by Mark Urban
British FHTs in Iraq were small – usually just a handful of people each in Basra and Baghdad (where they operated under Task Force Knight). Their system of working was informal with the case officer running a particular agent meeting regardless of the rank of those backing him or her up during the encounter. The pace of operations in Basra during late 2006 was such that the team were working flat out. On this Sunday they were on their way to ‘the Shatt’ – the Shatt al-Arab Hotel, headquarters of the Basra City Battlegroup.
As the boats reached a pontoon bridge in the centre of town they had to hug the western bank for there, underneath the ramp that led down to the bridge, was a channel big enough for them to get through. Each took its turn – the main transport carrying the FHT and its two escorts. It is a place just below the corniche where, in happier times, couples had strolled arm in arm before taking a meal in one of the floating restaurants moored nearby. But wedged into the wall just below the promenade was a huge bomb. As the boats passed through the gap they were being watched and videoed. The bomb detonated just as the main passenger craft passed in front of it. Two soldiers and two Royal Marines manning the boat were killed. Several others were wounded. Among the casualties were members of the Defence Humint Unit.
There were inevitable recriminations after an incident of that kind. If the boats could only get around the pontoon bridge in this one place, why wasn’t it kept under fixed technical surveillance or at least searched regularly? The forces’ failure to perform such checks or to equip the boats with countermeasures drew criticism at the subsequent inquest. But there were other questions posed by the incident too. Had members of the DHU deliberately been targeted? Did the skill with which the bomb had been used suggest Iranian training or technical involvement?
For British troops in the centre of the city, following the loss of a helicopter six months before and so many roadside bombs, this was just one more indicator of how their enemies could target all forms of transport. The Army, though, had its own ways of taking the initiative and the general onslaught on the Mehdi Army and other gangs continued.
D Squadron had posted Staff Sergeant Jon Hollingsworth at Basra Palace as the Team Leader of its HATHOR detachment. HATHOR had not yet been replaced by the larger Task Force Spartan, so it received regular support from Baghdad. The days in which MI6 had jokingly called Basra the ‘sleepy shire by the Shatt al-Arab’ were long gone. By late 2006 the tiny detachment was doing target development work on a variety of militia figures as well as spearheading many of the bigger strike operations.
In September HATHOR had been involved in target development work on an important member of al-Qaeda’s international network. Omar al-Faruq was an Iraqi who had become a convinced international jihadist. Arrested in Jakarta in 2002, Faruq had been taken from Indonesia to the Bagram detention facility in Afghanistan. There he had been extensively interrogated by the CIA and, having been wrung dry of information, was scheduled for transfer to Guantanamo when he and other al-Qaeda operatives managed a daring escape. Faruq had found his way back to Iraq, taking up residence in Basra – a curious choice given the overwhelmingly Shia nature of the city and his association with the militant Sunni underground.
Following an intelligence tip-off the SAS led an operation to storm the house where Faruq was staying. Had Faruq been captured, his return to Bagram or Guantanamo might have posed a difficult question for the British, given their aversion to assisting with renditions. This difficulty was avoided when, according to the British military spokesman, Faruq opened fire on the assault force and was killed. The operation that ran him to ground was an impressive intelligence coup that underlined the value of the HATHOR detachment.
Jon Hollingsworth had the energy, charisma and, above all, physical courage needed for this task, according to those who knew him. Originally from Hull, he had graduated from the 3rd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment to the SAS. He was awarded the Queen’s Gallantry Medal for operations in Northern Ireland.
Early in November, shortly before his squadron was due to be replaced, Hollingsworth, then thirty-five years old, had led a raid at the head of his detachment. While clearing a building he had been shot through the neck but had pursued his attacker and killed him. That bullet, which missed his carotid artery by millimetres, took the staff sergeant out of the fight and back to the UK for treatment. Hollingsworth returned to Iraq within days, leaving a citation for the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross behind him in the Hereford paperwork.
On 24 November he met his death, the first member of the task force to fall in action since Corporal Ian Plank in Ramadi three years earlier. Two SAS men, Major Jim Stenner and Sergeant Norman Patterson, had been killed when, driving late at night through the Green Zone in January 2004, their vehicle hit a concrete block. Dozens of men had also been wounded during the years since Plank had been killed, but what many had considered a run of good luck ended with the loss of Staff Sergeant Hollingsworth.
On the night in question, a strike was planned against a block of flats in Basra. It was a difficult mission, at night, in a hostile part of the city against an Alpha crammed with families. There were three assault teams but Hollingsworth, as the HATHOR commander, was in overall charge. Another soldier led the way into the target flat and told the inquest:
There were females with young children in there so there was a lot of screaming and shouting. As we were about to make entry into one room there was a lot of commotion and it seemed like a fridge had been pushed behind the door to barricade it. I was first into that room and saw some males in there and I was calling for John [sic] to back me up because I felt exposed and then [Jon] said ‘I need a medic’.
Hollingsworth had been shot. He was evacuated by helicopter to the nearby British military hospital at Shaibah, but died soon afterwards. Mystery surrounded both who had shot him and how they came to do it with a 5.56mm round, the type of bullet used by Coalition weapons. One soldier told the inquest that two men had been seen fleeing the building. Certainly nobody was apprehended in the flat where the assault team were looking for suspects, nor were weapons recovered. SAS colleagues dismissed the idea that Hollingsworth had died in a friendly fire accident: it is certainly true that Iraqi insurgents prized captured British or American weapons as trophies.
One SAS colleague gave Hollingsworth this pithy epitaph: ‘CGC! QGM! He was like Bodie from The Professionals – he was bound to die in a hail of bullets!’ To many of the operators, Hollingsworth personified the green-eyed warrior: completely fearless in battle, someone who exerted an irresistible pull over lesser men. As such, his leadership was sorely missed. Many considered that with the frantic pace at which it had pursued missions in 2006, Task Force Knight’s people had been living on borrowed time. Hollingsworth left behind a widow and two boys, one just a baby.
Hollingsworth’s repatriation produced a discreet but well-attended SAS funeral at Credenhill Camp. His body had been brought back under escort by members of his squadron, dressed in their assault rig, a pattern that was followed with future losses. Another important precedent was also set: the staff sergeant’s widow was invited to a private meeting with Tony Blair at Downing Street. This audience, which Number Ten regarded as a special form of recognition for the dangers faced by the SAS, underlined the Prime Minister’s personal interest in and gratitude for their work.
The hectic pace of operations in Basra was set to continue. In December a team from G Squadron was flown down for Operation DOVER. The undercover warfare specialists always reserved a particular zeal for hunting down those who had claimed their colleagues’ lives. In the case of DOVER, members of the DHU had managed to recruit a source with intimate knowledge of November’s Shatt al-Arab river bombing. The agent located the insurgent cell and leader responsible for carrying out the operation. These people were apprehended after G Squadron stormed a building in northern Basra. Video of the attack and much other intelligence was gathered.
The punishing tempo set by the British divisional and briga
de commanders in the city continued with a raid on 22 December which netted Captain Jafar among five other officers in the Iraqi Police Service. He was the man in the Serious Crime Unit under surveillance by the HATHOR detachment in September 2005 when two of its members were captured. This hammering of the Iraqi police culminated three days later, during the early hours of Christmas Day, with a huge raid on the Jamiat police station itself. More than 120 prisoners were released from its cells, many of whom, British army spokesmen claimed, showed signs of torture. Stacks of material including computers and files were taken away from the station before the whole place was blown up by the British.
And what did all of this raiding and killing achieve? As 2006 came to an end General Shirreff ’s aggressive approach had yielded only partial results. The trend of violence was still climbing upwards. Operation SINBAD had been blunted in its conception by both British and Iraqi doubters. Local support for it, even within the Iraqi army, had faltered early on due to fears that it would precipitate an open contest on the city’s streets, unifying the many splinter or radical groups with the Mehdi Army. The British general had at least confronted the issue of police involvement in Basra’s death squads, kidnapping and criminal mafias. One of the senior officers most closely associated with Britain’s Iraq policy throughout the 2003–8 period later told me, ‘In Basra we did not go there to win. We went to create the best conditions we could for withdrawal and that is not winning.’ Richard Shirreff presented an honourable exception to this mindset. But the limitations placed upon him by the MoD and Iraqi leaders effectively showed that Britain was incapable of ‘choosing victory’ in the same way as the United States.
Behind all of these problems faced by soldiers on the streets of Basra was the growing power of the city’s militias. Takedown operations could remove key figures but Britain could not produce the kind of operation JSOC was achieving further north, removing entire cells of Sunni extremists night after night. The intelligence effort, pool of specialist forces and, above all, political will were all lacking. Such an approach would have touched off huge gun battles with possible British losses most nights. So while the British could detain leadership figures such as Sajjad Badr and confiscate growing quantities of weaponry, the membership of insurgent groups was so large that empty shoes or caches were soon filled.
The question that people from Balad to Langley or Basra to Hereford asked themselves while these events were unfolding in the latter part of 2006 was whether the Shia extremist threat had reached such a scale that it needed to receive the same treatment as al-Qaeda and other Sunni groups. The issue of Iranian involvement was inextricably linked to this, for if JSOC’s tactics were used against the Shia groups they would sooner or later threaten Iranian interests. And how on earth could Balad take on a whole new target set when its people were already straining every sinew against al-Qaeda bombers in Baghdad and elsewhere?
14
THE COMING STORM WITH IRAN
Just after 3.30 a.m. on 11 January 2007 Black Hawks and Little Birds from Task Force Brown swooped across the roofs of Irbil in northern Iraq. The city, distinguished by an ancient walled citadel at its centre, could trace its history back beyond 2000 BC. With its beautiful sites, mountain views and relative peace, Irbil’s people were unused to the sounds of American raids. But as the choppers pulled up over a walled compound in a part of the city known as Old Korea that was precisely what was happening. As the area was roused from its slumbers men from Delta Force leapt off the choppers and rushed across the roofs of the building while a ground assault force broke in through the main gates. ‘It was a strategic moment,’ says one special operator. For the building that Delta was about to force its way into was the Iranian Liaison Office, effectively the country’s embassy in that region.
At the Joint Operations Centre in Balad, JSOC’s commanders watched on their plasma screens as the Delta men went into the building. For months a debate had gone on, from the White House down to the JOC, about how to prosecute the Iranian target. Even on that night some of the arguments were unresolved. And so, remarkably, the special operators made their own decision, as someone who watched events develop in Irbil points out: ‘The general feeling in the JOC was “nobody can make their minds up… let’s just do it!”’
JSOC had not put themselves out on a limb policy-wise, but there were some difficult matters of interpretation. Since November 2006 a new directive sanctioned by President Bush had allowed US forces in Iraq to kill or capture Iranian nationals if they were engaged in targeting Coalition forces. This change in Washington tied in with wider international developments: Hezbollah’s success in the Lebanon war of June 2006, as well as Iran’s continued defiance on the nuclear issue. The new mission had its own acronym, CII – Counter Iranian Influence.
Many in Iraq felt action was long overdue. The British had seethed with frustration at the increasingly obvious signs of Iranian involvement in the south. Late in 2006 one officer in Basra told me, ‘Iran is at war with us here, killing British soldiers, and nobody seems to care.’ The flow of EFP bombs, started in 2004, had been followed by growing human intelligence about the training of Iraqi insurgents in Iran as well as financial backing for attacks on Coalition forces. Finds of mortar rounds or rockets with recent Iranian markings had multiplied. These realities did not just affect the British in the south; MNF commanders knew that, by early 2007, most of the indirect fire attacks on the Green Zone were coming from Sadr City and other Shia areas. US intelligence reckoned that Iranian support for Iraqi insurgents was so extensive that anything up to 150 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps or other special forces were in Iraq at any one time. For several months the Pentagon had kept quiet about its growing losses to the Iranian proxies; commanders knew that public accusations would create a demand for action.
The problem with trying to close down this Iranian operation was that many were afraid of fighting on two fronts at once. Al-Qaeda was far from broken, despite its rout in Ramadi. Nobody wanted to repeat 2004’s mistake of triggering a war with the Mehdi Army at the same time as the Fallujah operation. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had himself sought to embroil the US in a war with Iran as a means of further weakening the superpower. Wouldn’t targeting Iranians be doing exactly what he had wanted?
Of one thing they were sure at Balad: it was essential to maintain the pressure of nightly raids against AQI. The Pentagon’s solution was to keep the commander of Delta, working through the JOC, in charge of the fight against the Sunni jihadists. At this time this effort (formerly codenamed TF-145) was referred to as Task Force 16. A new command, based around the headquarters of an army special forces group (Tier 2 special ops), was designated Task Force 17 and given the mission of Counter Iranian Influence. TF-17 could, and did, draw on the same Predators or Delta squadron as TF-16. But putting these command arrangements in place was just a small part of the picture. The big question about killing or capturing Iranians was one of political judgement.
In Baghdad on 21 December the US had captured two Iranians it believed were senior officers in the Quds Force, the branch of the Revolutionary Guards that operated in support of Iran’s overseas allies. The arrests had produced a hue and cry from Iran, the State Department and some Iraqi leaders. Nine days later the Iranian prisoners had been released.
Three weeks on, the Delta commandos moving through the corridors of the Iranian Liaison Office in Irbil were under pressure to find compelling evidence of Iranian involvement in the insurgency. As they burst into rooms they found staff hurriedly trying to destroy records and, bizarrely, alter their appearance by cutting off hair. The men had fake ID cards and one would later test positive for handling explosives. The Americans were looking for two senior figures from across the border: Mohammed Jafari, the deputy head of Iran’s Security Council, and General Minjahar Frouzanda, head of intelligence in the Revolutionary Guards.
The Irbil raid had resulted from human intelligence. The CIA Station in the Kurdish region had learned abo
ut the visit of the two top Iranians from one of its agents. The British government did not want Task Force Knight to arrest Iranians and so they could only watch what was about to happen.
However, the ‘fixing’ of Delta’s targets was not all that it might have been. As the raid proceeded, failing to find the two senior officials at the Liaison Office, the Delta team moved swiftly to Irbil airport, a few miles to the north, in case they were trying to escape by plane. There was a tense standoff between the Americans and Kurdish troops. The Delta team was withdrawn, taking five arrested Iranian officials with them, and the recriminations started. The MNF press office in Baghdad put out a release better calculated to soothe ruffled Kurdish feathers than reveal anything of substance: ‘Coalition Forces conducting routine security operations in Irbil Jan. 11 detained six individuals suspected of being closely tied to activities targeting Iraqi and Coalition Forces. One individual was released and five remain in custody.’
Iraq’s President and Foreign Minister, both Kurds, knew that the operation was anything but routine. They considered the raid to be a humiliating violation of their authority. Some Iraqi Kurdish officials used a similar line to that adopted by Iran in response to the raid – one that had also been deployed after the 21 December arrests in Baghdad – that the Iranian officials had been there at the invitation of the Iraqi authorities on a mission to improve security cooperation between the two countries. Since the Kurds were the group usually most supportive of America’s mission in Iraq, this political blowback was particularly embarrassing. State Department officials were soon asking the army to release the five Iranians. The generals refused, producing a standoff within the US bureaucracy. Admiral William Fallon, running the wider Middle East theatre at Central Command, backed the decision in Baghdad. American commanders wanted Irbil to send a signal and they believed that it had got through, one telling me, ‘They realised we were coming after them. The Iranians didn’t like doing much dirty work or getting their hands dirty. A lot of them would prefer the Arabs to do the dying.’
