by Mark Urban
It was now time for Sensitive Site Exploitation. The soldiers moved through the house looking for things of intelligence value. It was a shambles – blood, spent bullet casings and broken glass were trodden underfoot. There were men lying dead in some places. The blades trod gingerly around one of them when they realised that clutched in the dead man’s grasp was a grenade with the pin pulled out. Up on the roof, the suicide bomber who had tried to take a British operator with him had been blown to bits, his limbs and head scattered among the other debris.
Despite the carnage, the SAS could not afford to miss anything in the limited time they still had on the ground. In fact they recovered a great deal: weapons including four AK-47s and one that seemed in the torchlight to be an M4 (a 5.56mm assault rifle usually used by Coalition troops); and other possessions that might yield clues. Their mission had been accomplished, albeit with much violence. They had no remit to go on a further house-to-house search of the neighbourhood. The team had neither the time nor the men for that anyway, since dawn would soon be upon them, and given the level of resistance they had experienced that night there was no telling what daytime might bring. Subsequent intelligence suggested though that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi himself was in another building not far away. Once again, Coalition troops had unwittingly come within a whisker of capturing Iraq’s most wanted man.
The SAS had already experienced plenty of violence in Iraq. But the ferocity of their reception that night, and the speeding-up of operations that had generated Operation LARCHWOOD 4, were signs of a sea change. Lieutenant-General McChrystal’s vision of a relentless cycle of missions, with each revolution producing the intelligence that could fuel the next, was becoming a reality. Under this growing pressure, al-Qaeda in Iraq, as well as some of the other insurgent groups, appeared to have raised their own game. They were prepared to get their retaliation in first against the special operators – or at least to try to. There were suicide bombers ready to go, ambushes set up for helicopters and in some places houses rigged to explode.
Returning to the MSS after LARCHWOOD 4, members of B Squadron felt exhausted and elated in equal measure. They had overcome suicidally determined resistance and, fortunately for them, none of the five men wounded that night was so seriously injured that they would be absent from duty for long. They could have little imagined at that moment how successful their raid would prove to be. They were nearing the end of the SAS’s first six-month squadron tour and were collectively almost spent.
Their time in Iraq had been a period of frenetic activity but crucially, given the miserable overall security picture, one of considerable success. They had freed Norman Kember and the two Canadian hostages. They had also demonstrated the faith of their Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Williams, that the SAS could operate intensively as an integral part of the black American special operations task force. Given the relative scarcity of resources on the British side, this earned credit with McChrystal and the other key commanders. It should come as no surprise that the OC of B Squadron was decorated for the tour. Captain Ewan received a medal for his conduct on Operation LARCHWOOD 4. Many of the squadron’s NCOs were decorated or received commendations too. More importantly, although they had experienced many intense firefights and had eleven men wounded during the tour, B Squadron returned home without losing a man.
Daytime on 16 April was too early for the full results of Operation LARCHWOOD 4 to be appreciated. Abu Atiya and the other suspect were on their way to Balad. Belongings seized at the house were likewise en route to JSOC’s technical experts. One thing already seemed clear to members of B Squadron: the rifle they had captured looked suspiciously like one of those left behind during the ill-fated SBS raid in 2003. There was of course much banter about the SAS having to recover weapons lost by the Royal Marines’ ‘Tier 2’ special operators. But the more significant thing about the gun was that it was the sort of prize weapon that would hardly have been carried by some run-ofthe-mill insurgent. Indeed it had appeared in a photograph, propped up against a wall next to Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi.
10
ENDGAME FOR ZARQAWI
It was not long before the product of Operation LARCHWOOD 4 was being processed at Balad. ‘The Americans have a hugely greater capacity for forensic analysis,’ notes one British senior officer. ‘You’d take a guy’s computer, suck it of information, squirt it over to somewhere on the east coast of the US and the initial analysis of what was on it would be fed back in time to plan the following night’s operation.’ In the case of the Yusufiyah seizures, it did not take long for examination to produce some startling discoveries.
When the NSA and JSOC experts went through these seized possessions, they found video of Zarqawi giving political messages and posing with followers in the desert. At this time the only photographs of the Jordanian jihadist in circulation were very dated. Here was fresh footage, showing exactly what he looked like just a short time ago. What was more, in one scene, in which Zarqawi sat inside a building talking politics, the gun leaning on the wall beside him was none other than the former SBS weapon captured by B Squadron a few nights before. It was clear evidence both that the SAS had got Zarqawi’s prized possessions and that they might have been very close to the man himself on 16 April.
The American commanders were thrilled with the haul from B Squadron’s raid. It seemed to vindicate the long-debated idea that the SAS should be used against the same targets as Delta and effectively be placed under the tactical control of Colonel Grist, the American who commanded it. Though, as one of the British officers involved admitted, ‘It was a total piece of luck that the minute we switched to al-Qaeda we had a result, a trace of Zarqawi, a total jackpot.’
The detainees from the raid, Abu Atiya and the other man, were placed in JSOC’s Temporary Screening Facility at Balad. Once transferred, Britain’s direct involvement with them ceased. At Balad, the force of contractor-employed or reservist interrogators – ‘gators’ in base slang – got to work, apparently ignorant even of the fact that the SAS had taken them. Author Mark Bowden was allowed access to the team working at Balad at the time. He describes their backgrounds:
Some were lawyers. Some had advanced degrees. Some called themselves ‘reserve bums’, because they signed on for tours of duty in various parts of the world for six months to a year, and then took long, exotic vacations before accepting another job. One raced cars when between jobs; another was an avid surfer who between assignments lived on the best beaches in the world; another had earned a law degree while working as a city cop in Arlington, Texas. *
This disparate bunch conducted its interrogations in a hangar left over from Saddam’s time. Ten different interrogation rooms were divided from each other by plywood partitions, and each was kept under CCTV observation. The gators worked their cases in pairs, and since none of them spoke good enough Arabic to grill their man an interpreter was in there too. Interviews could last several hours, and when they were over the prisoners were taken back to their ‘boxes’ or personal cells in another building nearby.
Since new prisoners were coming in most nights, the capacity of the TSF imposed its own limits on JSOC’s interrogation operation. It could only accommodate a couple of dozen prisoners. There was also a time limit, imposed by the US chain of command, because of concerns about charges of detainee abuse and the fact it was a black facility, unregulated by the likes of the International Red Cross. A prisoner could be held for a certain number of days on McChrystal’s say-so. Going beyond that for a further period required authorisation from General Casey. If that was not forthcoming, the detainee had to be turned over to a regular jail – usually Abu Ghraib or the Divisional Internment Facility at Baghdad airport. Some suggest that a few of the insurgents seemed to know that if they held out for enough days they would be processed out of there and the pressure would be off. The gators were already under time pressure, but all the more so with the LARCHWOOD 4 detainees since the evidence of Zarqawi uncovered in the raid was so fre
sh.
As time passed, the gators formed the impression that the second insurgent taken in the Yusufiyah house, an older man, was more important than Abu Atiya, the ‘Admin Emir’ of the Abu Ghraib cell and the original target of B Squadron’s operation. In his article about the gators, Bowden assigned the pseudonym Abu Haydr to this other player. Abu Haydr was a stately figure who successfully parried questioning by Mary and Lenny, the two interrogators assigned to his case. As days slipped by, tension mounted between the gators and the supervisor about the best way to crack the prisoner.
Nine days after the Yusufiyah raid, Zarqawi took his own bold initiative. He posted a video on a jihadist website. It was an edited version of the material found at the Yusufiyah house. The message was put out under the logo of the Mujahedeen Shura Council, with an accompanying statement by them. In it, the al-Qaeda leader, dressed in loose-fitting black combats, with a black bandana around his head, harangued his followers. His main message was that they had already frustrated American plans to control the country and should fight on. ‘Your mujahedeen sons were able to confront the most ferocious of crusader campaigns on a Muslim state,’ he told the camera. ‘They have stood in the face of this onslaught for three years.’
The release of the video prompted a torrent of analysis and speculation across the Arab media and on the internet. Why had Zarqawi gone public? Was it a sign of weakness, given the recent rumours that he was under pressure from the homegrown Iraqi jihadists? Was showing the Coalition his face suicidal or a sign of bravado intended to reassure his followers?
There was, of course, a subtext to the posting of his message. Whenever Zarqawi might originally have intended to release it, following Task Force Knight’s raid in Yusufiyah he had reason to believe that the Coalition knew exactly what he looked like. Zarqawi’s image was compromised. Best get the video out under circumstances that he could control.
If Zarqawi was indeed concerned that the captured material might be used against him, then he was right. There were also out-takes from his video sessions captured in Yusufiyah.
The US chose a weekly media briefing in the Green Zone to fire its return salvo in the battle of the videos. On 4 May journalists were shown Zarqawi trying in vain to clear a stoppage from his machine gun. ‘So what you saw on the internet was what he wanted the world to see,’ said Major-General Rick Lynch. ‘What he didn’t show you were the clips that I showed, wearing New Balance sneakers with his uniform, surrounded by supposedly competent subordinates who grab the hot barrel of a just-fired machine gun; [you] have a warrior leader, Zarqawi, who doesn’t understand how to operate his weapon system and has to rely on his subordinates to clear a weapon stoppage. It makes you wonder.’
Lynch’s briefing produced its own debate in the press and blogosphere. Had the Americans really been right to release the material just to make fun of Zarqawi? And if he was so incompetent, why had the US built him up to be its leading enemy in Iraq, with a $25 million bounty on his head? In fact, Lynch had used the video to start a section of briefing in which the American military gave its latest assessment of the campaign against al-Qaeda in Iraq. This tour d’horizon proved just as contentious among the special operators and spooks because it revealed much about recent operations against AQI that they would rather have kept secret. British players in this drama also regarded it as a public revelation of ideas about the jihadist campaign, some of which they disagreed with, that would usually have remained highly classified.
Lynch talked about five operations around Baghdad during the preceding weeks (actually conducted by JSOC and including the SAS’s LARCHWOOD 4, although he did not describe it in those terms), indicating that they had killed thirty-one foreign fighters. He asserted that ‘Ninety per cent of the suicide bombers that Zarqawi employs are foreign fighters’, and that therefore the degradation of April and May 2006 operations was taking away Zarqawi’s capability to mount suicide bombings in and around Baghdad. He claimed that suicide attacks in Iraq had fallen from seventy-five per month early in 2005 to twenty-five per month at the time of the briefing.
The general went on to describe the attrition of AQI by Coalition operations, revealing that 161 significant players in the organisation had been killed or captured since January 2005. Explaining that ‘we believe that Zarqawi and al-Qaeda in Iraq is organised into three tiers’, he broke down these losses into eight ‘Tier 1’ terrorists – those with personal contact with Zarqawi – fifty-seven Tier 2 ‘leaders in local and regional areas’ and ninety-six Tier 3 fighters.
This 4 May presentation caused quiet controversy. Task Force Knight soldiers did not like the mention of its recent operations and considered that the reference to thirty-one foreign fighters killed was utterly speculative. Who was able to establish, for example, whether the man who blew himself to bits on the roof of that house in Yusufiyah was Iraqi or not? Both MI6 and British military intelligence analysts had long been sceptical of claims that most suicide bombers were foreign fighters. As for the classification of al-Qaeda in tiers, this was entirely a feature of the American analytical approach rather than a description of genuine levels within the jihadist organisation. Looking with hindsight at Lynch’s seventy-five suicide attacks in 2005 versus twenty-five in 2006, it can only have been possible with the most selective use of the facts, which showed a steady upwards trend in violence during 2006.
Overall, the emphasis given to Zarqawi and the organisation of AQI worried British observers. One British figure holding a senior post in Baghdad at the time of the briefing recalls, ‘Zarqawi had become a local bin Laden phenomenon. He was demonised and inflated into a figure rather more significant than he was.’
Although British critics might have punctured some of the hyperbole and trickery of analyses such as the Lynch briefing, their views had their shortcomings too. They were sometimes guilty of being overly negative or cynical. The language used by Zarqawi in his video, or by the Mujahedeen Shura Council upon its formation, betrayed a concern about the pressure these jihadist groups were under from Coalition operations and from a split in Sunni opinion about the best way ahead for the resistance. Some aspects of Lynch’s presentation, such as describing Zarqawi’s determination to derail the Iraqi democratic project before a new government could be formed, can be substantiated by resistance communiqués at the time. As for the 161 significant AQI members accounted for between January 2005 and May 2006, this was progress too, given the Coalition’s lamentable early performance against the insurgency.
McChrystal’s approach of ‘industrial counterterrorism’ had got under way in earnest. With each new takedown the intelligence picture was becoming clearer. The networks sketched out on computers in Camp Slayer showed an intricate web of relationships. And as interrogators worked on captives like Abu Haydr, the fidelity of that intelligence picture improved still further. JSOC’s units were getting enough information to mount operations the whole time. But as the squadrons competed with one another this carried its own risks.
The 13 and 14 May fell, in 2006, at the weekend – or at least what the bosses back in the Pentagon and Ministry of Defence regarded as their weekend. In Iraq the only meaningful cycle for the special operators was that of day and night. One visitor to Balad recalls, ‘If you arrived there at 9 a.m. it was a wasteland. The raids had gone in at 3 a.m., the prisoners had been brought back at 5 a.m. and everybody had got their heads down. In the afternoon they would start prepping the next operation and it would all start again.’
Task Force Knight’s Operation LARCHWOOD 4 was part of an intense series of operations in the Triangle of Death southwest of the capital. Most of these operations were carried out by Delta and other US forces. Over that May weekend, for example, they took out an entire network in and around Latifiyah. The cell led by Abu Mustafa was held responsible for shooting down an American Apache helicopter early in April, and a welter of other attacks on US forces in the Triangle. On 13 May the Americans had raided four houses used by the Abu Mustafa network. But th
eir pace and exploitation of intelligence from the first raids was such that they intended to go back on Sunday night to hit three more locations. During these operations around Latifiyah fifteen ‘suspected al-Qaeda associates’ as well as Abu Mustafa himself were killed.
At the same time as they were planning their second wave of raids against the Abu Mustafa group, JSOC’s attention turned to a further target several kilometres away, not far from Yusufiyah and the SAS raid of 16 April. It is unclear whether it was yet another arm of the Abu Mustafa network or the result of a separate targeting process. Such was the determination of Delta’s B Squadron to get in and take down their suspect that it was decided to strike in mid-afternoon – in broad daylight.
Special ops Black Hawks from Task Force Brown (known publicly as Task Force 160, the JSOC helicopter regiment) carried an assault force of Delta men towards their target. With them was an SAS liaison officer, Captain Morris, the man who had been wounded during the regiment’s October 2003 battle in Ramadi. The British and American Tier 1 units fostered many formal exchanges and postings with one another, but in Iraq there was often informal liaison too: people who went out on operations to see how their comrades/rivals did things, or even just for the hell of it as an extra shooter. That Sunday, 14 May, other elements of JSOC were backing up the Delta raid in the usual manner, and they would certainly need them.
