Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (50 page)

Those “assets” came largely from the “white” or “theater” special operations task force working in Iraq, which was known as Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force (CJSOTF, pronounced “see-juh-so-tiff”)-Arabian Peninsula and included Special Forces A-teams and SEAL units. Colonel Kevin McDonnell, commander of 5th Special Forces Group, led the task force, which also included SEAL Team 4, led by Commander John Burnham. McDonnell reported to Major General Frank Kearney, the former JSOC operations director who now commanded all non-JSOC special operations forces in Central Command's area of responsibility.

Realizing that he needed far more resources to handle both target sets, McChrystal's solution was to request personnel assigned to the CJSOTF, which had already been targeting Sadr's Mahdi Army. But when McChrystal made his move, “the threat was it would subsume the entire CJSOTF,” said a retired special forces officer. Concerned that the JSOC boss wanted to bring the entire CJSOTF under his command, Kearney and McDonnell resisted McChrystal's efforts to strip away theater special operations units from the task force for his own purposes. “Kevin [McDonnell] saw that [JSOC's] appetite was such that once it got its teeth into you, it could quickly eat you up,” the retired officer said. In a tense arrangement, the mission to counter the Iranians was handed to McDonnell from January to March 2007, reporting to McChrystal. But intense friction between the two officers meant that didn't work, so in April command of the counter-Iranian task force was moved to Balad and given to a former Delta squadron commander on the JSOC staff.
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McDonnell gave up some headquarters personnel, “a SEAL platoon or two,” and “some technical things” to the new task force, the retired officer said.

The new task force was named Task Force 17. Its mission statement was simple: “TF 17 defeats IRGC-QF [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force], their proxies and surrogate networks in Iraq IOT [in order to] disrupt malign Iranian influence.” In layman's terms, Task Force 17's mandate was to go after “anything that Iran is doing to aid in the destabilization of Iraq,” said a Task Force 17 officer. The task force was to work along three “lines of operation”: disrupting the Quds Force's networks in Iraq “through kinetic targeting” (i.e., via kill-or-capture missions); using captured intelligence materials to enable nonkinetic pressure to be brought to bear on key Shi'ite leaders; and isolating the Quds Force from its Iraqi proxies. Task Force 17's assault forces at first were a couple of Burnham's SEAL platoons and a Special Forces CIF company. Its campaign against the Quds Force was called Operation Canine.
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In addition to the challenges inherent in trying to find, fix, and finish enemies who did not want to be found, fixed, and finished, Task Force 17 faced political obstacles that TF 16 did not. While Iraq's Shi'ite political leadership was only too happy to have McChrystal's ruthless machine grind away at the Sunni insurgency, there was enormous sensitivity over the targeting of Shi'ite groups, even those who were clearly murdering other Iraqis. The political connections of some of the most savage Shi'ite militia leaders meant there was “an unofficial list of Shiites whom we could not knowingly target,” McChrystal wrote. This dynamic would act as a brake on Task Force 17 throughout its existence. But nonetheless the new task force quickly made an impact.

For months Task Force 17 had been hunting Laith and Qais Khazali, brothers who ran the League of the Righteous. Qais, at thirty-three the older of the two, had worked for Moqtada Sadr's father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr, before the latter's 1999 assassination by Saddam Hussein's regime. After throwing his support behind Moqtada following the U.S. invasion, Qais had split off in June 2006 to found the League of the Righteous. His political connections meant Task Force 17 was not supposed to launch a raid to grab him. The same did not apply to his brother, however, and in mid-March an intelligence tip fixed Laith Khazali in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. Task Force 17 named the location Objective Setanta and on March 20, 2007, a combination of the SAS's G Squadron and SEALs led by Burnham flew down to Basra and, supported by conventional British troops, detained Laith and seven other men without a fight. One of those seven, they almost immediately realized, was Qais. When Burnham called McChrystal with the news, the latter decided Qais was too big a fish to release.

The task force's analysts immediately went to work on the large amount of captured material, while interrogators puzzled over one of the detainees—a middle-aged Arab man who acted deaf and mute. The analysts quickly found a document that named Azhar al-Dulaimi as the leader of the Karbala attack, tied the brothers to the attack, and proved that the Quds Force had provided significant support for it. The document helped persuade Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki to keep the brothers behind bars. Within two months, the task force had killed Dulaimi in northern Baghdad and the supposedly deaf and mute man had begun to talk, revealing himself to be Ali Mussa Daqduq, a senior Lebanese Hezbollah operative brought in by the Quds Force to help the League of the Righteous.
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Daqduq's role was typical of the Quds Force's efforts to use cutouts to do its dirty work in Iraq. In order to preserve a fig leaf of plausible deniability for the Iranian regime, the Quds Force used a “train the trainer” concept, bringing members of its Iraqi proxy forces to Iran and Lebanon to receive training, often from Hezbollah instructors, before sending them back to Iraq to train others.
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“We were confused there about the actual delineation between the Quds Force and the splinter networks, and that's intentional,” a Task Force 17 officer said.

The task force followed that success up with an April 20 raid that netted Abu Yaser al-Sheibani, second in command of the Sheibani Network run by his elder brother Abu Mustafa al-Sheibani, who was a former member of the Badr Brigades. The network had been smuggling EFPs to militias like the League of the Righteous from Iran for the Quds Force for more than two years. But Task Force 17 had to wait five months for its next high-profile capture, when it detained Mahmud Farhadi, a Quds Force lieutenant colonel who commanded one of the three camps along the Iran-Iraq border from which the Ramazan Corps ran its Iraq campaign. The task force captured Farhadi, who was posing as an Iranian trade representative, in a September 20 raid on a hotel in the northern Iraqi province of Suleymaniyah. (The Iranian government protested Farhadi's seizure vehemently, closing the northern border for a period.)
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The captures—particularly those of the Iranian operatives—caused the Quds Force to reassess how it conducted its Iraq campaign. Rather than scale down or end its destabilization efforts, Suleimani increasingly sought to put an Iraqi face on the campaign. As a result, the Sheibani Network and other Iranian proxies grew in size.

In October 2007, Ranger Regiment commander Colonel Richard Clarke took command of Task Force 17. This was significant because it was the first time the Rangers had been given command of a JSOC task force at the O-6 level (the pay grade that equates to captain in the Navy and colonel in the other services). Underneath Clarke, a SEAL commander (an O-5) ran the operations, with two Ranger platoons (about ninety soldiers) and two SEAL platoons (about thirty-two personnel) under him (plus a Ranger company headquarters and a SEAL troop headquarters), all based at the massive Victory Base complex beside Baghdad airport. Task Force 17 also included a SEAL reconnaissance team in Baghdad, and a Ranger reconnaissance team in Al Kut, about 160 kilometers southeast of the capital
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McChrystal blended the assault forces, so that each company-level assault force included a SEAL platoon and a Ranger platoon working for either the SEAL troop or the Ranger company commander. This was double the size of Task Force 16 assault forces, in which a single Ranger platoon would be a strike force. Some of those forced to work under this paradigm resented it on the grounds that it unnecessarily limited the number of assault forces.
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There was no need to have seventy-five personnel on a single raid, according to a Ranger officer. “It was four assault forces that were forced into two,” he said.

One reason Task Force 17's forces were organized this way was that the SEALs lacked vehicle crews, limiting their mobility. In other locations, they'd use helicopters to air-assault to an offset location a short distance from the target. But in Baghdad's dense—often hostile—environs, that wasn't always possible. “You can't offset in Sadr City,” the Ranger officer said. The imperfect solution, he said, was “to get Rangers to drive them.”

Almost immediately, the Rangers were embroiled in a controversy stemming from an October 20 mission that exposed the thin political ice on which Task Force 17 was skating. That night Rangers from B Company, 2nd Ranger Battalion, launched a ground raid into Sadr City to get a Shi'ite special groups leader. The Rangers missed their target, and then found themselves virtually surrounded by Shi'ite militants in the dense urban jungle. With the support of helicopter gunships, the task force fought its way out block by block, killing an estimated forty-nine militiamen without suffering a single fatality. “It was like the Mogadishu Mile [in] and then the Mogadishu Mile out,” a Ranger officer said. “There was a substantial amount of collateral damage.”

The political backlash from conducting a large, violent operation in the heart of Shi'ite Baghdad was immediate. U.S. forces could virtually level entire neighborhoods in a Sunni city like Fallujah without upsetting Iraq's Shi'ite leaders, but kinetic action, even on a much smaller scale, in Sadr City crossed a line. Petraeus was worried. Maliki, a Shi'ite whose government had a distinctly anti-Sunni bent, was enraged. His government accused U.S. forces of killing fifteen civilians in the raid. From January 2008 on, Task Force 17 was no longer authorized to enter Sadr City. To the deep frustration of its personnel, it had to wait for targets to leave the rectangular Shi'ite neighborhood before striking.
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“The concept that we would allow a safe haven blew my mind,” said the Ranger officer.

To some observers, the Sadr City operation exemplified Task Force 17's overreliance on firepower at the expense of precision. “Whenever they did anything, they tended to shoot the shit out of everything,” the retired Special Forces officer said. “Either they shot everything up, killed the wrong person, captured the wrong person who was related to someone, or didn't coordinate with the locals.” But despite the Rangers' aggressive posture, which was on full display in Task Force 16 and in particular in Task Force North when it was under Ranger battalion command, Task Force 17 never came close to matching Task Force 16's operational tempo.

Politics was partly responsible. “My teams needed immense freedom to operate in order to achieve the desired operational tempo,” McChrystal wrote. But Petraeus had to balance his desire to counter the Iranians with Maliki's need to keep the Shi'ite militias from turning on his government. As a result there were standing restrictions on Task Force 17 operations in the provinces that had been turned over to Iraqi control (there were nine by the end of 2007), as well as the province of Qadisiyah and the cities Hindiyah, Najaf, and Karbala, in addition to Sadr City—“all their safe havens,” as the Ranger officer put it. Before striking a target Task Force 17 needed to get it approved on the day of the raid all the way up the chain of command to Petraeus.
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“TF 17 was very political,” said a Ranger officer who served in it. “There were a lot of times when we detained a senior-level Quds operative who had a diplomatic passport.… We'd get called and Maliki would shut down JSOC for a day, and say ‘Until he's in my compound, all JSOC operations are closed.' Not just [TF] 17. All. And so obviously, McChrystal would get pissed and then I would have to drive some dickhead to the Green Zone and he'd get released the next day.” However, he said, complaints that political concerns kept the task force from hitting Shi'ite targets were misplaced. “Don't let anyone fool you that the weak optempo was politically driven,” he said. “It was incompetence.” In particular, he blamed the “white” (i.e., non–Team 6) SEAL officers' inexperience with real-time signals intelligence. “The targeting was a joke.”

This inexperience only exacerbated another problem: the fact that when it came to signals intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets, Task Forces 16 and 17 were “in competition over the same resources,” as McChrystal put it.
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JSOC never gave Task Force 17 the priority it allotted to the task force going after Al Qaeda in Iraq. “At 17 you're at the bottom of the totem pole,” said the Ranger officer.

By 2008, Task Forces North and West, in Mosul and Al Asad respectively, were Task Force 16's priority, but Task Force Central, in Baghdad, still conducted more missions than Task Force 17, much to the amusement of TF Central's Rangers, who missed no opportunity to mock their TF 17 colleagues. Clarke, the Task Force 17 commander, followed the JSOC model of allowing his subordinate commanders to run day-to-day operations. But he repeatedly expressed his frustration with his assault forces' inability “to get out the door.” Despite these hurdles, Task Force 17 prosecuted about sixty raids in a ninety-day cycle in early 2008, probably the high point of its short history.

In spring 2009, interrogations of Quds Force and Shi'ite militia detainees revealed that the senior Quds Force operatives were not sneaking across the border into Iraq like their AQI counterparts in Syria, but instead were arriving on commercial flights from Tehran. It was a eureka moment for Task Force 17. U.S. intelligence persuaded the airlines to supply the passenger manifests for each flight from Tehran, which were quickly passed to the Task Force 17 operations center. TF 17 assumed Quds Force operatives would be flying undercover, but within three days the real name of one of its highest priority Quds Force targets showed up on the manifest. It was that man that the Rangers detained as he got into his taxi, flex-cuffing him, and putting him in the back of a Stryker for the short drive to Victory Base, adjacent to the airport.