Task Force Black (19 page)
Authors: Mark Urban
The target pack worked up by Captain
Ewan
, one of the B Squadron Team Leaders, on the night of 16 April featured one
Abu Atiya
. He was typical of the mid-level al-Qaeda leadership being targeted by JSOC at the time.
Abu Atiya
was classified as the ‘Admin Emir’ of the AQI cell in Abu Ghraib. He was credited with running the local group’s media efforts, such as posting videos of its attacks on Coalition soldiers on the internet. But, as the B Squadron men had heard during their briefings, intelligence also showed that
Abu Atiya
had a role in setting up ‘V-bids’ or car bombs. Those familiar with the operation say that there was both humint and signals intelligence implicating him in these activities.
A final trigger for the operation was the identification of
Abu Atiya
’s cell phone by electronic means and the production of a grid reference graphic. The GRG took the form of an aerial photo, where the target insurgent-held building or Alpha could be marked up, accompanied by symbols that would be used to denote aspects of the Team Leader’s plan as key players were briefed that evening.
In the case of LARCHWOOD 4, the Alpha was a farmhouse on the outskirts of Yusufiyah. To the west were open fields. To the north, an orchard, and east, close to the building itself, a sand berm or bund separated the farmhouse from surrounding fields. Captain
Ewan
plotted L1, the helicopter landing zone for his assault force, to the north-east of the Alpha, where the fruit trees would offer a certain amount of screening. Approaching from this cover,
Ewan
would then lead the assault force of four teams to the Alpha. Once there, they would split into two groups before prosecuting the assault, one blowing its way in from the east, the other from the south. As they did this, SAS snipers would be orbiting in Lynx helicopters in case the targets eluded the assault force. Inside the Alpha, two members of the Apostles, the SAS’s Iraqi helpers, would interpret and assist Sensitive Site Exploitation – the search of the building for further intelligence.
Captain
Ewan
would exercise command of the operation on the ground. Although still in his twenties, he was a seasoned SAS officer. The second captain, a less experienced officer, would be given the task of leading one of the assault teams.
Mounting up in the Pumas, the B Squadron men each understood their part in this scheme well. With a bit of luck, they would deliver the ‘vinegar stroke’, entering the Alpha, taking
Abu Atiya
, and nobody would die. The Pumas dusted off for the short ride to Yusufiyah, and their RV took to the night sky with the rest of the operation.
In addition to the blades of the assault force, the British were also taking with them a platoon of Paras from Task Force Maroon. Americans from 1st Battalion 502nd Infantry – the battalion involved in the Hamza rape charges – had also been assigned to support Operation LARCHWOOD 4. Its function that night was simply to be in reserve as a Quick Reaction Force. The British Paras would be used to block off the area around
Abu Atiya
’s house, preventing either reinforcements arriving or people escaping. The cordon rode that night in Chinook helicopters.
Above the choppers flying through the darkness towards the outskirts of Yusufiyah were three fixed-wing aircraft. A small surveillance aircraft would orbit with night-vision equipment. Two American C-130s were also on station: a command bird coordinating the entire effort and an AC-130 Spectre, a fearsome gunship that could saturate the ground with fire if everything went wrong.
It might be imagined, with this circling fleet of aircraft, that the entire neighbourhood would be up in arms before the first soldier came anywhere near the Alpha. However, as one Team Leader explains, ‘By this point the people in Baghdad and some of the surrounding places were thoroughly used to the sound of helicopters at night.’
The Pumas hit L1 just after 2 a.m., and the four assault teams were off in moments, their rides returning to the dark skies. Making their way across the few hundred metres to the assault point, the blades listened to the radio chatter through headphones. Given the violence following the Samarra bombing, even a short walk through the darkness in a mixed community like Yusufiyah had to be undertaken with the utmost care. One SAS man explains, ‘Because of sectarian violence people were leaving booby traps and pressure pads to protect their own neighbourhoods – you had to move very carefully.’ Once safely in cover within yards of the house, two operators were sent forward to scout its south-east corner.
To the soldiers’ delight they found that at the rear of the carport on that side of the building was an open door into the house. They peered in to determine that the place was still, as one might expect in the early hours of the morning, and went back to their waiting comrades.
Pleased that he could enter the Alpha without explosions or commotion, Captain
Ewan
ordered the assault. One team moved swiftly past the parked car, entering the house through the door beside it.
Just seconds later a burst of gunfire rang out. Three of the SAS team had been hit by someone waiting in a corridor of the house.
In moments the team ran back out through the door, helping the worst-wounded members to the cover of the sand berm just to the east of the house. The radio came alive with staccato reports:
Contact!
The call-sign had taken casualties. Fingers probed for bullet wounds; trauma packs were ripped open; the treatment of casualties began. All of them had been able to get out of the place on their own, but a man could be fatally pumping blood from a bullet-ruptured artery into some internal cavity at the same moment that he was celebrating his survival. It was vital to conduct a proper survey of their wounds.
Those inside the house were not content to rest on their initial success. From the upper floor they opened fire in the direction of the berm. One man ran on to the roof and started lobbing grenades at the SAS operators.
At this moment a torrent of options must have entered the mind of Captain
Ewan
. Those above would be straining their ears, awaiting his decision. Could the snipers in the Lynxes get clear shots? Should the Spectre give those inside a taste of its three Gatling guns, each of which could lay down a hundred rounds a second? Or should the air controller on board the command Hercules simply whistle up an F-16 while Captain
Ewan
’s men retired to a safe distance, and just level the whole place with a JDAM?
Those listening out for the Team Leader’s Plan B were not kept waiting for long.
Ewan
decided to resume the assault. Their mission was to capture
Abu Atiya
for questioning, and who knew who else might be in the building?
Putting himself at the head of his men, Captain
Ewan
renewed the assault. Approaching the building under covering fire, he and one of the blades lobbed in grenades.
As they went in, though, two more were wounded – one by a bullet and the other by a grenade fragment. To those watching the events unfold on Kill TV back at Balad or in the MSS, the drama had reached its critical stage. Flashes from explosions and zips of tracer stained the night-vision image captured by the aircraft orbiting above. The eagle-eyed spotted someone dart from the rear of the house. Little did they know, watching the battle on video, but this insurgent was wearing a suicide vest as well as carrying grenades and an assault rifle. An aerial sniper and members of Task Force Maroon not far from that western side of the building were ordered to engage him, but the man swiftly took cover under a car parked nearby.
Inside the Alpha, Captain
Ewan
’s men had killed one of the gunmen in the corridor, and then began to go through the house room by room. Another man was shot. In one room, the SAS burst in to find half a dozen terrified women and children cowering in the darkness. They soon discovered that one woman had been killed in the fight, with three others and one child wounded.
Once the rooms were clear, the assault force turned their attention to the building’s roof, from which they had taken fire. One of the SAS NCOs, already wounded, told his comrades he would go up the stairs in the middle of the building to clear the roof. Waiting for him was a second man in a suicide vest. As the NCO reached the door at the top of the staircase, the al-Qaeda man detonated his bomb. There was a further flash across the video screens. The NCO had been blown backwards, down the stairs, by the blast. Although sustaining further injuries, he was able to pick himself up.
Outside, the last man resisting, the one under the car, died without setting off his own suicide device. Located by the surveillance plane, he had been killed by a hail of bullets.
The assault force, pumped full of adrenalin with five members wounded, now had to move to the business at hand. Their primary mission, after all, was to arrest a man in the pursuit of intelligence. Five of the defenders were dead, including two who had been wearing suicide vests. Five men, as well as several women and children, had survived. Working through the Apostles, the SAS quickly established that one of these survivors was
Abu Atiya
. An older man also appeared to be an insurgent. They were cuffed and made ready for the helicopter. The wounded women and child meanwhile were taken to the landing zone for evacuation to the ‘Cash’ – the 10th Combat Support Hospital – in the Green Zone.
It was now time for Sensitive Site Exploitation. The soldiers moved through the house looking for things of intelligence value. It was a shambles – blood, spent bullet casings and broken glass were trodden underfoot. There were men lying dead in some places. The blades trod gingerly around one of them when they realised that clutched in the dead man’s grasp was a grenade with the pin pulled out. Up on the roof, the suicide bomber who had tried to take a British operator with him had been blown to bits, his limbs and head scattered among the other debris.
Despite the carnage, the SAS could not afford to miss anything in the limited time they still had on the ground. In fact they recovered a great deal: weapons including four AK-47s and one that seemed in the torchlight to be an M4 (a 5.56mm assault rifle usually used by Coalition troops); and other possessions that might yield clues. Their mission had been accomplished, albeit with much violence. They had no remit to go on a further house-to-house search of the neighbourhood. The team had neither the time nor the men for that anyway, since dawn would soon be upon them, and given the level of resistance they had experienced that night there was no telling what daytime might bring. Subsequent intelligence suggested though that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi himself was in another building not far away. Once again, Coalition troops had unwittingly come within a whisker of capturing Iraq’s most wanted man.
The SAS had already experienced plenty of violence in Iraq. But the ferocity of their reception that night, and the speeding-up of operations that had generated Operation LARCHWOOD 4, were signs of a sea change. Lieutenant-General McChrystal’s vision of a relentless cycle of missions, with each revolution producing the intelligence that could fuel the next, was becoming a reality. Under this growing pressure, al-Qaeda in Iraq, as well as some of the other insurgent groups, appeared to have raised their own game. They were prepared to get their retaliation in first against the special operators – or at least to try to. There were suicide bombers ready to go, ambushes set up for helicopters and in some places houses rigged to explode.
Returning to the MSS after LARCHWOOD 4, members of B Squadron felt exhausted and elated in equal measure. They had overcome suicidally determined resistance and, fortunately for them, none of the five men wounded that night was so seriously injured that they would be absent from duty for long. They could have little imagined at that moment how successful their raid would prove to be. They were nearing the end of the SAS’s first six-month squadron tour and were collectively almost spent.
Their time in Iraq had been a period of frenetic activity but crucially, given the miserable overall security picture, one of considerable success. They had freed Norman Kember and the two Canadian hostages. They had also demonstrated the faith of their Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Williams, that the SAS could operate intensively as an integral part of the black American special operations task force. Given the relative scarcity of resources on the British side, this earned credit with McChrystal and the other key commanders. It should come as no surprise that the OC of B Squadron was decorated for the tour. Captain
Ewan
received a medal for his conduct on Operation LARCHWOOD 4. Many of the squadron’s NCOs were decorated or received commendations too. More importantly, although they had experienced many intense firefights and had eleven men wounded during the tour, B Squadron returned home without losing a man.
Daytime on 16 April was too early for the full results of Operation LARCHWOOD 4 to be appreciated.
Abu Atiya
and the other suspect were on their way to Balad. Belongings seized at the house were likewise en route to JSOC’s technical experts. One thing already seemed clear to members of B Squadron: the rifle they had captured looked suspiciously like one of those left behind during the ill-fated SBS raid in 2003. There was of course much banter about the SAS having to recover weapons lost by the Royal Marines’ ‘Tier 2’ special operators. But the more significant thing about the gun was that it was the sort of prize weapon that would hardly have been carried by some run-ofthe-mill insurgent. Indeed it had appeared in a photograph, propped up against a wall next to Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi.
It was not long before the product of Operation LARCHWOOD 4 was being processed at Balad. ‘The Americans have a hugely greater capacity for forensic analysis,’ notes one British senior officer. ‘You’d take a guy’s computer, suck it of information, squirt it over to somewhere on the east coast of the US and the initial analysis of what was on it would be fed back in time to plan the following night’s operation.’ In the case of the Yusufiyah seizures, it did not take long for examination to produce some startling discoveries.
