Task Force Black

by Mark Urban

  On 23 March, the day of the Kember rescue, a wave of four car bombs went off just after the SAS’s coup. The resulting death of twenty-three Iraqis and serious wounding of forty-eight others did not actually make it a particularly bad day by Baghdad standards. Across Iraq the trend of violence was still steadily upwards. The SIGACTS (significant acts of violence) charts compiled at General Casey’s headquarters showed, for example, that in the month of Kember’s rescue attacks against Iraqi infrastructure and government targets reached one thousand, and the total for IEDs 850.

  Any notion that B Squadron might have earned a few days off after LIGHTWATER was swiftly scotched. The intelligence people were poring over their diagrams showing the networks of al-Qaeda cells that were sending so many bombs into Baghdad. In satellite towns around the capital, like Abu Ghraib, Taji or Yusufiyah, there was a picture of growing complexity of the bombers’ organisation. Team leaders began to prepare target packs for those whom analysis of mobile phone traffic could serve up.

  As the SAS moved against the AQI target in earnest the scene was set for intense but highly professional competition with Delta Force, their neighbours at MSS Fernandez, which, by coincidence, also had its B Squadron in Baghdad at the time. Having set the broad parameters for their operations Colonel Grist, in the JOC at Balad, and his boss Lieutenant-General McChrystal allowed Team Leaders in both squadrons to develop their own plans, pitching for targets ‘from the bottom up’. If the SAS plan was more promising they would get the backing and resources of the JOC.

  Two and a half weeks after the hostages were freed, the British played host to McChrystal and several other senior US officers at their base near Hereford. The visit was planned as an episode of military diplomacy and relationship-building. It also underlined the fact that McChrystal and his British host, the major-general who had succeeded Peter Rogers as Director of Special Forces, had to view events in Iraq as part of the wider special operations effort. Neither of these two officers could divorce what was going on in Baghdad from the regional, or indeed global, perspective. There were different pressures from the two sides of the Atlantic, and the meetings held over two days in Hereford were intended to help resolve those while sealing the understanding they had for Task Force Knight to operate against the full American target set in Iraq.

  During the course of General McChrystal’s visit there were the inevitable formal briefings. There was also a long hike through the Herefordshire countryside, and then the two days of conversation were rounded off with a dinner at an early Georgian country house. The American visitors were treated to interiors worthy of a Jane Austen novel, views across the manicured deer park as well as a lavish feast: an archetypal English experience. McChrystal, often characterised as an austere soldier-monk who worked almost all the time, rose to the challenge of relaxing with his hosts.

  McChrystal had for some time seen the Iraq problem in a regional context. JSOC had established liaison teams in several surrounding countries. ‘It was pretty well broadcast that the Saudis were cooperating,’ explains one senior American. ‘You would pick up a Saudi guy or a Moroccan [in Iraq], feed the information over to them. Then within days, sometimes hours, you got the answers back from them.’ The US approach was seen by some British intelligence officers both in terms of the attribution of much of Iraq’s bombing to foreign fighters and to the political ideology of the Bush Administration’s Global War on Terror or ‘G-wot’. Although many of the British believed that the US overestimated both the role of foreign fighters in Iraq and the global nature of al-Qaeda, they conceded there was some value in McChrystal’s approach. British intelligence had, after all, mounted Operation ASTON against suspected Pakistani jihadists travelling to Iraq two years earlier.

  Any intelligence officer realised the value of being able to confront a suspected foreign fighter in the interrogation room with knowledge of his associates back home or en route for Iraq. The accumulated picture of who was getting into the country, and how, could help to frustrate that jihad trail. At the time of the Hereford meeting Britain agreed to a similar, but far smaller, deployment of regional teams that would follow the US lead in working in neighbouring states. The problem for both McChrystal and the British was that in the places where regional cooperation was needed most – Syria and Iran – it was, respectively, very limited and non-existent.

  Still, the adoption of a regional approach was a British step worth toasting. It was just as well for Britain’s new Director of Special Forces that the Americans were taking Task Force Knight under their wing because UK concerns increasingly had to centre on Afghanistan.

  In the spring of 2006 the British military were deploying more than four thousand troops to southern Afghanistan. Under Peter Rogers’s rebalancing of special forces, the Special Boat Service was taking the lead in supporting this new deployment. But, as he had anticipated, the attempt to conduct these two operations at once was going to stretch both his own command and the wider armed forces. UK special forces were only provided with the ‘enablers’ (for example special secure communications equipment, helicopters and Hercules transports) to support one squadron on operations at a time. Since the Americans at that time still regarded Iraq as very much their first priority, support to the SBS in southern Afghanistan would be limited.

  Task Force Knight’s growing integration into the JSOC Iraq campaign was thus coming at just the right time for the British commanders who wondered how on earth they were going to cope in Afghanistan. And, as if on cue, just days after McChrystal and Britain’s Director of Special Forces charted their way forward in Hereford, the SAS squadron in Iraq demonstrated its usefulness to the Americans in a most dramatic way.

  9

  OPERATION LARCHWOOD 4

  The scene about the MSS Fernandez landing site that April night in 2006 was one that had already become thoroughly familiar. RAF Pumas had come in from BIAP and their crews were making final checks. ‘The guys on standby knew they could be quite relaxed during the daylight,’ recalls one crewman assigned to the Task Force Knight helicopter flight. ‘They would have an hour or two’s warning. But then that might go down to a thirty-minute standby, then a cockpit standby and finally a rotors turning standby.’

  In the murk beside the choppers, men formed up nearby, fresh from their quick battle orders. These were usually given in the briefing room of the SAS house, where the marble floors and gilded white sofas reminded the blades of its previous inhabitants. Sergeant-Major Mulberry was there, a couple of the troop commanders, two guys with snipers’ rifles. It was after 1 a.m. as each man checked his kit: night-vision equipment, radio, magazines for their primary weapon, usually an assault rifle, and a pistol. The blades had formerly worn their handgun or secondary weapon low-slung in leg holsters, but by this time the fashion was for fixing a quick-release holster to the front of the body armour, just beneath the neck. In addition to the standard kit, there would be small personal add-ons. Some men, usually the sergeant-major among them, carried cyalumes, chemical lights that could be used to mark a landing zone or an entry point. One or two men carried shotguns or explosive charges for blowing in doors. Many sported knives too, although the SAS never quite adopted Delta’s taste for fearsome fighting daggers.

  That night’s serial, as the name Operation LARCHWOOD 4 suggests, was a development based upon raids over the previous days. The two B squadrons – SAS and Delta – had been hitting AQI targets in the ‘Baghdad belts’ – a term used by the Coalition for communities surrounding the capital. There had already been several firefights. On 8 April a raid near the same town they were heading for on this night had killed five insurgents, who the intelligence people claimed were foreign fighters. On 13 April, another two. With each raid, JSOC’s intelligence picture of a group of al-Qaeda cells around the capital had evolved.

  Yusufiyah, twenty-five kilometres to the south-west of Baghdad, was seething with tension at the time. Fallujah is about twenty kilometres off to the west, Abu Ghraib between the two places.
To the east of Yusufiyah is Mahmudiyah and south-east is Latifiyah – the three ‘iyahs’ marking the points of an area of intense insurgent activity known since late 2003 as the Triangle of Death. By 2006 the violence was going in several different directions. It was an extremely dangerous area for Coalition forces but the presence of many Shia villages had also led to numerous sectarian murders.

  During the spring of 2006, there was a series of sweeps by US troops through the area. They had rounded up the usual trophies of Kalashnikovs, mortar rounds and IED materials but had also suffered many casualties at the hands of Sunni insurgents. The vicious war in this part of Iraq had also produced one of the Coalition’s most serious lapses, or rather collapses, in military discipline.

  Just one month before B Squadron’s planned raid, several US soldiers had got drunk on local bootleg whisky at their checkpoint not far from Yusufiyah and deserted their post. They had broken into an Iraqi home and raped and murdered a fourteen-year-old girl named Abeer Qasim Hamza. They killed her parents and five-year-old sister for good measure. At the time of the planned B Squadron mission the implications of these crimes were just beginning to percolate up the US military system, with the first conviction seven months later and several more to follow. Evidently, though, word of what had happened spread very quickly through the community. If the local people or the AQI groups in Yusufiyah needed any further reason to fight the Coalition, revenge for this act could be added.

  The target pack worked up by Captain Ewan, one of the B Squadron Team Leaders, on the night of 16 April featured one Abu Atiya. He was typical of the mid-level al-Qaeda leadership being targeted by JSOC at the time. Abu Atiya was classified as the ‘Admin Emir’ of the AQI cell in Abu Ghraib. He was credited with running the local group’s media efforts, such as posting videos of its attacks on Coalition soldiers on the internet. But, as the B Squadron men had heard during their briefings, intelligence also showed that Abu Atiya had a role in setting up ‘V-bids’ or car bombs. Those familiar with the operation say that there was both humint and signals intelligence implicating him in these activities.

  A final trigger for the operation was the identification of Abu Atiya’s cell phone by electronic means and the production of a grid reference graphic. The GRG took the form of an aerial photo, where the target insurgent-held building or Alpha could be marked up, accompanied by symbols that would be used to denote aspects of the Team Leader’s plan as key players were briefed that evening.

  In the case of LARCHWOOD 4, the Alpha was a farmhouse on the outskirts of Yusufiyah. To the west were open fields. To the north, an orchard, and east, close to the building itself, a sand berm or bund separated the farmhouse from surrounding fields. Captain Ewan plotted L1, the helicopter landing zone for his assault force, to the north-east of the Alpha, where the fruit trees would offer a certain amount of screening. Approaching from this cover, Ewan would then lead the assault force of four teams to the Alpha. Once there, they would split into two groups before prosecuting the assault, one blowing its way in from the east, the other from the south. As they did this, SAS snipers would be orbiting in Lynx helicopters in case the targets eluded the assault force. Inside the Alpha, two members of the Apostles, the SAS’s Iraqi helpers, would interpret and assist Sensitive Site Exploitation – the search of the building for further intelligence.

  Captain Ewan would exercise command of the operation on the ground. Although still in his twenties, he was a seasoned SAS officer. The second captain, a less experienced officer, would be given the task of leading one of the assault teams.

  Mounting up in the Pumas, the B Squadron men each understood their part in this scheme well. With a bit of luck, they would deliver the ‘vinegar stroke’, entering the Alpha, taking Abu Atiya, and nobody would die. The Pumas dusted off for the short ride to Yusufiyah, and their RV took to the night sky with the rest of the operation.

  In addition to the blades of the assault force, the British were also taking with them a platoon of Paras from Task Force Maroon. Americans from 1st Battalion 502nd Infantry – the battalion involved in the Hamza rape charges – had also been assigned to support Operation LARCHWOOD 4. Its function that night was simply to be in reserve as a Quick Reaction Force. The British Paras would be used to block off the area around Abu Atiya’s house, preventing either reinforcements arriving or people escaping. The cordon rode that night in Chinook helicopters.

  Above the choppers flying through the darkness towards the outskirts of Yusufiyah were three fixed-wing aircraft. A small surveillance aircraft would orbit with night-vision equipment. Two American C-130s were also on station: a command bird coordinating the entire effort and an AC-130 Spectre, a fearsome gunship that could saturate the ground with fire if everything went wrong.

  It might be imagined, with this circling fleet of aircraft, that the entire neighbourhood would be up in arms before the first soldier came anywhere near the Alpha. However, as one Team Leader explains, ‘By this point the people in Baghdad and some of the surrounding places were thoroughly used to the sound of helicopters at night.’

  The Pumas hit L1 just after 2 a.m., and the four assault teams were off in moments, their rides returning to the dark skies. Making their way across the few hundred metres to the assault point, the blades listened to the radio chatter through headphones. Given the violence following the Samarra bombing, even a short walk through the darkness in a mixed community like Yusufiyah had to be undertaken with the utmost care. One SAS man explains, ‘Because of sectarian violence people were leaving booby traps and pressure pads to protect their own neighbourhoods – you had to move very carefully.’ Once safely in cover within yards of the house, two operators were sent forward to scout its south-east corner.

  To the soldiers’ delight they found that at the rear of the carport on that side of the building was an open door into the house. They peered in to determine that the place was still, as one might expect in the early hours of the morning, and went back to their waiting comrades.

  Pleased that he could enter the Alpha without explosions or commotion, Captain Ewan ordered the assault. One team moved swiftly past the parked car, entering the house through the door beside it.

  Just seconds later a burst of gunfire rang out. Three of the SAS team had been hit by someone waiting in a corridor of the house.

  In moments the team ran back out through the door, helping the worst-wounded members to the cover of the sand berm just to the east of the house. The radio came alive with staccato reports: Contact! The call-sign had taken casualties. Fingers probed for bullet wounds; trauma packs were ripped open; the treatment of casualties began. All of them had been able to get out of the place on their own, but a man could be fatally pumping blood from a bullet-ruptured artery into some internal cavity at the same moment that he was celebrating his survival. It was vital to conduct a proper survey of their wounds.

  Those inside the house were not content to rest on their initial success. From the upper floor they opened fire in the direction of the berm. One man ran on to the roof and started lobbing grenades at the SAS operators.

  At this moment a torrent of options must have entered the mind of Captain Ewan. Those above would be straining their ears, awaiting his decision. Could the snipers in the Lynxes get clear shots? Should the Spectre give those inside a taste of its three Gatling guns, each of which could lay down a hundred rounds a second? Or should the air controller on board the command Hercules simply whistle up an F-16 while Captain Ewan’s men retired to a safe distance, and just level the whole place with a JDAM?

  Those listening out for the Team Leader’s Plan B were not kept waiting for long. Ewan decided to resume the assault. Their mission was to capture Abu Atiya for questioning, and who knew who else might be in the building?

  Putting himself at the head of his men, Captain Ewan renewed the assault. Approaching the building under covering fire, he and one of the blades lobbed in grenades.

  As they went in, though, two more were wounded –
one by a bullet and the other by a grenade fragment. To those watching the events unfold on Kill TV back at Balad or in the MSS, the drama had reached its critical stage. Flashes from explosions and zips of tracer stained the night-vision image captured by the aircraft orbiting above. The eagle-eyed spotted someone dart from the rear of the house. Little did they know, watching the battle on video, but this insurgent was wearing a suicide vest as well as carrying grenades and an assault rifle. An aerial sniper and members of Task Force Maroon not far from that western side of the building were ordered to engage him, but the man swiftly took cover under a car parked nearby.

  Inside the Alpha, Captain Ewan’s men had killed one of the gunmen in the corridor, and then began to go through the house room by room. Another man was shot. In one room, the SAS burst in to find half a dozen terrified women and children cowering in the darkness. They soon discovered that one woman had been killed in the fight, with three others and one child wounded.

  Once the rooms were clear, the assault force turned their attention to the building’s roof, from which they had taken fire. One of the SAS NCOs, already wounded, told his comrades he would go up the stairs in the middle of the building to clear the roof. Waiting for him was a second man in a suicide vest. As the NCO reached the door at the top of the staircase, the al-Qaeda man detonated his bomb. There was a further flash across the video screens. The NCO had been blown backwards, down the stairs, by the blast. Although sustaining further injuries, he was able to pick himself up.

  Outside, the last man resisting, the one under the car, died without setting off his own suicide device. Located by the surveillance plane, he had been killed by a hail of bullets.

  The assault force, pumped full of adrenalin with five members wounded, now had to move to the business at hand. Their primary mission, after all, was to arrest a man in the pursuit of intelligence. Five of the defenders were dead, including two who had been wearing suicide vests. Five men, as well as several women and children, had survived. Working through the Apostles, the SAS quickly established that one of these survivors was Abu Atiya. An older man also appeared to be an insurgent. They were cuffed and made ready for the helicopter. The wounded women and child meanwhile were taken to the landing zone for evacuation to the ‘Cash’ – the 10th Combat Support Hospital – in the Green Zone.