As I watched, I felt sick.
I could feel in my own limbs and chest the shame and fury that must have been coursing through the father, still lying motionless. Every ounce of him must have wanted to pop up, pull his son from the ground, stand him upright, and dust off the boy’s clothes and cheek. To be laid on the ground in full view of his son was humiliating. For a proud man, to seemingly fail to protect that son from similar treatment was worse.
As I watched, I thought, not for the first time: It would be easy for us to lose.
The professionalism of the Rangers in the sweltering heat, paradoxically, suggested just how arduous our task was. As much as Doug and his Rangers were doing to keep the insurgents off balance, they couldn’t change the dynamics in Ramadi simply through raids—which, even when done as professionally as they were on that day, could produce enmity in the population. Absent a campaign to protect the people, we could only hope the residents understood these raids were necessary. But even then, the targeting operations could not address the deeper structural sources of the violence that only a fuller-spectrum counterinsurgency effort could. Doug and his Rangers could help, but it was going to take much more.
* * *
Within days of my Ramadi trip, Scott Miller brought an army colonel named Sean MacFarland to see me in the bunker at Balad. Sean was commanding the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Armored Division. Armed with ideas they had seen pacify Tal Afar under then-Colonel H. R. McMaster, MacFarland and his force—comprising five Marine and army battalions—were to take charge of Ramadi. I’d heard good things about Sean but was anxious to judge for myself.
Sean’s visit to our command was part of a concerted effort, on both sides of the fence, to lash our efforts tighter with conventional forces. It was working. Brigade commanders increasingly stopped through to see Scott, Mike Flynn, Kurt Fuller, and me. Conversely, I encouraged conventional flag officers and their commanders to embed for a day or two with our strike teams and to go on raids. Scott, meanwhile, established a weekly video teleconference with all the brigade commanders in Iraq. Far from its stereotype as an overly secretive unit running its own war, our task force, which was then hardwired to succeed through internal collaboration, worked hard to drive an all-of-military effort.
As Sean sat down, I took stock of the tall, soft-spoken cavalry officer. “I’m going to retake Ramadi,” he said quietly. “We’re going to reoccupy the city itself.”
I was skeptical, not because of Sean, whom I liked immediately, but because a number of brigade commanders had tried and been unable to root out insurgents in places less violent than Ramadi. Yet his firmness struck me.
Sean explained he would not have his forces live concentrated in a large forward operating base, but he would nest them among the people in smaller combat outposts (COPs) spaced throughout the city. He spoke of the importance of standing up a police force drawn from local men. Keen to resuscitate a tribal uprising—undone six months earlier by dissension and a meticulous AQI assassination program—Sean knew he needed to provide American backing and protection to tribal leaders willing to band together against Al Qaeda.
“So this is going to take some time,” he said. He estimated around nine months.
“Sean, if it takes you that long, we’ve got a real problem,” I said. “You’ve got to get on that horse and ride.”
He did just that.
The full story of how Sean and his Iraqi partners turned Ramadi is theirs to tell. But on every idea Sean shared with me before arriving, he drove hard, and his team made them work. Like all counterinsurgency, it was slow, difficult, and deadly work.
Perhaps most important, Sean understood the indispensability of fielding a local police force that could target Al Qaeda, and the need for a strong Iraqi partner to lead the aggressive recruitment effort. The man Sean quickly identified as that partner—Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha—seemingly came out of central casting for a desert chieftain, with a thin face and falconlike eyes. Although he belonged to the powerful Albu Risha tribe of the Dulaim confederation, in the normal pecking order he was a third-tier sheikh. But Ramadi was not normal—most of the local government and higher-ranking tribal leaders had fled the violence.