Task Force Black (20 page)

When the NSA and JSOC experts went through these seized possessions, they found video of Zarqawi giving political messages and posing with followers in the desert. At this time the only photographs of the Jordanian jihadist in circulation were very dated. Here was fresh footage, showing exactly what he looked like just a short time ago. What was more, in one scene, in which Zarqawi sat inside a building talking politics, the gun leaning on the wall beside him was none other than the former SBS weapon captured by B Squadron a few nights before. It was clear evidence both that the SAS had got Zarqawi’s prized possessions and that they might have been very close to the man himself on 16 April.

The American commanders were thrilled with the haul from B Squadron’s raid. It seemed to vindicate the long-debated idea that the SAS should be used against the same targets as Delta and effectively be placed under the tactical control of Colonel
Grist
, the American who commanded it. Though, as one of the British officers involved admitted, ‘It was a total piece of luck that the minute we switched to al-Qaeda we had a result, a trace of Zarqawi, a total jackpot.’

The detainees from the raid,
Abu Atiya
and the other man, were placed in JSOC’s Temporary Screening Facility at Balad. Once transferred, Britain’s direct involvement with them ceased. At Balad, the force of contractor-employed or reservist interrogators – ‘gators’ in base slang – got to work, apparently ignorant even of the fact that the SAS had taken them. Author Mark Bowden was allowed access to the team working at Balad at the time. He describes their backgrounds:

Some were lawyers. Some had advanced degrees. Some called themselves ‘reserve bums’, because they signed on for tours of duty in various parts of the world for six months to a year, and then took long, exotic vacations before accepting another job. One raced cars when between jobs; another was an avid surfer who between assignments lived on the best beaches in the world; another had earned a law degree while working as a city cop in Arlington, Texas.
^*

This disparate bunch conducted its interrogations in a hangar left over from Saddam’s time. Ten different interrogation rooms were divided from each other by plywood partitions, and each was kept under CCTV observation. The gators worked their cases in pairs, and since none of them spoke good enough Arabic to grill their man an interpreter was in there too. Interviews could last several hours, and when they were over the prisoners were taken back to their ‘boxes’ or personal cells in another building nearby.

Since new prisoners were coming in most nights, the capacity of the TSF imposed its own limits on JSOC’s interrogation operation. It could only accommodate a couple of dozen prisoners. There was also a time limit, imposed by the US chain of command, because of concerns about charges of detainee abuse and the fact it was a black facility, unregulated by the likes of the International Red Cross. A prisoner could be held for a certain number of days on McChrystal’s say-so. Going beyond that for a further period required authorisation from General Casey. If that was not forthcoming, the detainee had to be turned over to a regular jail – usually Abu Ghraib or the Divisional Internment Facility at Baghdad airport. Some suggest that a few of the insurgents seemed to know that if they held out for enough days they would be processed out of there and the pressure would be off. The gators were already under time pressure, but all the more so with the LARCHWOOD 4 detainees since the evidence of Zarqawi uncovered in the raid was so fresh.

As time passed, the gators formed the impression that the second insurgent taken in the Yusufiyah house, an older man, was more important than
Abu Atiya
, the ‘Admin Emir’ of the Abu Ghraib cell and the original target of B Squadron’s operation. In his article about the gators, Bowden assigned the pseudonym
Abu Haydr
to this other player.
Abu Haydr
was a stately figure who successfully parried questioning by
Mary
and
Lenny
, the two interrogators assigned to his case. As days slipped by, tension mounted between the gators and the supervisor about the best way to crack the prisoner.

Nine days after the Yusufiyah raid, Zarqawi took his own bold initiative. He posted a video on a jihadist website. It was an edited version of the material found at the Yusufiyah house. The message was put out under the logo of the Mujahedeen Shura Council, with an accompanying statement by them. In it, the al-Qaeda leader, dressed in loose-fitting black combats, with a black bandana around his head, harangued his followers. His main message was that they had already frustrated American plans to control the country and should fight on. ‘Your mujahedeen sons were able to confront the most ferocious of crusader campaigns on a Muslim state,’ he told the camera. ‘They have stood in the face of this onslaught for three years.’

The release of the video prompted a torrent of analysis and speculation across the Arab media and on the internet. Why had Zarqawi gone public? Was it a sign of weakness, given the recent rumours that he was under pressure from the homegrown Iraqi jihadists? Was showing the Coalition his face suicidal or a sign of bravado intended to reassure his followers?

There was, of course, a subtext to the posting of his message. Whenever Zarqawi might originally have intended to release it, following Task Force Knight’s raid in Yusufiyah he had reason to believe that the Coalition knew exactly what he looked like. Zarqawi’s image was compromised. Best get the video out under circumstances that he could control.

If Zarqawi was indeed concerned that the captured material might be used against him, then he was right. There were also out-takes from his video sessions captured in Yusufiyah.

The US chose a weekly media briefing in the Green Zone to fire its return salvo in the battle of the videos. On 4 May journalists were shown Zarqawi trying in vain to clear a stoppage from his machine gun. ‘So what you saw on the internet was what he wanted the world to see,’ said Major-General Rick Lynch. ‘What he didn’t show you were the clips that I showed, wearing New Balance sneakers with his uniform, surrounded by supposedly competent subordinates who grab the hot barrel of a just-fired machine gun; [you] have a warrior leader, Zarqawi, who doesn’t understand how to operate his weapon system and has to rely on his subordinates to clear a weapon stoppage. It makes you wonder.’

Lynch’s briefing produced its own debate in the press and blogosphere. Had the Americans really been right to release the material just to make fun of Zarqawi? And if he was so incompetent, why had the US built him up to be its leading enemy in Iraq, with a $25 million bounty on his head? In fact, Lynch had used the video to start a section of briefing in which the American military gave its latest assessment of the campaign against al-Qaeda in Iraq. This
tour d’horizon
proved just as contentious among the special operators and spooks because it revealed much about recent operations against AQI that they would rather have kept secret. British players in this drama also regarded it as a public revelation of ideas about the jihadist campaign, some of which they disagreed with, that would usually have remained highly classified.

Lynch talked about five operations around Baghdad during the preceding weeks (actually conducted by JSOC and including the SAS’s LARCHWOOD 4, although he did not describe it in those terms), indicating that they had killed thirty-one foreign fighters. He asserted that ‘Ninety per cent of the suicide bombers that Zarqawi employs are foreign fighters’, and that therefore the degradation of April and May 2006 operations was taking away Zarqawi’s capability to mount suicide bombings in and around Baghdad. He claimed that suicide attacks in Iraq had fallen from seventy-five per month early in 2005 to twenty-five per month at the time of the briefing.

The general went on to describe the attrition of AQI by Coalition operations, revealing that 161 significant players in the organisation had been killed or captured since January 2005. Explaining that ‘we believe that Zarqawi and al-Qaeda in Iraq is organised into three tiers’, he broke down these losses into eight ‘Tier 1’ terrorists – those with personal contact with Zarqawi – fifty-seven Tier 2 ‘leaders in local and regional areas’ and ninety-six Tier 3 fighters.

This 4 May presentation caused quiet controversy. Task Force Knight soldiers did not like the mention of its recent operations and considered that the reference to thirty-one foreign fighters killed was utterly speculative. Who was able to establish, for example, whether the man who blew himself to bits on the roof of that house in Yusufiyah was Iraqi or not? Both MI6 and British military intelligence analysts had long been sceptical of claims that most suicide bombers were foreign fighters. As for the classification of al-Qaeda in tiers, this was entirely a feature of the American analytical approach rather than a description of genuine levels within the jihadist organisation. Looking with hindsight at Lynch’s seventy-five suicide attacks in 2005 versus twenty-five in 2006, it can only have been possible with the most selective use of the facts, which showed a steady upwards trend in violence during 2006.

Overall, the emphasis given to Zarqawi and the organisation of AQI worried British observers. One British figure holding a senior post in Baghdad at the time of the briefing recalls, ‘Zarqawi had become a local bin Laden phenomenon. He was demonised and inflated into a figure rather more significant than he was.’

Although British critics might have punctured some of the hyperbole and trickery of analyses such as the Lynch briefing, their views had their shortcomings too. They were sometimes guilty of being overly negative or cynical. The language used by Zarqawi in his video, or by the Mujahedeen Shura Council upon its formation, betrayed a concern about the pressure these jihadist groups were under from Coalition operations and from a split in Sunni opinion about the best way ahead for the resistance. Some aspects of Lynch’s presentation, such as describing Zarqawi’s determination to derail the Iraqi democratic project before a new government could be formed, can be substantiated by resistance communiqués at the time. As for the 161 significant AQI members accounted for between January 2005 and May 2006, this was progress too, given the Coalition’s lamentable early performance against the insurgency.

McChrystal’s approach of ‘industrial counterterrorism’ had got under way in earnest. With each new takedown the intelligence picture was becoming clearer. The networks sketched out on computers in Camp Slayer showed an intricate web of relationships. And as interrogators worked on captives like
Abu Haydr
, the fidelity of that intelligence picture improved still further. JSOC’s units were getting enough information to mount operations the whole time. But as the squadrons competed with one another this carried its own risks.

The 13 and 14 May fell, in 2006, at the weekend – or at least what the bosses back in the Pentagon and Ministry of Defence regarded as their weekend. In Iraq the only meaningful cycle for the special operators was that of day and night. One visitor to Balad recalls, ‘If you arrived there at 9 a.m. it was a wasteland. The raids had gone in at 3 a.m., the prisoners had been brought back at 5 a.m. and everybody had got their heads down. In the afternoon they would start prepping the next operation and it would all start again.’

Task Force Knight’s Operation LARCHWOOD 4 was part of an intense series of operations in the Triangle of Death southwest of the capital. Most of these operations were carried out by Delta and other US forces. Over that May weekend, for example, they took out an entire network in and around Latifiyah. The cell led by Abu Mustafa was held responsible for shooting down an American Apache helicopter early in April, and a welter of other attacks on US forces in the Triangle. On 13 May the Americans had raided four houses used by the Abu Mustafa network. But their pace and exploitation of intelligence from the first raids was such that they intended to go back on Sunday night to hit three more locations. During these operations around Latifiyah fifteen ‘suspected al-Qaeda associates’ as well as Abu Mustafa himself were killed.

At the same time as they were planning their second wave of raids against the Abu Mustafa group, JSOC’s attention turned to a further target several kilometres away, not far from Yusufiyah and the SAS raid of 16 April. It is unclear whether it was yet another arm of the Abu Mustafa network or the result of a separate targeting process. Such was the determination of Delta’s B Squadron to get in and take down their suspect that it was decided to strike in mid-afternoon – in broad daylight.

Special ops Black Hawks from Task Force Brown (known publicly as Task Force 160, the JSOC helicopter regiment) carried an assault force of Delta men towards their target. With them was an SAS liaison officer, Captain
Morris
, the man who had been wounded during the regiment’s October 2003 battle in Ramadi. The British and American Tier 1 units fostered many formal exchanges and postings with one another, but in Iraq there was often informal liaison too: people who went out on operations to see how their comrades/rivals did things, or even just for the hell of it as an extra shooter. That Sunday, 14 May, other elements of JSOC were backing up the Delta raid in the usual manner, and they would certainly need them.

The Americans’ first target building sat among a group of rural dwellings close to a waterway. A line of electricity pylons and a road ran parallel to that water. Delta’s landing zone was thus in a pocket of open space near the road, flanked on one side by pylons and on the other by trees. Soon after they landed the Delta men started to take fire from a nearby house.

What followed was a rapidly escalating battle in which, at times, the al-Qaeda defenders of the area seemed to get the upper hand. One SAS man, recounting tales of the raid, says, ‘No sooner were they down, than the Indians were all over them!’ Hunkered down close to the road, the Delta soldiers came under small-arms and mortar fire. At one point three al-Qaeda fighters – one wearing a suicide vest – jumped into a truck and tried to mount their own attack on the special operators. The vehicle was hit by a hail of bullets and the vest detonated.