Defending Baghdad
DANA PITTARD
June 2014
ISIS quickly gained momentum in the Iraqi provinces with large Sunni populations. Governments in the Middle East and worldwide were stunned by the fall of Mosul—the capital of Ninewa Province—while ISIS continued marching southward capturing towns and villages along the Tigris River Valley. ISIS’ fighters were superior to al-Qaeda and nearly any other insurgent force we’d ever seen. In fact, their troops often showed considerable courage on the battlefield.
By June, ISIS forces captured Tikrit, the home of Saddam Hussein and capital of Salah ad-Din Province. Then they took the city of Bayji and isolated and surrounded the Bayji Oil Refinery, the largest oil refinery in all of Iraq. They took control of the Bayji prison and freed all the inmates, most of whom subsequently joined ISIS.
In north-central Iraq, Balad Air Base was threatened. In Al Anbar Province in western Iraq, ISIS fighters pressed forward along the Euphrates River Valley threatening the cities of Hit and the provincial capital of Ramadi. They isolated the strategically vital Haditha Dam in Al Anbar in western Iraq, and were looming over the Diyala provincial capital of Baqubah—northeast of Baghdad and not far from the Iranian border. Closer to Baghdad, ISIS captured the towns of Jurf Al Sakhur and Abu Ghraib.
Buoyed by victory after victory, ISIS seemed unstoppable. Their fighters, infiltrators, and sympathizers edged closer and closer to Baghdad—a thriving city of over seven million people. The sounds of violent explosions from roadside bombs, car bombs, and rocket attacks could be heard daily. Thousands of U.S. and western contractors—responsible for assisting the Iraqi military with maintenance, logistics, training, and essential services for tanks, helicopters, aircraft, artillery, and other military equipment—began fleeing in anticipation of ISIS seizing Baghdad. The loss of these contractors soon had a crippling effect on the Iraqi Security Forces’ ability to re-constitute their equipment and units. As well, the U.S.-sponsored Iraqi F-16 fighter-bomber training program had to be moved from Balad Air Base in Iraq to the United States for fear ISIS would soon capture Balad.
The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad felt the pressure too. The embassy compound was the largest U.S. diplomatic post in the world, self-sustaining with its own power generation and water source. As the threat grew, the embassy conducted a partial evacuation of its personnel. Roughly one-third of the personnel evacuated to other posts within Iraq—either Erbil in Kurdistan, Basra in Shia-dominated southern Iraq, elsewhere in the Middle East, or back to the United States.
The State Department and the Obama administration debated whether to evacuate the embassy entirely. America’s recent experience evacuating the U.S. Embassy in Libya due to the intense militia violence in Tripoli,1 and the lingering memory of the brutal killing of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and others at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi in 20122 were central factors in those discussions.
Pressure increased on the Obama administration from regional allies, the American people, and Congress to do something about ISIS and see to the security of the thousands of Americans in Iraq. On June 15, Congressman Mike Rogers—chairman of the House Intelligence Committee—said the situation in Iraq was “as dangerous as it gets,” and called for the Obama administration to reunite with Arab nation partners to stop the ISIS surge.3
To that, President Obama publicly reiterated that he wouldn’t send troops to Iraq, but left open the possibility of military action. In anticipation, the U.S. moved the Navy aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush into the Arabian Gulf.
The U.S. Sends a Response Force
Within a week of the fall of Mosul, the CENTCOM commander, General Austin, in coordination with the U.S. ambassador in Iraq Steven Beecroft, deployed the Navy’s fifty-man FAST platoon and the CENTCOM Crisis Response Force (CRF, pronounced “kriff”).4 Composed of Navy, Army, and Air Force special operations forces, the CRF was led by an extremely competent Navy SEAL officer named Commander Black (name changed for security). The capabilities brought to Baghdad by the response force would prove very useful to our efforts over the next several months.
As the deputy commander of operations for ARCENT, in June 2014 I’d been visiting some of our troops in Egypt’s Sinai Desert. Due to the unfolding of the ISIS threat in Iraq, ARCENT was quickly placed in a heightened state of readiness and I soon found I’d been chosen to lead the initial effort into Iraq to protect the U.S. Embassy and assess the ISIS situation. With three previous extended combat command tours to Iraq and as a former Army division commander, I was told I was the choice general to lead the effort.
I arrived back in Kuwait from Egypt and went to Lieutenant General James Terry’s forward headquarters right away. James Terry was a serious, reserved-but-intense north Georgia native with extensive combat leadership experience including three extended combat tours in Afghanistan. He was probably one of the most experienced senior warfighters in the U.S. Army at that time.
His aide-de-camp, Major Brian Ducote, opened the door. Brian was an old friend I’d known since he was a young lieutenant. He shook my hand as I stepped into LTG Terry’s office. Terry motioned for me to have a seat.
“Dana, we have an interesting mission,” he said. “Within the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours, you will take no more than one hundred personnel to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and set up a command and control headquarters to assess the situation on the ground.”
I nodded, listening raptly as he continued.
“Be prepared to protect American citizens, American property, and—if necessary—evacuate the embassy,” he said. “The overall situation is somewhat ambiguous…we know that the numbers we’re sending are way too few for the task, but we have to try to stay within our limited guidance.”
“What about fighting ISIS, sir?”
Terry looked at me. “That’s not our mission, but the situation is still pretty fluid.”
General Terry gave me more guidance as we discussed the mission a little further. I relished going into an ambiguous situation, it seemed to be hardwired into my DNA.
“Sir, thank you for your confidence in us,” I told him. “We won’t let you down.”
“I know, Dana,” he replied. “That’s why you’re the one to lead us back into Iraq.”
Guests of the State Department
Splitting a rear headquarters to establish a forward headquarters element was not an easy task. Most U.S. Army division and corps headquarters did it routinely in deployments to the Middle East; however, it was not something that ARCENT normally carried out.
Still, we moved quickly. Our headquarters was already split between Kuwait and Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, so—with a herculean effort by the forward-deployed ARCENT staff in Kuwait, the main ARCENT staff in South Carolina, and assistance from other U.S. CENTCOM service component commands throughout the Middle East—we formed a joint team made up of Army, Air Force, Marine, and Navy personnel to deploy to Iraq.
Our noncommissioned officer in charge (NCOIC), Operations Sergeant Major Glen Robinson, got the new staff prepared to deploy and operate in Baghdad. Sergeant Major Robinson would stay with me as our senior enlisted advisor during the entire deployment. I knew we also needed a competent and experienced deputy commander. The new Marine Corps Forces Central (MARCENT) commander—Lieutenant General Kenneth McKenzie—jumped at the opportunity to help out. The Marine Corps came through in a big way and sent Brigadier General Robert “Cas” Castellvi—the commanding general of the 45,000 Marines at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina—to be my deputy. Cas Castellvi was extremely talented and would make a huge difference in our future operations in Iraq.
To make it a little easier on our staff in Kuwait, and to take advantage of their experience, I requested that the Iraq Assessment Team we’d sent to Baghdad in early May remain there to temporarily form the core of our new joint command headquarters. The assessment team, led by Army Colonel Eric Timmerman, had already been extended in Iraq beyond their initial three-week mandate. Eric Timmerman would become my new chief of staff, Marine Colonel Ed Abisellan the J3/Operations officer, Marine Lieutenant Colonel John Barnett the J2/Intelligence officer, and Army Colonel Andy Danwin the J4/Logistics officer. Other members of the assessment team filled other vital positions on the staff.
The assessment team became our advance party in Iraq. Since they’d already established excellent relations with both the embassy staff and the Iraqi Army staff, they proved to be a godsend for establishing our new headquarters.
Our advance team arrived in Iraq on June 22, less than two weeks after ISIS had invaded the country and seized Mosul. The bulk of the hundred staff officers and NCOs from every branch in the U.S. military arrived the next day. They would form the nucleus of our new command—the Joint Forces Land Component Command-Iraq (JFLCC-I).
I took an Army transport plane with my personal staff and security to the U.S. State Department compound at the Baghdad International Airport (BIAP). As we walked onto the tarmac, I turned to my executive officer, Major “B.J.” Pauley.
“We’re back!” I told him cheekily. B.J. and I had served in Iraq in the 1st Infantry Division together back in 2004 to 2005.
I received a briefing on the defenses at BIAP, then took a tour of the U.S. compound before hopping on a State Department helicopter for the short flight from BIAP to the U.S. Embassy compound in the Green Zone—the secured governance area of Baghdad. As we flew over Baghdad, a bustling city of seven million people, I wondered out loud what the people were thinking about ISIS. We passed over the moat-surrounded Al Faw Palace—once the center of Camp Victory and Camp Liberty where the former U.S. Forces headquarters in Iraq had been located. The massive compound of camps once housed over 60,000 U.S. and coalition troops and was a hub of activity during my last Iraq combat tour in 2006 to 2007. Now it was deserted—the structure and infrastructure mostly gone.
Reluctantly, I wondered if maybe we had left Iraq too soon back in 2011. Would it have changed the current situation? Three years later there we were, back in Iraq. I thought of the former U.S. commanders I’d served under during multiple tours—Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, General George Casey, General David Petraeus, General Ray Odierno, and General Lloyd Austin. I wondered what advice they would give now.
I thought of the tremendous sacrifices of our troops and their families, especially those that died or were wounded between 2003 and 2011. I thought of our fallen comrades, those I had personally known and served with during multiple combat tours. They were all great soldiers and Americans—Colonel Tom Felts, Captain Sean Sims, Command Sergeant Major Steve Falkenburg, Captain Humayun Khan, Sergeant Michael “Shrek” Carlson, Specialist Martin Kondor, Private First Class Lyndon Marcus, and thousands more like them.
Had it all been worth it?
I knew the answer was a somber “yes.”
We’d sacrificed so much to give Iraq a chance to be a free country that could determine its own destiny. ISIS had since invaded the struggling sovereign democracy and then occupied a third of Iraq’s territory. They assaulted a sovereign democracy that we, as Americans, had helped to create.
Why wasn’t there more outrage in America at the ISIS invasion?
In 1990, after Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded the monarchy of Kuwait, President George H.W. Bush had drawn “a line in the sand” and said, “This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.”5 Yet, we seemed to lack the same resolve to help the government and people of Iraq.
After nearly thirteen years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, most Americans were justifiably war-weary and certainly did not want to get involved in Iraq again. Many blamed Iraq’s problems on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki’s unfair policies toward the Sunni minority. Prime Minister al-Malaki’s lack of inclusion, and his Shia-dominated regime’s overall persecution of the Sunni minority, was despicable to be sure. However, Iraq still deserved a chance to become a sovereign nation—a democracy. ISIS had to be stopped. America had invested too much blood and treasure to not assist the struggling young Iraqi democracy we had helped to create. ISIS was an existential threat to Iraq, the region, and even the American homeland. Orders or no orders, we needed to defeat them.
As our State Department helicopter landed in the Baghdad Green Zone heliport, we were absolutely determined to do all that we could to protect the U.S. Embassy and help the Iraqi Security Forces defeat ISIS and get their country back. We believed we could accomplish the task with a relatively small U.S. footprint. It was time for the Iraqis to step up and take their country back—with assistance from us.
The key question was: Were they up to the task?
When I arrived at the U.S. Embassy, the situation was tense. Many thought that our small group of advisors and staff were there initially to evacuate the embassy. I quickly dispelled that notion, letting everyone know that we were there to conduct multiple missions as orders came down. The ambassador and his staff were just happy we were there to prevent ISIS from overrunning the embassy.
Ambassador Beecroft was fluent in Arabic and had spent decades in the Middle East. He gave me a frank assessment and his overall perspective of the situation. Then I met with Brett McGurk, the White House’s man on the ground in Iraq. Brett was very competent, an interesting personality, and had a direct line to the White House staff.
I also met with the Office of Security Cooperation-Iraq (OSC-I), led by U.S. Army Lieutenant General Mick Bednarek. I’d known Mick Bednarek for years and I respected his judgment and perspective. He outranked me, but I did not work for him and we needed his cooperation because he was well respected by all the Iraqi senior military leaders. As it stood, all the conventional operational forces in Iraq under both ARCENT and CENTCOM came under my command. Lieutenant General Bednarek had the mission of supporting the Iraqi military forces with resources and equipment. So, to avoid confusion I would later tell the Iraqis that if they needed beans, bullets, and vehicles to see Mick Bednarek. If they wanted to kill ISIS, they were to talk to me.
Our mission in Baghdad was a unique situation. The military was not completely in charge—we were more like “guests” of the State Department and the U.S. Embassy. There was no Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Iraq at that point, so our legal status there as U.S. military personnel was in question. We were only legally protected under a diplomatic note. At first there were a few growing pains with the State Department’s rules and procedures, but we were all able to work through the friction.
It wasn’t an easy task setting up our headquarters and joint operations center in such a condensed time period. To get us ready as quickly as possible, Colonel Eric Timmerman, Sergeant Major Glenn Robinson, and the team worked around the clock. I’m not even sure if our communications team slept within the first seventy-two hours of arrival.
Within a few short days, we had the JFLCC-I headquarters set up in the embassy’s compound. We were now prepared for a possible ISIS attack on Baghdad. We were poised to protect American infrastructure and citizens at both the U.S. Embassy and the Baghdad Airport compound. And, we were ready to assist with the evacuation of U.S. citizens.