For nearly three months, TF 714 had been targeting the Iranian proxies President Bush spoke of. The previous fall, General Casey had asked us to start targeting specific Shia extremists, particularly Iranian-backed “Special Groups.” At the time, as Robert Gates explained that winter, there were four vectors of violence in the country: attacks from the Sunni insurgency directed at the Coalition and Iraqi government; terroristic attacks by Al Qaeda against Shia and western targets; sectarian conflict between the Sunni and Shia; and Shia-on-Shia violence, largely nonideological power struggles in southern Iraq.
Shia organizations like Jaish al-Mahdi, or JAM, tiptoed along a line of opposition to MNF-I and made an uneasy truce with the status quo. Beneath the surface, however, were more sinister elements supported by Iran’s secretive Quds Force. These elements operated an aggressive, seemingly unconstrained network that funneled material, including the explosively formed projectile IEDs, known as EFPs, that were devastating Coalition forces. They also provided training and advice to Iraqi Special Groups.
After seeing how Green had responded after I made them own TF 16, I thought it would be a mistake to graft the Shia target set onto an existing task force, diluting its focus. So I decided to create a new task force: Task Force 17 (TF 17) would focus entirely on the Shia target set. As with many things, it was easier said than done. We now had double the mission but not twice the ISR, helicopters, or detention facilities. We’d beg or borrow what we could, but the new mission would inevitably put Task Forces 16 and 17 in competition over the same resources.
The sympathy and active support that hard-line, Iranian-backed Shia militias enjoyed from Iraqi officials at the highest levels meant our raids sent us wading into a murky world of politics. On January 11, 2007, the day after President Bush’s speech, TF 714 forces, acting on short notice, raided an Iranian facility in Irbil in northern Iraq, aiming to capture Mohammad Jafari, who we believed was guiding Quds Force activities in Iraq. Instead, our force detained five Iranians, later called “the Irbil Five,” judged to be members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The men were interrogated and ultimately held for the next two and a half years, pawns in a determined diplomatic struggle with Iran. Nine days later, perhaps as revenge, one of the most notorious Shia Special Groups staged a perfidious, goading attack.
In the early evening of January 20 a line of eight SUVs with thickly tinted windows stopped at the outermost gate of the Provincial Joint Coordination Center in Karbala, Iraq. Iraqis and Americans manned the small outpost and lived alongside one another. At the outpost’s front gate, witnesses later said, some of the men inside the SUVs wore U.S. Army uniforms and flashed fake identification. They were allowed in, and the vehicles rumbled past a further series of gates. Once inside the inner courtyard of the camp, roughly a dozen militants bounded out. Some beelined it to the American soldiers’ quarters and began firing their weapons through the doors. Others set fire to the American Humvees. They killed one American in his room and gravely wounded three others. Within minutes, the attack was over and the assailants had sped away into the evening. No Iraqis on the base were harmed or, according to the Americans, showed any alarm, raising suspicions about their involvement. As the Humvees billowed jet smoke into the sky above the courtyard, the Americans came to the sickening realization: The attackers had captured four Americans.
Later that night, Iraqi policemen who had given chase after the convoy passed one of their checkpoints came upon five of the SUVs. They were parked, doors ajar, about 20 miles from Karbala, in the neighboring province of Babil. Inside, the four Americans were found handcuffed and shot, some point-blank in the chest, others in the limbs or head. Three were already dead, and the fourth, with a gunshot wound to the head, died as one of the Iraqi policeman attempted CPR. The attackers had stripped the men of identification. But in the dark, flashlights illuminated the name of one of the perished Americans: a young lieutenant, less than two years out of West Point, had in his final moments scrawled his name into the film of Iraqi dust covering the SUV he had been left to die in.
We couldn’t immediately identify who had directed or conducted the operation. I was determined we would find out.