Contesting that vision, and the men who flocked to Iraq to achieve it, would soon lead us to an arid stretch of western Iraq.
| CHAPTER 11 |
Out West
November 2004–October 2005
At lunchtime on December 21, 2004, five days after bin Laden urged young Muslims not to miss the “golden opportunity” in Iraq, a man dressed in an Iraqi security forces uniform walked to the middle of the football-field-size mess tent at Forward Operating Base Marez in Mosul, northern Iraq. He wound his way through the long rows of white folding tables, covered with Tabasco bottles and napkin dispensers, where Iraqis and Americans sat eating. Some reports had him loitering by the sandwich bar. Others who survived saw him sitting and, at the last moment, bowing forward in silence. In either case, a few minutes past noon, he ignited. The BB pellets packed in a thick layer over the explosives of his vest cut through the packed mess hall in a metallic cloud. Unseen shock waves pulsed out, scattering tables and bodies. The glowing heat scalded the room and ripped open the tent ceiling. Beneath its charred tarp and in the bright, smoky column of sunlight coming through the gash, twenty-two people lay dead, including an operative from my task force.
After the mess-hall attack, Ansar al-Sunnah, the group that had sheltered Zarqawi before we toppled Saddam and that maintained a close but rocky alliance with Al Qaeda, was quick to take credit. In its Internet boasts, Ansar claimed the attacker was an Iraqi, a hometown recruit from nearby Mosul. But intelligence instead indicated Ansar had dispatched a twenty-year-old Saudi medical student, one of the many foreigners imported for these martyrdom attacks.
Contrary to Ansar and Al Qaeda propaganda efforts, Iraqis rarely volunteered for martyrdom operations at that stage of the war. These attacks were instead the hallmark of foreign volunteers, whose increasing infiltration into Iraq had been one of TF 714’s main concerns in the months leading up to this bombing. The operative we lost that day was part of a team we had dispatched to Mosul to help combat that flow.
Foreign fighters had fought in more than a dozen conflicts since bin Laden and his fellow volunteers had first become “Afghan-Arabs” in the 1980s. Iraq was the latest and, we believed, quickly becoming the largest battlefield destination for what the jihadists called the “Caravan of Martyrs.” Most were young men who considered themselves jihadists. Few came to Iraq with dreams of restoring the caliphate there. Rather, most left their homes in North Africa, Saudi Arabia, the Levant, Central Asia, and Europe roused by a more visceral sense of Muslim duty. Like the generation before them who flocked to Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Bosnia, many came fired by righteous indignation of real or perceived injustices committed by the West against their Muslim brothers and sisters.
I was in Afghanistan with Mike Flynn when I learned about the attack, and our loss, later that evening. Mike had been doing a superb job making our network smart about the growing threat. But as the event that day reinforced, we needed to get smarter, faster. We needed to scale our network to combat the tide of young Muslim men funneling into Iraq.
* * *
Although the war in Iraq was becoming international, TF 16 was not. Our operative was killed in Mosul, but the explosion was a product of a network that extended far beyond Iraq’s borders. Increasingly, its supply lines of material, money, recruiters, handlers, and, most important, volunteers, stretched to Riyadh and Aleppo, Tunis and Hamburg. But this periphery of AQI remained vague to us. To uncover and then dismantle these outer rings would require that our network overlay theirs. This meant finding creative ways to employ the international reach of other agencies and units, usually existing local security forces, like the police. To coordinate our effort to tie this together, we decided to replicate the proven model of JIATF-East in Bagram by creating a parallel structure in Balad. While JIATF-East focused on locating senior Al Qaeda leaders in Central Asia, the mission of the Balad-based JIATF-West was to reverse engineer the problem we were seeing in Iraq.
I knew the success of JIATF-West, like so many of the new teams and units we created, would hinge on effective leadership. So I called two men whom I had known since they were young soldiers, Tom D. and Tres H., into the Operations Center in our Bagram compound. T.T. and I had carefully selected each man for the task. Tres was an intelligence professional, but his real gift was getting people to do things and then feel particularly good about having done them. He could, as necessary, alternate between being animated, stern, demanding, and consoling. He had been a private in my Ranger company from 1986 to 1987; now, almost twenty years later, I was sending him as an experienced major to work a difficult assignment. He would be deputy to Tom D., who had been a Ranger captain when I commanded the regiment, which he had left to join Green. Tom D.’s wry, irreverent humor formed a veneer over his dogged leadership skills, which he later used to great effect in command of a Green squadron in Iraq. T.T. and I judged that together, Tom D. and Tres could corral, convince, coerce, and inspire a motley group of military and civilian analysts to gel into a team. Within a couple of hours of receiving their new mission, they had computers and gear quickly packed and had joined Mike and me on the plane for Iraq.