Coalition operators had their man. Given that only Saddam and his two sons ranked higher in the HVT pecking order, it was considered a highly successful operation. The SAS had got started in the business many of them would call ‘man hunting’.
Just over a week later, a disturbing event in the south drew in G Squadron and graphically demonstrated to British commanders the enormous potential for violence in Iraq. It happened in the town of Majar al-Kabir, in Maysan Province, one of those in the south that had been taken over by British forces. Arriving in Maysan, the British had soon become aware of its reputation for uncompromising lawlessness and banditry. The people there insisted they had liberated themselves from Saddam and did not want Coalition troops. British sweeps for guns, often using dogs – a tactic particularly inflammatory for Muslims – had caused local anger, and when six Royal Military Police soldiers had gone to a police station in Majar al-Kabir on 24 June a mob of several hundred attacked them.
What followed shocked the British army. Owing to poor coordination with the ground-holding unit (1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment), nobody came to help the lightly armed RMPs, who took refuge in the police station. The crowd stormed the building and some of the Red Caps were shot, others beaten to death with fists and stones.
A couple of days after the incident, half a dozen members of the SAS descended on Majar al-Kabir. The Paras declined to support their sortie into the town. Pressing on without a Quick Reaction Force to come to their aid was hazardous, but the SAS men went on and, in their own style, made enquiries about who had been responsible for killing the British soldiers. It didn’t take them long to get some answers, but gunmen were also appearing on the streets and it became apparent that they would have to shoot their way out.
The soldiers gathered their information, quitting the town under a hail of fire. But those running the British division in southern Iraq discouraged the SAS from going back in to arrest those responsible for the 24 June killings. The guidance to the special operators was just the same as it had been to 1 Para – stay out until the situation calms down.
In these few days in June 2003, the SAS team had seen the way things were going to play out. The future lay in Baghdad.
Those who ran UK special forces knew well enough that if they wanted to mount successful takedowns good, timely intelligence was critical to success. The more operations you wanted, the more intelligence you would need. As SIS started to set up shop, it was apparent that its variety of tasks, ranging from trying to find WMD to gathering political intelligence or predicting what might happen in the post-Saddam power vacuum, meant they could throw TF-14 the occasional bone but little more. And even if they did bring in a good tip, how would the SAS get there without its own helicopters, how would they fit in with the other troops operating there and who would back them up if things went wrong? These questions could be answered in part by sticking close to the Americans: if they were involved in every operation they could provide choppers and liaise with the local US ground-holding unit. But if the SAS worked like that they could show little independence and might be completely scuppered when operating in the British-held areas to the south. And if they could do so little on their own, what point was there in adding a few dozen British special operators to the huge killing machine already set in motion by the US?
To Williams, Beaufort and Lamb, the answers to these questions suggested that the SAS either develop its capabilities or give up the game. Since none of them were quitters by nature, they needed a stand-alone operation – or at least elements of one. The first step consisted of forming a special Iraqi unit as part of TF-14.
During the invasion of Iraq the British had assisted Scorpion Force, a special intelligence collection unit bankrolled by the CIA and manned largely by Iraqis. Much of the raw material for this outfit had come from the exiled Iraqi opposition – the mostly Shia and Kurd anti-Saddam parties on which the Pentagon set great store in those early days after the invasion. Scorpion Force was not considered a success for many reasons; many of its men disappeared soon after the invasion and others were considered to be political hacks rather than soldiers.
Starting afresh, the British set about assembling a different team of Iraqis. They found a dozen, so the unit was immediately christened The Apostles. The Apostles would emerge as the unsung heroes of what was to follow. They were used for everything from interpreting for SAS teams on the ground to more sensitive operations. Their singular advantage in all these missions was an ability to blend in on Iraqi streets in a way no foreigner could manage.
As the operation built up, the obvious question was, what was it for? The search for WMD soon became the kind of dispiriting exercise that many in the forces are used to but special operators, with their thirst for action or other tangible successes, carry out on sufferance. It was obvious with the killing already breaking out on Baghdad’s streets that it had political undercurrents. What was going on? Coalition forces had already killed hundreds, perhaps thousands of irregulars, from the Fedayeen Saddam and other groups during the invasion. Were the people who the Pentagon high-ups liked to call ‘Ba’athist dead-enders’ going to rally resistance to the invaders? Or what about the jihadists, religious extremists like Ansar al-Islam, whom intelligence suggested were summoning mujahedeen from across the Middle East to do battle with Americans in Iraq?
The top brass back in the UK didn’t seem to care about the answers to these questions. ‘There was a sense of apathy in the UK about why any of this mattered,’ recalls one special operator. ‘We were going into soft hats.’ The view of those watching the glue of Iraqi society dissolving on the streets of Baghdad was quite different from those back home, who just wanted to move on. With a bewildering array of possible enemies – from jihadists to demobbed officers or Sunni tribes – the SAS needed proper authority to shift from the war an
d WMD missions to something new. Major Williams took the initiative. In June 2003 he sent up a request for a new mission. It went through the command machinery back in the UK and was duly authorised under the codename Operation PARADOXICAL. Those who know about the contents of this secret order say it was very broadly drawn, allowing the SAS to target ‘threats to the Coalition’ without defining exactly what they were. While others debated whether an insurgency had really broken out, Britain’s special operators had already written their own marching orders.
2
INTO THE BLOOD
On 31 October 2003, Halloween, the SAS set out from the Big Brother House, as they had dubbed their modern-looking Baghdad mansion. They were riding in a handful of Land Rover WMIKs – Land Rovers mounted with heavy machine guns – and other Land Rovers. They nosed through the traffic in a city that was changing by the week.
The old government quarter on the west bank of the Tigris was already being sealed with concrete T-walls, concertina wire and roadblocks. At its centre was the Republican Palace with its giant sculptures of Saddam’s head on each corner. The special ops complex that the SAS had left that day, MSS Fernandez, was also walled into the four square miles of the Green Zone.
As this part of the city centre was sealed off, traffic started slowing and choking because of all the detours. Outside the Green Zone the oases of calm or pleasure that the city’s five million inhabitants had enjoyed were being smothered. As one bomb followed another at the main entrance to this fortified area, the once-bustling shops on nearby Haifa Street became too dangerous for most. Across the river, on Abu Nawas Street, there were restaurants where wealthy Baghdadis sat drinking arak or beer and downing masgouf, a local carp dish. But Abu Nawas Street was close to the Sheraton and Palestine Hotels where many foreign visitors were, and foreigners had become targets. As the road was closed with barbed wire and concrete, one by one the restaurants shut up shop.
There had been pleasure in Saddam’s Iraq as well as pain. But as the summer of 2003 wore on, all of the characteristics of life as it used to be – from fear of the secret policeman on the corner to the delights of washing down your masgouf with a bottle of beer – were disappearing. Through the carrots and sticks of Ba’athist Iraq, Baghdad had functioned as a multicultural metropolis, but with the arrival of the Americans this era was over. In this new world of uncertainty everybody seemed to be staking their claim with violence. In the east of Baghdad, in Sadr City – home to hundreds of thousands of Shia – gangs of looters had armed themselves with everything up to and including heavy machine guns and mortars. And while the Shia political parties had not yet turned on the Coalition, whom they thanked for toppling their oppressor, they were busy forming armed militia groups.
The western districts of Baghdad, through which the SAS column made its way, were predominantly Sunni. In these areas, attacks on passing Coalition forces had already started. The SAS was keeping itself busy responding to this emerging disorder, though as special forces they weren’t specifically focused on this street-level aggro, but rather the underlying strategic connections, for example those emerging between jihadists in Iraq and men coming in from other countries. Their broadly drawn post-invasion mission, Operation PARADOXICAL, gave them great latitude to operate with US classified forces prosecuting the best available intelligence. That was just how the regiment liked to do business.
Britain’s hand-picked troops headed west in their Land Rovers, under blue motorway signs that marked the way to Fallujah and Ramadi. The mission that night was to mount a raid on a compound near Ramadi. There were about two dozen ‘blades’ or fighting members of the regiment (the term coming from the designation as Sabre Squadrons of its four fighting subunits A, B, D and G) in the convoy. G Squadron had left Iraq in August and it was the turn of A Squadron to go out looking for trouble. Being technically the senior of the regiment’s four subunits, A Squadron fancied itself as the best, but naturally every other squadron would have disputed it. There was a steady banter in the vehicles – humour was rarely in short supply on these ops and A Squadron could never have been accused of taking itself too seriously. Its badge, semi-officially at least, bears what looks like a red scorpion on a blue background but, legend has it, the creature is in fact a pubic louse removed decades before from the moustache of a squadron sergeant-major.
The road running west through the Sunni heartlands to the Jordanian border had already proven thoroughly dangerous. Aid and news organisations had stopped using it after numerous brushes with armed men – bandits or insurgents, people weren’t quite sure what to call them – who robbed and sometimes killed passers-by. The convoy passed Abu Ghraib, where American guards had already taken over Saddam’s notorious prison, and over the Fallujah cloverleaf.
By late October, with the onset of Ramadan, something crazy had started in Iraq. The killing was soaring, as if open season had been declared on the invaders. Back in August there had been ten to fifteen attacks a day on Coalition forces across Iraq. By the end of October it had doubled, and by late November the shooting, mortars and car bombs would be running at around three times the figure of the summer.
In the weeks that A Squadron had been in Iraq there had been a distinct change in what the soldiers called ‘atmospherics’. Widespread unrest in Sunni areas – an insurrection, in fact – had broken out against the Americans. There had also been some spectacular attacks using huge truck bombs: the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad had been blown up on 7 August; twelve days later the United Nations compound had been flattened and their special envoy to Iraq among the twenty-two people killed; and on 29 August Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer Hakim, a senior Shia cleric, had been the victim of another massive blast. The hallmark of all three attacks was the use of what the Americans called ‘V-bids’ or VBIEDs – Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Devices, driven by suicide attackers against highly symbolic targets, which cause large numbers of casualties. In the case of the bomb that killed Ayatollah Hakim at the Shia spiritual centre of Najaf, more than ninety had been killed.
As the mercury of political killing had soared in autumn 2003, the Americans and their allies had struggled to understand it. There were so many different strands of violence that the intelligence analysts sent to Baghdad, few of whom had much experience of the Arab world, could not untangle them. The Bush Administration’s desire to force this mayhem into an ideological template had its own consequences. The orthodoxy coming down from the Office of the Secretary of Defence was that the violence must either be a product of Ba’athist ‘dead-enders’ trying to regain power or was being perpetrated by foreigners, fuelled up on Osama bin Laden’s international jihadism. Many in the Administration believed that Iraq fitted into the Global War on Terror, seeing the country as a great prize in the contest between the US – which was trying to turn it into a modern Middle Eastern democracy – and al-Qaeda, which could not allow this to happen. Some did disagree with this orthodoxy, for example General John Abizaid, head of Central Command, who had ruffled feathers in Washington in July 2003 by calling the situation a ‘classical guerrilla war’, but the idea that the violence resulted from a widespread Iraqi rejection of the invasion still rankled with Donald Rumsfeld and many others. Consequently, the tasking of critical intelligence assets and, through them, of Coalition special operations forces was closely linked to Administration ideology.
The special ops people had been steadily rounding up the former Ba’athists in the pack of cards. Late in July, Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay had been cornered and killed: the owner of the Mosul house in which they were hiding had sold them out for the reward money. Many of the intelligence people had, however, started to wonder whether rounding up the old leadership was going to get them out of trouble. Instead of the secular old Ba’athists, they worried about the new face of international Islamic militancy. Might they even be doing the jihadists a favour by removing the natural local leadership in many Sunni areas, creating a vacuum? Their answer was to pursue ‘transnational terrorist
s’ or foreign fighters at the same time as the Ba’athists. But if thousands of Muslims were heeding Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri’s appeal to wage jihad in Iraq against the infidels, then there was a shortage of actionable intelligence about what might be done to stop it. Delta Force had glimpsed this threat in the north, during its early confrontation with Ansar al-Islam, but months had gone by without hard leads. This Halloween, the American agencies had turned up something fresh – a tip about what they might find in Ramadi.
Meeting their colleagues from Delta in a laying-up point outside the city, the SAS received a briefing. The Americans were in pursuit of an important Sudanese jihadist believed to be facilitating the arrival of Islamic militants into Iraq and operating from a safe house in Ramadi. His work had required contact with brothers in other countries and the Americans had homed in on a satellite phone that he used. The operation, codenamed ABALONE, involved a series of assaults on a strip of dwellings on the fringes of Ramadi. The street faced onto open ground and it was across this sand that the main SAS assault would be delivered. Ramadi was already sufficiently dangerous that this operation might produce widespread resistance, so the local US unit, a mechanised infantry battalion normally based in Germany, had assigned a platoon of Bradleys to support the attack. The Bradley is a tracked and turreted heavy armoured vehicle – though many laymen assume it is a tank. It can carry infantry though, and its main weapon, a 25mm cannon, is much lighter than that of a tank.
