The Ground Truth
DANA PITTARD
June 2014
It was within twenty-four hours of our arrival in Baghdad and I was chomping at the bit to get to the Iraqi Combined Joint Operations Center (CJOC) so I could get an update from the Iraqis themselves. Though I was scheduled to meet with the senior Iraqi military leadership in three days, I decided to go to the CJOC immediately.
The U.S. Embassy security personnel drove us to the Ministry of Defense (MoD). Three large, black, armored SUVs made their way on the five-minute drive from the U.S. Embassy to the Ministry of Defense compound all within the secured Green Zone. We stopped at the MoD checkpoint. An Iraqi guard asked us in Arabic if we had an appointment.
My interpreter responded back to him in Arabic, “This is American General Pittard. He is here to help Iraq!” he told him promptly. The guard’s eyes got big and he quickly waved us through.
As we drove up toward the front of the main MoD building, another vehicle stopped in front of us. An Iraqi general got out. There were a lot of salutes exchanged and quite a commotion. When our three SUVs pulled up in front of the grand entrance to the MoD, with its red carpet and large outdoor stairway leading up, the commotion stopped.
I slowly stepped out of my SUV. The embassy security personnel quickly stepped in front of me for my protection. I waved them off and boldly walked up the steps toward the large outdoor entrance. Two very tall Iraqi guards wearing dress uniforms and holding long ceremonial pikes stood staring at me—their jaws gaping.
We walked down a long, red-carpeted hallway. Lots of people milled around. No one had been expecting us. When they saw our party dressed in U.S.-camouflage combat uniforms, there were many shocked looks and audible gasps. For the last three years prior, American military personnel visiting the MoD from the Office of Security Cooperation-Iraq would normally go in civilian business suits at the urging of the State Department (given the then-diplomatic nature of the mission in Iraq). Our arrival was one of the few times in the three years since American forces had left Iraq that the Iraqis saw Americans in combat uniforms walk into the MoD.
They knew what it meant. The gasps quickly turned into smiles and even some clapping. The Iraqis were glad to see us. They knew we were there to help them protect Baghdad and fight ISIS. We were soon treated like old friends.
Not everyone was clapping. I exchanged quick glances with two bearded gentlemen wearing suits. I could tell they were not Arabs, but Persians—Iranians, to be more precise. The men had sour looks on their faces and were clearly not happy to see us. One of the Iranians put his hand up to someone unseen from our vantage point who was obviously about to walk in through a side door, but instead quickly departed. (Months later, I found out the unseen person was more than likely Major General Qasem Soleimani—commander of the special forces unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the Quds Forces, which the U.S. had designated a sponsor of terrorism. I could never quite confirm the close encounter, but we never saw another Iranian at the Ministry of Defense for the rest of 2014.)
We were soon escorted into the Iraqi Combined Joint Operations Center. The large, smoke-filled room had tactical maps on all the walls with red and blue pins to track the numerous ongoing fights with ISIS. The maps depicted just how close ISIS fighters had gotten to the outskirts Baghdad. Things were more chaotic than I’d expected within the Iraqi CJOC—with a lot of shouting, pointing, and phone conversations buzzing. I was welcomed then briefed on the current situation by Iraqi Lieutenant General Hassan, the Army’s chief of operations.
He told us the city of Tikrit had fallen to ISIS and that both the strategic Bayji Oil Refinery in central Iraq and Haditha Dam along the Euphrates River in western Iraq were under siege. As well, ISIS had made huge gains in Diyala Province just northeast of Baghdad. The Kurdish Peshmerga were filling the vacuum created by the fleeing Iraqi Army and had secured the Mosul Dam along the Tigris River, the city of Kirkuk, and the oil fields in north-central Iraq in order to prevent ISIS from seizing them.
After the brief I met with the prominent members of the senior Iraqi military leadership. They seemed to be lacking in confidence. Most of the Iraqi generals could not even look me in the eye. Worse, Iraqi senior military leadership was focused mostly on tactical engagements and responding to constant inquiries from Iraqi Prime Minster Maliki’s office rather than the strategic or operational aspects they should have been concentrating on.
ISIS seemed unstoppable to them. Only one Iraqi general seemed to have confidence. That key exception was General Talib al-Kenani. General Kenani commanded the elite U.S. Special Forces-trained Counter Terrorism Service (CTS).1 The CTS was one of the few Iraqi Security Forces units that did not retreat from ISIS—they stood and fought. General Kenani had just been appointed the overall Iraqi Joint Forces Commander only a couple of days earlier after the former commander was fired.
Kenani looked me in the eye and quietly said, “With your help, we are going to beat Daesh!” (Daesh was a derogatory term for the Islamic State—a term that was growing in popularity.) I could tell immediately that General Kenani and I were going to work well together. He laid out what he thought needed to be done against ISIS. Almost no one except General Kenani was focused on the operational or strategic-level fight.
Despite their obvious shortcomings and humiliating defeats over the previous couple of weeks, I detected a glimmer of hope amongst the Iraqi military leadership—primarily due to General Kenani’s confidence and competence. There seemed to be a quiet, but firm determination to prevent ISIS from taking Baghdad. I slowly began to feel their resolve. I departed my first visit to the Iraqi Ministry of Defense cautiously hopeful about the Iraqi military’s desire to fight ISIS.
The Situation
Within forty-eight hours of hitting the ground, we concluded that Baghdad could be held by the Iraqi military and there was no need to further evacuate the U.S. Embassy. Based on the belief that the Iraqi Army would fold against ISIS—a belief held by much of the senior American military and civilian leadership back in the U.S.—our conclusion seemed pretty bold. Even some of the military personnel at the American embassy in Baghdad, who had been in Iraq for over a year, disagreed with our assessment. Many believed ISIS would overrun the Iraqi Army and seize Baghdad.
I briefed our assessment to Lieutenant General Terry and General Austin: ISIS maintained a clear momentum at the tactical level. In fact, in individual tactical engagements ISIS fighters showed a greater ability to conduct maneuver and mass firepower than the Iraqi Security Forces. And, it was clear that ISIS was militarily stronger than what we had anticipated; however, I did not believe ISIS was strong enough to seize the Iraqi capital.
ISIS’ manpower shortages and recruiting problems were slightly more complex. ISIS would have to either send more fighters from Syria or convince more Sunni tribes in Iraq to fight with them. ISIS could potentially capture more Iraqi prisons and coerce the freed inmates to join their ranks—which they’d already done in places in Syria as well as in Mosul and Tikrit. Those manpower difficulties slowed ISIS’ offensive operations, and that gave the Iraqis—and our forces—a potential window of opportunity to strike.
We believed the Iraqi Security Forces had more than enough manpower around Baghdad to stop ISIS from seizing the capital. This included Iraqi Shia volunteers and militia. On June 13, the much-revered Shia religious leader Grand Ayatollah Sistani decreed that all Shias had a duty to defend Iraq and defeat ISIS. After the decree, Shia men from all over Iraq arrived into the Baghdad area volunteering to fight. Thanks to Grand Ayatollah Sistani, there was no shortage of Iraqi manpower.
It would be extremely difficult for ISIS to sustain a massive offensive against Baghdad. As ISIS forces moved forward and expanded, their logistical problems would increase. In the meantime, any Iraqi forces that fell back closer to Baghdad would consolidate and have a far easier time logistically supporting themselves. In military terms, the Iraqi military would be taking advantage of their “interior lines.” The Iraqi military clearly had the force structure necessary to stop ISIS. But did they have the will to fight?
Since U.S. forces were not allowed to take part directly in ground combat operations, we were left to observe from afar how ISIS fought against the Iraqi troops we would be supporting. We spoke to and grilled any Iraqi military leaders we could find who had commanded troops against ISIS, and we watched ISIS fighters maneuver through the lens of our aerial drones via live feeds into our joint operations center in the U.S. Embassy compound. In July, the Iraqi Army conducted a counterattack to re-take the city of Tikrit from ISIS. We watched a portion of the Iraqi counterattack from our operations center.
The initial combined arms assault was pretty effective, and the Iraqi Army made gains against ISIS on the southern side of Tikrit. Unfortunately, the assault broke down when ISIS was able to separate the Iraqi infantry from their tanks and infantry support vehicles through the skilled use of IED (improvised explosive device) ambushes combined with direct fire. Though the Iraqis had helicopter gunship support, they had no fixed-wing air support. And we were still prohibited by our government from supporting the Iraqi Army with airstrikes.
The counterattack failed, and the Iraqi Army was forced to retreat from Tikrit. But we believed the Iraqis could have succeeded if we had been authorized to support them with airstrikes from U.S. and coalition aircraft.
In the battle for Tikrit and on other battlefields, we observed that ISIS senior leaders typically rushed to the front lines when their troops were challenged. Even the ISIS supreme leader himself—Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—was reported to have visited battlefronts earlier in the summer to motivate his fighters.
Their cause may have been a warped and extremist brand of Islam, but there was no denying that ISIS leaders appeared to be very courageous. We quickly learned (to our dismay) that ISIS often fought harder and more disciplined than either U.S.-trained Iraqi Security Forces or the Syrian Army forces. Months later, we would turn that brave ISIS trait into a liability as we hunted ISIS leadership.
I knew that General Austin took ISIS seriously from the very beginning. He realized they were a threat to Iraq and Syria. Even so, he was slightly surprised at the recommendation I made within just a few days of my arrival to Baghdad: ISIS was a real threat. They were better equipped, more competently led, and could tactically outfight the Iraqis. We needed to assist the Iraqi Security Forces.
Barbaric Acts
It was around that same time that a U.S. television network correspondent suddenly asked to meet with me personally. Initially I declined to meet, but the journalist assured me it would not be an interview so I agreed. I had known the journalist since 2004 when we were both in Iraq’s Diyala Province.
The correspondent came to me with an unusual request well outside the typical military command’s interaction with the media. The journalist had a friend and colleague—Peter Kassig—who’d been taken hostage by ISIS.2 A former Army Ranger, Kassig was an Indiana native in his mid-twenties. After the military and college, he’d joined a humanitarian effort in Lebanon to aid refugees of the civil war in Syria. He was captured while delivering medical aid to refugees.
A trained emergency medical technician, Kassig had told his parents that he felt called to use his medical skills to help the refugees. His dedication to the relief project led him from Lebanon across the Syrian border and into a very dangerous area of western Syria. After being captured by ISIS, Kassig converted from his Methodist faith to Islam and took the name Abdul-Rahman. His parents mounted a public campaign to try to win his release, and even held prayer vigils at Islamic centers in Indiana. The Muslim community back home in America as well as a lot of American college students and Syrian refugees took up their cause. Even members of the Islamist al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front (ANF) supported his release—the ANF respected that Kassig had treated wounded “rebels” as well.
My American journalist colleague asked me to help find and rescue Kassig. I told the journalist that we’d already been looking for him, along with every other hostage held by ISIS at the time, but we hadn’t been able to locate Kassig. I said that if we had a location, we might be able to go after him. The correspondent had hundreds of sources throughout the region, and after talking to me tapped into them.
Within a week, Kassig’s journalist friend came back to me with a possible location in Syria. Impressed, I relayed the information to our special operations elements. They’d been watching the same area as one of the possible locations for Kassig. They soon identified it as a potential holding area not only for Kassig but three other American hostages—James Foley, Steven Sotloff, and Kayla Mueller.
On July 4, scores of U.S. special operations forces conducted a night raid deep in ISIS territory near the ISIS “capital” of Ar-Raqqah, Syria. They fought their way into an ISIS encampment, killing dozens of ISIS fighters. However, unfortunately there were no American hostages—only a makeshift prison with some half-eaten meals and a wisp of hair.3
The hostages had been there but were gone by the time the rescue element showed up. To our horror—Peter Kassig, James Foley, and Steven Sotloff were later beheaded. Kayla Mueller was also declared dead by ISIS (they claimed she was killed by a Jordanian airstrike).4
Once it was made public, the rescue mission became quite controversial back home. President Obama acknowledged during interviews that the special operations team had “probably missed [the hostages] by a day or two.” Senior officials said it was one of the most complex and dangerous rescue missions ever undertaken and had moved through planning, approval, and execution at “warp speed.”5
The torture and killing of the hostages had a profound impact on all of us. The publicly recorded beheadings served as grim reminders that we were in a high-stakes war. But they also furthered our resolve. We could not—and would not—allow a barbaric entity like ISIS to terrorize the world.
1 David Witty, “The Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service,” Brookings, June 1, 2016, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/David-Witty-Paper_Final_Web.pdf.
2 Shiv Malik et al., “The Race to save Peter Kassig,” The Guardian, December 18, 2014, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/dec/18/-sp-the-race-to-save-peter-kassig.
3 Karen DeYoung, “The Anatomy of a Failed Hostage Rescue Deep in Islamic State Territory,” The Washington Post, February 14, 2015, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-anatomy-of-a-failed-hostage-rescue-deep-into-islamic-state-territory/2015/02/14/09a5d9a0-b2fc-11e4-827f-93f454140e2b_story.html?utm_term=.b914258bb1a1.
4 Karen Yourish, “The Fates of 23 ISIS Hostages in Syria,” The New York Times, February 10, 2015, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/24/world/middleeast/the-fate-of-23-hostages-in-syria.html.
5 Karen DeYoung, “The Anatomy of a Failed Hostage Rescue Deep in Islamic State Territory,” The Washington Post, February 14, 2015, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-anatomy-of-a-failed-hostage-rescue-deep-into-islamic-state-territory/2015/02/14/09a5d9a0-b2fc-11e4-827f-93f454140e2b_story.html?utm_term=.b914258bb1a1.