ISIS on a Silver Platter
DANA PITTARD
WITH REMARKS FROM WES BRYANT
In the days following the successful offensive at Haditha Dam, our coalition aircraft patrolled the skies above the area in order to thwart any ISIS counterattacks and hunt any remaining fighters we could find.
Through our Predator drones, we observed a lot of civilian vehicles moving across the Iraqi-Syrian border near the ISIS-controlled city of Al Qaim. However, we could not accurately determine if any of the ISIS fighters had “hostile intent” against coalition forces—a condition we had to meet before striking per our rules of engagement. Sometimes we just had to sit and watch until a determination could be made.
One night, three military transport trucks moving suspiciously through the border crossing at Al Qaim caught our eye. The trucks were about seventy kilometers west of the Haditha Dam, moving east along the major east-west highway that ran parallel to the Euphrates River between Al Qaim and the Haditha Dam.
Soon, they made their way to within fifty kilometers of Haditha. At twenty kilometers from the Haditha Dam, the trucks moved off the main highway and turned southwest onto a winding secondary road.
At the same time, we were receiving reports of multiple small ISIS counterattacks against various Iraqi Army defensive positions. There were numerous requests to move our Predator drone off the three trucks and allocate it to one of the reported skirmishes. Lieutenant Colonel John Barnett, our J2 intelligence officer, resisted those calls and kept tracking the trucks. He had my full support—John and his intelligence targeting team were on to something.
The trucks stopped about fifteen kilometers from Haditha. Approximately seventy people got out of the trucks, appeared to assemble, then started walking east. Their manner was very discreet. They walked in a single file and appeared to try to conceal themselves from observers on the ground by stealthily maneuvering through dry creek beds and folds in the desert valleys.
I looked at the Predator screen and asked John, “What do you think?”
He calmly replied. “Sir, it looks like an ISIS force preparing to attack the Iraqi defensive positions that are about ten or eleven kilometers away.”
Colonel Ed Abisellan walked up to us at that moment. “Do you recommend we hit them?” I asked Ed.
“Yes,” he answered without hesitating.
John intervened. “Sir, let’s continue to observe them just a bit and see what happens.”
Like Ed Abisellan, my gut feeling was to strike right then, but I agreed to wait. John Barnett was on to something—he was in the zone, I could feel it.
“Okay. Let’s observe for now,” I said. “Make sure we alert the Iraqi CJOC so they can inform their military leadership in Haditha what’s going on.”
I called General Kenani and told him about the suspected ISIS fighters approaching. He said his commander on the ground had his hands full with multiple ISIS counterattacks throughout the Haditha area. I warned him that the small counterattacks might be diversions, and that the seventy ISIS fighters we were watching could be a part of a larger planned attack. Still, Kenani told me they could not spare any fighters to interdict the ISIS force approaching from the west. He asked if we could just bomb them and be done with it. I wanted to be sure they were ISIS, though, and see if they would link up with an even larger ISIS force.
We waited and watched as the seventy fighters walked cautiously and deliberately through the night. About seven or eight kilometers from the Iraqi positions, they stopped. It looked like a rest stop. However, we quickly realized that something more sinister was happening. The seventy ISIS fighters had arrived at a weapons cache site deep in a small valley at the base of a hill. A small group of men met them. They handed each fighter a bulky package. The suspected ISIS fighters carefully put their arms through straps on the bulky packages and wore them.
I gave John a puzzled look.
“Sir, I believe those are suicide vests,” he said.
I was shocked. “My God…seventy suicide bombers? That’ll wreak havoc on the Iraqi positions.”
Ed Abisellan looked at me. “Sir, I recommend we hit them right now.”
I agreed. “Yeah. All right, John—call it in,” I said. “Tell our JTACs to take them out.”
But we didn’t have any strike aircraft immediately available. Our concurrent support of the small diversionary attacks happening all around Haditha had all our strike assets tied up. Two F-16 Vipers could be on station and over the target area within about ten minutes, though. That was good news, since the suicidal ISIS fighters were likely two hours away on foot from the Iraqi military forces.
Within five minutes, the seventy ISIS fighters were back on the move. They were walking single file with about five-to-ten meters between each man over about a 600–700-meter span—almost seven football fields in length. We knew then that we had missed a huge opportunity to strike when they’d all been standing still and consolidated in one place. Their spread-out orientation presented a weaponeering problem for our pilots and JTACs. One pair of fighter jets simply wouldn’t have enough bombs to cover such a long distance.
Ed Abisellan and the targeting team huddled with the JTACs. They came up with a strike plan. We would hit both ends of the column and then the center simultaneously with six 500-pound bombs. Then we’d destroy the remnants of fighters with additional bombs and 20mm gunfire from the Vipers. It was a sound plan.
The JTACs coordinated with our Viper pilots. They confirmed the location and orientation of the ISIS column and briefed the plan of attack. Both pilots acknowledged.
All eyes were on the Predator screen. The feed showed the seventy ISIS fighters within five kilometers of the nearest Iraqi Army position walking single file through a gulley. The timing and location were perfect.
The F-16s dropped two bombs.
The front of the column erupted, the tremendous explosions setting off a lot of secondary explosions from the suicide vests. At least ten fighters were killed. Two more bombs hit the rear of the column with the same explosive effect. At least eight more fighters were killed with more secondary explosives.
Near simultaneously, two more bombs hit the center of the column, killing at least ten more fighters. The rest of the ISIS fighters scattered quickly, running and hiding wherever they could—some discarding their suicide vests as they ran. Unfortunately for the survivors, we could still clearly see their heat signatures from the Predator drone and our F-16s. I gave the order for our JTACs to continue to track them down and kill them all.
The Vipers began rounding the ISIS fighters up with their 20mm cannons just as we received a fresh pair of F-16s on station hungry to jump into the fray. We watched as approximately twenty-five ISIS fighters hid in a small crevice. The pilots and our JTACs were all over it.
Two more 500-pound bombs from our freshly-armed Vipers went into the shallow crevice. The explosion and resulting secondary explosions were unbelievable. No one could have survived the barrage. Still, we were slightly surprised as we watched five fighters crawling out, wounded and dazed.
The JTACs asked me if I wanted to re-engage the surviving ISIS fighters.
“Yes,” I firmly replied.
Another 500-pound bomb was soon dropped that ended all human movement at the crevice. Every ISIS fighter was killed.
While that was happening, a second Predator drone had been tracking some of the ISIS fighters that survived the initial strikes. Our JTACs controlled 20mm attacks onto those squirters (maneuvering ISIS fighters).
At that moment, Lieutenant General Terry—who’d been intensely watching from his remote screen in Kuwait and tied into our strike cell via teleconference—came across the loudspeaker. “Let them go, they don’t have any fight left in them.”
Everyone in the operations center looked at me.
I nodded. “Hold fire and continue to track them until I return,” I instructed the team. I walked to my office and called Lieutenant General Terry right away for a private discussion.
“Good engagement, Dana,” he answered.
“Thanks, sir,” I replied. “But there are about ten more left to kill.”
“I know…but I don’t want to waste time or ammunition on squirters. They’re clearly defeated.”
“Sir, we need to kill every one of them. These are suicide bombers. They’ll eventually try to kill our allies.”
“Dana, I’m not budging on this one. Let them go and look for larger targets around Haditha.”
Even though I disagreed, I understood General Terry’s perspective and followed his logic.
Roughly eight ISIS fighters escaped that night. The next morning on Monday, September 8, the Iraqi Army sent heavily armed patrols into the area where the ISIS fighters had been hit. The ground patrols found remnants of fifty-nine dead ISIS fighters. That fact by itself was amazing—not just for the kill count but because ISIS rarely left their dead on the battlefield.
Remarks from Wes Bryant
Vern and I had dispatched a couple of our JTACs to assist the Embassy Strike Cell during the final offensive operation to take back the Haditha Dam. One was a young SEAL lieutenant, freshly JTAC-qualified. He’d gotten his certification only weeks before deploying with the CRF—a deployment that had unexpectedly turned into support of the Iraq crisis.
By chance, the lieutenant happened to be the controlling JTAC in the Embassy Strike Cell when our drones and intelligence picked up the vehicles carrying dozens of suicide bombers. In his first control in a combat zone, the lieutenant racked up a kill count of fifty-nine ISIS fighters! As far as we knew, that was a record for any first real-world control—and it was among the highest kill counts any JTAC could hope to get during a single mission in general.
Just a few months prior, I’m sure the lieutenant wouldn’t have thought he’d be killing scores of America’s greatest enemy from a strike cell in Baghdad. But that was the nature and beauty of special operations—you never knew where you’d end up or what craziness you’d be involved in on a moment’s notice.
Because it was such a lucrative strike, the rest of the JTACs in the BIAP Strike Cell affectionately gave the SEAL lieutenant the nickname “Hero of Haditha” from that point forward. It was a nickname that stuck with him until the end of the deployment—largely, I’m pretty sure, to his dismay.
An IO (Information Operations) Win
The killing of fifty-nine ISIS suicide bombers constituted ISIS’ largest single death-toll up to that point. The next morning, as an Iraqi patrol checked the bodies of the dead fighters, they spied slight stirring from the area of the crevice where we’d bombed. There they found three wounded, shell-shocked ISIS fighters and promptly captured them.
The Iraqi Army soldiers treated the ISIS prisoners with humanity. It was rare to capture ISIS fighters alive because normally the fanatical fighters either fought to the death or their comrades removed them from the battlefield once wounded. Later that day, the Iraqi military brought another huge media contingent with television cameras from Baghdad into the Haditha Dam area. The Iraqi government and military officials took pride in showing the world how humanely they treated ISIS prisoners—in stark contrast to ISIS’ barbaric treatment of Iraqi prisoners.
The three captured and wounded ISIS fighters were interviewed on Iraqi television. They were very scared and shaken. Of the three surviving fighters, two were Saudi Arabian and one was Libyan. Listening to the prisoners gave us new insights into ISIS.
One of the Saudis was only twenty years old. He said he’d joined ISIS to fight Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his “blasphemous” regime. He and several of his friends had originally driven a car from Saudi Arabia through eastern Jordan and into southern Syria. He’d been fighting in the Deir ez-Zur area of eastern Syria in the Euphrates River Valley. After the Iraqi Army operations began in Haditha, he and the other seventy ISIS fighters had been ordered to board three trucks that then made their way from Syria to Iraq through Al Qaim. They said they were never told that they were going to Iraq. The Saudi insisted to the Iraqi media that he’d only wanted to fight in Syria.
“I would have refused to fight in Iraq,” the fighter said. “Our fight is not with Iraq, it is with Bashar al-Assad and Syria.”
Having the frightened young ISIS foot soldiers on Iraqi television was a huge propaganda victory for Iraq. Suddenly, the unstoppable, bloodthirsty, masked ISIS fighters became mere mortals. Unmasked, the ISIS fighters were just scared young men. It had a positive effect on the Iraqi national mindset—they understood ISIS could be beaten and humbled.