by Mark Urban
As if this wasn’t enough to worry the British watching in Downing Street and the military, the Coalition’s problems suddenly multiplied. Under orders from Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, troops moved to arrest a senior member of the Mehdi Army – a Shia militia – and close down its newspaper. This touched off an insurrection by thousands of Shia gunmen loyal to a radical preacher, Muqtada al-Sadr. What became known as the First Sadrist Rising marked the awakening of a sleeping giant of Shia militancy. Although many of the Shia, who were the clear majority of the Iraqi population, did not like al-Sadr’s party, support for it would soon spiral upwards if it was seen to be taking on the goliath of the US military, or venting national frustration with the failure of the American project. The Sadrist Rising had grave implications for the British, not least because of the Mehdi Army’s strength in Basra, Nasiriyah and other places under the control of the British-led Multi-National Division South East. In the south, large-scale gun battles with the Sadrists marked the definitive end of the honeymoon that many of the British military felt they had enjoyed.
In a few days in April hundreds of people died as the Coalition tried to escape a disaster of its own making: a two-front fight. The Sunni revolt was already well established, with Fallujah as its symbolic centre. By triggering a national rising by a powerful Shia militia the Americans ran the risk of alienating the community that was emerging as dominant in the new Iraq. If there was any silver lining for those watching from Downing Street, it was that international attention focused more on Fallujah than on the crisis facing British troops in the south. Having entered the war feeling the need to stand shoulder to shoulder with the US, even Tony Blair began to doubt the wisdom of being too closely associated with operations like those in Fallujah.
Bremer and his military chiefs knew they could not sustain a confrontation on this scale. On 9 April they ordered a halt to the Fallujah operation and the gunmen on the city’s streets proclaimed victory. The violence with the Sadrists was far from over. Heavy fighting involving British troops erupted in al-Amarrah, the capital of Maysan, and the following month US troops confronted the Mehdi Army in its centres of resistance: Sadr City in east Baghdad, and the holy city of Najaf.
If Bremer and his commanders had reeled from this battering, there was one more body blow for them to absorb that April. On the 28th the American television programme 60 Minutes showed pictures of detainees being abused by American guards at Abu Ghraib. The resulting furore produced a crisis of confidence in the US and yet more damage to the country’s reputation in the Middle East. It was at this moment that Zarqawi, sensitive to the propaganda value of the moment, chose to dress Nick Berg in a Guantanamo-style orange jumpsuit for his last video appearance, and said he was being killed in revenge for the abuse of prisoners at the Iraqi jail. The video of Berg’s last moments hit the internet just a fortnight after the Abu Ghraib pictures emerged, with the story still running high in the global news agenda.
The combination of these setbacks, as George Bush campaigned for re-election, proved terminal for Bremer and his military chief Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez. By June the latter had been replaced by General George Casey, and Bremer signed off to the Interim Iraqi Government. The US–UK occupation authority, the CPA, vanished. With this change, the military gained a legal fig leaf through an authorising United Nations Security Council resolution sanctioning their operations. The good news – that Coalition forces had a legal mandate – was balanced with a difficult new reality: US and British commanders found themselves in a new world of political management, one in which they increasingly had to take account of what Iraqi politicians wanted. This was to prove particularly difficult for ground-holding commanders like Britain’s in Basra, where a testy governor and provincial authority second-guessed their operations.
As for British participation in the Coalition, it was profoundly affected by these simultaneous crises. With growing public hostility to the war, Downing Street could hardly blame the press for ignoring ‘all the good news coming out of Iraq’ as it had throughout 2003. The blistering fighting experienced in the south, where the British had briefly come close to running out of ammunition, had its effect on many at the divisional headquarters at Basra air station. One colonel told me, ‘Since the Sadrist rising, we’ve basically been looking at our watches and asking “can we go now please?”’
The special forces further north, operating as Task Force Black, took a more aggressive attitude. JSOC’s operation had, through its intense secrecy, gained a large measure of exemption from the hostile public scrutiny that now focused on the visible Coalition effort. Task Force Black could see the militant Islamists gaining power by the day in the resistance, and they knew their mates in JSOC were increasingly hard-pressed in the struggle against them. But April’s crises had produced intense unease in Whitehall. It made ministers wary about being seen to do too much to back the Americans. What was more, Abu Ghraib had also made them extremely sensitive to the issue of detention. At a time when the need for a coordinated Allied response to these crises was at its peak, the UK started trying to distance itself from its faltering ally. This affected even traditionally intimate areas of cooperation such as special ops. It was to be on the rock of the detention issue that UK special forces operations in Iraq foundered later in 2004.
The Abu Ghraib scandal came not long after British intelligence and Task Force Black discovered what had happened to the two Pakistanis whom they had captured on Operation ASTON. It was standard procedure, on returning to the MSS after an operation, to turn over prisoners to the Americans. It had happened that way since soon after the invasion.
In the case of the suspected Pakistani militants dark rumours soon began to circulate. After being handed over, they had been put on a plane to Afghanistan for interrogation at the US facility at Bagram airbase. By detaining them, the British had played a part in this rendition. Campaigners would later argue that Amanatullah Ali, the Pakistani national, was a Shia who had gone to Iraq on a pilgrimage and who could not, by virtue of his religious confession, have been a member of the Sunni militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba. At the time of writing, more than five years after their arrest, those same campaigners have not yet established the identity of the Qatari national picked up with Ali, such was the secrecy surrounding the Bagram detention facility and its inmates.
Defending their actions, the Americans argued that their interrogators in Iraq did not have the linguistic skills to screen the men so it had to be done elsewhere. Unaware of this, the SAS had passed on the prisoners and London was unhappy. The British told JSOC that they could no longer hand over detainees if they were going to be flown elsewhere. The creation of this ‘national caveat’, as such restrictions are known in Coalition operations, was not to be the last of 2004, nor was it the most damaging to Task Force Black’s relationship with the Americans. The vast majority of those taken were, after all, Iraqis and there was no need to send them to Bagram or a ‘black prison’ in some other land for interrogation. The events in Fallujah, however, were acting as a catalyst, accelerating the change towards an insurgency dominated by Islamists rather than nationalists. And the way in which the US had chosen to deal with Fallujah was simply feeding this trend.
Throughout the summer of 2004 Fallujah operated as a ‘liberated zone’ for the Iraqi resistance groups. The CIA’s formation of the Fallujah Brigade, a Sunni security force under a former Republican Guard brigadier, in April proved to be a costly and divisive miscalculation. Rather than holding the ring and providing the US with a dignified way out of the confrontation, the brigade’s soldiers soon declared for the resistance, either handing over their weapons or signing up with the association of jihadist and nationalist groups that vied for authority in the town.
Fallujah had long been a bastion of conservatism. It revelled in its reputation as a city of two hundred mosques. Perhaps inevitably, when credit was being claimed for halting the US Marines in April increasingly it was th
e Islamist voices that drowned out the others. As to who was leading this chorus, one intelligence figure remarks, ‘All the reporting suggested Zarqawi was in Fallujah.’ Armed men walked the streets in the white robes and headdresses of Salafist purists, while in the bazaar, DVDs of Hindi musicals were replaced by snuff movies showing members of the new Iraqi army, or terrified men who identified themselves as spies, being murdered on screen.
According to some who served in Baghdad that summer, the CIA used its new Iraqi partners, the INIS, to provide agents for infiltration into the city. All of the men sent in were apparently tracked down, tortured and killed. Others suggest that this version of events was put around by the Agency because it did not want to admit that it had no human sources in the city. Instead, ‘there was 24/7 Predator coverage of Fallujah and a huge amount of movement analysis’. Watching their screens at Balad, the analysts tracked patterns of car movements, pinpointing certain properties as the places where car bombs that ended up in Baghdad originated. JSOC was soon directing the Air Force to drop bombs on these places. The analytical work at Balad also extended to identifying movements of people or vehicles that revealed the ‘apparent signature’ of Zarqawi’s presence.
Several of the British who watched this say they were very uneasy about what was going on. From the Blackwater and Berg incidents onwards, Zarqawi began to grow in importance in US public pronouncements. His elimination replaced the capturing of Saddam as the prime focus of JSOC’s daily operations. This played well with the Bush re-election campaign’s message about international terrorism, and it also served the Iraqi politicians of the interim government, who liked to blame the country’s difficulties on foreigners. Political considerations – US and Iraqi – also meant that the US military could not go back into Fallujah to confront the militants. Everybody understood this would entail a huge battle, and while the politicians shrank from it during the summer the situation inside Fallujah became steadily more extreme, playing into the hands of Zarqawi.
‘Fallujah became al-Qaeda’s FOB [Forward Operating Base],’ says one intelligence officer. Car bombs were being sent out, and hostages brought back in through the security cordon that supposedly surrounded the city. As the US bombing of targets inside became increasingly frequent, scores, perhaps hundreds, of civilians were killed. Many ordinary people chose to flee, seeking safety with relatives. Foreign fighters in search of martyrdom found their way in, and the complexion of an already angry city changed markedly. As the waiting game went on, by September 2004 the number of US dead in Iraq topped one thousand. General Casey’s British deputy meanwhile penned a memo for his boss giving seven reasons why an assault on the city could prove counterproductive.
The onslaught against Fallujah was finally launched on 8 November, just after the re-election of President Bush. Operation PHANTOM FURY threw approximately twenty thousand US and Iraqi troops into action. By that time, the Coalition estimated more than 95 per cent of the population had fled, and the number of mujahedeen in the city was thought to be 1200 to 1500.
British political nervousness about the possible scale of the slaughter stopped any direct UK involvement, though the Black Watch was moved up to northern Babil Province in order to relieve a US unit so that it could take part in the operation. They were swiftly targeted by Sunni insurgents, losing five men in their first fortnight on the mission – a sobering taste of what the Americans were up against. Such was the nervousness in Downing Street that serious consideration was given to withdrawing the Black Watch after these incidents. British field commanders preferred to plough on. As for Task Force Black, D Squadron of 22 SAS had initially prepared to take part in the operation.
The blades set off for the short drive west, finding themselves a leaguering-up point in the desert near Fallujah. One of Delta’s squadrons had already got stuck into the fight, and D, sometimes described as the most intense of all the squadrons, was itching to join in. Their spirit arose from ‘airborne aggression’ – the traditional domination of the squadron by members of the Parachute Regiment. At Fallujah many of them might have liked to adopt the traditional Para approach, which went by the acronym FIDO: Fuck It and Drive On. But orders came down the chain of command that they were not to do so. Britain had played another red card in a national caveat. Neither the visible army nor UK special forces were to take part in the assault on Fallujah.
In street-to-street fighting, the US Marines stormed the city. It was a bloody, grim and determined business done with hand grenades, small arms and all the support the Americans could muster. One week later the operation was declared complete. Four thousand artillery rounds, ten thousand mortars and ten tons of bombs had been used on the city. The Americans had lost fifty-one soldiers. The tally of bodies recovered in the city was around two thousand. The military said they were all insurgents, but one British officer who was in Fallujah shortly after PHANTOM FURY speculates that the difference between the intelligence estimate of fighters before the attack and the number of bodies recovered suggests several hundred civilian fatalities. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was not among the dead. Indeed, Islamist sources suggested he had moved to an area south of Baghdad before the assault commenced.
In the months before the assault the balance of power between him and the al-Qaeda leadership hiding in Pakistan had changed decisively. A letter seized early in the year, which was believed to have been addressed to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the movement’s number two, showed the reason why ‘head office’ was nervous about Zarqawi. In it he had preached hatred of the Shia, describing them as the American’s puppets in evicting the Sunnis from power. In June 2004 Zarqawi wrote to Osama bin Laden that ‘they [the Shia] have been a sect of treachery and betrayal through all history and all ages’, arguing that he would not formally join al-Qaeda unless he was allowed to step up his onslaught on the Shia. Zawahiri and bin Laden apparently feared this nakedly sectarian approach, but events had begun to define their response. ‘Zarqawi generated so much success and publicity,’ says an intelligence officer, ‘that al-Qaeda simply had to anoint him.’ In October an Islamist website carried a communiqué stating that Zarqawi had sworn an abaya, or oath of allegiance, to bin Laden. His movement changed its name to ‘Organisation for the Holy War’s Base in the land of the Two Rivers’ (in Arabic, Tanzim Qa’idat Al Jihad bil Balad al Rafidayn), leading to the simplified Coalition designation of the movement as ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’ or AQI.
As the Americans became increasingly preoccupied with hunting down the Jordanian leader and his network, British special forces found themselves on the sidelines.
Shortly before the attack on Fallujah, MI6 visited Balad to question a suspected insurgent. The Iraqi was being held in a secret jail called the Temporary Screening Facility (TSF). In keeping with Major-General McChrystal’s approach, this place provided the JSOC team of interrogators with their own opportunity to question the people they had captured using the full range of intelligence information coming into Balad. It was not visited by the Red Cross or other humanitarian organisations, and its exceptional sensitivity made it, says one British officer, ‘a black prison within a black programme’.
Following the MI6 visit, concerns were raised about the detention conditions there. Another visitor to the TSF told me that ‘the cells there were like dog kennels – tiny’. In the first place the wooden cells constructed to hold the prisoners were smaller than stipulated by British standards. There were also worries about the condition of some of the detainees. People in JSOC sometimes refer to the injuries a prisoner can take at the moment of capture, when being overpowered by those he was trying to kill moments before. But were the violent practices Colonel Herrington uncovered at Camp Nama being continued?
As a result of MI6’s visit and the concerns raised, Britain communicated another national caveat to JSOC in Iraq: from now on Britain’s special forces would only turn its prisoners over to the Americans if there was an undertaking not to send them to Balad.
It can be imagined how this news w
as received by the CO of Delta Force, and McChrystal himself. The American general was carefully building his network and the British had just tugged out an element of it. ‘Inevitably [the decision] caused a degree of tension with McChrystal and his crew at Balad,’ says one figure in this drama, with remarkable understatement.
JSOC’s people knew that Task Force Black, through Operations ABALONE the previous autumn in Ramadi or 2004’s ASTON, the capture of the alleged Pakistani jihadists in Baghdad, had delivered some of the only evidence of how the global al-Qaeda network might be operating in Iraq, but this UK–US cooperation was effectively at an end. One senior American figure told me that they had never consciously shut the British out. But the new British caveat had left JSOC with a stark choice. Given the importance of rapidly exploiting intelligence, they did not want to rely upon the British to capture someone who might know where Zarqawi or some other key figure was hiding, because that precious source of intelligence would be delivered into the neverland of the ‘white’ detainee system rather than to JSOC’s own people.
By the autumn of 2004, roughly one year after Major-General McChrystal had taken over JSOC, British special forces were operating in an increasingly ‘semi-detached’ way. A consensus had emerged between Brigadier Peter Rogers as DSF Lieutenant-Colonel Beaufort in command of the SAS, the MI6 station and several senior officers, such as those back at PJHQ in Northwood, that Task Force Black needed to put some distance between itself and the Americans. By building up its humint team, analysts, support from intelligence agencies and means of transport, those who had lost faith in the American approach intended to give Task Force Black the ability to find-fix-finish its own targets. The only problem with this approach was that as SAS operators chatted to their Delta neighbours in the MSS, or the spooks shared a coffee after one of their endless liaison meetings in Camp Slayer, Britain’s team in Baghdad started to develop a nagging feeling that it might be fighting the wrong war. Up in Balad, McChrystal and his people were coming up with ideas, technologies and tactics that amounted to nothing less than a revolution in counterterrorism. The first target for this new machine would be al-Qaeda.
