It was another hot early summer night. Sweat trickled from under the helmets of the Rangers creeping north through the back streets and alleys of north Mosul.1
They had left their Stryker vehicles on the south side of a canal almost two kilometers behind them, so as to not alert their target as they approached his home, which, like those of many insurgent leaders, was not easily accessible by vehicle in any case. Parking so far away entailed significant risks. If the Rangers took fire en route to their objective, they wouldn’t be able to reply with the Strykers’ heavy machine guns, nor quickly evacuate any casualties on the vehicles. But the target that night was worth the risk. While the Coalition referred to Abu Khalaf as Al Qaeda in Iraq’s emir of Mosul, he was really the organization’s number two, second only to Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the Egyptian who had taken charge after the death of Zarqawi. For six years the task force had hunted Abu Khalaf without success. Today, for the first time, it had located him and was striking before he had a chance to slip away. During the previous few months, Task Force North had launched a series of raids that had steadily dismantled Al Qaeda in Iraq’s infrastructure. The Rangers knew that now, June 24, 2008, they had a chance to strike a devastating blow against the network. This was the most important mission in which almost any of them had participated, and it exemplified not only the machine that Stan McChrystal had created and then passed on to Bill McRaven, but how far the Rangers had come since their assault on Objective Rhino less than seven years before.
Two files approached Abu Khalaf’s house from the rear, a route selected in part to hide them from guards on the roof. As they moved quietly through the streets, one of two small civilian-style aircraft high overhead “sparkled” the objective, confirming its location for the Rangers by briefly illuminating it with an infrared light that looked like a spotlight in their night vision goggles, but was invisible to the naked eye. Various units flew such aircraft over Mosul, but it was usually Orange operating two-seater Cessnas or similar propeller aircraft packed with imagery and signals intelligence collection gear. If any insurgents ran from the building and somehow escaped the Rangers’ cordon, one of the aircraft would track them with a pulsating infrared spotlight so that they could be dealt with after the initial assault.2
Tonight’s was a platoon mission. One of the platoon’s four squads had stayed to guard the vehicles. The other three squads of eight men each moved to the objective, hugging walls and staying in the shadows as they neared Abu Khalaf’s house, which was in the middle of a block. One squad would take the lead in the assault, breaching and entering the house with the platoon sergeant, the unit’s most experienced soldier. Another stayed in reserve to the front of the objective, in case it was needed to reinforce the assault. The remaining squad split into two teams of four, each taking position on a corner of the block to isolate the objective, not allowing anyone to leave or enter the area.
Less than ten minutes after leaving the vehicles, the Rangers reached the release point, which was a block from the objective. The four-man sniper-observer team and the isolation squad split off. The rest of the assault force paused at the corner, out of sight of the house. A block farther back were Colonel Michael “Erik” Kurilla, commander of 2nd Ranger Battalion and Task Force North, and the company commander, a major.3 Kurilla was there to observe the mission. He knew the stakes were high. The major was officially the ground force commander, but his primary role was to keep Task Force North’s operations center in the loop and request additional assets, if needed. It was the platoon leader’s fight.
The entire assault force was itching to move. Every second they waited increased the chance of compromise. But the platoon leader, a captain who was the assault force commander, wanted to wait until the sniper-observer team was in position on a roof adjacent to the objective. The team’s role was to ensure that the Rangers had “as many eyes and muzzles over all the apertures of the house as possible,” said a Ranger on the mission. The four Rangers on the team were moving as fast as they could, shimmying from one flat rooftop to another across a thirty-foot-long lightweight graphite ladder. After examining pictures of the neighborhood, the team leader had picked a site his men could reach without being seen. The only problem was that they had to cross seven rooftops to get to it.
The assault force knelt and waited. The tension mounted. The Rangers were kitty-corner from the home of the most powerful insurgent leader in northern Iraq, out of direct line-of-sight of the objective but bathed in streetlights. “There’s a sense of urgency to get to the breach,” recalled a Ranger. But the platoon leader had done 200 missions with the sniper team leader, a sergeant first class, and knew that he could depend upon him. Finally, the team leader called to say that his team was in position. The trip across the rooftops had taken all of nine minutes, a pace that was “unbelievable, when you think about what’s involved, moving four guys across one ladder,” said the Ranger. “But … it feels like it’s an eternity when you’re sitting on a fairly well lit street corner at 11 P.M. in one of the most hostile cities in Iraq.”
The lead assault squad and the platoon sergeant ran across the street and got ready to breach. Like many insurgent leaders’ homes, Abu Khalaf’s compound was defended by a high wall and heavy steel gate. His thick front door provided further protection. The Rangers would need to breach each simultaneously. The squad leader scampered up a ladder he’d placed against the exterior wall and dropped down into the compound, where he moved quickly to place an explosive charge on the door. The others readied the charge on the gate or climbed ladders to cover the squad leader as he set the door charge.
Whispering into a small microphone on his shoulder, the sniper team leader reported that two “military-age males” had been lying on the roof of the objective, but one had just stood up, having presumably heard the assault squad getting into position, despite the Rangers’ efforts at silence. The captain checked a screen slung over his chest that enabled him to watch real-time video from the aircraft overhead. He too saw the man moving on the rooftop. At that moment, the platoon sergeant’s voice came over the radio: “Three, two, one, breach.”
A blur of movement and violence ensued.
Grabbing a pistol, the man standing on the roof took a couple of steps toward the building’s front. That was as far as he got before the sniper team leader fired two rounds into his skull, killing him instantly, as the breaching charges exploded with a deafening bang. The other guard on the roof reached for an assault rifle. Below, the Rangers rushed through the door, which opened into the living room. “Good breach,” said the platoon sergeant into his mike. “Eagles moving in. Foothold.” In other words, the squad had blown through both gate and door and was inside the house. (In radio chatter, U.S. personnel were “Eagles.”)
When “clearing” a building—i.e., moving through it and eliminating any threats—Rangers flowed through the structure like water, scanning each room in a synchronized choreography that was the result of hundreds of repetitions in training and combat. Only if they found any military-age men would the Rangers pause momentarily to leave a couple of soldiers to watch that room as the others continued through the building. It was not unusual for the Rangers to clear a compound in less than twenty seconds.
The living room opened to a hallway that led to a corridor with several bedrooms. In the first, the squad leader and a young Ranger found a man and woman sleeping on mats. Using memorized Arabic, the squad leader, who was a battle-hardened staff sergeant, and the other soldier—a twenty-one-year-old specialist armed with a light machine gun called a squad automatic weapon—told the couple to put their hands up. Neither did. The two Rangers repeated the order, as their colleagues checked the corridor’s other rooms, finding two women and several children. But instead of putting his hands above his head as ordered, the man in the first room made as if to reach inside his robe. The squad leader’s finger tightened on the trigger of his M4. He had less than a second to make a life-or-death decision.
* * *
By 2008, JSOC’s successes elsewhere had caused the command’s main effort in Iraq to shift to Task Force North. Having been squeezed out of Baghdad and Anbar, Al Qaeda in Iraq was increasingly focused on Mosul. Task Force North’s strike forces were two Ranger platoons and a Delta troop. After weighing the units’ strengths, Kurilla settled on a division of labor: the Delta troop would concentrate on helicopter assaults and vehicle interdictions in the Sinjar desert between Mosul and the Syrian border to the west, while the Rangers focused on urban ground assaults in their Strykers.
In the first half of the year, this combination subjected Al Qaeda in Iraq to an unrelenting campaign that targeted its foreign fighters, its financial and spiritual emirs, and its military leaders. The task force’s operational tempo built to as many as eight missions a night. A strike force would hit a house based on signals intelligence that there was a cell phone linked to an insurgent leader inside. Once the strike force found the phone, analysts would load its contents into computers packed with advanced network mapping software, and combine what they found with what had been learned from questioning detainees. “The analysts would then push out a bunch of additional targets immediately, so we could then destroy that whole cell in one period of darkness,” said a Task Force North source. “That wasn’t happening in 2004 and 2005.”
Abu Khalaf was Task Force North’s highest priority target, but its analysts had never been able to link a cell phone to him. “That’s why he’d been alive for six years,” the source said. “He didn’t even have couriers that were allowed to use phones.”
The keys to finally running Abu Khalaf to ground were National Security Agency cyber sleuths and Task Force North’s Mohawks, who in this case were Kurdish spies being run by the Delta troop. Suspecting that insurgent leaders were communicating by sharing an email account and writing draft emails that they never sent, but which their colleagues could read so long as they had the right username and password, the NSA had built a query that alerted it whenever the same username and password information were entered in different countries—like Pakistan, Syria, and Iraq—within the span of a few hours. From this, the NSA got username and password information for those accounts, allowing Task Force North’s Mohawks to upload software onto computers in Mosul’s Internet cafés that would alert them whenever someone typed in one of these username and password combinations. Analysts soon knew that they were tracking a senior Al Qaeda in Iraq leader from the contents of one of the accounts, but they didn’t know his identity. Finally, someone with that username stayed logged on at a Mosul café long enough for the task force to get a Mohawk there and positively identify him as Abu Khalaf as he walked out of the café and strolled through an adjacent market.
Trailed by the Mohawk and a task force aircraft, the terrorist went back to his house, which became Objective Crescent Lake, simply because Crescent Lake was Khalaf’s code name in the task force’s targeting matrix. It was now mid-afternoon and Kurilla’s instinct was to assault it immediately. But his operations officer persuaded him to keep the house under observation and map out Khalaf’s network by having aircraft follow whoever left the house. There was a risk in this: one of those people could be Abu Khalaf, and Task Force North might lose him.
The task force quickly got two drones over the house. By 2008, this was routine for JSOC forces in Mosul, who were used to controlling as many as fourteen surveillance aircraft over the city at one time. In the task force headquarters at Forward Operating Base Marez, leaders and analysts watched as, sure enough, early that evening, Abu Khalaf left his home and returned to the market, where a black sedan picked him up. Kurilla was getting anxious. Even with the task force’s exquisite surveillance assets, it was easy to lose a target as his car weaved in and out of traffic, or as he switched vehicles. But the highly trained imagery analysts kept their eyes on the car as it took Abu Khalaf back to his neighborhood, where he met with two men for thirty minutes in the courtyard of a house before getting back in the sedan and returning home.
It was getting dark. The task force put a plan together for two simultaneous assaults that night. One platoon would take down Abu Khalaf’s home, the other would target the compound he had just left. After a quick series of briefings and planning sessions, the Rangers loaded onto the Strykers and rolled out of the gate.
* * *
The squad leader made his decision. He pulled the trigger, shooting the man in the head. Realizing what his squad leader was going to do, the specialist did the same, firing a burst with his squad automatic weapon. Their reaction “was aggressive,” said another Ranger later, with studied understatement. If it turned out that the man was unarmed, there would be consequences.
The squad leader reported the room “clear and secure” and left the specialist to guard the woman. Above them, the sniper team leader shot and killed the second gunman on the roof. But as soon as the squad leader had left the room, the woman dove toward the body of her husband. Again the specialist had to make a split-second decision. Again his instinct told him to pull the trigger. He fired a short burst and the woman’s head split apart. With the squad momentarily distracted by the firing, a figure darted from the last room left to be cleared and ran up the stairs clutching a pistol. He burst out of the cupola, only for the sniper team leader to put two bullets in his head. The gunman’s lifeless body toppled back through the cupola and fell to the ground floor, crashing into a Ranger, the impact tearing the latter’s night vision goggles from his face.
Abu Khalaf was dead.
The Rangers had been in the house for less than thirty seconds.
With the house finally cleared and all the adult males killed, the Rangers began the exploitation phase of the mission. An examination of the dead man in the first bedroom revealed a suicide vest. Had the two Rangers not fired when they did, they and perhaps several of their comrades would have died. Honed in nine combat deployments, the squad leader’s instinct had saved numerous lives, as had the specialist’s decision to open fire on the woman. She was the first woman that platoon had shot in about 200 missions. That there had been shooting at all was unusual. Only about 10 percent of the platoon’s missions involved gunfights.
The Rangers also found about $120,000 in U.S. currency that Abu Khalaf had received from the man he met earlier that day—an Egyptian doctor who, the task force learned via signals intelligence, was in Iraq to work on some type of chemical attack. (Al Qaeda in Iraq had been trying to mount a chemical car bomb attack on a Coalition base for months.) The Rangers were elated. Kurilla, in particular, was “fired up,” said a soldier who was there. They had achieved a huge victory with a perfectly executed mission. The assault’s impact could be gauged from message traffic the task force intercepted over the next few weeks. “I’m tired of running,” said one AQI fighter. “I have no place to sleep. They hunt me every day. I can’t keep doing this.”4
In conjunction with operations by conventional U.S. and Iraqi forces, Task Force North kept hammering at Al Qaeda in Iraq. The result was a two-thirds drop in car bomb attacks from March to June of 2008, from 234 to seventy-eight. For suicide car bombs, the drop was 59 percent, from twenty-seven to eleven.5 Numbers such as these, combined with the successful assaults on Abu Khalaf and other senior figures, caused some outside JSOC to declare victory.6 With its own cell that fused intelligence of different types from diverse sources, Task Force North’s operational tempo was far beyond what had been imagined in the early days of the revolution started by McChrystal and Flynn. From a total of eighteen JSOC missions across all Iraq in August 2004, in the spring of 2008 a single Task Force North Ranger platoon averaged more than sixty raids a month. But as the capability peaked in Iraq, things were starting to change.
On June 13, Bill McRaven replaced Stan McChrystal as JSOC commander. McRaven was a SEAL officer with a reputation as a deep thinker, based in part on his time at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where he designed—and was the first graduate from—the special operations/low-intensity conflict curriculum. He turned his thesis into a book, Spec Ops—Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare: Theory and Practice, in which he presented his own definition of special operations, one that paid homage to the direct action missions that were the forte of JSOC and the SEALs, but which ignored the unconventional warfare approach that was the specialty of Special Forces: “A special operation is conducted by forces specially trained, equipped, and supported for a specific target whose destruction, elimination, or rescue (in the case of hostages), is a political or military imperative.” With the exception of a brief spell at Team 6 as a junior officer, McRaven’s career before he became an admiral had been entirely in non-JSOC jobs. But his stint after September 11 as director of strategic planning in the Office of Combating Terrorism on the National Security Council staff (working for retired general and former JSOC commander Wayne Downing) gave him invaluable insight into how national security decisions were made at the highest levels of government.7
McRaven was by no means an unknown quantity at JSOC, however, having served as the organization’s deputy commander for operations during the middle of the decade. And while there were subtle differences between his command style and that of McChrystal—some observers thought McChrystal drove his subordinates slightly harder8—by and large McRaven continued where McChrystal had left off in terms of continuing to flatten and broaden the organization.9
After taking command, McRaven initially positioned himself in Balad. But JSOC’s—and the U.S. military’s—priority was shifting to Afghanistan.10 In Iraq, JSOC kept up the pressure, but with fewer forces and more political constraints. The task force was now working closely with Iraqi commandos, a recognition that even the “black” special operations war was taking on more of a local flavor. But there were missteps. In a mission aimed at a Shi’ite “special group” in central Iraq’s Babil province on June 27, JSOC forces killed an innocent security guard who was a cousin of Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister. In early July, in an apparent effort to mollify Maliki, Petraeus brought him to McRaven’s Balad headquarters, where operators and leaders gave him an overview of the task force’s capabilities—a highly unusual display for a foreign leader.11
For the final three years of the United States’ war in Iraq, JSOC, like all U.S. military forces, was subject to the status of forces agreement (or SOFA)12 between the U.S. and Iraqi governments. The agreement’s requirement that JSOC obtain warrants for most targeted individuals before launching raids, and the Iraqi government’s habit of releasing most terrorist suspects detained by JSOC, created intense frustration at all levels of the command’s forces in Iraq. The situation regarding JSOC’s targeting of Shi’ite militias and their Quds Force benefactors remained even more tenuous. Quds Force operatives were on an Iraqi government “restricted target list,” meaning JSOC could not detain them without a warrant from Maliki’s government, which rarely, if ever, provided one.13
By early 2010, most of the task force had shifted to Afghanistan. But the units that remained had one more major success to come, when on April 18 a combined JSOC-Iraqi special operations raid killed Masri and three other insurgents in a safe house on the border between Anbar and Salahuddin provinces.14
That raid aside, for JSOC no less than the rest of the U.S. forces, the 2011 withdrawal marked an anticlimactic end to its war in Iraq. McChrystal and other senior U.S. military leaders had always argued that JSOC’s campaign was designed to hold the terrorists and insurgents at arm’s length, to keep them on the back foot, to allow time for a political solution. There can be no doubt that the JSOC task force in Iraq achieved extraordinary successes against Al Qaeda in Iraq and its allies. But absent a holistic political solution in Iraq, and given the reality that the U.S. military presence was destined to end, those gains were always likely to be temporary. By the first week of January 2014, the organizational descendants of Al Qaeda in Iraq were back in control of Fallujah.15
For many in the task force, the frustrations that accompanied the status of forces agreement prompted jealous glances toward their colleagues in what had long been the secondary theater in the “war on terror.” “The SOFA agreement,” said a Ranger officer. “This is when everyone was like, ‘Pack it up, boys. Let’s go to Afghanistan.’”