Authors: Dan Mills
'OK, lads, the target is that circular electrical box on the outside of the house's main western wall. Can you see it? It's white and the size of a doorbell.'
Under the cover of the next mortar attack, each sniper cracked on.
To zero a sniper rifle, you fire between three and five
rounds from the same firing position at the same target, and take the volley's average position as the mean to which your sights are set. If they're off a little, you adjust them accordingly. Then you break the fire position, get up, and get back down into another firing position and let off another volley, repeating the process. To get the sights spot on, it normally takes three or four volleys. The idea is also to test that you are shooting properly from whatever position you need to be in.
It took a good hour. By the end of it, we had put around 400 rounds of 7.62mm into or around the white box. It would have done nothing for the family's electricity supply. Or their nerves.
We were ready just in time.
By the end of my first full day back, the rioting on the streets near Cimic thinned out as the gunfire on the compound began to hot up. Nobody wanted to get hit in the cross-fire.
For the first few days, the attacks weren't very well organized. They came at us either as individuals or small groups of five to ten. Fighters would try to creep up on Cimic as close as they thought they could. They'd use dead ground behind the dam, on the north bank or inside RPG alley.
'Enemy movement spotted, wait out,' came the warning over the PRR.
Before any sniper had a chance to get a fix on them, they'd jump out and riddle the place with full AK mags, or let rip with a wildly inaccurate RPG.
'Contact! Get your fucking heads down!' one of us would shout if the fire was at the roof. Then, as soon as they changed mags, we'd be back up again and putting down as many rounds as we could back at where the muzzle flashes were.
Pretty quickly, the attackers would have expended all their ammo and they'd have to bugger off again – if they were still alive.
The ground attacks would be peppered by almost constant single-round sniping from further away. For that, they used the rooftops of the old town, the hospital, the bus shelter or the Aj Dayya estate. It posed more of a threat because it was more accurate.
At that stage, still the only thing that really bothered us was the mortar fire. Up to ten separate barrages a day were being launched at us – one of the highest rates we'd experienced.
A mortar round had to be very accurate to kill anyone on the roof, thanks to our reinforcements. But the sheer weight of that sort of incoming was no small pain in the arse. It made every movement out of cover in Cimic very hard work, and people only ever got about by either sprinting like gazelles or crawling everywhere on their bellies. We became a company of high-speed invertebrates.
Largely thanks to its two water boundaries, Cimic came into its own as a natural defensive stronghold. They weren't ever going to breach our walls fighting like that either, and the volume of incoming wasn't unbearable yet. Also, the stronger we appeared, the sooner they'd go away, or so we thought.
'They can't do us any proper damage if they can't get close to us, boys,' I reminded them. 'Slot as many of these fuckers as you can. They might get the message it's not worth coming back.'
Every now and then, a gaggle of women in black dresses and veils shuffled out on to the dead ground waving white flags. The sight was a good morale boost and was always broadcast all round on the PRR. They were the body parties.
Some Mehdi Army were more obliging than others. There were a surprisingly large amount of looney tunes similar to the three we killed from the Snatches who seemed intent on martyrdom. They'd just charge us in full view blazing away any old how. It would have been churlish not to have given them what they wanted so the lads dispatched them to their seventy-two vestal virgins without any further ado.
Other fighters were a lot more devious and harder to kill.
On the north bank, they soon struck on a particularly cynical ploy of using the refugees' mud huts and slum housing as cover points to attack us. Old women and kids would be ordered to stand at their windows or doorways at gunpoint. Hiding behind civilians has been a coward's trick I've seen the world over from Belfast to Bosnia. How they justified that against the allegedly moral aim of their jihad was beyond me.
The scumbags hadn't counted on Fitzy though. After a day or so of us seeing this, he came up with an idea.
'I can do one of those sods, Danny. If you flush them out, I'll keep my eye on the door.'
'You sure, mate? Wasting some old Doris's kid by mistake isn't going to help our cause much, you know.'
'Positive.'
I took his word for it. There was one mud hut on the north bank that the fighters were particularly fond of, about 600 metres to our north-west. We waited for the next 'holy warrior' to go inside it and push out the human shields.
Ten minutes later, one turned up. He was a well-built bloke in his forties with a bushy beard. Most likely a longstanding OMS stalwart. Once he was inside, Fitzy and I lined up our longs on the building from Rooftop Sangar. I took aim at the open window two feet to the left of the
door, where we'd seen the guy's muzzle flash. Fitzy concentrated solely on the door frame.
'Ready, Fitz?'
Thirty seconds of silence, as he studied every single centimetre of the possible target area in turn and mentally banked the lot of it.
Fitz took a last calm deep breath. 'Ready.'
I put a round right into the window's top righthand corner, behind which I could see straight on to the back wall.
There was a commotion inside. It worked. Convinced we were going to waste him in there, the gunman came out the door crouching low behind a twelve-year-old girl. Brandishing his AK in his right hand, he pulled the screaming child's body close to his with his left arm wrapped around her neck. Crablike, he began to slowly shuffle both of them along the building's front wall.
Fitzy let him move three feet before he released his round, immediately pulling the bolt back to drop another in the chamber if he needed it. He didn't.
The bullet ripped into the very middle fleshy part of the OMS man's lower neck, exactly in between both collarbones. It made a big old mess, slitting a major artery and spraying fountain arcs of blood over the back of the girl's head and down her face for a second or two until she threw off his weakening grip. He gradually sank down the wall to the floor, choking violently, and making feeble efforts to stop the blood flow with both hands; it just spurted out between his fingers instead. Thirty seconds later, he was dead.
'Sorry, mate,' came Fitz's brief verdict. 'Fucked with the wrong platoon, didn't you.'
By the fourth day of the siege, stocks in Cimic were getting low and we needed a hefty resupply. Because the violence was still increasing every day, Abu Naji decided they didn't
want to make a habit of sending Warrior convoys into the city if they could possibly avoid it. Instead, they loaded an entire company of Warriors up with as much rations and ammo as it could possibly carry to last us for as long as possible.
The convoy got through to us in the early hours of the morning, after the predictable hefty slapping on the way, even though they came via the greatest round-the-houses back route possible. It took us all two full hours to unload everything from them.
'That's your lot, lads,' said C Company's sergeant major as his growling Warriors prepared to set off back to Slipper City. 'Go easy on that lot. I don't fucking fancy doing this journey again just to give you guys second helpings of ice cream.'
At that stage, we weren't particularly bothered at the prospect of not seeing them for a while. We felt very comfortable in Cimic with our veritable new powder keg. Boxes of 5.56mm, 7.62mm ball and green spot, UGLs, L109 hand grenades, 51mm HE mortar rounds and dynamite (Just in case) lined the stockroom's walls from floor to ceiling. We had enough ammo to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Anyway, the solitude was just another exciting challenge for us.
'Eh, it's just like the Alamo here now, innit?' quipped Pikey. 'Fuck 'em all. We'll do a better job without those armoured pansies interfering anyway.'
It was still early days then. A week later, Pikey had shut his big gob. We all had.
The resupply also brought us something else: a new OC.
Major Featherstone was exhausted. He hadn't had a break since we arrived in Al Amarah, and Ray's death coupled with the frenzy of the last four days had really knocked the remaining energy he had left out of him. Still under heavy protest, he eventually gave in to the Commanding Officer's insistence that he take some leave. It became obvious even to him that he wasn't going to be any use in command for much longer.
Out went Featherstone on the Warriors, and sadly three of my snipers with him too: Ads, DV and H. Their R&R was also long overdue. All three volunteered to stay, but since we had no idea how long this was going to last I told them to go while they still had the chance.
In came Captain Charlie Curry. Up until then, Captain Curry had been the battle group's Operations Officer based in Abu Naji. Of medium build and height, he was in his mid-thirties with short dark hair, tinged with flecks of grey. He smiled a lot, and was generally thought of as a decent bloke. It was only when he actually got stuck into the job at Cimic that we realized what a fantastic leader he was too.
He proved this on his very first morning. After ordering everyone under cover, he walked around the whole compound personally picking up every single blind mortar round we had at that time and throwing them all in the river.
Blinds considerably hindered our movement around Cimic
because you couldn't go anywhere near the bloody things. Just because they hadn't gone off when they'd landed didn't mean they were necessarily duds. The slightest movement could explode them, killing anyone within a 20-yard radius. It was a job that normally had to be done by calling out the ATO from Abu Naji. It was very dangerous, and one of the bravest things I've ever seen an officer do. It was also great leadership – as the man would have known – and won him a lot of friends immediately.
Captain Curry was not a man for all the PC bollocks that I felt had hindered us in the past. He made quick decisions with total confidence, and he let us be as aggressive as we wanted. A breath of fresh air, and the man for the moment.
The new boss bought himself more brownie points with us by insisting on joining Dale who was taking out a fighting patrol that very night.
By day, we battened down the hatches at Cimic. Night was a different matter though. We exploited the darkness to push out fighting patrols around the city to take it back to the enemy whenever we could. The best form of defence is always attack and it was important not to let our opponents feel 100 per cent comfortable on Al Amarah's streets.
There was never a need for a sophisticated plan to have a go at them. Mostly, it was just a case of stealthily creeping up on the OMS's favourite mortar base-plate sites, the places we had coded Gold, Silver and Bronze. You'd be assured of a decent contact with mortar teams setting up or their pickets. Never Zinc though, which was the park opposite the OMS building at Yellow 3. The building now doubled as the uprising's battle HQ and had been so heavily fortified we couldn't get anywhere near it.
To our delight, Captain Curry encouraged as much of this as possible.
'The CO wants us to go out and keep the enemy on their feet. You're the best fighters in the battalion, so let's give these fuckwits a bit of payback, shall we?'
That was despite Curry getting into a dirty great contact on his rookie outing with Dale on the north bank. My snipers saved his arse from the rooftop, so he swiftly found out what we could do for him too. From then onwards on their way back in, the fighting patrols would also raid RPG alley and its offshoots to blunt any night-time assaults being prepared at the time.
Bad news in Al Amarah then was never far away though. The day after Captain Curry's arrival, we got another wheelbarrow load of it.
Private Lee O'Callaghan, a young lad from the battalion's B Company, was shot dead by insurgents in Basra. He wasn't the only casualty of the battle either.
Some Royal Artillery lads got lost after a big ambush on their patrol of Snatches. They were in a right shit state and didn't even know where they were. Our guys went out in the Warriors to find them and ran slap bang into an ambush set up just for them.
The company commander had various bits of his body blown of by an RPG, including some fingers and a chunk of his shoulder. The sergeant major got a bullet in the mouth, and a couple of other blokes got badly hosed down.
Lee had been standing up doing top cover out the back of a Warrior's mortar hatch. He took a single round through the heart, dying very quickly.
Lee was only twenty years old, and Sam, Smudge and H had all been through training with him. He'd died in Basra of all places rather than up here, where the fighting had
always been a lot more intense. It brought us all down a peg or two, and reminded us that this uprising had become a very serious business. It was only a week old, and already there would be two spare spaces in the dining hall at Tidworth.
Just like with Ray, the overriding emotion after we heard the grim news wasn't one of fear or panic. It was anger. The more the Mehdi Army killed our own, the more they hardened our resolve. If they wanted a fucking fight, we'd give them one.
The head shed were no different. After Lee's death, an order went out to the whole battle group from Colonel Maer's deputy, Major Toby Walch.
'I want you all to be
considerably
more aggressive,' he said. Major Walch was another one for not pissing about. He'd served in some pretty interesting places and was a true soldier's soldier if ever there was one.
Thanks to the new OC, we were only too happy to oblige.
For months a huge cedar tree fifty metres to the right of the front gate had been pissing us off on the roof. It degraded our view down Tigris Street, but Major Featherstone had always refused me permission to pull it down. I decided to ask Charlie Curry.