The First Strikes in Baghdad
WES BRYANT
Mid-September 2014
The first operation for the BIAP Strike Cell: support an Iraqi Security Force ground offensive to take back the ISIS-controlled southwest and southeast Baghdad regions and thwart ISIS’ encroachment on Baghdad.
Early on in the operation, as Iraqi forces slowly but steadily maneuvered their vehicle convoys into the region, we’d been witness to a massive civilian exodus. We watched on our drone feeds as hundreds of civilians left their homes and crossed the Euphrates River toward the west in order to avoid being caught in the inevitable crossfire that they knew would be coming as soon as Iraqi Security Forces advanced to fight ISIS.
That was actually a very fortunate thing for us in the BIAP Strike Cell—it meant we’d have far less worry over inadvertently causing civilian casualties. Even so, our attempts at targeting ISIS with airstrikes in the first couple of days were slow and cumbersome. ISIS fighters in the area were well dug-in and fortified. By then, ISIS forces were no longer as overt as they had been when we’d first kicked off the airstrike campaign a few weeks previous. They’d become far more cunning in avoiding our strikes within a very short period of time. Worse, the Iraqi ground units were tentative to advance and showed little motivation to fight.1
The Iraqi military leadership pushed for our strike cell to bombard the area with airstrikes ahead of their ground movement. They told us that they would not go on the offensive until we “dropped bombs for them”—yet they couldn’t seem to give us any valid ISIS targets.
It was a struggle to get the Iraqi military leadership to accept how the modern U.S. military waged war. More likely, they just didn’t care. But we were not going to budge. We needed “vetted” targets—with positive identification of an enemy force or entity, verification of all nearby friendly force locations, and confirmation that the target area was free of civilians.
We could not simply “drop bombs” randomly in and around villages and cities simply because they asked us to. That is the difference between the modern American military and those we call our enemies. We do not disregard the lives and well-being of anyone in our way for the sake of killing the enemy—we are calculated, precise, and go to great lengths to protect the local populace and infrastructure. It took time to get these points through to the Iraqi commanders running the offensive in southwest and southeast Baghdad, but we finally did.
We were frustrated with the Iraqi forces’ apparent lack of motivation to advance, but part of their gradualness was because ISIS had emplaced a heavy concentration of IEDs on the routes their convoys were forced to take. Mostly made up of American Humvees and pick-up trucks, the Iraqi convoys were pretty vulnerable to the ISIS-emplaced IEDs. They were even more encumbered by the time it took to clear their routes. And they were still hitting IEDs even with all the exhaustive clearing, just because of the sheer quantity that ISIS had placed. That caused casualties and debilitated vehicles, further slowing the Iraqi Army advance.
To top it off, ISIS was well concealed—they didn’t seem to want to come out and fight directly. They stayed in “hide-sites.” They strongpointed in buildings. At most, they’d throw a few sniper shots at the Iraqi Army troops just long enough to harass them but not long enough for anyone to pinpoint where the shots came from. We deduced that ISIS must have been tipped off on our operation—likely by an insider in the Iraqi Army, which was not outside the realm of possibility.
Finally, on the evening of September 16 about three or four days into the operation, the first real fighting between ISIS and the Iraqi forces began. At last we got our chance to hit ISIS from the BIAP Strike Cell.
An ISIS heavy machine gun nest and rocket-propelled grenades rained down on a small convoy of Iraqi forces as they tried to maneuver toward a suburban area in southwest Baghdad. My right-hand man—a senior Combat Controller named Adam—was the primary controller. Using a flight of F/A-18 Super Hornets, he swiftly went to work.
Adam directed the Hornets to put a 300-pound Maverick missile into the doorway of the building where the ISIS fighters were popping out from shooting their RPGs. The first missile annihilated the fighters in the doorway. Then Adam coordinated a second strike onto the nearby ISIS machine gun nest and, within minutes, had obliterated it. He hammered ISIS fighting positions with more strikes from the F/A-18s as our Iraqi convoy pressed forward and aggressed.
Adam’s strikes in southwest Baghdad were the first to fall under the newly-authorized U.S. mission to offensively hunt and destroy ISIS throughout Iraq—a mission that President Obama had announced just a few days earlier.2 “Offensive” was exactly what we became. That first engagement set the precedent for the new BIAP Strike Cell—aggression was the name of the game.
Opportunities to target ISIS seemed to open ten-fold over the next few days as Iraqi forces continued to draw ISIS forces out from their hiding and take ground back. Iraqi forces quickly became emboldened by the support of our airstrikes, and ISIS was scrambling to resist against our combined onslaught.
Throughout the remainder of the operation we targeted ISIS command and control buildings (structures from which ISIS planned and directed combat operations), heavy weapons positions, armored vehicles, gun-trucks, anti-aircraft artillery, and dismounted fighters actively engaging and maneuvering on Iraqi Security Forces.
We destroyed ISIS supply boats and transport vehicles along the Euphrates River after we’d identified a robust waterborne operation to support ISIS front line fighters with ammunition, equipment, and food. We thwarted several attempted ambushes on Iraqi forces when we identified ISIS positions lying ahead in wait; annihilating the ISIS fighters before they ever knew what hit them. And when Iraqi forces called on us pinned down and under heavy fire, we destroyed ISIS forces within danger close of the Iraqi positions—close enough that they were within fragmentation range of our ordnance—without a single friendly injury from our strikes.
Within less than two weeks we had decimated the command and control infrastructure, fighting capability, and local logistical network of ISIS in the southwest and southeast Baghdad regions and enabled Iraqi forces to take back the majority of the ground.
The south Baghdad operation was an immensely successful first mission for the BIAP Strike Cell. The volume of our airstrikes in the ensuing weeks would only fiercely increase as we shifted our focus to taking out the ISIS footholds in and around the cities of Bayji, Karma, Hit, Ramadi, Fallujah, and elsewhere.
1 Kirk Semple and Eric Schmitt, “ISIS Keeps Up Pressure Near Baghdad as Iraqi Troops Hesitate,” The New York Times, October 17, 2014, accessed April 24, 2018.
2 Zeke J. Miller, “U.S. Launches First Strike in Campaign Against ISIS,” TIME, September 16, 2014, accessed September 13, 2018, http://time.com/3380722/united-states-airstrike-campaign-isis/.