by Mark Urban
Explosively Formed Projectiles or EFPs had been in use since 2004. The bombs, which look a little like large tin cans with a concave face pointed towards the target, are manufactured in such a way that this front piece of metal is flipped into a metal bolt by the explosive behind it – a transformation that takes place with such speed and energy that the resulting bolt or projectile can pierce almost any armour.
In May 2004, intelligence experts believed, the first British victim of these devices was claimed when an EFP detonated in Maysan Province. Iraqi border guards operating in the area seized some smugglers with unexploded EFPs near the Iranian border not long afterwards. In June 2005 a British bomb disposal officer successfully defused an array of ten EFPs, allowing experts to make a detailed study of the devices. They were impressed not just by the manufacture of the bombs, which required high production tolerances, but by the infrared device used to trigger them. The bombs were similar to ones used against the Israelis by Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
American J2 officers in Baghdad were soon connecting the dots. They were losing soldiers to a sudden spate of EFPs in Baghdad. They had human intelligence that Iran was not just supplying bombs but training Iraqi insurgents in how to use them. One of the British intelligence officers who was party to those discussions in Iraq felt a distinct sense of déjà vu, a worry that information was being stove-piped or selected to reach a particular conclusion. ‘The Americans couldn’t get their mind around the idea that these things might be produced in Baghdad, in someone’s back yard,’ he says. ‘It had to be another country as far as they were concerned.’
During these discussions, the MI6 station expressed doubt about the credibility of the idea that Iran was directly supplying the insurgents or using Hezbollah know-how to raise the game of the Mehdi Army or other Iraqi insurgent groups. The service simply did not believe that the intelligence proved such suppositions. Views were split though within British military intelligence, as some saw the new roadside bombings as acts beyond the competence of typical Iraqi insurgents.
The individual bombings had generated less media attention or soul-searching than the Jamiat. In the wake of that incident, both the Ambassador and Prime Minister decided to blame Britain’s troubles, at least in part, on Iran. Given the ongoing arguments about the intelligence concerned, they were taking a significant risk. Despite this, the Sun and other newspapers soon adopted a narrative that the Iranians were behind the death of ‘our boys’.
For the SAS or soldiers conducting strike operations in southern Iraq, it was already obvious that Iran and its Revolutionary Guards Corps provided some kind of inspiration for the insurgents. They could see the posters and pamphlets; the growing threat from roadside bombs was eroding previous assumptions that the south was much safer than the areas patrolled by the Americans. But public accusations of Iran at the highest level changed the nature of this confrontation. It was, without doubt, political escalation at a time when many of those running operations in Iraq would have preferred not to have gone in search of new enemies.
Further north, violence was stepping up relentlessly. The Sunni insurgency was mutating in an alarmingly sectarian way. With Sunni and Shia murdering one another in growing numbers, as well as campaigning against foreign forces, the chance of the Coalition getting a lid on the violence seemed increasingly remote. But beneath this tide of violence there were important developments and the SAS would be at the centre of them.
7
BEYOND BLACK
In the weeks following the Jamiat incident, operational pressure caused by an ever-rising tide of violence, and a change in personnel brought an important shift to Task Force Black. These developments unfolded against the backdrop of a new hostage drama that was to prove far more protracted than the late unpleasantness in Basra.
On 26 November 2005 a car was stopped by masked gunmen in the university area of Baghdad. Inside were four members of an organisation called the Christian Peacemaker Teams. The university quarter had been a distinctly desirable suburb during Saddam’s time, being home to his smooth-tongued minister Tariq Aziz among others. But from the moment of the US Marines’ advance into this sector in March 2003, it had been the scene of trouble, the Americans fighting running gun battles lasting days with fedayeen around the campus. The green, open nature of the place afforded plenty of hiding places for criminals and gunmen. As communal relations worsened, it also became a seam for Shia–Sunni violence. Early in 2005, gunmen had kidnapped an Italian journalist close to the same mosque where the Christian Peacemaker Team was intercepted.
That November, the kidnappers were able to take their prize without hindrance from either militias or the security forces. In the car were Tom Fox, an American, and Canadians Tom Loney and Harmeet Singh Sooden, as well as a Briton, Norman Kember. The gunmen simply pulled the driver and interpreter out of the westerners’ car and jumped into their seats.
Four days after the abduction, al-Jazeera aired a tape of the hostages and a communiqué from a group calling itself the Swords of Righteousness Brigade. During the first days of December the pressure was ratcheted up with a second then third video, the latter showing Fox and Kember in orange jumpsuits.
Kember, a 74-year-old retired professor and conscientious objector, had gone to Iraq as an ardent opponent of the US-led invasion. His decision to do so ignited heated public debate between those who admired his courage and others who felt he was a well-intentioned fool for putting himself in such danger. As Kember and his three comrades were bundled into their assailants’ vehicle, they were to become a major operational priority for the very forces whose presence they opposed. The complexities of the case deepened when Moazzem Beg, the freed British Guantanamo inmate, and the security detainee Abu Qutada, Osama bin Laden’s so-called Ambassador in Europe, joined in the appeals for Kember’s release. As these vociferous opponents of President Bush and his War on Terror spoke, the subtext of their appeals to the kidnappers – essentially ‘you got the wrong guys’ – fell on deaf ears. The SAS, meanwhile, responded to the crisis in its own fashion.
At the time of Norman Kember’s abduction, the regime of British special forces operations in Iraq was going through significant change. A Squadron finished its four-month tour and was replaced by B Squadron. As part of the rebalancing between theatres decreed by Major-General Peter Rogers, Director of Special Forces, the use in Afghanistan of one troop from the Iraq-tour squadron was halted. Afghanistan was to be the responsibility of the Royal Marines elite force, the Special Boat Service.
There would therefore be a reinforcement to B Squadron as it tried to hold the ring, meeting operational commitments around Baghdad and in the south. In practice this meant a squadron gaining up to a dozen soldiers, not a vast number, but the move enjoyed widespread approval since every man counted. Another change, although it remained rumour until officially confirmed the following March, was that B Squadron and its successors would serve six-rather than four-month tours. This was a harder sell for the blades, in that the stresses of tours with JSOC were such that Delta kept its squadrons in country for half that time – just ninety days. The longer SAS tours were principally the idea of Lieutenant-Colonel Williams, their Commanding Officer, who felt that the men would benefit from greater familiarity with the Iraqi scene and its operational peculiarities. The six-month stints also meant, as each squadron was followed by three others, a longer period at home or on less arduous duties between tours.
For the Commanding Officer of the SAS, this period at the end of 2005 and early the following year marked the fulfilment of his plans to integrate Task Force Black’s operations far more closely with the Americans. It is in terms of this critical change that fine detail about tours and numbers needs to be seen, for Williams was determined to raise the effectiveness of his men. When chiding regimental comrades about the effectiveness of Task Force Black, he had mocked it as ‘Task Force Slack’. Like any executive preparing for a relaunch, he welcomed some rebranding too. In the wake of t
he Jamiat incident the name Task Force Black had been published in the press, so it was replaced with a new one: Task Force Knight. In both name and mission the moment had arrived to go beyond black.
Williams was helped by the fact that Peter Rogers moved on from the Directorate of Special Forces at the end of 2005. Their personal relationship had often been ugly, and having survived the general’s attempt to get rid of him the passing of Rogers removed a brake on Williams’s freedom of action. Some of the more tangible issues that had prevented this happening sooner, such as conditions in the Temporary Screening Facility, the special ops jail at Balad, had also been cleared up by the end of 2005.
The key benefits to closer integration with JSOC were increased flows of intelligence, particularly that gathered from a growing operation to intercept mobile phones, as well as the backing of American aircraft and so-called ISR or Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance assets. The change had already been felt during the latter part of A Squadron’s time. Technology was playing a bigger role. This change did not reflect some drying up of humint or spies – far from it. Rather, it showed what happened when the NSA, America’s electronic eavesdropping organisation, switched even a fraction of its huge resources to helping the British.
During the Jamiat incident, the British had experienced a little of that nice warm feeling that came from getting closer to JSOC. Colonel Grist had swiftly sent a Predator to help, as well as tasking the NSA to intercept dozens of mobile phones in Basra. There had even been the offer of a Delta squadron to rescue them.
In the series of incremental changes that were made by the SAS at this time, the one that signalled most clearly their changed role occurred in mid-January 2006. It was then that the regiment began Operation TRACTION, its secret upgrade in the world of JSOC. Under TRACTION, the SAS deployed Task Group Headquarters (TGHQ) to Balad, where it could be joined at the hip with the American effort. As violence and missions soared, Williams himself would be there with TGHQ to direct the British side of covert operations in Iraq. It is a measure of the seriousness of TRACTION that this was the first deployment of TGHQ in Iraq since it had left shortly after the 2003 invasion. Williams thus followed Major-General Stan McChrystal’s model of spending much of the year in Iraq, personally overseeing what went on. Just as McChrystal did not run the day-to-day battle – a task that fell to Grist and his JOC nerve centre – so Williams left the execution of SAS operations to his in-country squadron commander, the OC of Task Force Knight at the time.
The presence of Williams and TGHQ lasted only a few weeks, as the hunt for Norman Kember neared its climax, but other aspects of TRACTION were intended to be enduring. Britain upgraded its involvement at the JOC. Although representatives of the intelligence agencies had already been used as part of the British liaison team at Balad, from early 2006 more senior representatives were sent, and aimed for a constant presence. Through this, the British gained the ability to channel far more intelligence to their strike force (Task Force Knight), so raising the pace of their operations. McChrystal was naturally delighted at the prospect of the British boosting their involvement to the ‘industrial’ scale established by American special operations units. But this was not just being done to allow the British to do more chasing of Former Regime Elements. McChrystal and Williams would get what they had wanted for months: the new target set that was to give the SAS a pivotal role in the fight against Sunni militant groups, and in particular al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).
All of this rearranging of the special ops furniture evidently took place in great secrecy, at a time when the public in both the US and UK were growing increasingly alarmed by developments in Iraq. It also happened as JSOC’s arch-enemy was taking initiatives of its own.
By a dark coincidence, at the same time as the SAS launched Op TRACTION, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda leader, was recasting his own command. A jihadist website carried news on 15 January that six Sunni resistance groups had formed the Mujahedeen Shura Council. These were not nationalistic factions like the 1920s Brigades but rather cells that embraced the Salafist ideology of AQI. Zarqawi, through the formation of this Council, was preparing the way to reap the rewards of growing chaos in Iraq. He wanted to declare a Sunni state or caliphate in the west of the country that would be run along strict religious principles. He believed this required growing violence, against the Shia as well as the Coalition and, if necessary, against Sunnis who supported the government or the more secular Ba’athist resistance factions.
In the communiqué announcing the formation of the Council, al-Qaeda’s spokesman said it would ‘manage the struggle to ward off the invading infidels and their apostate stooges’. It also alluded to intra-Sunni tensions, saying the Council would help in ‘determining a clear position towards developments and incidents so that people can see things clearly’. Intelligence analysts in Baghdad debated whether these arguments within the resistance had been exacerbated by US operations in the Euphrates the previous year. There had been reports of tensions between the Iraqi tribes in that area and foreign fighters or ‘outsiders’ whom they resented. Some saw the formation of the Shura Council as a way of giving al-Qaeda’s image a more Iraqi face. Many who joined in the debates at Camp Slayer or in the CIA station drew larger conclusions. The British had often questioned the central importance that the Americans assigned to Zarqawi. But was the formation of this new resistance front, with Zarqawi pulling its strings, a sign that US intelligence had been right all along, or simply a self-fulfilling prophecy? Had the US, by putting a $25 million bounty on Zarqawi’s head, as well as referring to him constantly, turned him into the central figure in the movement?
Whatever the underlying realities of Zarqawi’s status, his organisation had by this time become the target of a large-scale JSOC campaign. Attempts by the jihadists to broaden their organisation were mirrored by Stan McChrystal’s launch of a JSOC operation codenamed DAHIR. This marked a new attempt to settle the ill will between the special operators and the visible American ground forces by locking together their campaign plans. JSOC would broaden its takedowns from operations chasing the AQI leadership, mounting more against middle-level players pinpointed by the ground-holding units. They in turn would give more support to McChrystal’s people. The intelligence fusion techniques pioneered at Balad would be copied by the US Army and Marine divisions, and they would get greater access to precious assets such as drones. Some of those in Baghdad at the time have characterised Operation DAHIR as the subordination of large parts of the US military effort in Iraq to McChrystal’s plan to defeat AQI. One observer comments that, at this period, with General Casey trying in the face of rising violence to cling to his plans to drawdown US forces, ‘McChrystal was the offensive strategy’. Others insist that the US Marines in Anbar never lost their offensive spirit.
Since McChrystal’s people appeared to provide the best and possibly the only chance for the Coalition to take the offensive against Zarqawi’s network, his empire grew. The four special ops units operating under the aegis of Delta’s CO at Balad (Blue or West, Green or Central, Red or North, and the UK’s Knight in Baghdad) were joined by a fifth, designated Task Force East. JSOC received all manner of supporting units under command too – for example a National Guard Black Hawk helicopter squadron to shuttle the growing numbers of prisoners around. When all of the supporting players in JSOC’s cast were included it numbered more than five thousand people across the region controlled by Central Command. As if to underscore the growing importance of his empire, McChrystal received his third star, being promoted to lieutenant-general in February 2006.
Britain’s relationship with this special operations juggernaut was still complicated. The obstacles to Task Force Knight operating against the al-Qaeda target set had been removed, much to the Americans’ delight. At the same time, during early 2006, much of their effort was actually being directed towards finding Norman Kember. In the meantime, the enemy did not stand still. On 22 February, it became clear that Zarqawi had sto
len a march – not just on JSOC or the SAS, but on the entire Coalition and Iraqi government campaign.
It was 6.44 a.m. in Samarra, a city sixty-five miles north of Baghdad. Samarra is a predominantly Sunni city, although it is also home to a sacred Shia shrine, the Golden Mosque. That day, in the lull between dawn prayers and the city reaching the peak of its morning rush, the mosque was subjected to a complex attack. The first bomb brought down one of the compound’s distinctive minarets.
Major Jeremy Lewis, an American officer who was briefing a joint patrol at a nearby Iraqi security base, turned around to register the scene: ‘All of a sudden, the mosque just explodes.’ As the smoke cleared it became evident the dome itself had been shattered. Lewis reflected, ‘Every last one of us said this was the beginning of the civil war in Iraq.’
It was later reported that nobody – none of the bystanders or security guards, at least – was killed in the attack. But through this symbolic act of violence against their Shia neighbours, Sunni fanatics caused an effect that countless marketplace massacres or murderous abductions had failed to achieve. The characterisation of what followed as civil war was in itself the subject of intense political argument. But it was clear soon enough that the bombing had been what US generals call a ‘game changer’, and that the effects felt by people in communities across the country were truly horrific.
The Mehdi Army, posing as protector of the Shia community, took vengeance against pockets of Sunni. AQI, its Shura Council allies and even some of the ‘nationalist’ parties answered them back. Bodies turned up in rivers by the dozen, were dumped on Baghdad street corners in Khadamiya or Doura, entire villages in the Upper Euphrates and Diyala were wiped out or driven away. In the weeks that followed, humanitarian agencies estimated the number leaving their homes at fifty thousand per month. Those who did not flee hid behind shuttered windows or locked doors.
