The Abisellan Line
DANA PITTARD
August 2014
My team huddled at the joint operations command center at the U.S. Embassy to finalize what we would and wouldn’t do under the newly issued rules of engagement. The meeting included our team of intelligence experts, logisticians, communications specialists, JTACs, and many others as we laid the groundwork for morphing our operations center into an ad hoc strike cell.
We weren’t alone. Accelerated planning and coordination was also taking place at CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, Florida, at ARCENT’s forward headquarters in Kuwait, as well as at the Air Force’s Combined Air Operations Center in Qatar. In Qatar, the commander of all Air Forces in CENTCOM, Lieutenant General John “Kid” Hesterman, and his deputy, Major General Jeff “Butkus” Longren, had been chomping at the bit. (As a confession, I was always a little jealous that the Air Force officers got to use their nicknames officially—we didn’t have that option in the Army! If given the chance, I would have probably been called “Cool Hand Luke” or “Pistachio.”)
I wanted us to do our best to push the envelope on what was considered “authorized” to give us maximum flexibility to target ISIS fighters. I directed our J3 operations officer Marine Colonel Eduardo Abisellan, our chief of staff Colonel Eric Timmerman, and our operations planner Major John Holstad to draw a red “no penetration line” on our operational maps. To protect Erbil and Kurdistan, we would attack any ISIS fighters that crossed that red line.
I told our guys to push the line out as far west of Erbil as we possibly could while still trying to stay within the spirit of our commander in chief’s guidance. I called the demarcation the Abisellan Line, after the excellent Marine officer who physically drew it on the map.
It was swiftly approved. As our campaign went on, the Abisellan Line would become commonly referenced as it defined where we could and could not prosecute our airstrikes on ISIS in the early days of the campaign.
ISIS had gained momentum in early August by seizing the Mosul Dam, moving into the Kurdish Erbil Province, and sending the Kurds’ once feared Peshmerga troops into retreat. The terrorist army seemed unstoppable. We received frantic calls from the senior Kurdish leadership pleading for American airstrikes on ISIS. I could hear the anxiety in their voices. They feared ISIS would take over Erbil. Still, we couldn’t yet strike until ISIS crossed the Abisellan Line—even though it was a line we’d arbitrarily drawn on the map just to meet President Obama’s restrictive rules of engagement.
On August 8, one of our F/A-18 pilots reported a group of ISIS fighters on the east side of the Abisellan Line in four U.S. Humvees that were likely captured from the Iraqi Army. We sent a drone over the area. We watched what appeared to be an ISIS reconnaissance patrol as it moved within sixty kilometers of the Kurdish capital.
The small ISIS patrol soon ran into a Peshmerga force of about 100 soldiers. Much to our surprise, the ISIS fighters unleashed a barrage of machine gun fire from their Humvees that sent the Peshmerga force into retreat. The ISIS patrol’s aggressiveness and skills were impressive. The Peshmerga fled to some half-finished defensive positions they’d been frantically preparing before the attack; and appeared to be in shock from the ISIS onslaught.
The ISIS fighters returned to their vehicles and continued traveling steadily east. Our intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel John Barnett, along with our targeting staff and Air Force TACP JTACs, all recommended we hit the patrol with an airstrike.
I approved the strike after getting blanket permission from my superiors.
The plan was to knock out the lead and rear vehicles first so the rest of the convoy couldn’t escape, then finish off the middle two. As our JTACs coordinated the strike with the pair of F/A-18 Hornets, we watched on our drone feeds as the ISIS patrol continued toward Erbil. They were bold, but they had no idea of the hell we were about to unleash.
Within minutes, the Hornets dropped two 500-pound bombs on the ISIS convoy, hitting the first and last vehicles. The ISIS fighters must have heard the whistling sound of the bombs coming down because about five seconds before they impacted the fighters started scrambling out of their trucks. But they didn’t scramble fast enough. We saw only one survivor, and he was severely wounded.
Cheers went up in our operations center at the U.S. Embassy. Colonel Timmerman gave me a thumbs-up. Later that same day we engaged another larger ISIS convoy on the east side of the Abisellan Line.
It appeared that we’d stopped ISIS from entering Iraq’s northern region, but we couldn’t be sure. The strikes that day marked the initiation of strike cell operations against ISIS—and they were the first of thousands of future airstrikes against the caliphate.1
1 Dan Roberts and Spencer Ackerman, “US begins air strikes against Isis targets in Iraq, Pentagon says,” The Guardian, August 8, 2014, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/08/us-begins-air-strikes-iraq-isis.