“LET US NEVER NEGOTIATE OUT OF FEAR. BUT LET US NEVER FEAR TO NEGOTIATE.”
CHAPTER 12: THE BLUE MOSQUE
TEAM COMANCHE CONTINUED MAKING PROGRESS IN THE TRIBAL area of Zangora, one of the few bright spots in Ramadi. Captain Mike Schoenfeldt had done a tremendous job as company commander, but it was time for him to change command. Mike was heading back to Germany for R&R to witness the birth of his first child, and then would return to take command of the Highlanders of Headquarters Company.
The incoming commander, Captain Matt Alden, had spent the previous twelve months as the task force assistant operations officer. Matt arrived in Baumholder just before our deployment, having just come off a deployment with another Germany-based brigade that was deactivating. He wanted the opportunity to command a company in combat, so he waived the redeployment rules and volunteered to deploy with us with no guarantees. Born and raised in the town of Hudson in northeast Iowa, Alden wrestled for a few years at Central College in Pella, Iowa, before transferring to the University of Texas in Dallas. After graduation, Matt realized that working in a cubicle was not for him, so he enlisted in the Army and went to OCS.247
Matt’s time on the staff exposed him to the capabilities all the supporting specialized assets, known as enablers,” – specialized small units that were available in Ramadi. Now a company commander, Matt realized that if he leveraged the enablers, he could generate the forces necessary to patrol aggressively into the tribal areas. Many of the Comanche operations consisted of Alden, First Sergeant Bolmer, a couple of truckloads of mechanics, a section that just came off an eight-hour static OP, a dog team, a Marine ANGELICO team, and whoever else he could scratch up to go out and hunt bad guys. Matt also varied how Team Comanche attacked, switching between driving in by Humvee, walking five miles, or riding the Marine riverine boats to get to the small villages in Zangora from a unique route. Although often playing with a pick-up team, Matt Alden personally led a detailed rehearsal prior to each mission, with each person on the mission having to brief his responsibilities and his sectors of fire.
Team Comanche was fortunate to have First Sergeant Robin Bolmer. Bolmer was something of an anomaly. On only his thirteenth year of service, he was already a First Sergeant and a damn good one. Whenever I had to get out of the headquarters and talk to someone, I would use Bolmer as a sounding board. He had already deployed to Anbar province as a tank platoon sergeant in the 3rd ACR and had been in Baghdad with the battalion at the end of its previous deployment. After graduating high school in 1993 in South Georgia, Bolmer figured he would join the Army to get the money for college. He moved through the ranks quickly, earning the Draper Leadership Award during his Advanced Non-Commissioned Officers course after only six years in service.248 Bolmer knew as much about the Abrams tank as anyone I had ever served with and was a no-nonsense leader. Once back in Germany, I had walked into his company headquarters sat down in Captain Schoenfeldt’s office. Clearly agitated, Bolmer busted into our meeting.
“Did the staff duty NCO call the building to attention?” he asked.
“Negative, first sergeant. I just walked on in,” I told him.
Bolmer was off like a shot. When I left the building minutes later, he was standing next to the staff duty NCO. The staff duty runner was walking through the door with my command photo in front of his face, and the staff duty NCO was calling the building to attention.
“Top?” I asked, puzzled.
“Remedial training, Sir. They’re going to do this fifty times each ‘til they figure out what you look like,” Bolmer explained.
In Zangora, Comanche conducted humanitarian missions a couple of time a week, usually handing out a couple of pallets of bottled water and some school supplies, or having the medics do some routine preventive care for the locals. These missions were always of questionable value to me personally. To this day, I am not sure how many hearts and minds we won by conducting them, but they undeniably provided us a cover to meet with the locals and allowed the citizens an opportunity to give up intelligence to the Coalition forces without Al Qaeda watching.
After a couple of weeks in command, Matt came to my office.
“Sir, we need to stop conducting the humanitarian missions. We’ve turned the corner on Intel. These missions are preventing us from conducting raids,” Alden said brusquely. There was never much small talk with Matt.
I thought about it for a bit and realized that, despite my own doubts, I was not ready to stop them completely. “Matt, here’s the deal,” I replied. “You still have to conduct the water drops, but I don’t care what you do after hours. You can chase terrorists all night long. Just don’t forget your day job.”
“Roger, Sir. Conquer or die!” he said dryly walking out.
There is an Italian proverb that roughly translates to “Don’t shit where you eat,” and we felt this applied to Zangora. The tribal areas were a “safe zone” where the AIF kept their families and then commuted into Ramadi to conduct terror. Comanche was able to develop new streams of intelligence, which led to more raids, more intelligence, and more terrorists captured, all while staying in contact with the population by day. The tactic was starting to pay dividends. When Comanche raided a village looking for an enemy operative, someone to whom they had given a book bag or an Iraqi flag a couple of days earlier would often step up and point out a true terrorist, or the location of an arms cache. Sometimes overtly, sometimes with the just a nod of the head.
Figure 15. Team Comanche conducting a water drop mission, providing school supplies, Iraq flags, and bottled water to the villages of Zangora. 3 September 2006. Courtesy Corporal Trenton E. Harris. Click on the photo for bonus features.
One afternoon after a meeting with Sheik Sattar, I drove to the site of Comanche’s humanitarian mission and saw children waving Iraqi flags crowded around the trucks. It was a beautiful image, and one that I only dreamt could someday happen in Tam’eem. After a few minutes of soaking up the atmosphere, I sought out Captain Alden, who was meeting with the village elder, Sheik Aboud. We knew the sheik was always trying to get something extra for his tribe from the Coalition. He passed himself off as an important local leader, but we knew better. His favorite tactic when dealing with the Americans was to hold the hand of the person in charge until the U.S. officer became so agitated that he would agree to anything just to get the sheik to let go of his hand. As I entered the house, I found Alden sitting on a couch next to Aboud, their fingers interlocked. Unknown to me at the time, the handholding had been going on for almost an hour and for Matt this had become a test of wills; he was not going to complain about holding the sheik’s hand, nor was he going to give in to his requests.
“Sir, Sheik Aboud needs to talk to you about the security situation. Here, come sit down next to him,” Alden requested flatly.
Figure 16. Meeting with tribal leaders during a Team Comanche water drop mission. From left, an unidentified translator, CPT Matt Alden (covered), LTC Deane, unidentified member of the Civil Affairs Team. Seated Sheik Aboud. Date unknown 2006. Click on the photo for bonus features.
This was not my first rodeo. “Matt, I think you can handle this,” I told him. “I’m going to check around outside for a while.”
It was the only time I saw Alden’s eyes betray his emotion. Then we both cracked a smile before I got out of there.
Team Comanche took its partnership with the Iraqi highway patrol much more seriously than I did. It certainly made sense for the Iraqis to patrol the vast road network running through Anbar province and linking Iraq with Syria and Jordan, but the image of Iraqis in Smoky the Bear hats and reflective sunglasses, handing out speeding tickets during the height of an extremely violent insurgency always troubled me. I felt that we did not have enough forces available to keep a full-time presence at the highway patrol station to help train them. In retrospect, I should have had a team there from the start. There was a civilian contractor assigned to the station to assist in training, but he did not report to me, and he was training them to be regular policemen, when the times called for something a bit more than that.
Although the purpose of the Iraqi highway patrol remained a mystery to me, the patrolmen, led by Lieutenant Colonel Hameed, brought down more than their share of hard-core terrorists. About every three weeks, we would receive a call from the highway patrol station, which was located directly across from OP 2, asking us to come by and pick up detainees. Upon Team Comanche’s arrival, the Iraqis would turn over four or five visibly beaten prisoners, and a mound of PKM machineguns, grenades or Dragunov sniper rifles, with a stack of signed confessions. About every six weeks, an Al Qaeda suicide bomber tried crashing through the gates of the highway patrol station. The consistent attacks led me to believe that Hameed’s men must be doing something right, so we kept supporting them; although the leadership of Team Comanche routinely had to explain to me why we should not arrest the lot of them for stealing the fuel we were providing for their vehicles.
It took us a while to figure it out, but Al Qaeda feared the local police much more than they did the U.S. forces. It was not just Islamist doctrine to kill anyone associated with the kafirs; there was a much more practical side to it. The enemy knew that the Americans could kill them individually or even in groups, but a police force comprised of local men could defeat them in detail over the long haul. For the continued success of Al Qaeda in Ramadi, they needed to ensure that the Iraqi police remained ineffective. This is why they employed their large, operational-level weapon, suicide bombers in dump trucks, against the Iraqi security forces rather than against American static positions.
Al Qaeda attacks were always big and splashy, and often had a certain Wile E. Coyote feel to them. For example, they employed a dump truck with modified water cannons spewing gasoline fireballs over the walls of a police station, a motorized handcar rigged with explosives rolling down the railroad tracks into a static position, and a dump truck packed with two thousand pounds of explosives to create an exceptionally powerful and destructive blast. They knew these attacks would make national and international headlines, spreading fear among the locals and eroding support for the war back in the States. Al Qaeda used violence to further its public relations campaign, whereas the Coalition largely employed violence merely to kill terrorists.
Good things were starting to happen across AO Conqueror. The Iraqi army battalion improved every day thanks to Kris Stillings and the advisor team, and their partnership with Team Comanche. Our relationship improved over time, but in retrospect, I did not have the correct approach in dealing with the Iraqi army battalion from the beginning. I tried having the Team Comanche commander provide oversight in conjunction with Kris Stillings’ advisor team, when instead, I should have been partnering directly with the Iraqi army battalion supported by the advisor team while Team Comanche should have partnered with the Iraqi army companies. We figured it out eventually, but only after wasting a couple of months.
The advisor team itself was fantastic. Lieutenant Colonel Stillings and I had a great relationship. Often it is hardest to lead your peers, but Kris respected that I was the commander and never tried to undermine my position. I did everything I could to make Kris and his team successful by using the intelligence and logistics assets of the task force to support the advisors. Kris grew up just north of Philadelphia in the town of Sellersville. After graduating Pennridge High School in 1980, he and a buddy were working dead-end jobs during the Iranian Hostage Crisis and became incensed over the treatment of American diplomats and Marines, so they enlisted in the Corps. After a tour as an infantryman, Kris entered a commissioning program and attended the University of Arizona, graduating as a Marine second lieutenant in 1989. Also a veteran of Desert Storm, this was his first tour in Iraq since the fall of Saddam as the leader of the advisor team.249 As necessary, Kris would come into my office, shut the door and calmly tell me when and where I was screwing up. He was always professional and always correct in his observations. It was a tremendous asset to have a warrior like Stillings on the team.
I never really figured out the command relationship with the Iraqi army battalion. They worked for me since their Iraqi army brigade headquarters was not yet operational, but they were not truly under my command. Initially, there was little direct communication between Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa and myself aside from a weekly “Iraqi Targeting Meeting” between the Task Force Conqueror staff and the Iraqi staff. This meeting served only to patronize the Iraqis and send the message that we did not care about what they were doing. At first, I did my best to ignore the Iraqi army and make them the advisor team’s problem, but over time, I came to realize how much we needed them.
Matters came to a head during the U.S.-only final planning session for a combined Team Comanche and Iraqi army battalion operation in the Yellow Apartments. Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa sent word through the advisor team that due to their leave schedule, his men were not going to be able to execute the operation on the day I selected. The likely cause of the conflict was that the planning session for a combined Iraqi/U.S. operation was a U.S.-only meeting. After the meeting had ended, Kris Stillings and I were standing in the dusty courtyard of the Task Force Conqueror compound. Furious that the Iraqis could not execute the mission on my schedule, I turned to Kris and vented, “You go fucking tell Mustafa that he better have his guys ready to fucking go when I say they need to go!”
“You go fucking tell him. You’re the commander!” Kris snapped back at me.
I was dumbfounded—not because I thought that he was questioning my authority, but that I had never thought to talk directly with Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa. I felt that was the advisor team’s job, not mine.
“Shit, you’re absolutely right,” I told Stillings.
From that point on, we went all in with the Iraqi army battalion. We canceled the Iraqi only targeting meeting and brought them into our formerly U.S.-only meetings. We laid out all of our upcoming operations, something that we had not shared with the Iraqi army previously. It might have been a security risk, but if they were our partners, then we needed to treat them as partners. I had Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa sit at the head of the table and asked him for his thoughts on the presentations by both the U.S. and the Iraqi officers in the meeting. I hoped to build Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa’s wasta in the eyes of his staff, but also to display trust between our organizations. This had the added benefit of forcing the Iraqis Army officers to raise the level of their game. The more we asked of the Iraqi army, the more it produced. The combination of bringing them into the fold and giving them decent living conditions was starting to pay dividends. They were still grossly undermanned, and being murdered and intimidated when they went back on leave to Baghdad, but the desertion problem they had when we first arrived had slowed to a trickle.
Kris Stillings invited me to see the Iraqi army in action by going on a dismounted patrol with them. Waiting to head out, I was able to talk with some of the Iraqi soldiers. One of the privates complimented one of his comrades about his combat boots and asked what size they were. When the second Iraqi asked why, the first responded that he wanted to know if they would fit him after his comrade was killed. Two Joes in any army would have exchanged the same macabre humor.
Specialist Tommy Ladell, Dragon and I, along with Lieutenant Colonel Stillings and six other advisors, moved out with the surviving eighteen Iraqis from the ECP 3 attack, packing into the back of five-ton trucks rattling down the dusty mile of trail from Camp Defender to the front gate of Camp Ramadi. For me, this was exciting, like getting to fire another Army’s weapons. For Kris and his advisors, it was just one of over seven hundred similar combat missions in which they accompanied the Iraqis over the course of their six-month tour. The Iraqis were doing the work of searching the houses, while the advisors were there as a security blanket since the Americans had the radio nets to call in a Medevac or the combined firepower of the Coalition if needed. We dismounted, formed into files, and slipped into the night, moving across the barren quarter mile field that separated the Coalition from the people of 5 Kilo. The Iraqi objective for the night was to search forty houses on the northeast side of town. They passed the eye test, advancing with tactical competence, and knowing where to look for hidden compartments in walls, floors, and cars—probably because they had similar hidden compartments in their own homes and vehicles. The locals accepted their presence and gave them information on a suspected bomb maker we were hunting. Although the search results were negative, the Iraqi army was “good enough.”
On the night of 17 July, we caught a break when a Team Dealer patrol captured three men out after curfew. When their justification for breaking curfew raised suspicions, the patrol brought them back to Camp Ramadi for further questioning. In the morning, we realized one of them was the imam from a mosque in Tam’eem. Detaining an imam was a big deal, with a clear-cut set of rules including a requirement for prior approval from the commander of the three-star Multi-National Corps-Iraq in Baghdad. Technically, since we did not know he was an imam when we detained him, we held him, although another rule of thumb is that when a commander uses words like “technically” he is skating on thin ice. Numerous intelligence reports linked this particular imam to Al Qaeda, and but Baghdad disapproved Lieutenant Colonel Lovejoy’s request to arrest him months prior to our arrival. We were sure he was a bad guy. I called Colonel MacFarland telling him that we had detained an imam, filling him in on the cleric’s background. Colonel MacFarland’s response was “Good.” There was never any hand wringing on MacFarland’s part.
Later that day a restive crowd of nearly one hundred Iraqi men chanting and carrying signs gathered outside the front gate of Camp Ramadi. This was extremely out of the ordinary since we were for all practical purposes isolated from the population. The only Iraqis who dared venture near the gates were Iraqi security forces, detainees who were zip-tied and in U.S. custody, the terps, and the owner of the Haji Mart. At the time, the Iraqis stayed on one side of the wall, and the U.S. forces stayed on the other.
The crowd was demanding the release of the imam. Half of the signs were in English, but without Western reporters around to film the protest, their efforts were in vain. Most of the mob stayed well back from the gate, but four men came forward demanding to speak to the commander. Colonel MacFarland called me on the telephone.
“You brought the imam in here; you get rid of the crowd,” he said.
“Sir, don’t want to usurp your authority. They want to see the post commander. I think they want you,” I replied, jokingly.
“Good try Tony. Get out there,” was his reply.
I wanted to make this an Iraqi problem as well, so I sent for Lieutenant Colonel Fallah from the al Horea police station. The police rolled up in their Silverado pickups, mall-guard uniforms, and black ski masks, and immediately set up a picket line between the soldiers and the mob. The protestors stayed two hundred yards back, except for four protest leaders who initially came forward under a white flag to ask for the commander. The situation was calm for the moment, but tensions on both sides were high. A peaceful mob can turn ugly quickly, especially when instigators are looking to make a media event.
From the Boston Massacre in 1770, where a group of British soldiers fired into a crowd killing five colonists, to the first Bloody Sunday in Ireland where English auxiliary forces opened fire on a soccer match in Dublin’s Croke Park in November 1920, killing fourteen people, shooting into a crowd of unarmed protestors has served as a catalyst for a revolution. We had received non-lethal crowd control training using riot shields and batons prior to deployment, but there was no way I was sending soldiers to disperse the crowd. Nothing good was going to come out of trying to break up the mob; they would have to go home peacefully on their own.
The four protest leaders, Lieutenant Colonel Fallah, Dragon and I moved behind a nearby Bradley for cover. In Ramadi, it was unwise to stand in the middle of the street. Instead, soldiers took cover inside doorways, behind vehicles, or away from a window to limit exposure to enemy fire. The leaders assured me the imam was a good man, a man of peace, and that we had been wrong to arrest him. Although the four were agitated, the mob stayed well back and seemed to be going through the motions rather than being truly angry. My gut told me that the AIF had intimidated the crowd into demonstrating against the detention of the Imam. This was not a grass roots public outcry over the arrest of a man of peace.
“If the imam is innocent, then he’ll be released,” I told the protest leaders. “If he’s a terrorist, he’s going to prison. I promise you that I’ll look at the evidence and let you know within a week.”
The four Iraqis seemed to accept my promise. The Iraqi police had a calming influence on the mob, and once again, Dragon’s skills as an interpreter proved invaluable in communicating with the locals.
“Why don’t you tell me where you live so I can personally tell you of my decision?” I added, asking the protest leaders directly.
They quickly became evasive, clearly suspecting that a Coalition patrol would be coming around later that night to arrest them if we knew where they lived—which it would have. In a few moments, the crowd dispersed peacefully, leaving me a week to figure out what to do with the imam. Unfortunately, none of my choices seemed good.
Throughout the day, some of the Superfriends came to my office to talk about the Imam. The cleric had reportedly been working with Coalition forces and proclaiming a message of tolerance during his Friday sermons. The Superfriends looked at the imams preaching as a good sign, even if we had to pay for it. We routinely monitored the sermons from the mosques to gauge the mood of the community, and the locals knew it. Whether he was practicing what he preached was irrelevant to the Superfriends. They all wanted him released. Growing tired of the parade of beards coming into my office, I set up a meeting for 20 July with the entire bunch. I was putting this decision off for a couple of days until we had more information.
Figure 17. Lieutenant Colonels Fallah and Deane meeting with the leaders of the riot following the arrest of the Blue Mosque Imam. 18 July 2006. Click on the photo for bonus features.
That afternoon, 18 July, Lieutenant Ian Blackstone’s platoon was conducting census operations in Tam’eem when they came under a sustained enemy attack. In the initial barrage of gunfire, a bullet ripped through Staff Sergeant Michael Muir’s thighs. Pinned down behind a five-foot wall surrounding the water tower in Tam’eem, the platoon laid down a furious gauntlet of suppressive fire. Lieutenant Blackstone and Specialist Richard Anderson realized that Sergeant Muir was unable to move and laying exposed in the street. They ran out under the hail of enemy fire and pulled Muir to safety. Next Blackstone and his men attacked from their base of fire and aggressively assaulted the enemy-occupied building that was the source of the hostile fire, only to have the enemy slip away. Such was the nature of the battle in Tam’eem against a lethal foe who knew the terrain and would not stay and fight.
On the morning of 20 July, all the different groups of Superfriends assembled in the Task Force Conqueror conference room. The imam’s “handler” made an impassioned plea, arguing that we were wrong in arresting him and that we needed to cut the holy man loose now. “You conventional force guys just don’t get it,” seemed to be the general theme. When I pressed him for what the imam had produced in supporting the Coalition and asked why there was an intelligence asset living in AO Conqueror that they never bothered to tell me about, his reply was vague.
“You got to understand that the Imam is in a tough position. If he comes out too strongly for the Coalition, the terrorists will kill him,” the handler explained.
That might have been true. Then again, the Imam may have been just playing the handler.
The meeting went on for almost an hour. I knew that there was intelligence implicating the Imam, but I also understood what the Superfriends were saying. Like it or not, they were conducting operations that were not being shared with the task force commanders. While it was possible that the Imam was working for the greater good, I just did not see it.
Finally, it was cards-on-the-table time, and I went around the room and asked each of the Superfriends to vote whether to kick him loose or to send him to jail. In the military, we defend democracy, not practice it, but I wanted to get each one of them on the record regarding where they stood on releasing him. Starting with the handler, each one in order said to set the cleric free, but the farther away from the handler; the less impassioned each vote seemed to be. I began to feel that the Superfriends felt the need to stick together and that I was not getting the whole truth from the collective group. They had about broken my will and convinced me to release the Imam when one of the SEAL intelligence guys sitting in the back of the room locked eyes with me. He was a junior petty officer and did not have a speaking part at the meeting. More importantly, since he was sitting in the back row, no one else could see him. Ever so slightly, a frown came across his bearded face, and he shook his head from side to side. That was all I needed.
“Thanks for your input guys, but I am going to have to think about this some more.” I declared. As fate would have it, that afternoon, a Team Dealer patrol took RPG fire from the Imam’s mosque.
Inshallah.
The rules were clear concerning U.S. forces entry into a mosque. Such an act was a big deal that required pre-approval from the Multi-National Corps-Iraq Commander, and that permission had to be based on quite a bit of evidence of terrorist activity. All of the higher headquarters above brigade were terrified of offending the Iraqis or causing a stir in the Western media through an incident in which U.S. forces entered a mosque without proper justification. The terrorists knew this and consequently used mosques all across Ramadi as arms rooms, IED cache sites, propaganda printing houses, terrorist meeting locations, and Al Qaeda recruiting stations. The only exception to the blanket prohibition on entering a mosque arose when U.S. forces were in pursuit of the enemy, which allowed some wiggle room.
Not much wiggle room, but, in this case, just enough.
The Dealer patrol immediately locked down the perimeter with Bradleys and Humvees and called for permission to enter the mosque. I desperately wanted to get my men inside, but I knew the rules prevented our entering. I ordered them to keep the building surrounded while we tried to get the Iraqis to clear the mosque. I called Kris Stillings while we raced to the scene, telling him to get the Iraqis moving.
“When do you need them?” Kris asked.
“Now! We’ve got the place surrounded!” I told him.
“What? Tony, the Iraqis don’t really work on now,” Kris reminded me. “They’re more on Inshallah time.”
“I know Kris, but I need them now. Do what you can and get them here as fast as you can,” I urged.
The Iraqi army arriving within thirty minutes is a tribute to Kris and his team’s leadership. The five minutes after the Iraqi troops entered the mosque felt like the longest five minutes of my life. As we were waiting, I turned to my driver, Specialist Rumpl.
“I hope for your sake the new commander is a good guy,” I told him. “Because if we don’t find anything my ass is gone.”
Rumpl cracked a nervous smile. I think he was weighing the option of continuing to drive for me versus having to break in a new commander.
Finally, the radio crackled with an initial report that the Iraqi troops had found weapons and IED-making material. Rumpl and my gunner Specialist Brown both let out a resounding “Yes!” with accompanying fist pump. I felt good on many levels: first, I was not going to be relieved of command; second, I could send the imam to prison at Camp Cropper for an extended stay; and third, my driver and gunner were pulling for me. It was a win all the way around.
The Iraqi army proceeded to drag out an array of sniper rifles with homemade silencers, grenades, radio base stations, car batteries and wire used to construct IEDs, ten AK-47s with a full stock of magazines, stacks of anti-Coalition leaflets and CDs, black ski masks and bloodied Iraqi police body armor and laid it on the curb for all to see. We made the neighbors come out and look at the stash while the Iraqi soldiers groused at them for letting terrorists live in their neighborhood. I knew the AIF were going to spin the mosque entry as an attack on Islam, so I wanted some locals to be able to say that was not the case. I also sent for Lieutenant Colonel Fallah from the Iraqi police so he could see what we had captured. Fallah was not at the police station, but one of his lieutenants came in his place.
When the lieutenant saw the body armor soaked with the blood of one of his fellow policemen, his expression changed immediately. I think there may have been an informal truce between the mujahedeen and the Iraqi police in 5 Kilo, such that if the mujahedeen left the police alone, the police would leave the mujahedeen alone. They had found a middle ground, which was a very Mediterranean solution to the problem, but now there was proof that the terrorists were killing the police, so the agreement had changed. By the look on the lieutenant’s face, the police were about to get into the fight in full force.
Figure 18. Weapons and IED-making material taken from the Blue Mosque. The bloody Iraqi Police body armor is located on the curb above the battery. 20 July 2006. Click on the photo for bonus features.
We just had to get enough of them recruited so they could do some good.
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I was putting as much of my personal time as I could into a meeting with Sheik Sattar. Commanding an armored task force is a full-time job. Ever since the first two IED strikes during RIP, I stayed awake until at least 0200 every night. I knew, rationally, that I was not helping anyone on patrol by being awake, but I felt the need to be awake and aware of what was happening. Scholars say counterinsurgency is a marathon, not a sprint. If that was the case, we had better be able to run with the Kenyans. Carving out time for long meetings with local leaders meant something had to drop, and in my case, I substituted tobacco and coffee for sleep and exercise. The immediate downside of that was dehydration. I could tell it was getting bad when I could hear my pulse in my ears, and the edges of my vision start to darken. The medics were never happy to see me for their “IV Training.” One time, they even brought in Doc Farr as I was starting my third IV bag.
“Tony, are you OK?” Farr asked.
“Fine, John, I was just really thirsty,” I replied.
“Tony, come on. You know better than this. Dumbass.” He shook his head as he walked out.
I looked to John Farr for straight advice. We were the same rank, and I could always count on him as a sounding board for big picture issues facing the Task Force. John grew up in Anderson, South Carolina and graduated from T. L. Hanna High School in 1985. He attended the Citadel and was a member of the Air Force ROTC program until he switched to the Army ROTC program two weeks before graduation in May 1989. Farr wanted to become a doctor and determined that the Army had the best residency program. He attended the Medical School of South Carolina in Charleston and graduated in 1993. He had deployed to Bosnia in 2002 and was with us throughout the train-up in Germany and Kuwait.250 Farr was an honest broker in figuring out who had seen too much combat, and he took excellent care of the routine health needs of the soldiers in the task force. He organized the visits of the combat stress teams, which at the time were in their infancy and not very well-suited to dealing with the problems soldiers faced—typically they merely overmedicated or sent the soldier back to Germany, away from his brothers in arms. John did everything from treating every soldier in the task force for any non-battle injury to proofreading all 751 end-of-tour awards, all with the strategic vision of a senior Army leader, and the wit, skill and brilliance of a country doctor.
Frankly, every time I took some personal time, (reading, exercising, sleeping, or having a second cup of coffee in the mess hall) I felt guilty that I should be doing something for the unit. My one vice was watching bootlegged episodes of Scrubs on DVDs that I bought for ten bucks at the Haji Mart. I had a sign that I would put on my office door that said “CCIR (Commanders Critical Information Requirements) Only.” This meant I was taking a nap during the day, and that any prospective visitor should let me sleep unless it was really important. I also allowed myself one other indulgence: Chuck Bergman and I made it a point to attend Mass on Sundays, mainly because the Navy Chaplin, commander (Father) Paul Shaughnessy was both an inspirational speaker and a character.
From the back of the small wooden post chapel (a Seahut with a steeple), “God Bless the Red Sox Nation” would boom out in his Boston brogue, signaling the beginning of mass. Father Shaughnessy would get through mass in less than thirty minutes, but would spend five minutes delivering a well-thought-out and meaningful sermon, some of which I still reflect on today. The last Sunday I saw him in September 2006, he said from the pulpit in a somber voice “It is a sad day, as the Sox were eliminated last night,” Then his face lit up, and he added, “But the Pats are 3 and 0 in the preseason!”
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I now believed that the local police were the key to victory, and I knew that Sheik Sattar was adept at bringing in other sheiks to encourage their men to join the police. To put it in political terms, he was a bundler. We had developed a great relationship, and I did everything I could to protect it. I was ruthless in making sure that only selected officers from Task Force Conqueror talked with Sattar or his brother, Sheik Ahmad. I could not afford to have a well-intentioned member of one of the other battalions, the Ready First, or worse, some “tourist” from an external headquarters derail what we were building in police recruiting. Captain Pat Fagan and Lieutenant Sean Frerking were my primary delegates, but the commander of Team Comanche, Captain Schoenfeldt, and later Captain Alden, filled in when needed. Both Pat and Sean did a magnificent job in dealing with the sheiks during a very tenuous period. We were plowing new ground, and they both proved themselves adept in dealing with the brothers and with external organizations.
We limited the number of people meeting with the Bezias in order to stay on message and avoid “SOI fratricide”, where two groups of Americans promise different things to the locals. Fagan worked diligently in coordinating with the Ready First staff, the Naval Special Warfare unit, and the civil affairs group. Each one of these organizations had a part to play in securing Ramadi, but we needed to synchronize their actions with ours. By now, Jim Lechner and Captain Travis Patriquin were also meeting with Sheik Sattar occasionally to discuss police recruiting. We were on the same page with Lechner and the Ready First staff, so I was comfortable with their involvement. The rest of them, however, did worry me.
My desire to get the locals to police themselves reminded me of high school, with the locals as the students and the Coalition forces as the administration. The students in my high school all knew who was drinking booze or smoking dope, but the administration had no idea, or if they did suspect something, they did not have the evidence to prove it. Likewise, the locals in Ramadi all knew who the bad guys were while we were clueless. If we could get the citizenry to take responsibility and police themselves, then the Coalition’s responsibility for providing security would drop down to almost nothing.
At one of our meetings with Sheik Sattar, he brought up the idea of establishing a branch office of the Desert Protectors in Ramadi. The Desert Protectors program was an attempt to have the tribes of western Anbar province join with Coalition forces to stem the smuggling of arms and enemy foreign fighters from Syria into Iraq. The program received much attention both in the western and Arab media and had kind of a romanticized Lawrence of Arabia feel to it. We looked into their request and went as far as bringing in a lieutenant from the Naval Special Warfare (NSW) group to see if we could set up a similar program in Ramadi. The NSW had the background on the Desert Protectors and had access to money for these kinds of programs. If fact, they had a lot of money, and money was something that we struggled to get our hands on. Initially, I bought into the common belief linking establishing governance and providing reconstruction projects. We were not looking for millions of dollars to dump into the economy, but enough to start some small projects that would spark a little economic progress. A “quick win” in counterinsurgency parlance.
Over time, I came to realize these projects were never quick, and hardly ever a win. All we were doing was injecting ourselves directly into an Iraqi process when we should have stayed on the periphery. We were never able to break the code on how to get our hands on reconstruction money. In the end, that may have been the best thing that happened.
The conventional wisdom concerning the events in Ramadi is that we just paid off the tribes to join the team. That is the exact opposite of what happened. Task Force Conqueror spent less than a $100,000 in reconstruction projects in nearly six months, with most of that buying gravel for the dustbowl that was Camp Ramadi. In the big picture, the tribes got on the team of their own free will. They joined the Iraqi police and their paychecks said “Government of Iraq,” not “United States of America.” We just helped connect the people to the government. I never saw my mission as funding small businesses or overseeing public works projects. We were there to help provide security so the Iraqis could build their own country. I did not see what good putting large sums of money directly from American hands into the Iraqi economy was having in establishing or restoring Iraqi governance. I understand that the Latin root of soldier is soldi (“money”), but pumping money into Ramadi without security for the population and governmental capacity to administer the funds was clearly not the answer.
I only knew what I had read in Stars and Stripes about the Desert Protector program. 251 By the time we looked into using it, the Desert Protectors had fallen out of favor with both the Americans and the Iraqis. While the Desert Protectors were successful in stemming some of the influx of arms and terrorists moving across the western Iraqi desert, they were also successful in smuggling, hijacking trucks carrying legitimate commercial goods, and levying their own taxes on legitimate shipments. While they seemed like a good idea at the time, in retrospect, creating additional security forces separate from already established units proved to be a mistake, although the men who came up with the idea deserve a lot of credit for trying to find a new solution to the problems in Iraq. There are no silver bullets or cookie cutter solutions to defeating an insurgency; it really comes down to leaders doing the hard work of linking the government to the people. Occasionally, leaders will have to take chances on new ideas and see what works.
After looking into the program we went back to the Bezias and told them that the way ahead was with the Iraqi police not the Desert Protectors. The brothers were not happy about the decision, but accepted it and continued supporting the Coalition, and working with other tribal leaders to enhance the police recruiting effort. The police were part of the legitimate government while the Desert Protectors were external to the Iraqi security forces.
In the end, it worked out for the best that Baghdad denied our request for a Desert Protectors branch.