Re-taking Mosul Dam
DANA PITTARD
WITH REMARKS FROM WES BRYANT
Mid-August 2014
It was only days before the Mosul Dam operation was slated to begin. Mansour Barzani, the Kurdish national security advisor, had told Brigadier General “Cas” Castellvi that the Iraqi military could participate but that they would be placed way behind the Kurdish Peshmerga and would play a secondary role in the operation.
The combined operation to retake the Mosul Dam was to kick off on Friday, August 15. Cas and our special operations advisors were able to get the Kurds to agree to delay the operation until Saturday the 16th. That allowed the Iraqi Army units to get up north to Kurdistan to join the operation.
The next big hurdle was how to transport the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service brigade, with its Humvees and equipment, up to Erbil. Our great logisticians, led by Colonel Andy Danwin, jumped into high gear—flying the Iraqis and their equipment to Kurdistan on U.S. and Iraqi transport planes.
The initial Kurdish maneuver plan called for a complex series of assaults by Kurdish Peshmerga forces from several different directions. Unfortunately, the Peshmerga really were not trained well enough to execute the plan. It surely would have resulted in fratricide (some of the Kurdish forces accidentally shooting each other), and it would have been very difficult to support with airstrikes due to the chaotic maneuver of friendly forces all over the battlefield. Our special operations advisors along with Cas Castellvi talked the Kurds out of the plan. They convinced the Peshmerga to change their scheme of maneuver to a two-directional attack.
The Kurds were anxious to begin. They scheduled a huge outdoor rehearsal and battle group meeting on top of a hill north of Erbil to make final coordination for the operation. At the start of the meeting the Iraqis were no-shows. The senior Kurdish Peshmerga leaders immediately complained that the Iraqi military had not shown up as promised, and they made jokes that the Iraqis were too scared to fight. It was one of the many reasons, they argued, why the Kurdish leadership wanted to keep the Iraqi soldiers in a supporting role. The Kurds believed that the Iraqis just couldn’t be counted on.
As if on cue, the ground rumbled with the sound of heavy vehicles coming up the hill. Dirt and dust kicked up as the convoy of Iraqis arrived. The Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service, with their distinctive and daunting black heavily-armored Humvees, appeared out of nowhere like the cavalry in a Hollywood Western ready to save the day.
The convoy stopped, kicking up more dust, and the elite Iraqi troops emerged from their vehicles with unbelievable precision. They were clad in all-black uniforms with black weapons, black body armor, and even black Kevlar helmets. According to our U.S. Special Forces advisors on the scene, the entire Peshmerga leadership was damned impressed.
Major General Fadhil, known as the “Black Scorpion,” was an experienced and near-legendary combat leader who inspired love and devotion from his men and fear in his enemies. He and his leaders confidently walked over and met the Kurdish leaders, relaying that they were there to help.
The Kurds were awestruck. They whispered amongst themselves as their leadership strode away into a secluded wooded area. Shouting was overheard, and after a few minutes the Kurdish Peshmerga commander emerged. He told General Fadhil they were so impressed with the elite Iraqi unit that they wanted the CTS to lead the attack on Mosul Dam.
What an unbelievable turnaround! We could not have been happier with the decision. The final plan was to conduct one major attack along a single approach led by the Iraqi CTS, with a smaller secondary axis of advance from the Kurds.
The combined Iraqi and Kurdish forces attacked the ISIS fighters defending the Mosul Dam on Saturday, August 16. The special operations strike cell near Erbil supported the offensive with airstrikes. By late Sunday, after some tough fighting, the combined Iraqi-Kurdish force had recaptured the town of Tel Skuf about nine miles east of the Mosul Dam as well as the towns of Sharafiya and Batnaya.
By Monday, August 17, Mosul Dam was recaptured.1 Both the Iraqi and Kurdish flags flew victoriously over the dam. Iraqi and Kurdish political and military leaders were quick to announce the recapture to the media. Justifiably, they declared a great victory over ISIS.
Upon hearing the news of the recapture of Mosul Dam, President Obama interrupted his family vacation on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts to fly to Washington and meet with his national security team at the White House. He then spoke to the nation and the media about the Mosul Dam operation.
President Obama went to great lengths to reassure the American people that the U.S. airstrikes around Mosul Dam were within the same narrow and limited military campaign that he’d authorized to break the siege of the stranded Yazidis and Kurds on Sinjar Mountain and to protect American personnel, citizens, and facilities in Iraq. A senior administration official further reiterated that the United States did not plan to replicate the counteroffensive on Mosul Dam in other parts of Iraq. Unbeknownst to the Obama administration, that was exactly what we planned to do next.
Remarks from Wes Bryant
The Mosul Dam operation was a unique turning point in the evolution of strike cell operations. From the special operations task force in Baghdad, we’d tasked one of our Combat Control JTACs, Josh, to embed with the Kurds and the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service and assist with the operation.
Josh was an especially savvy and innovative JTAC, and among the most experienced in his career field. He came up with the idea to give the Iraqi CTS an app on their smart phones to enable them to send accurate targeting information that he could then pass to the JTACs at the strike cell in Erbil. The Iraqi special operations forces were better trained than many of the regular Iraqi and Kurdish forces. They could be trusted to send accurate targeting information via cell phone after only a brief bit of training and rehearsal.
The CTS soldiers would message targeting information back to Josh, who was embedded at the Iraqi headquarters element. Josh would then quality check and fine-tune the information to send final targeting information to the JTACs in the strike cell so they could coordinate an airstrike.
Josh set up a number of fail-safes in the procedures. First, the Iraqis would snap photos of the readings on their handheld GPS to depict their location. Then they’d take moving map screenshots depicting their own location along with an azimuth and distance to their intended target. If they weren’t taking enemy fire bad enough to prevent them from getting their heads up, they’d take a cell phone snap of the target.
Josh went with screenshots as a precaution because his experience with the regular Iraqi troops proved that they would often mix up numbers when passing grids via radio—they’d sometimes say the wrong grid coordinates or even read the numbers in reverse order. A screenshot mitigated any chance of a misread or mistyped coordinate.
Josh also requested that the CTS soldiers pass the “three Ds”—distance, direction, and description of the target from the vantage point of the friendly position. After getting the snapshots of friendly locations and all targeting information, he’d get a follow up text or phone call translated through one of the Iraqi interpreters. “We have an ISIS gun truck firing on us! Five hundred meters from our position, azimuth zero-five-two degrees.”
With all of that, Josh and the other JTACs could cross-check the information using their own imagery and drone video feeds and coordinate strikes onto the right targets.
The cellphone texts between Josh and the Iraqi CTS troops were a little different from those sent between most people back home in the States for sure, and they were far more expensive. During the operation to liberate the Mosul Dam, Josh ran up more than $20,000 in data fees on his military-issued global iPhone! But it was a small price to pay to decimate ISIS positions around the Mosul Dam and enable a united Iraqi and Kurdish force to push in and liberate it.
A Hostage Killed—James Foley
James Foley was an American freelance journalist and photographer who’d been reporting on the Syrian Civil War when he was abducted on November 12, 2012. The loss of Mosul Dam and the halting of their attack on Erbil were huge defeats for ISIS. To shift the world’s attention from their defeat, ISIS murdered James Foley by beheading him on August 19—forty-eight hours after their defeat in the battle for Mosul Dam.2 ISIS posted the video online as propaganda.
Foley was the first American to be killed by ISIS executioner “Jihadi John.”
James Foley’s brutal beheading received condemnation from the United States and throughout the world. His murder began a terrible pattern of beheadings by ISIS that seemed to follow their more spectacular defeats at the hands of the U.S. and its coalition.3 Unfortunately for ISIS, rather than weaken our morale their murderous beheadings further steeled our resolve and made us even more determined to destroy them.
1 Karen DeYoung, Liz Sly, and Loveday Morris, “Obama says Iraqi, Kurdish forces have reclaimed strategic Mosul Dam,” The Washington Post, August 18, 2014, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/iraqi-kurdish-forces-claim-defeat-of-insurgents-at-strategic-mosul-dam/2014/08/18/c869a59a-26d6-11e4-86ca-6f03cbd15c1a_story.html.
2 Rukmini Callimachi, “The Horror Before the Beheadings,” The New York Times, October 25, 2014, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/world/middleeast/horror-before-the-beheadings-what-isis-hostages-endured-in-syria.html.
3 Adam Taylor, “From Daniel Pearl to James Foley: The modern tactic of Islamist beheadings,” The Washington Post, August 20, 2014, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/08/20/from-daniel-pearl-to-james-foley-the-modern-tactic-of-islamist-beheadings/?utm_term=.2e21bc5654f1.