Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

by Jeremy Scahill

  Eventually, U.S. Special Forces moved into Najaf and the crowd was dispersed. 42 At the end of the battle, an unknown number of Iraqis were dead in the streets. According to Corporal Young, it was “hundreds.” Other estimates put it at twenty to thirty dead with two hundred wounded.43 Because Blackwater was guarding the building and coordinating its defense, there are no official military reports on how the incident started.44 Blackwater admitted that its men fired thousands of rounds into the crowd, but vice president Patrick Toohey told the New York Times his men “fought and engaged every combatant with precise fire.” Then, according to the Times, Toohey “insisted that his men had not been engaged in combat at all. ‘We were conducting a security operation,’ he said. ‘The line,’ he finally said, ‘is getting blurred.’” At the end of one of the home videos of the Najaf battle, Iraqis are shown loaded on the back of a truck with hoods over their heads and plastic cuffs binding their hands. One of the men appears to be crying under his hood as he clutches his forehead.

  What was clear from the video and from Corporal Young’s recollections of that day was that Blackwater was running the operation, even giving orders to an active-duty U.S. Marine on when to open fire. “When there are rounds firing, coming at you from down range, everybody pulls together to do what needs to be done,” said Blackwater’s Chris Taylor. He praised Corporal Young after hearing how the Marine resupplied the ammunition of the Blackwater contractors on the roof. “He should be proud of the way he acted,” Taylor said.45 By afternoon, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, and his deputy, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, had arrived on the scene. When Kimmitt later spoke about the battle, he did not mention Blackwater by name but praised the operation its men led. “I know on a rooftop yesterday in An Najaf, with a small group of American soldiers and coalition soldiers . . . who had just been through about three and a half hours of combat, I looked in their eyes, there was no crisis. They knew what they were here for,” Kimmitt said. “They’d lost three wounded. We were sitting there among the bullet shells—the bullet casings—and, frankly, the blood of their comrades, and they were absolutely confident. They were confident for three reasons: one, because they’re enormously well trained; two, because they’re extremely good at what they’re doing; and three, because they knew why they were there.”46 Blackwater’s Toohey, acknowledging the growing use of private military contractors, concluded, “This is a whole new issue in military affairs. Think about it. You’re actually contracting civilians to do military-like duties.”47

  To the Iraqis, particularly Sadr’s followers, April 4 is remembered as a massacre in one of the holiest cities of Shiite Islam—indeed, clerics were among the casualties that day.48 To the Blackwater men and Corporal Young, it was a day when—against all odds—they fended off hordes of angry, armed militia members intent on killing them and overtaking a building they were tasked by their government with protecting. “I thought, ‘This is my last day. I’m going out with a bang,’” Corporal Young later told the Virginian-Pilot. “If I had to die it would be defending my country.”49 While scores of Iraqis were killed and Blackwater retained control of the CPA building, the battle emboldened Sadr’s forces and supporters. By that afternoon “the loudspeakers of the Kufa mosque announced that the Mahdi Army held Kufa, Najaf, Nasiriyah and Sadr City, Baghdad’s teeming Shiite slum,” according to the Washington Post. “The checkpoint controlling access to the bridge into Kufa and Najaf was staffed by young militiamen. Many Iraqi police officers, paid and trained by the U.S.-led coalition, had joined the assault on its quarters.”50 That afternoon, Paul Bremer announced that he had appointed new Iraqi defense and intelligence ministers. In making the announcement, Bremer addressed the fight in Najaf. “This morning, a group of people in Najaf have crossed the line, and they have moved to violence,” Bremer declared. “This will not be tolerated.”51

  Just before the sun set over Najaf, Muqtada al-Sadr issued a public call for an end to all protests, instead exhorting his followers to rise up. “Terrorize your enemy,” he said. “God will reward you well for what pleases him. . . . It is not possible to remain silent in front of their abuse.”52 That night U.S. forces began moving into the Sadr City section of Baghdad. A U.S. military spokesman said U.S. fighter jets and helicopter gunships were striking back in response to the Najaf clash, and Reuters television footage showed images of tanks crushing civilian cars in the neighborhood.53 As word spread of Sadr’s orders, his followers carried out ambushes against U.S. forces, including in Sadr City, where Cindy Sheehan’s son, Casey—a Specialist in the U.S. Army—was killed that day.54 In all, eight U.S. soldiers died in Sadr City April 4 and fifty were wounded, along with an unknown number of Iraqis.55 Maj. Gen. Martin Dempsey, commander of the First Armored Division, would later call the fighting in Sadr City that day “the biggest gunfight since the fall of Baghdad a year ago.”56 Ultimately, Sadr’s followers staged uprisings in at least eight cities across Iraq.

  On Monday, April 5, Paul Bremer officially labeled Muqtada al-Sadr an outlaw. “He is attempting to establish his authority in the place of the legitimate authority,” Bremer declared. “We will not tolerate this. We will reassert the law and order which the Iraqi people expect.”57 Hours later, occupation authorities announced that there was a warrant for Sadr’s arrest.58 It would prove to be a disastrous decision that would boost Sadr’s status tremendously. Along with the situation in Fallujah, the crackdown on Sadr would also briefly unite Shiites and Sunnis in a guerrilla war against the occupation.

  Back in the United States, a debate was beginning to rage about the increasing use of private contractors—a development due in no small part to Blackwater’s involvement in Fallujah and Najaf. In an unsigned editorial, the New York Times referred to the Fallujah ambush as evidence of “America’s troubling reliance on hired guns” and the Najaf firefight as an indication that the “Pentagon seems to be outsourcing at least part of its core responsibilities for securing Iraq instead of facing up to the need for more soldiers.”59 The Times editorial said, “Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has pledged that the Pentagon will keep looking for ways to ‘outsource and privatize.’ When it comes to core security and combat roles, this is ill advised. The Pentagon should be recruiting and training more soldiers, rather than running the risk of creating a new breed of mercenaries.”60 Amid mounting criticism of the use of private soldiers, Blackwater was lionized in some circles, particularly the Republican Congressional leadership. If there had been any question before, it was now clear that Blackwater was a major player in the war. The night of the Najaf firefight, hundreds of miles to the northwest, more than a thousand U.S. Marines had Fallujah surrounded and were preparing to exact revenge for the killing of the four Blackwater contractors five days earlier.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “THIS IS FOR THE AMERICANS OF BLACKWATER”

  EVEN AS a Shiite rebellion spread across Iraq, the White House remained determined to crush Sunni Fallujah. The Blackwater ambush had provided the administration—enthusiastically encouraged by Paul Bremer in Baghdad—with the ideal pretext to launch a massive assault on a population that was fast becoming a potent symbol suggesting that the United States and its Iraqi proxies were not really in control of the country. To back down in the face of the boldest insurrection to date among antioccupation Sunnis and Shiites and talk of a Mogadishu redux, the administration reasoned, would have sent the message that the United States was losing a war that President Bush had already declared a “mission accomplished.” Bremer and the administration had calculated that in “pacifying” Sunni Fallujah and making an example of the Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, they could surgically eliminate organized resistance in Iraq. While Washington’s disastrous policies resulted in the deaths of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of U.S. soldiers, they simultaneously facilitated an extraordinary business opportunity for Blackwater and its mercenary friends (which will be discussed in depth later in this book).

  The first U.S. siege of Fa
llujah began on April 4, 2004, the day of the Blackwater firefight at Najaf. It was code-named Operation Vigilant Resolve. That night, more than a thousand Marines and two Iraqi battalions surrounded Fallujah, a city of about 350,000 people. U.S. forces positioned tanks, heavy machine guns, and armored Humvees at the major routes running in and out of the city. They set up blockades with concertina wire, effectively locking people in, and Marines set up “camps” for detainees.1 American forces commandeered the local radio station and began propaganda broadcasts telling people to cooperate with U.S. forces and to identify resistance fighters and positions. Iraqi police distributed leaflets to mosques in Fallujah announcing a weapons ban and a mandatory curfew from 7 p.m. to 6 a.m.2 and passed out “Wanted” posters featuring pictures of men alleged to have been involved with the Blackwater attack.3 On the city’s outskirts, the Marines dug trenches near a Muslim cemetery as sharpshooters took up positions on the roof of a mosque.4 “The city is surrounded,” Lt. James Vanzant of the First Marine Expeditionary Force told reporters. “We are looking for the bad guys in town.”5 U.S. commanders announced their intent to conduct house-to-house raids inside Fallujah to find the killers of the four Blackwater contractors. “Those people are specially targeted to be captured or killed,” said Marine spokesman Lt. Eric Knapp.6 U.S. commanders sent their Iraqi proxies into the city to instruct Fallujans not to resist when U.S. forces entered their homes and to gather everyone in one room during a raid.7 If they wanted to speak with the invading troops, they must first raise their hands.8 Thousands of Fallujans fled the city ahead of the imminent American onslaught.

  The next morning, the U.S. forces made their first incursions into Fallujah—first sending in special operators to hunt “high value targets.” Then came the full-on assault carried out by twenty-five hundred Marines from three battalions, backed up by tanks.9 U.S. forces soon found themselves in fierce gun battles with resistance fighters. As the fighting raged on, the Marines called in for air support. On April 7, an AH-1W Cobra attack helicopter attacked the Abdel-Aziz al-Samarrai mosque compound, which the U.S. said was housing resistance fighters who were attacking the invading forces.10 A Hellfire missile was launched at the base of the mosque’s minaret.11 Eventually, an F-16 warplane swooped in and dropped a five-hundred-pound bomb on the mosque compound, 12 an alleged violation of the Geneva Convention that prohibits the targeting of religious sites. The Marines issued a statement defending the attack, saying that because resistance fighters were inside it, “the mosque lost its protected status and therefore became a lawful military target.”13 Witnesses reported that as many as forty Iraqis were killed in the mosque attack,14 while a handful of American soldiers died in the fighting that day.

  Meanwhile, the military had seized Fallujah’s main medical facility, preventing its use in treating the wounded.15 “U.S. forces bombed the power plant at the beginning of the assault,” recalled journalist Rahul Mahajan, one of the few unembedded journalists to enter Fallujah at the time. “[F]or the next several weeks, Fallujah was a blacked-out town, with light provided by generators only in critical places like mosques and clinics.”16 Food supplies were running out in the city, and a local doctor said that sixteen children and eight women had been killed in an air strike on a neighborhood on April 6.17 The siege of Fallujah was under way. “We are solidly ensconced in the city, and my units are stiffening their grip,” said Marine commander Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne.18 If anyone resists, he said, “We will break their backs. We will drive them out.”19 Fallujah, Byrne said, had become a haven for resistance fighters and smugglers because “No one ever took the time to clean it out properly.”20 Byrne’s battalion “was the first to persuade the U.S. Army Psychological warfare teams to initiate scatological warfare,” recalled Bing West, a military author who was embedded with U.S. forces around Fallujah.21 Platoons “competed to dream up the filthiest insults for translators to scream over the loudspeakers. When enraged Iraqis rushed from a mosque blindly firing their AKs, the Marines shot them down. The tactic of insult-and-shoot spread along the lines. Soon the Marines were mocking the city as ‘Lalafallujah’ (after the popular stateside concert Lollapalooza) and cranking out ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ by Guns ‘n’ Roses and ‘Hell’s Bells’ by AC/DC.”22

  As images from inside Fallujah emerged, primarily via journalists from Arab television networks, portraying a dire humanitarian crisis in the city, protests began spreading across Iraq, with U.S. forces using violence in an effort to shut them down.23 Mosques in Baghdad and elsewhere began organizing humanitarian convoys to Fallujah and stockpiling blood.24 By April 8, local hospital officials inside the city painted a horrifying picture of the human suffering, saying that upwards of 280 civilians had been killed and more than 400 wounded.25 “We also know of dead and wounded in various places buried under the rubble but we cannot reach them because of the fighting,” said Dr. Taher al-Issawi.26 The U.S. military denied it was killing civilians and accused resistance fighters of trying to blend into the broader population. “It is hard to differentiate between people who are insurgents or civilians,” said Maj. Larry Kaifesh. “It is hard to get an honest picture. You just have to go with your gut feeling.”27

  Byrne, according to the Washington Post, “said any bodies were those of insurgents. He estimated that 80 percent of Fallujah’s populace was neutral or in favor of the American military presence.”28 That optimistic pronouncement, however, did not match the ferocity of the resistance that succeeded—at an incredible human cost—in keeping the United States from totally capturing control of the city. “The enemy was better prepared than the Marines had been told to expect,” wrote veteran Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks.29 He cited an internal Marine summary of the battle. “Insurgents surprise U.S. with coordination of their attacks: coordinated, combined, volley-fire RPGs, effective use of indirect fire,” the summary stated. “Enemy maneuvered effectively and stood and fought.”30

  As the siege neared a week, bodies began piling up in the city and, according to witnesses, a stench of death spread across Fallujah. “Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw in Fallujah,” recalled a doctor from Baghdad who made it into the city with a peace delegation. “There is no law on earth that can justify what the Americans have done to innocent people.”31 Independent U.S. journalists Dahr Jamail and Rahul Mahajan, meanwhile, managed to make it into Fallujah—unembedded—a week after the siege began. Upon entering the city with a humanitarian convoy, Jamail described the scene at a makeshift emergency room at a small health clinic. “As I was there, an endless stream of women and children who’d been sniped by the Americans were being raced into the dirty clinic, the cars speeding over the curb out front as their wailing family members carried them in. One woman and small child had been shot through the neck,” Jamail wrote in a dispatch from inside the besieged city. “The small child, his eyes glazed and staring into space, continually vomited as the doctors raced to save his life. After 30 minutes, it appeared as though neither of them would survive.”32 Jamail said he saw one victim after another brought into the clinic, “nearly all of them women and children.”33 Jamail called Fallujah “Sarajevo on the Euphrates.”34

  Mahajan, meanwhile, reported: “In addition to the artillery and the warplanes dropping 500, 1000, and 2000-pound bombs, and the murderous AC-130 Spectre gunships that can demolish a whole city block in less than a minute, the Marines had snipers criss-crossing the whole town. For weeks, Fallujah was a series of sometimes mutually inaccessible pockets, divided by the no-man’s-lands of sniper fire paths. Snipers fired indiscriminately, usually at whatever moved. Of 20 people I saw come into the clinic I observed in a few hours, only five were ‘military-age males.’ I saw old women, old men, a child of 10 shot through the head; terminal, the doctors told me, although in Baghdad they might have been able to save him. One thing that snipers were very discriminating about—every single ambulance I saw had bullet holes in it. Two I inspected bore clear evidence of specific, deliberate sniping. Friends of mi
ne who went out to gather in wounded people were shot at.”35 Jamail reported that “the residents have turned two football fields into graveyards.”36

  The War on Al Jazeera

  While most of the world came to understand the siege of Fallujah as an earth-moving development in the occupation, the story of the extent of the human suffering endured by Iraqis was downplayed in the “mainstream” U.S. press. Embedded corporate journalists reported exclusively from the vantage point of the invading U.S. forces and relied disproportionately on military spokespeople and their Iraqi proxies. The graphic verbiage that had peppered the media landscape following the ambush and killing of the Blackwater men days earlier was now absent from the reporting on the civilian consequences of the assault. As battles continued to rage on and spread to the outskirts of Fallujah, New York Times correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman—totally avoiding mention of the humanitarian disaster—wrote that the fierce fighting “showed not only the intensity of the resistance but an acute willingness among insurgents to die.”37 [Emphasis added.] Coming alongside U.S. military claims that “90 to 95 percent” of Iraqis killed in Fallujah were combatants,38 such embedded reporting from the U.S. “paper of record” appeared almost indistinguishable from official U.S. military propaganda. “It’s their Super Bowl,” Maj. T. V. Johnson, a Marine spokesman, was quoted as saying in Gettleman’s story. “Falluja is the place to go if you want to kill Americans.”39