Is This Any Way to Run a War?
DANA PITTARD
August 2014
We finally had a real mission against ISIS. We began receiving constant reports of ISIS activity and clashes throughout Iraq, which stirred plenty of excitement in our Embassy Strike Cell. Unfortunately, we were still only allowed to conduct airstrikes in defense of Erbil and only when ISIS crossed the Abisellan Line.
On August 9, we received a report of a large group of ISIS fighters approaching Erbil from the south. There was some skepticism about the report because of the similar circumstance just the day before that had proven false. This time, I wasn’t among the skeptics—and neither was Colonel Abisellan. We agreed that it was a very likely approach strategy for ISIS to attack the Kurdish capital.
Our intelligence analysts confirmed that as many as 600 ISIS fighters were at the reported location. The force was just outside the Abisellan Line, approaching the Kurdish town of Makhmur and traveling in over fifty U.S.-made armored Humvees and other military and civilian vehicles.
It was truly the largest concentration of ISIS fighters we had seen up to that point. We believed it to be the same strike force that was the initial spearhead for all of ISIS’ offensive operations in the Mosul area earlier that summer.
Watching their movements on our drone feed was quite instructive. The ISIS force appeared to be a well-trained and disciplined unit. It was divided into three major columns: one on the road and two others about one-to-two kilometers bracketing either side. It was a well-coordinated movement.
We watched the initial few minutes of their attack on the city of Makhmur. The ISIS fighters fired their weapons deliberately and accurately, and they used hand and arm signals as they cleared buildings and streets in a disciplined and tactical offensive maneuver. As much as I admired their tactics, I had no problem ordering their destruction. I directed our JTACs to target the entire force.
As one of our JTACS began coordinating the attack with a set of U.S. fighter pilots, Colonel Timmerman took me aside saying we had a “slight problem.” The ISIS strike force was five kilometers outside the Abisellan Line, to the west. Based on the restrictions of the presidential authorization, we could not strike until the ISIS forces moved east inside the line.
I laughed. It seemed so silly to me because we’d arbitrarily drawn the line on the map in the last forty-eight hours just to give Washington what they wanted. In asymmetric warfare against an insurgency force, there was never an actual “line in the sand.”
My inclination was to simply bring out the red pen, hand it to Colonel Abisellan and have him re-draw the line to include the town of Makhmur so we could bomb the ISIS force. Colonel Timmerman nodded and we prepared to strike the targets. Then the lawyers stepped in. They wouldn’t budge, and neither would their legal counterparts at CENTCOM. They refused to legally certify our striking the target.
We were shocked. Everyone in the operations center (minus the lawyers) was up in arms. To keep from inflaming the situation visibly, I went to my office and called Lieutenant General Terry. He was one tough cookie and a combat veteran of vast experience. When I frustratingly explained that the lawyers had shut down our plan to strike the major ISIS force, he stood by the lawyers. He noted that we didn’t want to risk losing our newly-won airstrike authorization by going beyond the president’s orders.
My response was not the most thoughtful I’d ever come up with. “Sir, that’s bullshit! We just drew that damn line within the last forty-eight hours. We can re-draw it. We need to strike now!”
His north Georgia drawl came back with an even harder edge. “We have to follow orders, Dana.”
I thought our lawyers were insane. We would never get another opportunity like this one. At that point ISIS had not yet been hit by a massive-scale airstrike. I was so pissed off that I went up the ladder to four-star General Austin at CENTCOM. I made the case that we had a rare and fleeting opportunity.
He listened, and then told me to stand by the president’s guidelines. “No targets beyond the approved red line.”
I felt as though the top of my head would blow off. “Approved red line? Sir, we just drew that freakin’ line two days ago. Let me re-draw it five more kilometers west! I’ll tell President Obama myself.”
I had met the president on three different occasions. I would have had no qualms telling him I’d taken a fat red felt marker and extended the line five more damn kilometers.
That brought a light chuckle from General Austin, along with a stern reminder that we had to stay within the guidance of the man in the Oval Office. It seemed crazy to me. My only consolation was that, sooner or later, the fanatical terrorists would have to cross our approved red line. I was just afraid we’d never be able to hit them this effectively ever again.
I returned to the operations center to await that opportunity. We waited...and waited some more. To our collective consternation, most of the ISIS force stayed near Makhmur. They did not move east into our killing zone. In fact, they parked nearly fifty vehicles just outside of town and staged what looked like an Islamic extremist pep rally, raising their weapons in the air and cheering. A man jumped on top of one of the vehicles and spoke to the amassed ISIS fighters—he was obviously one of their leaders, which made me all the more frustrated.
I held my head in my hands. The whole scene made me sick. A pall of disbelief overtook the operations center as we watched the terrorists party on.
The ISIS fighters never crossed our arbitrary Abisselan Line. It was as if someone had shown it to them on a map and said, “Hey, don’t cross here!” We later learned that as many as three top ISIS leaders were in Makhmur that day. We never got another shot at such a lucrative target.
The image of the ISIS strike force partying with impunity just outside our authorized killing zone still haunts me. Ever since that moment, I thought that if we had only been able to show the scene to President Obama to let him see what we were seeing, he would have told us to strike.
As I’d feared, it was quickly disseminated throughout the ISIS ranks that we were authorized to conduct airstrikes and they soon began adjusting their tactics. Shortly after we initiated our airstrike campaign en masse, we rarely saw ISIS move with more than three military vehicles in a convoy. They began using civilian cars to move their fighters, which made it far more difficult to identify them. They started using “human shields” from the civilian population knowing we wouldn’t strike.
In addition to those increasing challenges, we dealt with a severe drone shortage. We relied on drones to corroborate intelligence and gain eyes on ISIS positions. The shortage was a significant limiting factor. I had some tense phone conversations with my superiors on the topic.
General Austin was in a tough position. From his command he had to allocate a limited number of Predator and Reaper aerial drones for the entire twenty-nation CENTCOM region. That included Afghanistan—where we were still heavily involved in a ground and air campaign. Afghanistan was allocated fifteen times the number of drone “lines” that we had in Iraq. I understood why Afghanistan was the priority—we still had troops on the ground there in need of support—but I was frustrated and amazed that we were not being allocated more drones to fight ISIS.
The lack of drone allocations to our operations in Iraq, coupled with the restrictive rules of engagement, really limited our effectiveness during that critical time. Due to the drone shortage we were often forced to race against time. We had to fly the drones from their base in Kuwait southeast of Iraq all the way up to northern Iraq. By the time they flew into our coverage areas in northern Iraq, they had limited loitering time to support operations. Since our operating area included at least three potential ISIS avenues of approach to Erbil—from the north, center, and south—it was a lot of area to cover with very few drones.
We thought that flying drones out of southern Turkey would be better, but getting clearance to do that became an issue. I contacted the CENTCOM deputy commander of air forces, Major General Jeff “Butkus” Lofgren, and the CENTCOM operations officer, Major General Ken “Cruiser” Wilsbach. They understood the urgency of the situation around Erbil—that we could not allow Erbil to fall to ISIS—and they helped us get two additional drone allocations for the region.
We were finally able to see more, and what we saw wasn’t pretty.
It was chaos on the ground as ISIS poured into Iraq on several fronts. They were moving more fighters from Syria to Iraq to fight the Kurds in their territories while also conducting operations in western Al Anbar Province, threatening the strategic Haditha Dam and Baghdad. ISIS forces were also attacking in eastern Diyala Province and putting pressure on the Iraqi Security Forces guarding the economic and strategically important Bayji Oil Refinery in central Iraq.
In northern Iraq, the Kurdish Peshmerga attempted to put up a fight along each of the three major routes to Erbil, but they were outgunned and outflanked by the experienced and more aggressive ISIS fighters. In the meantime, thousands of Kurdish, Iraqi, and Yazidi civilian refugees were fleeing an ISIS invasion and jamming the roads as they escaped east toward Erbil.
Because of the limited authorizations for airstrikes we’d been given, we couldn’t do anything about a lot of what we saw. We even had ISIS rocket and mortar attacks aimed at the U.S. Embassy and our joint operations center, as well as our special operations forces on BIAP, but we were unable to retaliate. It seemed insanely timid to sit on our hands while Iraq was attacked in multiple locations from ISIS forces. I had to wonder what the Pentagon and White House staffers were thinking.
I understood President Obama did not want to get dragged into another war, but I felt the United States had invested too much in trying to create a democracy in Iraq to just let it fall away. We’d taken out the dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003, and now we were standing by, eleven years later, while ISIS seized the country in their vision to create a throwback empire where women become sex slaves, beheadings are a daily occurrence, and extremist Muslims slaughter anyone who didn’t share their beliefs.
Our response to the ISIS threat was truly underwhelming. It was no way for the world’s last remaining true superpower to lead. The reluctance of our president and Congress to take on ISIS with a full-on military response was embarrassing. The Kurds and the Iraqis were fighting for their very existence, and they were incredulous that we offered such limited assistance.
Compounding that, our joint operations center was constantly under siege and yanked in all directions. We were bombarded with anxious calls from the Combined Joint Task Force staff, U.S. Central Command, U.S. Embassy, State Department, Defense Department, various intelligence agencies, Iraqi senior military staffs, Kurds, and a host of others.
Everyone had a stake in the game. Half of them wanted ISIS wiped off the map immediately regardless of any collateral damage, while the other half wanted a gentler approach. They all wanted constant updates and reassurances that we were playing by their rules, as varied as those rules were.
As the U.S. military leader in Iraq, I did the best I could given the handcuffs placed upon us. Our goal was to keep ISIS from overrunning the Middle East and turning the region into a primitive Islamic caliphate and terrorist breeding ground. But the question that kept popping into my mind was: “Is this any way to run a war?”