CHAPTER 3
THE BEGINNING OF FEMALE ENGAGEMENT
We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.
—ANGELA Y. DAVIS
AR RAMADI, IRAQ, APRIL 2004—Army Captain Anastasia Breslow stood with a few Marines on the side of a dusty road, scanning vehicles as they approached a nearby checkpoint.
Cars inched forward, and infantrymen asked drivers to pull off to the side of the road for inspection. Breslow was there in case women needed to be searched.
It was early morning, and the streets, which always reminded the soldier of Mad Max after the destruction, were quiet. As the last vehicle pulled off, Breslow glanced up for a brief moment and followed the sight line along the crumbling houses on the adjacent street, searching for the private she called AC. The two women had traveled together to the Marine base where the mission—to root out IEDs, provide protection for the local community, and gather information that could lead to a weapons cache—had begun. They split up just before the convoy took off for downtown Ar Ramadi.
AC was nowhere to be found.
An Iraqi man’s voice, booming through a speaker, suddenly filled the downtown streets.
“Allaaahu!”
It was the call to prayer, the second one that morning. As soon as it began, Breslow knew something was wrong. She stood still and listened. Right away she heard the Iraqi man scream his alarming directive.
“Jihad!”
Iraqi insurgents stood up along the roofs of surrounding buildings. They peppered the street with bullets. A Marine fell to the ground after being shot in the leg.
Breslow ran and ducked behind her vehicle. She scanned the streets again for AC and saw the private shielding herself from the firefight behind a nearby building. As bullets flew in Breslow’s direction, she ran over to the young soldier to offer her a few words of reassurance.
AC looked up. Her face was pale, her eyes filled with terror. Breslow told her that everything would be okay. That the Marines they were with knew what they were doing. Just follow.
It was the first time either of them had been in the middle of a fire fight.
Even during an attack the foul smell of Ar Ramadi—a mix of burning trash and human feces—was unmissable. The most dangerous city in Iraq contained everything US troops across the Middle East were trying—but failing—to defeat: it was overrun with anti-American militants who dominated neighborhoods where a lack of opportunity left residents desperate enough to follow any group with a strong message, even if that meant rooting against their own interests.
The Ar Ramadi operation was one of the bloodiest battles in Iraq, but it marked an important beginning for the military and the female soldiers who fought in it. Among the women were Breslow, a signals officer; Sergeant Ranie Ruthig, a mechanic; and Specialist Shannon Morgan, a mechanic. They were some of the military’s first to participate in female engagement. The combat mission wasn’t even supposed to involve gunfire. The women were there to perform searches, bag and tag contraband, and gather information. But the Ar Ramadi fight showed how insurgent groups in the Middle East had erased traditional frontlines and how women were easily forced into the heart of conflict. The guerilla-style attack took place on the streets of Al Anbar Province’s capital among the city’s women and children. The fighters had hidden on top of city buildings and taken care to blend in with the few civilian businessmen who had been milling around the core of downtown. At least a dozen Marines died during the April 2004 battle, and about two dozen more were wounded.
Breslow, Ruthig, and Morgan were among twenty-five women stationed at Camp Junction City, the forward operating base (FOB) in Ar Ramadi that is located about seventy miles west of Baghdad. And Major Kate Guttormsen, a company commander in the 1st Engineer Battalion, was responsible for choosing which of the twenty-five women to send off the base for combat missions with Marine infantry units and the Army’s 1st Engineers or the 5th Field Artillery. Her choices depended on the mission and the skill sets each woman had to offer.
Guttormsen, a West Point graduate, later recalled what prompted her decisions during the PBS documentary Team Lioness, which detailed the formation of that first all-female group of fighters in 2003: Morgan, a farm girl from Arkansas, grew up firing a weapon and was her best shooter. She brought a sense of grit and determination to everything she did. Another member of that team, Specialist Rebecca Nava, was a petite woman with a soft voice who had an affable demeanor that immediately put people, Iraqi and American alike, at ease. That made the supply clerk, Guttormsen said, the perfect soldier to send on missions to schools, where interaction with area mothers and children was key. Ruthig was tough, reliable. Breslow was smart, accomplished, and able to adapt quickly.
Months after the Iraq invasion, field commanders—Lieutenant Colonel Mike Cabrey, commander of the Army’s 1st Battalion, 5th Field Artillery Regiment, and his counterpart in the 1st Engineer Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel W. D. Brinkley—figured out that patrolling villages without a regular female presence was hurting the overall mission. Attempts by American men to frisk Iraqi women were a cultural affront. Forcing their will on unwilling populations was turning small allied communities into enemies.
One night at Camp Junction City, not long before the Ar Ramadi battle, the two men sat in Cabrey’s office talking about upcoming missions and brainstorming ways around the gender-based obstacles keeping their men from getting information about insurgents from Iraqi women, who made up more than half of the country’s population. Both officers believed in the capabilities of the women of the 1st Engineer Battalion. That night they decided that at least two women would accompany combat soldiers from both units into the field on all missions. They would be responsible for searching Iraqi females and children during raids, talking to the female population during foot patrols, and frisking them at traffic checkpoints. With that decision Cabrey and Brinkley gave women the opportunity to prove themselves in battle. But they also set the tone for the military’s most distressing (and last) contradiction in how it used its women—actively assigning them to the most dangerous theaters of combat with little room for advancement, no credit, and no training.
The first group of women took on their new roles with no real understanding of infantry tactics, no knowledge of interrogation techniques, and no experience in searching, frisking, or identifying female suspects. They learned as they went. When male soldiers ran, they ran. When soldiers stopped to frisk Iraqi men, the female soldiers frisked the accompanying Iraqi women and children. Nonetheless, the women became the most useful soldiers in the field. Both the 1st Engineers and the 5th Field Artillery started gaining more intelligence than they ever had before. The handful of women who left Camp Junction City on combat missions built a reputation for being reliable and steady under pressure. The women were the second group of soldiers to enter homes during raids to hunt down insurgents. They participated in knock-and-greets—missions that took soldiers from house to house, looking for weapons. And though the work was voluntary, when asked, the women never said no to taking on a mission and putting their lives in danger. The men on the base soon developed a nickname for this fierce group of fighting females: Team Lioness.
Within nine years of the Ar Ramadi attack, by the time Army Captain Johanna Smoke of Fort Knox, Kentucky, landed in the Zabul Province of Afghanistan, the job of FET leader had become more powerful. In 2013 Smoke developed her own missions and selected not only women but also men from her unit and Special Forces teams who could help carry them out.
INTELLIGENCE PROBLEMS, FET SOLUTIONS
Our intelligence apparatus still finds itself unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which we operate and the people we are trying to protect and persuade.
—Major General Michael T. Flynn, US Army; Captain Matt Pottinger, US Marine Corps; Paul D. Batchelor, Defense Intelligence Agency
By the time US troops faced insurgents at Ar Ramadi again in 2006, the Marines had adopted the Army’s idea of using female troops to reach, frisk, and collect intelligence from local women and created their own version of Team Lioness called the Iraqi Women’s Engagement program. And while the female engagement concept was growing, feedback from intelligence officers proved that more programs focusing on relationship building were needed to fix a military strategy that was failing in its efforts to prevent attacks, find weapons, and dismantle insurgent forces. Problems with intelligence collection in both Iraq and Afghanistan that had long plagued the US military were being felt even more acutely by soldiers on the ground. Poor language training among male soldiers made it hard to connect with locals who could potentially provide information about targets; men who tried to develop relationships with male Afghan community leaders sometimes failed because of strained communication between intelligence soldiers and the infantrymen they were attached to as well as between the US Army and area villagers. Intelligence soldiers who developed missions that targeted Taliban fighters bringing bombs into Afghanistan across the Pakistani border were sometimes stymied by commanders who thought the missions were too risky and would yield little in return. In reality Pakistan was and still is a frequent gateway for supplying insurgent forces in Afghanistan. What soldiers were experiencing with an out-of-touch command reflected long-held findings in a 2010 report that criticized an intelligence community that had for too long distanced itself from the Afghans they were tasked to protect. At the beginnings of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan there was very little effort to find out what members of local communities needed. Currying favor with Afghan elders who could become informative allies would eventually become a key aspect of the FET mission. But during the beginnings of female engagement, not all units thought reaching out to elders was an effective means of taking down insurgent strongholds.
But conversations with locals proved helpful in severing relationships between insurgent fighters and average citizens who didn’t want the forces in their communities.
Two intelligence officers and a civilian analyst documented intelligence problems during the wars’ beginnings and the slow improvements that groups like the FET helped usher in within their report “Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan.” Army Major General Michael T. Flynn, Marine Captain Matt Pottinger, and Paul D. Batchelor of the Defense Intelligence Agency documented failures in intelligence going back to the beginning of the wars and concluded that with more interaction, “the focus shifted to local residents and their perceptions. What do locals think about insurgents? Do they feel safer or less safe with us around? What disputes exist between villages or tribes? As the picture sharpened, the focus honed in on identifying what the battalion called ‘anchor points’—local personalities and grievances that, if skillfully exploited, could drive a wedge between insurgents and the greater population. In other words, anchor points represented the enemy’s critical vulnerabilities.” Finding those anchor points through the collection of atmospherics—day-to-day activities and interactions—is exactly what the FET did well.
But even with some gradual shifts in intelligence collection, dissemination of information was still a problem. Disorganized databases made it impossible to find intelligence that had already been gathered about Taliban targets. Intelligence units throughout Iraq and Afghanistan sometimes had no idea they were following the same targets. Getting permission to use the databases eventually became cumbersome. Leaks by Bradley Manning in 2010 and Edward Snowden three years later made intelligence units suspicious of nearly anyone who wanted access to secret and top-secret data. Requests for access before those nationally publicized breaches sometimes took three to five days, if granted at all. Afterward restrictions put on databases made it nearly impossible for intelligence soldiers to do their jobs. Burning information on CDs while in the field in Afghanistan—a practice at the beginning of the war that allowed soldiers to move information from less secure laptops used during foot patrols and community searches to the more secure computers housed at FOBs—was eventually forbidden, a potentially career-threatening security breach.
The US military’s ability to use intelligence to effectively target the Taliban, according to one male noncommissioned officer who spent four stints fighting in Afghanistan, was “not as successful as it needed to be to win during any” time of the war. The staff sergeant, who worked first as a military police officer, decided to become a Pashtu linguist in 2009 after frustrating interrogation sessions paired him with subpar translators who often blocked his ability to elicit information from Taliban operatives. “There were all kinds of issues,” he said. “Have we gotten better? Yes. As good as it needs to be? No.”
One key advancement in 2006 that helped increase intelligence collection happened as the result of a fundamental shift in the way the military trained and used its engagement teams in Western Iraq. That year Multi-National Forces West released official Marine Corps protocol that required the all-female teams to be combat ready. The guidelines also set out requirements for female staffing among Marine combat units patrolling the area. That one set of rules helped transition the perception of female engagement from a sporadic program to a useful one for Marine battalions throughout Afghanistan.
The directive came at a crucial time.
Ar Ramadi had once again become a target for insurgents. The city’s location—a primary entryway into Al Anbar Province and Western Iraq from Baghdad—and the fact that the largest concentration of coalition forces was housed there, made it a crucial win for insurgent forces.
Under the new protocol the women trained in five to ten days at Iraq’s Assad Air Base. The sessions quickly filled in the gaps between the basic weapons skills women already had and the intense combat training they had never before seen. They learned how to set up and man entry control points, to fire AK-47s, and to identify and properly search female suspects. The women were briefed on current insurgent threats and learned basic intelligence-gathering techniques.
After fighting had broken out in Ar Ramadi, a group of women who had completed training at the air base were sent to an outpost in Habbaniyah, Iraq, just east of the provincial capital. Along the small city’s dusty roads the engagement team set up traffic checkpoints that slowed speeding vehicles heading through Al Anbar Province. The FETs’ job was to stop and frisk Iraqi females coming through the entry control points. During the thirty-day mission just five female Marines stopped between ninety and one hundred Iraqis daily, some of them men disguised as women, trying to smuggle weapons, photos of military personnel, and other dangerous materials into Western Iraq.
Still, in 2006, just three years after the Army’s Lioness teams pioneered the movement in Iraq, FETs were only slowly starting to trickle to the rest of the country and into Afghanistan. By the end of that year many intelligence collectors still couldn’t talk to more than half of the Afghan and Iraqi populations—a limitation that only exacerbated the already frustrating inability to gather, store, and share intelligence. Speaking to women was still, for most combat units that went on foot patrols, an impossibility.
FEMALES IN COMBAT BECOME IMPERATIVE
What started as an idea carried out by a handful of American women under highly improbable, dangerous circumstances in 2003 had, eight years later, become formalized by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). In 2011 NATO’s ISAF stated that the teams were “battlefield enablers that influence [and] inform.” Soon virtually every unit around the world that deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan did so with at least one three- to five-person FET. By the time they formalized the mission, there were 149 teams in Afghanistan from fourteen countries.
The expansion of the FET mission was the beginning of fully integrating women into combat and was arguably one of the most challenging transitions in the military’s history—second only to the full racial integration of the armed forces. Women who spearheaded early FET operations caught the brunt of the military’s growing pains—which, according to at least one account, included an attempt to break certain females.
In 2010 American women were still fighting against men who didn’t want them on the ground. Uniquely American restrictions on female soldiers—like the inability to drive themselves off the base to complete missions and other rules that supported the government’s denial that women were in combat—put US FETs significantly behind teams from other countries like Canada, which opened all ground combat roles to women in 1989, and Romania, which did the same in 2002. Women from those countries could freely travel into areas where growing a FET presence helped local women get health care, water, and food for their children. Still, the FET program would spend its entire existence plagued by a struggling dynamic in which its contributions to success in Iraq and Afghanistan were obvious, yet the very institution that needed it often blocked its progress. FET work changed roles for females and improved intelligence collection in the military.
IMPACT IN IRAQ
Team Lioness couldn’t have started at a more desperate time for women in Iraq. Elections were being held in 2004, and some women were being used as tokens of progress whereas others were targeted because of their political boldness.
Parliamentary candidate Salama al-Khafaji was an example of the latter. In a push for peace, the candidate headed to Najaf—a city that, for Shiites like her, was considered sacred. To the US military in 2004 it was known as a central location for multiple insurgencies. Skirmishes brought Khafaji to the city. A hand in peace negotiations between Shiite militants and the US military would mean a boost to her campaign. Khafaji was a rare female candidate: she was brave enough to canvas in public despite threats. And her efforts were working. She quickly became the most popular candidate on the ballot, but her gender, in the eyes of insurgents, made her and members of her convoy fair targets. And her son, acting as one of her guards, was in her convoy.
As the line of vehicles left Najaf, heading north to return to Baghdad, a group of militants opened fire. The attack, meant to kill her, killed her son Ahmed instead. He was seventeen. According to Human Rights Watch, Khafaji made the following comment about Najaf during an interview after the incident: “When I was in Najaf, I met many women who had lost their sons, husbands, brothers, and I was very moved by their desire for peace.”
By 2008 female journalists and civil rights activists in Basra and Baghdad were being killed; there were dozens of recorded honor killings in those cities, all with no convictions; women were being attacked simply for not wearing headscarves in public—all part of militant quests for power. Multiple wartime elections provided even more motivation for violence.
Iraq’s transitional government and the US government sold the years after President Saddam Hussein’s ouster as ones of political progress for the country. The provincial elections that started in January 2008 put more than one hundred females on the ballot in Al Anbar Province alone, prompted by a law stating that women needed to fill a quarter of the council member seats in each province and in Parliament. But bubbling under the veneer of progress were the same insurgent forces and acts of terror that necessitated the creation of Team Lioness five years before.
Throughout the country sixteen different terror groups were vying for power. Pascal Warda, a member of Parliament, survived several assassination attempts. A colleague of hers, Aquila al-Hashimi, who was set to become a UN ambassador, died of gunshot wounds after five days of suffering. Fear of violence kept many women—regardless of political ambitions—from leaving their homes.
Despite ongoing violence in Iraq and a female engagement strategy that was making progress, the United States would soon draw down forces and attempt to shift its focus solely to Afghanistan.