Task Force Black
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Once Petraeus was hard at work in Baghdad a great many advisers were able to shape his ideas. In the case of Graeme Lamb, the plain-speaking Brit was able to move his efforts to woo tribal sheikhs into a higher gear. He was also influential in formulating new strategies to combat the car bombs in Baghdad. Petraeus was determined to put high concrete T-walls around certain markets or neighbourhoods in order to control access. He called it creating ‘gated communities’.
Petraeus’s ideas on Iran and the Counter Iranian Influence mission were only half formed when he arrived in Baghdad. He believed the Irbil raid had worried the Revolutionary Guards in Tehran but thought that any further steps needed to be considered with great care. He was particularly worried about being drawn into stand-up fights in places like Sadr City before the Sunni insurgency had been tackled.
Lamb provided a concept of operations at this time, called the Squeeze Box. One special operations officer who was briefed by the general recalls:
[Lamb] produced this spectrum chart. On the right was lethal Iranian influence and on the left was al-Qaeda in Iraq. In the middle you have the ‘squeeze box’, ordinary people you needed to win over. By using Task Force 17 to neutralise the Iranians and Task Force 16 on al-Qaeda you could allow the middle ground to escape the influence of the extremes.
Petraeus endorsed these ideas and added his own political top-spin. He leant on Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi leader, to publicly condemn Iranian interference and to support the removal of senior government or security forces figures found to have cooperated with the Shia militias. It was vital for the new effort to be seen as even-handed, or at least more so than the security drives of 2006. This was not just a matter of political stage management; it also reflected the reality that Shia militants were killing growing numbers of Coalition soldiers at the same time as the Sunni strike rate was showing some signs of slackening. The drive against the Special Groups was about to move into a different gear. The trigger would prove to be an operation by Task Force Knight.
16
THE KHAZALI MISSION
On a mid-March night some members of G Squadron found themselves aboard a Hercules, deploying once again to Basra. In the near darkness of the cargo hold, men listened to their iPods or dozed. The blades rotating through their duty at Task Force Knight had become used to shuttling back and forth, but this tour of G Squadron, which was coming towards its end, had seen more of it than most. The higher tempo of strike operations started the previous autumn by Major-General Shirreff had not stopped with his departure. Although the SAS presence at Basra Palace had been upgraded through the formation of Task Force Spartan early in 2007, extra people were sometimes needed for big jobs, and this was one of those occasions.
One senior Coalition commander told me, ‘Even in late 2006 there was a recognition of how involved the Iranians were in a number of issues. They had in mind a compliant and weak Iraq. They’d been getting an absolutely free ride for some time.’ This latest serial in Basra was a further attempt to do something about it. It was a result of intelligence-gathering on a player called Qais Khazali. The ‘find’ part of the F3EA (find-fix-finish-exploit-analyse) doctrine had not been hard. Reports from human and other sources gave him a central role in organising militant breakaways from the Mehdi Army.
Qais Khazali was a Shia cleric who had studied under Muqtada al-Sadr’s father before Sadr senior’s assassination by the Saddam regime in 1999. Khazali had been close to Muqtada after the US invasion, acting for a time as his spokesman. But following the Second Sadrist Rising of late 2004 the two men had fallen out, with Khazali favouring continued operations against Coalition forces and Muqtada a ceasefire. The two had drifted in and out of alliance, Khazali all the time gaining importance and followers. By mid-2006 Khazali had secured leadership over a group of rejectionists within the Sadrist movement who were taking large amounts of cash and weaponry from Iran.
Moving against Shia extremists was a particularly delicate issue with the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. His own small party, bereft of a militia, was in coalition with other Shia movements that had much to lose from any attempt to shut down their armed groups. General Petraeus and US Ambassador Ryan Crocker thus spent much time during the early weeks of 2007 convincing Maliki that their surge against the extremists required an even-handed approach – it could not simply be an anti-Sunni campaign. ‘Dave and Ryan were working Maliki day and night,’ says one senior US officer. But they found that Maliki had a naïve faith in the likes of Muqtada al-Sadr’s assurances that his people were not attacking Coalition forces or contributing aggressively to the problem.
So Petraeus and Crocker started briefing Maliki with sensitive intelligence material, including telephone intercepts of some of his Shia allies crowing about how they were pulling the wool over the Prime Minister’s eyes. Someone party to those briefings remarks, ‘We showed him what those assholes were doing.’ Maliki’s attitude started to change but, lest he be saying one thing and planning another, the Americans leaked that they were listening in on the Prime Minister himself. It was all a process of what the senior officer describes as ‘manipulation’. Maliki, says another player in this high-level intelligence gambit, ‘goes from “the Shia can do no wrong” to a situation where he’s listening to tapes and seeing product which made him think certain people were making a buffoon of him’.
In the case of Qais Khazali, Coalition intelligence had been aware of his role as an Iranian proxy for some months. But the officers briefing Maliki found ‘[Khazali’s group was] allies of some kind with Maliki, they had something on him, which gave them some kind of political top cover.’ It was only once the Iraqi Prime Minister had finally been convinced early in March to agree to an operation that the Khazali target pack could be passed to British special forces.
The operation against Khazali, due to take place on the night of 20 March, first required the SAS to ‘fix’ him. One member of the regiment says their trip to Basra that night was the logical result of ‘a lot of exploitation of human intelligence in southern Iraq over a period of eighteen months’. The picture built of rat lines from Iran into Basra had allowed certain locations to be pinpointed. Another figure connected with the operation says, ‘Once we decided to target him, it all happened amazingly quickly,’ adding that their intelligence analysts had realised ‘hit these dudes and we’re laughing’. The trigger was specific information about the place where Khazali might be found.
The ground assault force was duly dispatched into the darkness in Basra. They hit the house where Khazali was staying without injury on either side.
Having found, fixed and finished the operation, it entered its critical phase. For it was in the exploitation and analysis that this raid was to emerge as the most significant Task Force Knight action of the entire Operation CRICHTON saga. In the house in Basra were several other people. Among them was Laith Khazali, Qais’s brother, and a middle-aged Arab man who pretended to be deaf-mute. Along with the arrests came a haul of critical documents.
One of these papers was a twenty-two-page report on the Kerbala raid two months earlier. It described in great detail preparations for the operation and its execution. It identified Azhar al-Dulaimi as the commander responsible for this sophisticated raid, which resulted in the deaths of five American soldiers. A month after G Squadron seized these papers, Dulaimi was killed by US forces. The Kerbala memo also contained entries of a high political significance: indicators that Iran’s Quds Force had approved the operation.
There were other memos too. Some listed attacks on British bases such as the Palace and Shatt al-Arab Hotel. Others indicated payments ranging from $750,000 to $3 million per month. Analysts who studied the documents considered that the payments were linked to performance in the execution of attacks on the Coalition. Perhaps the most extraordinary information yielded by that night’s raid, though, concerned the manacled man who was taken northwards by Hercules soon afterwards, still pretending not to be able to hear or speak.
Daqduq had been brought in by the Quds Force leadership in Tehran as a sort of insurgent management consultant. Since Hezbollah had become so expert in IEDs and other techniques during its long war with Israel, could they not raise the game of those fighting the British in Basra? He described how he had travelled from Lebanon to Tehran in May 2006 to receive his orders from the deputy commander of the Quds Force. He had then made four trips into Iraq where he reorganised the Shia Special Group cell structure, reported on their indirect fire as well as IED attacks and organised groups of Iraqis to travel into Iran for further training.
One of the Britons analysing the take from the 20 March raid in Basra argues, ‘The case was proven from an intelligence point of view long before Daqduq.’ The captured Hezbollah officer’s debriefing, when set alongside other information gathered by the Coalition, demonstrated – and in a detailed way that could be publicly exploited – the role of Iran’s Quds Force in funding and directing operations that had killed US and British soldiers. The only real issue outstanding was whether specific leadership figures, including Ayatollah Khamenei or President Ahmedinejad, had given clearance for operations like Kerbala.
General Petraeus changed his previously cautious public line about Iranian proxy operations in Iraq. Shortly after reviewing the intelligence seized in the SAS’s Basra raid, he said at a press briefing, ‘The Iranian involvement has really become much clearer to us and brought into much more focus during the interrogation of the members – the heads of the Khazali network and some of the key members of that network.’ The SAS mission, just like Delta’s January move in Irbil, had made a strategic impact. In this sense the Khazali operation ranked alongside LARCHWOOD 4 as the most significant of the entire British special forces campaign in Iraq.
This new explicit language about Iran carried with it profound implications. Many in London or Washington wondered whether the US was about to go to war with Iran. Petraeus did not want this, but he did direct contingency planning for air strikes on Revolutionary Guard facilities inside the country. The raids would be launched if an attack attributable to Iran claimed the lives of many US soldiers – the exact number was not revealed. At the same time, the Americans resolved to use diplomatic channels to warn the Iranians about the possible consequences of what they were doing.
Since Petraeus was about to confront al-Qaeda in Baghdad and nearby Baquba in late 2007, the last thing he needed was an open fight with the wider Shia community or the Mehdi Army. So the CII covert operation, TF-17, was his weapon of choice. It would be used to step up raids against those acting as Iran’s hitmen in Iraq. The information from the Khazali raid that resulted in the death of Azhar Dulaimi was just one aspect of this. Since the Coalition had leaders of the Special Groups in custody, their mapping of its networks received a huge boost, triggering raids throughout April and May. It was not a deniable or completely black campaign, but it was one in which the agility of special ops soldiers would be used to keep the profile low, thus avoiding the crisis that something like a full-scale offensive in Sadr City might cause.
In order to mount these operations Task Force 17 relied a good deal on the US Army’s Green Berets mentoring teams with the emerging ISOF (Iraqi Special Operations Forces) units. The Americans had embedded what they called ‘A Teams’ or ODAs (from Operational Detachment Alpha) in outfits such as the Iraqi National Intelligence Service’s special forces and the Iraqi army’s commando brigade. These US units, of around twenty men, became during the course of 2007 the key to Coalition operations in provinces such as Dhi Ghar or Maysan, where the British had pulled back. One senior American figure comments, ‘It is hardly recognised how the entire situation in the south depended upon a very small number of US special forces soldiers.’ Acting as mentors to Iraqi SOF, the use of these teams also ensured that operations in Shia militant strongholds had an Iraqi face to them – something of great symbolic importance in the US relationship with Iraq’s government. Of course the American A Teams did not at that time have the run of Basra. Task Force Spartan was to be highly active throughout 2007 but, as the British discovered, the dynamic of confronting Iranian influence was quite different for them.
At 10.30 a.m. on 23 March a group of fifteen Royal Navy sailors and Royal Marines had gone in two inflatable boats to investigate a vessel in the lower part of the Shatt al-Arab waterway. It was just three days after the Khazali raid and naval officers had noted an upward trend in Iranian Revolutionary Guard violations of waters claimed by Iraq.
The British mission that day was to board a ship carrying cars to make sure it was not involved in smuggling. Their parent ship, the frigate HMS Cornwall, stood off in deeper waters while the search was made. Cornwall’s helicopter, which had originally covered the boarding, providing vital surveillance over the horizon, returned to the ship after a quarter of an hour in order to refuel. It was at this moment that two speedboats belonging to the Revolutionary Guards moved swiftly to the boarded craft, apparently catching the British naval party by surprise before they had completed their mission.
As soon as the Iranians told the members of the Cornwall’s crew that they were under arrest, a further six Revolutionary Guard speedboats were launched to cover the operation of removing the British. The sailors and marines were disarmed and, while an Iranian cameraman filmed them, sped under arrest back to a nearby naval base. Under the rules of engagement then applied by the Royal Navy, no attempt was made to stop them.
Iran’s seizure of the boarding party soon developed into a major international incident. Much attention was focused on the lone female captive, the chain-smoking Faye Turney. Iranian TV showed footage of the British officers apparently confessing their ‘mistake’ in being in Iranian waters at the time of capture.
In Baghdad the capture prompted immediate contingency planning for a British rescue effort. Although the practicalities of mounting such an operation into Iran were far less promising than those of getting two SAS men out of the Jamiat, JSOC responded in similar spirit. A Predator drone was swiftly scrambled to assist the British.
Other preparatory steps were taken to facilitate a rescue mission. The Task Force Knight helicopter detachment at BIAP started to prepare for a move down south. An SAS liaison officer went down to Basra to discuss what might be done. The British divisional commander was by this point Major-General Jonathan Shaw, who had a poor working relationship with Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Williams, the SAS commander. Shaw was named joint commander for any rescue mission by PJHQ in Britain, so the two men would just have to get along.
However, the window for any rescue soon closed as intelligence and media reporting revealed that the captives had been taken north to Tehran. Britain used the diplomatic avenues open to it to pressure Iran, and on 4 April the detainees were duly released following a grand piece of political theatre, over which a beaming President Mahmud Ahmedinejad presided. In front of the world’s press he decorated Iranian naval officers for their steadfastness and vigilance before releasing the sailors and marines with a gift of new suits. ‘The Islamic government and the Iranian people,’ he said, ‘with all powers and legal right to put the soldiers on trial, forgave those fifteen. This pardon is a gift to the British people.’
So ended the drama of the Royal Navy’s captured patrol. Media attention was focused on their behaviour and indeed whether they had really been inside Iraqi waters. Little was given to the issue of whether Britain was paying the price f
or the increasingly aggressive campaign against Iranian agents in Iraq. Certainly MNF headquarters in Baghdad had been sensitive to the possibility that strike operations like that against the Khazalis might expose Britain to retaliation in Basra or on the border. In an apparent attempt to deflect attention, some journalists had been briefed that American special forces had carried out the raid. And while direct action by Iran to embarrass Britain had always been feasible (other boat crews had been detained on the Shatt al-Arab waterway before), friends of the Khazalis also had the capability to strike back within Iraq.
This retaliation came in May 2007, when a convoy of heavily armed ‘police’ turned up at the Finance Ministry in Baghdad. They quickly found a British computer expert and the five bodyguards detailed to look after him, and spirited the men away. A nightmare had begun for the hostages, this time without the chance of a political showman like President Ahmedinejad turning it into a bloodless piece of propaganda.
The technique used to take the men was a trademark of the Special Groups – up to forty men in police commando uniforms with official-looking vehicles. It had been used against the Americans in Kerbala and to kidnap Iraqis belonging to the country’s Olympic committee. It guaranteed passage through Baghdad’s many checkpoints, and the large number of gunmen involved served to intimidate any bona fide policeman with suspicions, or indeed a western private security detail.