Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (56 page)

The Ethiopian invasion essentially reinstalled Somalia's Transitional Federal Government, but the TFG controlled very little territory and was wholly reliant on its foreign backers. Meanwhile, from JSOC's perspective, the situation in Somalia was worsening. Put another way, the more force JSOC applied to the problem in Somalia, the more work the command found for itself. U.S. intelligence concluded that up to 300 Islamist fighters arrived in Somalia in summer 2007.
25
JSOC believed that a similar number of militants were training in just two camps near Ras Kamboni.
26
Operators also accompanied Kenyan forces to the border in order to help the Kenyans intercept senior Islamists trying to slip into their country.
27

Although the decision to move assets from Iraq and Afghanistan to the Horn meant there were now Predators and manned ISR aircraft flying over Somalia from Djibouti, it was nowhere near the sort of coverage to which JSOC was accustomed. In contrast to JSOC's “Unblinking Eye” in Iraq, “in Somalia, it was a blink all the time,” the senior intelligence official said. There would be days on end when task force commanders in the Horn had “no overhead collection capability,” the official added.
28

The lack of airborne signals and imagery intelligence collection might not have been so painful for JSOC had the Defense Intelligence Agency not turned its nose up at a golden opportunity several years earlier. In 2002, after a Defense Humint officer made an approach through an intermediary, a fiery Islamist leader named Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys let it be known that he was open to establishing a relationship with U.S. intelligence. Aweys would go on to become the spiritual adviser to the Islamic Courts Union and al-Shabaab, a man in regular contact with the United States' highest-priority targets in the Horn. “All Aweys wanted,” said a special mission unit officer, was “respect.” But in 2002 mid-level Defense Humint managers had “no interest” in pursuing a relationship with him, the officer said. “It wasn't sexy.… Aweys was a nobody. Few of us believed he was destined for greatness, loosely defined.”

The fact that the U.S. government had already designated him a supporter of terrorism didn't help. “They didn't want us meeting with an actual terrorist,” said the officer, many years later. “It was still early in the game. Nowadays nobody would think twice about it.”

As the situation in Somalia worsened, a human intelligence source with the access and placement of Aweys would have been invaluable. “We could have been in his camp in 2002,” said the special mission unit officer. “It would have been a lot of work for an unknown return, but looking back through a better lens, we probably should have [done it].… That was a missed opportunity.”

*   *   *

With the AC-130s gone, JSOC turned to the Navy when it needed to strike high-value targets. On March 3, 2008, the task force tracked Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a twenty-eight-year-old senior East Africa Al Qaeda figure, to a compound in Dhobley in southwestern Somalia. JSOC had been on Nabhan's tail for five years. Now they had him in their sights. There then followed what the senior intelligence official described as an “unbelievably painful” decision-making process as JSOC shoved its request to strike Nabhan through the upper layers of the U.S. government. Finally, President Bush signed off. A Navy vessel fired two Tomahawk cruise missiles at the compound, destroying much of it. JSOC's intelligence had been good. Nabhan was indeed at the compound, but he escaped the blasts. McChrystal later complained that the task force made a mistake in only firing two missiles (“to be conservative”) when four would have done the job. “The miss was a bitter lesson for me,” he wrote.

Eight weeks later, there was almost a case of déjà vu for the task force. This time the compound was in Dhusamareb in west-central Somalia, and the target was Ayro, the al-Shabaab leader. Another torturous bureaucratic struggle ensued. “The confidence [the Bush administration] wanted was almost 100 percent, because they didn't want to have this compound destroyed with a whole bunch of women and children getting lined up,” the senior intelligence official said. That meant the task force had to confirm Ayro's location as close as possible in time to the missile launch. Flying out of Djibouti, a Chain Shot aircraft—a secret variant of the Navy P-3 Orion sub-hunter—provided real-time video of the compound. President Bush gave his okay and at least four Tomahawks flew across Somalia. Sitting in his headquarters in Balad on May 1, McChrystal watched a screen nervously waiting for the explosions, “worried about the potential impact of a second failed strike on [JSOC]'s standing and its hard-won freedom of action.” But this time, JSOC made no mistake. The missiles devastated the compound, hitting at about 3
A.M
. and killing Ayro and several colleagues. JSOC's “freedom of action” was safe, but it would have to wait for its reckoning with Nabhan.
29

 

24

Victory in Mosul?

It was another hot early summer night. Sweat trickled from under the helmets of the Rangers creeping north through the back streets and alleys of north Mosul.
1

They had left their Stryker vehicles on the south side of a canal almost two kilometers behind them, so as to not alert their target as they approached his home, which, like those of many insurgent leaders, was not easily accessible by vehicle in any case. Parking so far away entailed significant risks. If the Rangers took fire en route to their objective, they wouldn't be able to reply with the Strykers' heavy machine guns, nor quickly evacuate any casualties on the vehicles. But the target that night was worth the risk. While the Coalition referred to Abu Khalaf as Al Qaeda in Iraq's emir of Mosul, he was really the organization's number two, second only to Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the Egyptian who had taken charge after the death of Zarqawi. For six years the task force had hunted Abu Khalaf without success. Today, for the first time, it had located him and was striking before he had a chance to slip away. During the previous few months, Task Force North had launched a series of raids that had steadily dismantled Al Qaeda in Iraq's infrastructure. The Rangers knew that now, June 24, 2008, they had a chance to strike a devastating blow against the network. This was the most important mission in which almost any of them had participated, and it exemplified not only the machine that Stan McChrystal had created and then passed on to Bill McRaven, but how far the Rangers had come since their assault on Objective Rhino less than seven years before.

Two files approached Abu Khalaf's house from the rear, a route selected in part to hide them from guards on the roof. As they moved quietly through the streets, one of two small civilian-style aircraft high overhead “sparkled” the objective, confirming its location for the Rangers by briefly illuminating it with an infrared light that looked like a spotlight in their night vision goggles, but was invisible to the naked eye. Various units flew such aircraft over Mosul, but it was usually Orange operating two-seater Cessnas or similar propeller aircraft packed with imagery and signals intelligence collection gear. If any insurgents ran from the building and somehow escaped the Rangers' cordon, one of the aircraft would track them with a pulsating infrared spotlight so that they could be dealt with after the initial assault.
2

Tonight's was a platoon mission. One of the platoon's four squads had stayed to guard the vehicles. The other three squads of eight men each moved to the objective, hugging walls and staying in the shadows as they neared Abu Khalaf's house, which was in the middle of a block. One squad would take the lead in the assault, breaching and entering the house with the platoon sergeant, the unit's most experienced soldier. Another stayed in reserve to the front of the objective, in case it was needed to reinforce the assault. The remaining squad split into two teams of four, each taking position on a corner of the block to isolate the objective, not allowing anyone to leave or enter the area.

Less than ten minutes after leaving the vehicles, the Rangers reached the release point, which was a block from the objective. The four-man sniper-observer team and the isolation squad split off. The rest of the assault force paused at the corner, out of sight of the house. A block farther back were Colonel Michael “Erik” Kurilla, commander of 2nd Ranger Battalion and Task Force North, and the company commander, a major.
3
Kurilla was there to observe the mission. He knew the stakes were high. The major was officially the ground force commander, but his primary role was to keep Task Force North's operations center in the loop and request additional assets, if needed. It was the platoon leader's fight.

The entire assault force was itching to move. Every second they waited increased the chance of compromise. But the platoon leader, a captain who was the assault force commander, wanted to wait until the sniper-observer team was in position on a roof adjacent to the objective. The team's role was to ensure that the Rangers had “as many eyes and muzzles over all the apertures of the house as possible,” said a Ranger on the mission. The four Rangers on the team were moving as fast as they could, shimmying from one flat rooftop to another across a thirty-foot-long lightweight graphite ladder. After examining pictures of the neighborhood, the team leader had picked a site his men could reach without being seen. The only problem was that they had to cross seven rooftops to get to it.

The assault force knelt and waited. The tension mounted. The Rangers were kitty-corner from the home of the most powerful insurgent leader in northern Iraq, out of direct line-of-sight of the objective but bathed in streetlights. “There's a sense of urgency to get to the breach,” recalled a Ranger. But the platoon leader had done 200 missions with the sniper team leader, a sergeant first class, and knew that he could depend upon him. Finally, the team leader called to say that his team was in position. The trip across the rooftops had taken all of nine minutes, a pace that was “unbelievable, when you think about what's involved, moving four guys across one ladder,” said the Ranger. “But … it feels like it's an eternity when you're sitting on a fairly well lit street corner at 11
P.M
. in one of the most hostile cities in Iraq.”

The lead assault squad and the platoon sergeant ran across the street and got ready to breach. Like many insurgent leaders' homes, Abu Khalaf's compound was defended by a high wall and heavy steel gate. His thick front door provided further protection. The Rangers would need to breach each simultaneously. The squad leader scampered up a ladder he'd placed against the exterior wall and dropped down into the compound, where he moved quickly to place an explosive charge on the door. The others readied the charge on the gate or climbed ladders to cover the squad leader as he set the door charge.

Whispering into a small microphone on his shoulder, the sniper team leader reported that two “military-age males” had been lying on the roof of the objective, but one had just stood up, having presumably heard the assault squad getting into position, despite the Rangers' efforts at silence. The captain checked a screen slung over his chest that enabled him to watch real-time video from the aircraft overhead. He too saw the man moving on the rooftop. At that moment, the platoon sergeant's voice came over the radio: “Three, two, one, breach.”

A blur of movement and violence ensued.

Grabbing a pistol, the man standing on the roof took a couple of steps toward the building's front. That was as far as he got before the sniper team leader fired two rounds into his skull, killing him instantly, as the breaching charges exploded with a deafening bang. The other guard on the roof reached for an assault rifle. Below, the Rangers rushed through the door, which opened into the living room. “Good breach,” said the platoon sergeant into his mike. “Eagles moving in. Foothold.” In other words, the squad had blown through both gate and door and was inside the house. (In radio chatter, U.S. personnel were “Eagles.”)

When “clearing” a building—i.e., moving through it and eliminating any threats—Rangers flowed through the structure like water, scanning each room in a synchronized choreography that was the result of hundreds of repetitions in training and combat. Only if they found any military-age men would the Rangers pause momentarily to leave a couple of soldiers to watch that room as the others continued through the building. It was not unusual for the Rangers to clear a compound in less than twenty seconds.

The living room opened to a hallway that led to a corridor with several bedrooms. In the first, the squad leader and a young Ranger found a man and woman sleeping on mats. Using memorized Arabic, the squad leader, who was a battle-hardened staff sergeant, and the other soldier—a twenty-one-year-old specialist armed with a light machine gun called a squad automatic weapon—told the couple to put their hands up. Neither did. The two Rangers repeated the order, as their colleagues checked the corridor's other rooms, finding two women and several children. But instead of putting his hands above his head as ordered, the man in the first room made as if to reach inside his robe. The squad leader's finger tightened on the trigger of his M4. He had less than a second to make a life-or-death decision.

*   *   *

By 2008, JSOC's successes elsewhere had caused the command's main effort in Iraq to shift to Task Force North. Having been squeezed out of Baghdad and Anbar, Al Qaeda in Iraq was increasingly focused on Mosul. Task Force North's strike forces were two Ranger platoons and a Delta troop. After weighing the units' strengths, Kurilla settled on a division of labor: the Delta troop would concentrate on helicopter assaults and vehicle interdictions in the Sinjar desert between Mosul and the Syrian border to the west, while the Rangers focused on urban ground assaults in their Strykers.