Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (15 page)

On April 5, 2004, five days after the murder of Blackwater’s men, the Pentagon unleashed hell upon Fallujah.

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O
peration Vigilant Resolve commenced
with approximately two thousand total men, plus M1A1 tanks with seventeen-foot-long cannons that could hit targets from four thousand yards out; a lineup of tracked assault vehicles that carried eighteen Marines apiece; and a battery of M198 howitzers, the Marines’ eight-ton cannons that can fire a variety of lethal munitions up to fourteen miles.
The 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment attacked
from the southeast of the city, quickly capturing the industrial district.
The 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment stormed
into the residential Jolan district of northwest Fallujah, where they launched into thirty-six hours of sustained fighting against pockets of insurgents who fired at them from inside mosques and school buildings and defended their fortifications with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns.

Lithe little Bell AH1W Cobra and heavier UH1N Huey
helicopters fired Hellfire missiles
at rebel strongholds.
Fighter jets flew more than a hundred sorties
, dropping dozens of laser-guided bombs on
entrenched positions and destroying as many as seventy-five buildings. Marines in tanks on the ground called in nighttime strikes from the AC130 gunships, known to the men as “slayers,” then thundered into downtown Fallujah as insurgents scattered. But hemmed in by the city’s walled streets, Marine infantry squads advancing through town on foot faced hit-and-run attacks by Fallujah’s two thousand insurgents, among them two hundred foreign fighters, mainly from Syria and Yemen, as well as former members of the Iraqi Special Republican Guard. The rebels hid among civilians and darted into neighborhood households.

Those homes,
originally built to shield their residents
from the scorching Iraqi summers, were generally made of concrete walls, and concrete roofs three feet thick, often with three more feet of dirt on top. Their front doors were either metal or wood doors protected by a locked metal gate. They were basically bunkers—and they all had to be cleared, room by room, in a
bloody procession that led to the deaths of more than a dozen Marines
and wounded almost a hundred others. It was the start of what would become, to that point, the deadliest month for U.S. forces in Iraq.

Some
seven hundred insurgents were killed
in the April 2004 offensive. Unfortunately, in the accelerated ramp-up to the attack, little planning was in place to prevent civilian casualties. After just days of fighting, the media—Arab outlets fed information by insurgents, while Western reporters faced kidnappings or beheadings in Fallujah—
estimated total civilian deaths there
as high as 700. The
Iraqi minister of health estimated a far smaller number
: 220. Neither is confirmable. Both are tragic. What is clear is that, as grisly imagery from the war zone spread across the country, Sunni members of the Iraqi Governing Council—the collection of political, religious, and tribal leaders advising Bremer’s CPA—
threatened to resign unless the ambassador initiated a cease-fire
. Two months before the handover of power, democracy in Iraq stood at a perilous crossroads—and the message from the Governing Council was clear. So five days after the Marines began their siege of Fallujah, they
were ordered to stop advancing.
They pulled out of the city entirely three weeks later
.

In the coming months, anti-American sentiment only deepened in the devastated City of Mosques. Fueled by news reports from the first assault,
Fallujah grew into a staging ground for insurgent attacks
across Iraq, which exploded from approximately two hundred per week at the start of 2004 to more than five hundred per week over that summer. By fall, it was clear to all of us in Moyock and beyond that if the Bush administration intended to ensure a secure first democratic election for the Iraqi people in January 2005, U.S. forces would have to return to the city.

On November 7, 2004, seven months after slinking out of Fallujah the first time—after Bush had been safely reelected at home and power in Iraq transferred from the CPA to the transitional government—as many as fifteen thousand U.S. troops launched their
largest urban battle since Hue in Vietnam in 1968
. They intended to finish what they started.

Operation Phantom Fury soon became
one of the bloodiest single engagements of the Iraq War, as two armored Army battalions rolled heavy into the streets of Fallujah, rustling out insurgents for the four Marine infantry battalions that swept in behind. U.S. forces carried out hundreds of additional air strikes;
between the two assaults on Fallujah, they unloaded
enough munitions to damage or destroy roughly half the city’s thirty-nine thousand buildings. After two days of intense battle,
military officials announced that U.S. forces controlled
70 percent of the city. The rest was secured just over a week later.
More than ninety soldiers died
and more than five hundred were wounded. In their wake,
U.S. forces left a bombed-out wasteland
of approximately 1,350 dead insurgents—and, if studies are correct, a level of
unrelenting toxicity in the flattened city that appears to have led to a staggering rise in birth defects
there today.

On Sunday, November 14, 2004,
Marines with 3rd Battalion
, 5th Marine Regiment rolled away the bundles of concertina wire that had been spread along on the shore of the Euphrates. They became
the first Americans to walk across Fallujah’s infamous bridge since two of my men had been strung up on it nearly eight months before. Back in the States, it was an emotional time for our staff. We printed eight hundred Blackwater shirts with “3/5” embroidered on the sleeve as a thank-you to the Marines. “
It’s symbolic because the insurgents closed the bridge
, and we reopened it,” Major Todd Desgrosseilliers, the battalion’s executive officer, told reporters.

In black marker, one of the Marines left a message on one of the bridge’s green trestles: “This is for the Americans of Blackwater that were murdered here in 2004. Semper Fidelis 3/5.”

“PS,” it concluded. “
Fuck you
.”

2004

In the weeks leading up to Blackwater’s convoy through Fallujah, Paul Bremer’s attention had been increasingly drawn to a small town far south of the Sunni hotbed called Najaf. Located just outside the ancient Mesopotamian city of Babylon and its fabled hanging gardens, Najaf was chosen as the final resting place of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the cousin and son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad. In the years following Muhammad’s death in 632, Talib’s rise through the caliphate—the political and religious government of the early Muslim world—led to the major schism between the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam. Today, Imam Talib remains Shia Islam’s most revered figure, and the massive, golden-domed mosque that houses his tomb in Najaf is one of the world’s holiest sites for the sect’s hundreds of millions of followers.

When coalition forces invaded Iraq in 2003,
Shias made up roughly 60 percent
of the country’s population, dominating its southern regions. Yet from nearly the moment modern-day Iraq was created from the disintegrating Ottoman Empire at the end of World
War I, the country’s Sunni contingent—about only 20 percent of its population—had dominated Iraqi politics, sometimes brutally suppressing sectarian dissension. Amid the turmoil of the occupation, Shia leaders in Najaf, home to more than a half million people, saw a chance to rebel—violently—against not only coalition forces but also decades of religious and political oppression. And by mid-2004, as the CPA faced its impending government handover, Bremer was largely focused on one particular Shia:
Muqtada al-Sadr, the frumpy thirty-year-old
commander of the nascent “Mahdi Army,” a militia named for a messiah yet backed by Iranians who were anything but holy saviors.

Almost entirely unknown prior to the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime,
al-Sadr is the son of Ayatollah
Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, an outspoken critic of Hussein and one of the most powerful Shia clerics in Iraq during the late 1990s.
The third of four sons
, Muqtada al-Sadr has no grand educational background to speak of; he was once derided as “Ayatollah Atari” because of his love of video games. But he was smart enough to ride his famous father’s coattails, and reportedly oversaw his family’s security during the time of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr’s heaviest criticisms of the Iraqi government. If that’s true, however, he failed: On February 19, 1999,
gunmen working for the Iraqi secret police
killed the sixty-year-old and two of his sons, Mustafa and Muammal, as they left a mosque in the holy city of Kufa, right outside Najaf. Suddenly the twenty-five-year-old Muqtada al-Sadr was thrust into the lead of his father’s swelling movement.

The amazing part? He pulled it off.
While initially dismissed by fellow religious leaders
as a
za’tut
, or ignorant child, al-Sadr had the famous ancestry that appealed to some educated Shias. At the same time, restless young men oppressed under Hussein’s regime could relate to those dismissals, and they rallied behind al-Sadr’s underdog scrappiness. The man wasn’t known for nuance: Al-Sadr found his voice in lashing out against the U.S. presence—and anyone who disagreed with him,
allegedly going so far as to orchestrate the murder
of a rival Shia cleric, Abdul Majid al-Khoei, who had supported
the American overthrow of Hussein. Al-Sadr’s was a social movement more than a religious one, and against much conventional wisdom, it was taking hold. “
The most puzzling aspect of Muqtada’s ascent
is that he possesses none of the more obvious criteria of political success and little that can account for the existence and resilience of his social base,” according to a report by the International Crisis Group (ICG). “Although coming from a prominent family, he is neither particularly charismatic nor a particularly adept speaker. He does not enjoy the backing of a party apparatus. He has few religious credentials. By most accounts, even his material assets are scanty.”

While it was tempting to try to dismiss al-Sadr at first as a petty rabble-rouser—that ICG report noted, “
His critics, and even a few of his allies
, have accused [al-Sadr] of mental deficiency”—the cleric’s influence quickly became as unmistakable as it was unexpected. In a show of force in the summer of 2003, al-Sadr cobbled together a black-clad militia guided by the theology of his father, who’d declared that an army of believers would be led by the Shia messianic figure Imam Mahdi. Supplied with guns, roadside bombs, and training by forces in the predominantly Shia Iran—which had great interest in helping shape the unfolding political climate in neighboring Iraq—al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army attacked Americans, they attacked Sunnis, they even attacked rival Shia parties in the Iraqi government. “
In the Najaf-Kufa area, al-Sadr’s militia
demonstrated better structure and organization than the local government,” according to a 2004 Marine Corps battle study. “The militiamen roamed the streets, set up roadblocks, and intimidated whomever they pleased. On one occasion, al-Sadr’s men kidnapped an Iraqi policeman and tortured him while broadcasting the atrocity over a government radio frequency.”

Al-Sadr’s terrorist group grew over the course of the U.S. occupation to include as many as sixty thousand disenfranchised fighters—replacing al-Qaeda as the country’s “
most dangerous accelerant of potentially self-sustaining
sectarian violence,” according to the
Pentagon. Amid the power vacuum in Iraq after the American invasion, this small-time cleric was beginning to cast quite a shadow over politics in his homeland, and by the spring of 2004 al-Sadr’s influence was cause for alarm both in Baghdad and in Washington D.C.

In addition to following his firebrand speeches, Blackwater’s security teams used to monitor the eight-page weekly newspaper,
al-Hawza
, that al-Sadr published for fifteen thousand readers. It was full of the expected propaganda and false reports—including a list of those al-Sadr labeled the “124 traitors,” who’d cooperated with the coalition, leading to the immediate killing of two of them. One February 2004 article headlined “
Bremer Follows in the Footsteps of Saddam
” accused the CPA leader of deliberately starving Iraqi children. And when, a few weeks later,
al-Hawza
transcribed a fiery sermon from al-Sadr
describing the September 11 attacks as “a miracle from God,” the ambassador had heard enough. “We’ve got to shut that damned paper down,” Bremer snapped. “I’m not going to tolerate this.”

The CPA head ordered al-Sadr’s paper closed for sixty days. On March 28,
U.S. soldiers escorted the newspaper staff
into the streets of Baghdad and padlocked chains on the doors.

The strategy backfired. I remember reading reports of hundreds of protestors rallying outside the newspaper offices for days.
They held portraits of al-Sadr and chanted
, “Just say the word, Muqtada—we’ll resume the 1920 revolution!” The chants escalated from there: “Today is peaceful,” they warned; “tomorrow will be military!”

Three days after the closing of the newspaper, the four Blackwater men were slaughtered by Sunni insurgents a hundred miles away in Fallujah. Taken together, the events ushered in confrontations on two fronts, and the most serious crisis the CPA would face in Iraq. “For the first time,” Ali Allawi, Iraq’s first postwar civilian minister of defense, wrote in his book
The Occupation of Iraq
, “
important constituencies in both the Shia and Sunni
communities simultaneously rose up in arms in two widely separate locations.” Bremer later stated in a PBS inverview, “
The Iraqi political system was on the brink
of flying apart. The Sunni members of the Governing Council were
outraged by the nightly broadcasts on Al Jazeera television, which were especially provocative about the civilian deaths in Fallujah [during Operation Vigilant Resolve]. The Shia were concerned about what was happening with Moqtada al-Sadr, because he was a Shia.”

Believing an additional show of force—if of a different severity than was about to be meted out in Fallujah—was the only way to restore order in Baghdad, Bremer cracked down even harder on al-Sadr. On Saturday, April 3, coalition forces arrested the cleric’s senior deputy, Mustafa al-Yaqubi, for his alleged connection to the killing a year earlier of rival cleric Abdul Majid al-Khoei. Now even further incensed, al-Sadr responded by loosing his protestors and army throughout southern Iraqi cities and towns, catching coalition forces off guard. Or at least certain members of the coalition: “
The fledgling Iraqi police
had no intention of stopping [al-Sadr’s men],” reports Patrick Cockburn in his book
Muqtada
. “The security in important cities in southern Iraq was in the hands of Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Salvadoran and Spanish troops sent there at the high tide of U.S. success in 2003 and whose governments had never expected them to fight.”

The crux of al-Sadr’s plan was to overrun Najaf, the Iraqi Shias’ symbolic capital. From there, he would demand al-Yaqubi’s freedom.

No U.S. combat unit served in Najaf at the time; the few uniformed Americans in the city were communications technicians. Security there was the responsibility of the Spanish army, which in turn commanded small contingents of troops from El Salvador, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic. But the safety of the CPA headquarters there—and the State Department’s Philip Kosnett, the top coalition official in Najaf—was the responsibility of eight men from Blackwater, who in early April 2004 were about to rewrite the rules of the contractor-combatant relationship.

•   •   •

A
s the sun rose over Najaf on April 4, busloads of Shia protestors flooded the city and overwhelmed Spanish forces, who didn’t exactly
try to stop them. Spain’s thirteen hundred soldiers in and around Najaf were officially on a civil support mission, helping farmers irrigate their land and helping local justices set up court systems. They had their own atrocity on their minds: Three weeks earlier, al-Qaeda had murdered 191 people in the Madrid train bombings, the worst Islamic terrorist attack in European history. More attacks were threatened unless the Spanish troops were pulled from Iraq. And three days after the bombing, in a surprise upset in Spain’s national elections, Socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero defeated conservative People’s Party candidate Mariano Rajoy to become prime minister.

Zapatero’s first move after taking office was to make good on his campaign promise to withdraw Spain’s troops from Iraq. And quite clearly, none of the Spaniards in Najaf that April morning wanted to risk getting shot a few weeks before leaving the war zone. They were “security” in name only.

Similarly, the local Iraqi police remained indifferent to the throng sweeping through the city. And in no time at all, nearly one thousand of al-Sadr’s protestors flowed through to the northeast corner of Najaf and up to the main gates of the regional CPA headquarters. Inside, Kosnett and his Blackwater detail began considering their options.

The aerial photos of the compound Blackwater used to plan our security procedures showed government offices occupying a small building at one end of the city’s as yet unfinished Kufa University complex. That complex sat midway between the built-up, relatively metropolitan infrastructure of Kufa and Najaf. The whole area surrounding Kosnett’s walled compound was flat and beige, with patches of scrubby grass and a few stubborn trees. At the time, almost no structure in or around the complex was taller than two stories; the whole spread was mostly a rat’s nest of exposed rebar that jutted out from the half-built shells of concrete school buildings to come. The tallest structure in the area, the university’s eight-story teaching hospital, sat a third of a mile across the street from the
front gate, gazing down upon the rooftops and courtyards of the compound.

Officials in the CPA offices could hear the chanting from the growing crowd at the gate. The anger was palpable; it was only a matter of time before a spark ignited the crowd. As the team responsible for Kosnett’s security, Blackwater’s guards advised the regional CPA head of the obvious: Now might be a good time to leave. Our men were not contracted, authorized, staffed, nor armed and equipped to engage in any sort of offensive operations. Quelling rebellions was the military’s job. As a defensive security unit, Blackwater’s duty was to protect the principal—and from that standpoint, the safest option is not be there when an attack begins. “Get off the X,” we drilled into our contractors: The first plan should always be to avoid the spot the militants plan to assault. Holding one’s ground in a shoot-out is almost always the last.

Kosnett, on the other hand, was a career diplomat who’d volunteered to be there. “I had joined the [State Department’s] Foreign Service to serve my country when called,” he later recounted. “
Iraq was center stage; I wanted to contribute
.” In Iraq for only three months at that point, Kosnett had already survived one attack outside Najaf, when nearly two dozen insurgents ambushed the diplomat’s convoy on a ride in from Baghdad,
only to be fought off by his El Salvadoran escorts
. Choppering out of the city at that point would effectively hand al-Sadr the CPA offices—and the city—and Kosnett refused to be run off his post by a mob. “
Our union is fond of saying
that more American ambassadors have died in action than American generals since the end of World War II,” Kosnett said. “There’s more to being a modern American diplomat than conference tables and cocktail parties.”

Just after eleven a.m., Blackwater’s team, led by a middle-aged former Navy SEAL named Chris White, caught an early lunch with CPA staff, a few Salvadoran soldiers, and two members from Bravo Company of the Alabama National Guard’s 711th Signal Battalion.
One of those National Guardsmen
, Specialist Michael Acquaviva,
was installing communications networks at the base. Meanwhile, behind the CPA building a small team of Marines had just finished wiring a base station radio in the Spanish force’s headquarters.
Corporal Lonnie Young, a burly twenty-five-year-old
Defense Messaging System administrator from Dry Ridge, Kentucky, reckoned he had a few minutes before chow time, so the Marine climbed into the backseat of his truck for a quick nap.