My Share of the Task(154)

                The eye-watering changes there had come at a steep price. Five hundred of Sean’s troops were wounded and eighty-five of their comrades died in the fight to retake Ramadi.

                As Sean and his troops left, having pried back the fingers of AQI’s grip on the population, TF 17 was about to execute a mission whose intelligence harvest would, in the right hands, drive a growing wedge between the Maliki government and the Shia extremists who influenced it.

                On the night of March 19, 2007, then-Commander John B. brought me pressing information. Since the previous September, he had commanded a squadron from SEAL Team 4 as part of TF 17, which had relied on TF 714’s airpower and intelligence architecture throughout the fall. But to streamline TF 17’s operations, by the beginning of January we formally placed it under TF 714’s full tactical control.

                Built like a logger, John B. had been one of the first TF 714 people I’d met in Afghanistan when I deployed to Bagram in May 2002 with Combined Joint Task Force 180. Wearing civilian clothes and an enormous beard, John B. initially struck me as one of a number of dilettantes I’d met. But he was different.

                John B. lacked the crusty arrogance I’d always despised in some special operators and sought to eliminate in TF 714. We’d worked together when I joined the command in 2003, and it was reassuring to have a trusted partner in the new TF 17. He had been part of most of their operations into strongholds like Sadr City, Karbala, and Najaf, and he understood the political aftershocks that could ripple out from even the most precise of raids. That night, he was asking to conduct one that would, inevitably, upset a number of powerful Iraqis.

                At the time, political sensitivity had created an unofficial list of Shiites whom we could not knowingly target. One such no-go target was Qais Khazali, a thirty-three-year-old who had served as an aide to Muqtada al-Sadr’s father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr, before he was killed in 1999. Khazali then assisted Muqtada in the first years after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, before splitting off to lead one of the designated Special Groups. His network was considered particularly dangerous, yet he also had powerful political connections and was periodically discussed as a potential alternative to Sadr.

                But while Qais was off-limits, his younger brother Laith was not. That March night, John B. explained, Laith had popped onto the grid. The weather was particularly bad that evening and had grounded aircraft. But from intercepts, John B.’s team was confident they had found the younger Khazali brother. Then, and for the next few nights, they believed Laith was in a house in the heavily Shia port city of Basra. John B. proposed capturing him before we lost the scent.

                The operation carried all kinds of risks. Launching a raid from Balad to Basra involved a lengthy flight down. More significant, we had a light presence that far south, and although we had good partnerships with the Brits, the operational infrastructure in and around Basra was unfamiliar. I knew we risked political backlash from inside Maliki’s regime, but I gave John B. the go-ahead.

                On the night of March 20, John B. climbed into the aircraft alongside his TF 17 operators for the almost three hour flight to Basra. There they would link up with British special operators who, augmented by conventional troops and intelligence partners, were moving. The Brits in Basra had played a vital role in the lead-up, helping with intelligence and planning and now in the coming assault. The British troops positioned themselves around the area in Basra as blocking forces, as the TF 17 teams approached by vehicle, quietly established a cordon in the dark, and took the house without fire. Elsewhere in Basra, British troops got into a series of gunfights, diverting the Shia insurgent groups, including Laith’s own Asaib Ahl al-Haq, which might have turned the objective into a much more costly affair.

                As expected, they found Laith Khazali inside the house, along with seven other men. After a few minutes, they realized that one of the men they’d captured on the target was about to complicate things.