My Share of the Task(95)
Between our Friday-evening dinners throughout September and October, TF 16 commanders went to Camp Fallujah to coordinate their targeting with the Marines, who lent key support—providing cordons, putting doctors and triage hospitals on standby, and offering spare barracks for our operators. This level of coordination and cooperation eventually became routine, but in the fall of that year it was not.
Even as our task force attacked the insurgent nodes in Fallujah, John Sattler wisely enlisted Prime Minister Allawi to exhaust all opportunities to negotiate with the insurgency to turn over the city without an assault. But the negotiations broke down, the insurgents ignored Allawi’s ultimatums, and the Coalition scheduled the invasion for the first week of November.
With the date set, the task force went into high gear at the end of October. TF 16’s full focus turned to Fallujah, and we transitioned from hitting targets every couple of nights to striking multiple targets throughout the day. We targeted leaders, trainers, and mortarmen in order to eliminate their skilled labor. We knocked out key command-and-control centers and barriers the insurgents set up to channel American vehicles and foot patrols into ambushes and traps. At the same time, then–Major General Rich Natonski, commanding the 1st Marine Division, ran feints at the south of the city, while the Marines planned to bring the real attack from the north. As the British had done there in 1941, the Marines dropped leaflets urging civilians to leave Fallujah. Most did, while the jihadists entrenched and fortified the terrain.
John later recounted one of the strikes on these insurgent traps that reflected why our continued efforts at partnership were so important. One night just before the offensive, a group of Marine leaders, including John and the ground division commander, gathered in their combat operations center, where they watched videotape from one of the targets hit that day. After the air strike destroyed the initial target, smaller explosions cascaded down each of the roads leading away from it: pop, pop, pop, like chains of fireworks or lines of electrical charges. These were daisy-chain IEDs the insurgents had buried under the road, stringing together bombs for meters on end that would explode together. As the charges continued exploding on the soundless video, the room was silent. The hushed commanders watched, imagining what would have happened had a file of Marines attacked that position with the IEDs still unexploded, waiting in the packed dirt beneath their feet.
In an effort to ensure that no targets went unserviced, strikes continued up until the Marines’ ground assault. That invasion began when Iraqi commandos and Marines seized the main hospital just before midnight on November 7. Air strikes continued throughout the following afternoon, the Marines cut the power at 6:00 P.M., and later that night they crossed the berms and railroad tracks at the city’s northern edge. Accompanying them were TF 16 operators.
Zarqawi’s jihadists who fought in the streets during the battle were doing so under a different name. On October 17, three weeks before the Fallujah offensive began, Zarqawi’s group posted a message to its website declaring that Zarqawi pledged bay’ah—swore allegiance—to Osama bin Laden. The message hinted at Al Qaeda’s senior leaders’ unease with Zarqawi’s campaign design. After eight months of back-and-forth messages, Zarqawi’s group explained, “our most generous brothers in al Qaeda”—the upper echelon of leadership, mostly in Pakistan—“came to understand the strategy of the Tawhid wal-Jihad organization in Iraq, the land of the two rivers and of the Caliphs, and their hearts warmed to its methods and overall mission.” While tensions would remain, Al Qaeda blessed the decision on one of its websites a few days later. Zarqawi’s group now went by “Al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers” or “Al Qaeda in Iraq” (AQI), the latter being the name we had already called the group since Zarqawi first emerged into the fray the previous January.
Less than a year after writing to bin Laden and Zawahiri for support, Zarqawi was quickly eclipsing Al Qaeda’s patriarchs as the most active, violent, energetic commander of jihad—especially for a younger generation of aspirants who were less theologically minded and more violent. The United States was partly at fault, as the constant chorus of blame assigned to Zarqawi in the press—much of it warranted, some of it misappropriated—had inadvertently inflated his stature. But the ruthlessness and ambition he would continue to display in the years ahead convinced me he would have grabbed the spotlight anyway.