by Mark Urban
Among the blades the evaporation of worthwhile targets soon had an impact. ‘They got very low-level operations to go and get mortar teams and people who should have been the responsibility of the Iraqi Army,’ explains one former operator. ‘People got disillusioned.’ Smart young soldiers coming through special forces selection and hearing tell about the intensity of combat in southern Afghanistan started to gravitate towards the SBS which was operating there: ‘People want to go where the action is.’
While B Squadron tried ever harder to make an impact with its operations Richard Williams, who had until December 2007 been the Commanding Officer of the SAS, faced an uncertain future. He had left the army with his marriage broken, while dealing with post-traumatic stress. To compound his personal situation, Williams was briefly investigated by the Director of Special Forces for his use of official expenses. There had been no wrongdoing, and he was soon exonerated.
When Williams handed in his resignation the previous summer, the fact had soon appeared in the press. Obsessive and aggressive, the former CO had made plenty of enemies. Williams had emulated his hero Stan McChrystal in spending much of his time during 2005 to 2007 personally directing operations in Iraq, pushing his people hard. The Times commented that his leadership style ‘has drawn criticism from the army hierarchy, which believes that commanding officers, whether they are in the SAS or in conventional regiments, need to be less involved in frontline combat and more concerned with the “big picture”.’
Talking to participants in these operations it was obvious that Williams’s period in command still evokes strong emotions. One leading (non-special forces) figure in Baghdad said he regarded the SAS leader as ‘a victim of Hereford politics, and it is a place where there are bitter rivalries’. Such is the strength of these animosities that one officer who had served in the SAS in Baghdad alleged to me that Williams had actually been forced out early, or effectively sacked.
In fact this is untrue, as is the suggestion that he had blotted his army record by leading from the front. One general who could have influenced Williams’s promotion prospects had he remained in the army says, ‘Had he stayed I have no doubt that he was destined for three- or four-star rank.’ A more junior figure, a veteran of Task Force Knight, told me candidly that he had bitterly resented Williams’s pressure at the time, but had come to realise that his boss had provided the impetus necessary to make their operations really bite.
Any supporter of Richard Williams could point out that the regiment’s period of maximum effectiveness in taking down terrorist networks – from the summer of 2005 to late 2007 – coincided almost exactly with his tenure as CO. Before he arrived, due to differences with the Americans over detainees and command arrangements, the SAS had been achieving only a limited impact. They had rounded up old men, Ba’athists whose detention made little difference to the carnage on the streets. Once Williams had gone the aggression he had insisted upon, telling each squadron commander they must complete at least one mission a night, seemed to fall away too.
There is without doubt an element of coincidence. In particular, the improvement of security in Baghdad, and more widely during 2008, rapidly cut the ground from underneath the special operations people. That had nothing to do with who was running the SAS, Task Force Knight or indeed JSOC, for Lieutenant-General McChrystal was gone by then too. It was however in taking the SAS to its high-gear, high-impact operations against al-Qaeda, often in the teeth of opposition from his boss, Major-General Peter Rogers – that Williams made his greatest personal impact.
In some ways Williams came to symbolise a deeper clash of cultures within the British system. For, talking to many of those who were involved, the debates about Williams or the SAS’s role in Baghdad were clearly suffused with a theme of pro- and anti-Americanism. These arguments about the rights and wrongs of George Bush’s war or the often disastrous early conduct of operations in Iraq provided a subtext to so many of the discussions in the SAS, MI6, the Foreign Office or Army. Many of those who favoured the British caveats on Task Force Black’s operations during 2004 to 2005 shared a scepticism about American goals and methods that bordered on hostility. Issues such as detainee conditions or rules of engagement were exploited to keep British operations semi-detached. ‘The British, when we went there, were very sniffy about the American way of doing things,’ reflects one commander who started off in the sceptic camp but ended up realising that JSOC ‘was doing it in a rather templated industrial manner and in the end we came around to their way of doing things’.
Williams believed that the SAS could never be truly effective without harnessing the massive intelligence resources at JSOC’s disposal. But he was also an unashamed Americanophile. One SAS officer told me ‘the thing about Richard is that he would probably have preferred to have commanded Delta’, but the idea of the SAS commander sitting at the Joint Operations Center at Balad running the whole US–UK black operation in Iraq could never be. The United States simply had too many of its top covert operatives and too much of its sensitive intelligence technology at play in Iraq to allow a foreigner, even a Brit, a turn at command. The other pivotal pro-American in these debates was Graeme Lamb. As Director of Special Forces he had launched the SAS into its Baghdad mission cooperating closely with Delta Force. Later, when wearing the two hats of deputy commander of MNF-I and Senior British Military Representative in Iraq, he not only played a key role in the Awakening but also kept a paternal eye on UK special forces operations.
The record of squadron operations perhaps provides the best vindication of those who argued that UK special forces could only achieve the same results as the Americans if they were led with comparable aggression and supplied with comparable intelligence. During the middle part of 2003, during A Squadron’s tour that operated closely with the Americans, it raided eighty-five properties. Four years later, after various UK national caveats had been removed, the same squadron mounted almost twice as many raids. In fact, the rate was not dramatically different because the first tour had lasted four months and the 2007 one six, amounting to an average of five operations each week on the first tour and almost seven on the second. In between these two highly successful deployments, however, the British had for much of 2004 to 2005 removed themselves from JSOC’s operations against Islamic militants and concentrated instead on Former Regime Elements. During this period the tally fell dramatically, reaching its nadir during the C Squadron (SBS) tour of 2004, when fewer than two dozen raids, or an average of 1.3 each week, were mounted.
On the same March day that B Squadron’s raid in the Sunni Triangle unfolded, the highways to southern Iraq began to hum with military traffic. On 25 March Nouri al-Maliki had taken the decision to bring forward an operation against Shia militias in Basra. The 7th Iraqi Division was dispatched southwards with hundreds of armoured vehicles and teams of embedded US advisers. The 14th Division, trained by the British to operate in the city, was also stood by for action.
When convoys of Iraqi Army vehicles began snaking into the city thousands of black-clad Mehdi Army fighters took to the streets. General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker had spent the past year convincing Maliki that he had to break the power of the Shia militias, principally the Mehdi Army. They had succeeded to such a degree that by March 2008, according to one senior US figure, ‘we almost had to stop him taking a gun and going to Basra to join in the fighting’.
It was just as well that Maliki restrained his impulse because during the early days of Operation Charge of the Knights his army suffered some embarrassing reverses. One of the British-trained brigades of the 14th Division ‘collapsed’, with hundreds deserting. British Merlin helicopter crews sent to the Palace to pick up Iraqi casualties reported having to beat back dozens of terrified Iraqi soldiers who were trying to escape on their aircraft.
The operation pitted twenty-seven thousand Iraqi security forces against an estimated five to six thousand militia. Around two hundred US and British embedded advisers with these units were
able to bring in artillery, helicopter and other support. During street-to-street fighting the government lost more than two hundred soldiers. The militia’s casualties have been estimated at up to six hundred killed. At one stage, against military advice, Maliki allowed a ten-day ceasefire for negotiations.
On 19 April, four weeks after the operation had been launched, Iraqi troops walked into the Hayyaniyah. In that onetime militia bastion that the British troops had dubbed the Shia Flats, people came out onto the street to applaud their soldiers. Resistance was over and for the first time in years the spell of intimidation that the gunmen had woven across the city was broken. Young women returned to the university without veils and the corniche once again thronged with couples arm in arm.
Although General Petraeus and other senior officers in Baghdad had been dubious about the timing of the operation they celebrated its results. In the corridors of the Republican Palace or Camp Victory the American brass drew its lessons. Many Iraqi generals and a small band of British officers, including many from the special forces, saw things in much the same way.
Operation CHARGE OF THE KNIGHTS had demonstrated that the Shia militia in Basra could be beaten. It was not a permanent solution, for that could only come through politics, but it did scatter and suppress the city’s armed gangs. The negativity and hesitancy – or ‘defeatism’ as one SAS officer characterised it – of many of the British officers who had served in Multi-National Division South East during the previous years had however been exposed. People like Major-General Richard Shirreff, who had argued that Britain could not leave the power of the militia intact and had tried to confront it, found little support from head office at the Ministry of Defence or from the wider British public.
The more politically savvy British officers argued that flushing out the militias, with all the bloodshed and destruction that involved, was something only the Iraqis could do, and that the confidence of Maliki’s forces had received a boost as a result of the operation’s success. But US actions in Ramadi late in 2006, in Baghdad early in 2007, or in Baquba in June of that year had confronted opposition even more intense than that seen in Basra and defeated it. The view that Britain had been defeated in Basra became widespread among the American top brass. Yet their perceptions of what had been achieved by the small British special operations task force in Baghdad could not have been more different.
On 30 May 2009 Operation CRICHTON, the UK special forces deployment in Iraq, ended. A small party from G Squadron left Baghdad airport and headed back to the UK. In some ways the work of Task Force Knight was unfinished. Iranian influence remained strong and the search for British hostages taken at the Finance Ministry in 2007 continued. There was still some low-level political killing in the country. But Baghdad felt like a city transformed. Levels of violence had fallen away, there were few tasks left for Coalition special operators. Moreover, the Iraqi government, while agreeing to the future US presence in the country, no longer wanted the British to operate.
During six years in Iraq a British special forces task force that rarely exceeded 150 had killed or captured 3500 people. Of these, the great majority were captured. Precise tallies of the dead are difficult because in places like Ramadi in 2003 or Yusufiyah in 2006 blades have told me they had to leave before bodies were counted. However, the number killed by British special forces, based on estimates of those involved, was probably 350 to 400. The equivalent figures for JSOC’s US operations across Iraq during the same period can be estimated at a total of eleven to twelve thousand, of whom around three thousand may have been killed. A higher proportion of British captured to killed is apparent, but this pattern was set in the years where their main mission was taking down Former Regime Elements, relatively few of whom put up any resistance.
These stark estimates hint at the deeper story of the Coalition’s secret war in Iraq. Certainly many of those involved would accept that it was bloody, but argue that in the maelstrom of violence that wracked the country it was necessary to meet fire with fire. They assert, furthermore, that the campaign masterminded by General Stanley McChrystal succeeded in breaking al-Qaeda in Iraq. JSOC captured or killed the organisation’s members faster than it could recruit new ones. What some refer to as the martyrdom argument – that killing an insurgent simply causes others to step forward in his or her place – needs to be reevaluated in the light of JSOC’s campaign. No doubt there were many who wished to avenge killing by the Coalition’s special operators, but it was General McChrystal’s operational design that eventually made it impossible for them to do so.
In many counterterrorist campaigns the limitations of intelligence, special forces numbers or political will mean that strike operations can never account for more than a small percentage of the enemy organisation. Dead men’s shoes are quickly filled. What happened in Iraq was different. By insisting that each of his five or six task forces carry out multiple takedowns every night, McChrystal set a pace of operations that probably removed from the streets (by arrest or elimination) most of the membership of AQI. One senior British officer who watched it happen asserts that ‘the US tempo proved irresistible and decisive’.
Of course credit in the American success of bringing Iraq back from the abyss was claimed by many people outside JSOC. One US officer with a special forces background who served with the regular army unit south of Baghdad at the time of A Squadron’s many raids in the area during 2007 argues that the key building block in the Coalition’s success was the establishment of dozens of Joint Security Stations. These places combined US and Iraqi security forces and enhanced people’s safety while offering an easy local address to those who wished to give information. On the other hand, a ground-holding commander in the Rashid district of southern Baghdad told me that the entire Coalition effort was secondary to the shift in Sunni opinion to rejecting the insurgency during 2007.
In September 2008, during the course of a long BBC interview with General Petraeus in Baghdad, I explored his perceptions of how the tide had been turned. Petraeus had banned his staff from using the ‘V word’ and told me that he didn’t think he ever would. The situation was too tenuous and the general too careful to claim victory. As to the ingredients, he laid emphasis on the Anaconda Strategy, his comprehensive approach that stressed everything from political reconciliation to economic progress and conventional and special operations forces. Giving the example of the elimination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June 2006, Petraeus asked, ‘Did that make any difference in the violence? Well, it undermined, certainly, leadership for a while in al-Qaeda but someone else popped up and there was again a continual standing up.’ While special ops ‘may conduct the most important operations of all, and they typically do’, the effect of changes in the way intelligence was gathered and shared proved critical. ‘In fact,’ he argued, ‘the breakthrough is not any one technological capability or intelligence advance: it is the fusion of all of those.’ The way in which General McChrystal had built his own network at Balad had, implied General Petraeus, cascaded through Tier 2 special forces to conventional units and even Iraqi ones.
In evaluating the relative role of what Petraeus referred to as ‘special mission units’ – the classified forces or JSOC – the general was obliged to take a line in which due acknowledgement had to be given to his new operational approach of making the people the centre of operations and to increases in the number of conventional forces: the surge. None of the key players, not even General McChrystal himself, appears to believe that a stand-alone special operations campaign of increasing intensity and size could have been the panacea for Iraq’s security problems. It is also obvious that constraints, from the political to operational ones posed by more limited intelligence, prevent the application of the JSOC Iraq model in many other parts of the world. However, it is clear that the covert offensive against al-Qaeda in Iraq and Iranian influence played an important role in bringing the country back from the brink of anarchy.
It is also clear that key aspects of the campa
ign against the Sunni insurgency were gaining traction before Petraeus and his Anaconda Strategy were in place. The Awakening movement (with British participation) was already delivering important results in the second half of 2006. The JSOC campaign in the Triangle of Death had also started to degrade al-Qaeda’s ability to mount complex large-scale attacks. That the overall tide of violence was still rising at that time was due in large measure to the Shia insurgency being sponsored by Iran. The great achievement during the Petraeus period was to take on the irreconcilables of both sides at the same time and for this the Anaconda or comprehensive approach was vital.
As for Britain’s involvement in Iraq, the picture is more straightforward. The green army arrived in the country with the conviction that it knew best how to conduct a counterinsurgency. Words like smug and complacent are sometimes used by officers who witnessed the UK approach in the south. Instead, Basra and Maysan provided a bitter learning experience. The overt military mission ended with recriminations and suggestions after Operation CHARGE OF THE KNIGHTS in spring 2008 that the Iraqis had been forced to do a job Britain was unable to perform. As for the other parts of the UK’s involvement, it is important not to overlook the command element in Baghdad – the Senior British Military Representative in Iraq; British members of the MNF staff; the embassy; and the MI6 operation. Certainly there were times when SIS provided an element of coherence that was lacking from the American intelligence operation. The role of the SBMR-I – particularly Lieutenant-General Graeme Lamb in late 2006 and early 2007 – was also significant in developing the Awakening strategy.
