Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (47 page)

There would be other close calls for Zarqawi, but for the next fifteen months he and the task force were locked in a deadly contest, as JSOC's operators and intelligence analysts raced to devour the middle ranks of his network before he could replenish them, in the hope that this would stall his campaign and lead the task force to him. Zarqawi, meanwhile, was trying to ignite a full-scale sectarian civil war before the task force destroyed his organization, which he had presciently designed to function as semi-autonomous regional and local cells.
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Zarqawi and McChrystal each encouraged their respective organizations to take an entrepreneurial approach to warfare. McChrystal was renowned for promoting a sense of competition among the various strike forces at his disposal in Iraq, allotting the precious ISR assets to whichever commander came up with the most compelling target.
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In early January 2006, the task force's luck began to turn. Iraqi forces captured Mohammad Rabih, aka Abu Zar, an Iraqi native and a senior Al Qaeda in Iraq leader. The task force had briefly been on his trail the previous summer, only to fall victim to a ruse: in late August, Abu Zar had faked his own funeral, complete with his apparently grief-stricken mother. Task force sources in the crowd believed the funeral was genuine, so the task force stopped looking for Abu Zar. Now he had turned up in Iraqi government hands. The task force used Defense Department channels to persuade the Iraqis to transfer Abu Zar to JSOC's detainee facility at Balad, where he soon told interrogators that Zarqawi's number two, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, would sometimes stay in a particular cluster of buildings in Yusufiyah, twenty miles southwest of Baghdad. The task force saw nothing untoward about the buildings. However, one intelligence analyst was convinced Abu Zar wasn't lying and continued to observe the area whenever aircraft were available.
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While that analyst kept watch over Yusufiyah, a significant event in JSOC's history went almost unnoticed by the public. On February 16,
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McChrystal was promoted to lieutenant general but remained in command of JSOC. By elevating the JSOC commander's position to three-star rank, Rumsfeld had at a stroke raised the prestige and leverage of the command, and created space underneath the commander for more subordinate flag officers. JSOC's command structure soon expanded to accommodate a two-star deputy commander in addition to a pair of one-star assistant commanders.

But while McChrystal was pinning on his third star, Zarqawi was finalizing his plan to ratchet up Iraq's sectarian tensions several more notches. On February 22, explosives planted by his fighters destroyed the golden dome of the Shi'ite Al-Askari mosque in Samarra, one of Shi'a Islam's most sacred places. Inevitably, the bombing initiated an intense cycle of Sunni versus Shi'a violence. Entire neighborhoods switched hands as populations coalesced along sectarian lines. Zarqawi had again stolen a march on the Coalition. By spring 2006, the task force's hunt for Zarqawi had become a higher JSOC priority than its search for Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. “Who's the biggest threat right now?” said a special operations source at the time. “In military terms, bin Laden has been neutralized. He's not going anywhere. He can't really move. His communications are shallow.… Zarqawi is a bigger threat.”
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As the bodies piled up in Baghdad trash dumps and floated down canals, McChrystal rallied his troops. On March 18, he told subordinates that the task force was “supported and well resourced,” but the lack of apparent progress in Iraq had people back home worried. He derided those people as “quitters.” Less than two weeks later, on April 1, he reminded his commanders that their mission was to “win here in Iraq.”
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The route to that victory included pressuring Al Qaeda in Iraq's lines of communication from Syria and Saudi Arabia. The task force would occasionally undertake raids into Syria and more frequently conduct clandestine intelligence operations in the country. There were no raids into Saudi Arabia, but JSOC had people there working on a secret intelligence operation in which Saudi militants captured in Iraq would be taken back to their homeland, and then persuaded “to somehow go back to Iraq as a double agent,” said a task force officer.

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As insurgents figured out that the task force preferred to work at night, they began conducting more business during daytime. “You'd watch them on ISR during the day run around freely, make all their runs and drop their messages, take the dudes out, put them in the trunk, take them out to the desert, and execute them,” said a Little Bird pilot. The task force responded by increasing use of a favorite tactic of both Delta operators and Little Bird pilots: air vehicle interdiction, or AVI.

By March 2006, Task Force Brown had divided its Little Bird crews into day and night teams, so as to always have a team ready for a no-notice AVI mission. There were several ways to conduct such missions, but a typical vehicle interdiction involved two AH-6s, two MH-6s with snipers on the pods, and a pair of MH-60K Black Hawks full of operators. The mission began with an ISR aircraft tracking an insurgent vehicle. The pagers the pilots carried buzzed. Checking the numeric code, the pilots saw a row of 1s: “launch now.” The flight leads raced to the operations center for a quick briefing on the type of vehicle they'd be chasing, its location, and who was in it, and then went straight to the aircraft, where the operators were waiting. The helicopters launched and the race was on. The insurgents' only hope was to drive into a heavily populated neighborhood where the task force would be loath to shoot for fear of harming noncombatants. “If the vehicle went into a populated area, we'd just pull off and hold out in the desert and wait for him to start moving again,” said a Little Bird pilot. “If he was out in the open desert, it was game on.”

After chasing down the vehicle, either the Black Hawk door gunners or the AH-6 pilots fired red tracer warning shots in front of it, to give the people in the vehicle a chance to surrender. If the insurgents took that opportunity, the Black Hawks landed behind and beside the vehicle, and the operators quickly zip-tied the insurgents and searched the vehicle while the MH-6s landed the snipers to set up blocking positions on the road. But if the vehicle occupants attempted to fire at the helicopters, the snipers on the MH-6 pods, the Black Hawk door gunners, and the AH-6 gunships were ready to render any show of resistance futile and fatal. By spring of 2006, the Little Birds were launching as many as five AVI missions a day. “If you were an adrenaline junkie it was pretty exciting,” said an AH-6 pilot. Or, as a Delta operator put it: “All the [A]VI shit was always awesome.”
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Al Qaeda in Iraq leaders knew that their hunters were the United States' most elite forces. They were also easily identifiable—they wore beards and used aircraft and vehicles like Little Birds and Pandurs to which no other military units had access. The insurgents came up with nicknames for their nemeses: they called the operators “Mossad,” after the vaunted Israeli intelligence service, and referred to the Little Birds as “Killer Bees” and “The Little Black Ones.”
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That spring, the task force continued to hunt insurgents moving along Anbar's ratlines while also focusing on the “belts” around Baghdad—the suburbs and rural areas surrounding the city. Coalition presence was lower in the belts than in the cities, and Al Qaeda in Iraq used them as rear support areas from which to terrorize the capital. This was particularly the case with the southern belt, which encompassed the towns of Yusufiyah, Latifiyah, Iskandariyah, and Mahmudiyah. Sometimes known as the “Triangle of Death,” JSOC paid particular attention to this area in early 2006.
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Smack in the heart of this triangle was the group of buildings in Yusufiyah that Abu Zar had pinpointed and that a savvy, determined intelligence analyst had been monitoring for three months. On the afternoon of April 8, his patience paid off when the screen in front of him showed a line of cars pulling up to one of the buildings. That was enough to launch the daytime vehicle interdiction team on a raid. When the C Squadron operators landed at the objective shortly before 2
P.M
., the men in the building opened fire. Five militants died in the fierce firefight that followed. No task force personnel were killed, but an MH-6 pilot was shot in the foot, and another got plexiglass in his face when his cockpit took a round. Both aircraft were damaged. One returned to base immediately. The operators gathered a large amount of intelligence material. (The house also held a van that had been turned into a mobile bomb.) Meanwhile, as the helicopters were en route to the objective, task force analysts had seen more vehicles arriving at a nearby building. A second raiding party launched, arriving at the target compound at 4:11
P.M
. The dozen men they found there put up no meaningful resistance and were soon bundled aboard helicopters and flown back to Mission Support Site Fernandez.
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While interrogators went to work on the new detainees, who were soon flown to Balad, more raids followed. In the early hours of April 16, elements of B Squadron of the SAS, which had only begun hunting Al Qaeda in Iraq targets as an equal component of JSOC's task force in late March, assaulted Objective Larchwood IV, a farmhouse on the outskirts of Yusufiyah. The “blades,” as SAS operators are known, were met with a burst of gunfire. After initially withdrawing, they quickly resumed the assault with renewed vigor, killing five militants, three of whom wore explosive suicide belts. The blades shot two before they could blow themselves up. The third detonated his bomb, killing only himself and injuring nobody else. The SAS detained five other men, one of whom was wounded, and suffered five wounded themselves. But there were other casualties in the house. A woman was killed. Three others and a child were medically evacuated to a U.S. military hospital in Baghdad. One of the detainees turned out to be AQI's administrator for the Abu Ghraib region, who was the individual the SAS had targeted in the raid.
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Among the materials the British seized in the farmhouse was a video shot by Al Qaeda in Iraq's propaganda wing that showed a black-pajama-clad Zarqawi firing an M249 squad automatic weapon, a light machine gun used by U.S. forces. Nine days later, AQI released an edited version of the video, prompting the U.S. military to publicize the raw footage, which showed Zarqawi's inexperience with the weapon and his willingness to ignore a muezzin's call to prayer, which can be heard in the background. The video also included a scene of Zarqawi seated beside an M4 assault rifle with an M203 grenade launcher attachment. The SAS blades had seized just such a weapon—presumably the same one—on Larchwood IV. It had apparently been lost by their maritime counterparts, the Royal Marines' Special Boat Service, in a bungled mission during the 2003 invasion, but its presence in the farmhouse told the task force it was getting closer.
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Indeed, intelligence suggested that Zarqawi himself had been about a thousand meters away.
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The task force continued grinding away at Zarqawi's network. Although almost every raid was conducted in the hope that the targets would surrender peacefully, the results were often extraordinarily violent. On April 25, the same day Zarqawi released his video, the task force raided Objective Johnson Village, another Yusufiyah safe house. As they approached, a man ran out brandishing “a shoulder-fired rocket,” according to a Central Command press release. Operators shot him dead. A fierce gunfight ensued between other militants who emerged and the operators, who, supported by the helicopters, killed four more. Still taking fire from the building, the operators called in an air strike that leveled it. In the rubble, they found the bodies of seven men and a woman. Each man wore webbing holding two loaded magazines and two grenades. But the fight had not been without cost for the task force. The insurgents killed Sergeant First Class Richard J. Herrema, twenty-seven, a Delta operator, in the opening exchanges.
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JSOC's task force was essentially the U.S. military's offensive arm in Iraq, at least as far as operations against Zarqawi's network were concerned. While the task force's operations tempo was now approaching what McChrystal and Flynn had first envisioned, the JSOC commander wanted to gird his troops for a fight he did not expect to end soon.

“This has been, and will be, a long and serious war,” he wrote in a memo to his entire force (one of about five he issued during his command), which was published on JSOC's intranet. “Although initial structures and TTPs [tactics, techniques, and procedures] have evolved tremendously from where they were even two years ago, we are still operating with manning and operating processes that need to be improved to be more effective and professional. We must increasingly be a force of totally focused counter-terrorists—that is what we do. This is as complex as developing a Long Term Strategic Debriefing Facility that feeds our in-depth understanding of the enemy, and as simple as losing the casual, ‘I'm off at my war adventure,' manner of dress and grooming. In every case it will not be about what's easy, or even what we normally associate with conventional military standards. It will not even be about what is effective. It will be about what is the MOST effective way to operate—and we will do everything to increase the effectiveness even in small ways. If anyone finds this inconvenient or onerous, there's no place in the force for you. This is about winning—and making as few trips to Arlington Cemetery en route to that objective.”
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On May 11, he reiterated the message to his subordinate commanders, reinforcing the “fanatical importance” with which he expected them to treat the fight. This was the essence of McChrystal. “He expected everybody to be as fanatical about the task at hand as he was,” said one of McChrystal's commanders. “Life is hard right now,” McChrystal continued. “Take this [war] and make it the cause.”
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