Chapter 15
The Faylaka Operation
The Persian Gulf sun was high in the sky when Lima Company broke for lunch. The Marines had spent the morning doing urban combat training in the ruins of a school. “It was ridiculously hot,” radio operator Lance Corporal George R. Simpson recalls of that day in early October 2002. The Marines had left their base at Camp Pendleton, California, in June, and sailed aboard the USS Denver to Singapore, Thailand, Djoubouti and Bahrain. And now they were in Kuwait to take part in Eager Mace, a joint training exercise with the Kuwaiti armed forces. After a month in the desert, they moved camp to Faylaka Island, a tiny drop of land in Kuwait Bay that had been occupied and obliterated by Iraqi troops in 1991. The soldiers pitched their tents on the beach, opposite a row of war-gutted buildings that still had Iraqi war graffiti on them, and spent the evening playing baseball.
The Marines had been led to believe that Faylaka was abandoned, but when they arrived they found there were quite a few people around. Kuwaitis had been trickling back since the end of the Iraqi invasion. The soldiers felt secure on the island nonetheless. They had been through anti-terrorism and force protection training. They knew the potential threats, but the Kuwaitis had told them Faylaka was safe. Kuwaiti military personnel and police were on the island to guard against trouble, and besides, soldiers had been training there for years and there had never been an incident. This was, after all, Kuwait, where people loved Americans. Most of them, anyway.
“All the Kuwaitis that I talked to seemed more than friendly, more than happy to have Americans there. They had malls and they seemed to mix their traditional culture with the new world that they really embraced,” Corporal Simpson says.
In the morning the soldiers, part of Battalion Landing Team 3/1 of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, held a promotion ceremony and then got down to training, practicing the close-range combat techniques they would need should the order come to invade Iraq. They stopped for a rest at about 11 a.m. A few of the Marines got out a baseball and a bat and tossed their helmets onto the sand for bases. They felt like they were back at Camp Pendleton. “That was kind of the attitude; there wasn’t any threat,” says Corporal Simpson, a 21-year-old from Ohio. “We weren’t all armed. We weren’t in any kind of state of readiness.” Only the captain and a few others had weapons.
Corporal Simpson warmed up his arm with rifleman Lance Corporal Antonio James Sledd, who was playing third base. Sledd was a native of Tampa who drove a Mustang and had a twin brother who was a marine stationed in Japan. They were lobbing the ball back and forth when a white pickup pulled up on the road. Out of the corner of his eye, Corporal Simpson caught a glimpse of it, and as he turned for a look, two men emerged wearing long robes.
“They were dressed for battle,” he says.
The men in the truck were close, so close Corporal Simpson could see one of them clearly. “I could see his face, just that second that I turned around. I could see his face and I could see what he was doing.” What Corporal Simpson saw, in that split second, was a young man with a black beard raising an AK-47 into firing position. It was Anas Al Kandari. And then the bullets came whizzing in. Corporal Sledd collapsed onto the burning sand. “They shot him in the back.”
Al Kandari had returned to Kuwait one week before the 9/11 attacks. The Kuwaitis detained him upon arrival, questioned him about his activities in Afghanistan and advised him he was not to leave the country, lest he cause more trouble. Many other Kuwaiti jihadists got the same treatment as they returned from Afghanistan, where they claimed to have been doing charity work for refugees, widows and orphans. Jobless, Anas resumed his studies at the Kuwait University faculty of education. After living among the austere Taliban, Anas was shocked by the behavior of his countrymen. He was outraged when a group of actors and singers visited Kuwait to perform at a festival, considering it ironic that such infidels should be warmly greeted while he, an “Islamic scholar” who had memorized the Koran, was treated as a criminal. He visited several Members of Parliament to complain about the moral corruption of Kuwaiti society. And then he decided to do something about it. Like his best friend Mohammed Jabarah, Al Kandari wanted a martyr’s death. The Americans had caught Jabarah before he could fulfill his death wish. Al Kandari was not going to make that same mistake.
It was what Abu Gaith would have wanted. But the teacher and recruiter had never made it home. There were rumors of his capture in Iran, but Tehran would not confirm or deny them. His absence left a vacuum for the brothers of Kuwait City, who had grown up listening to his preachings and exhortations to jihad. Al Kandari decided it was up to him to carry on in the spirit of Abu Gaith. If the Kuwaiti authorities would not let him leave to fight his jihad, he would do it right at home. He started recruiting within the Al Kandari family. An “Al Kandari” is someone who fetches water. The families that would cross the Gulf to bring back drinking water were called Al Kandari, even if they were not all related. Today, there are many Al Kandaris in Kuwait, and many of them are related to Anas. Some had followed him to Kandahar to train at the camps of bin Laden.
Anas began visiting the young men. He showed them videotapes of bin Laden and Abu Gaith. Come fight the Americans with me, he told them, it is a jihad. Anas gathered the recruits at his house and announced they would soon begin attacks in Kuwait. The ideology—if it can be called that—of the Al Kandari gang was that the Kuwait government was the enemy, an apostate regime because of its ties to the Western world. Therefore, the Al Kandaris would wage jihad in Kuwait by disobeying the government and attacking both the national infrastructure and the foreign troops. The Al Kandari gang was an autonomous cell of Al Qaeda, although most of its members had trained under bin Laden in Afghanistan. But the group did meet with one active Al Qaeda member.
Anas armed his men with guns left over from the Iraq war. They trained at his house in the desert at Al Wafra. Anas taught them how to conduct surveillance, and told them which targets to watch. Cell members scouted U.S. military camps, but they were scared off by the security measures. Anas assigned his members to monitor other targets as well. Two schools were mentioned; they were to be attacked “when the time is right.” One of the military bases that Anas thought might make a good target was Faylaka Island. Faylaka is about twelve kilometers long and six kilometers wide, and laden with old land mines. It is the most important archeological site in Kuwait, with a history dating back to the Bronze Age. The Greeks settled the island in the 4th century BC. When Saddam invaded in 1990, the Iraqi troops turned the island into a military base and, when they retreated, they left little but rubble. A car ferry leaves Kuwait City every day for Faylaka, a 90-minute trip, but not many people embark on it. For the most part, the island is a military training ground, although there are a handful of local inhabitants.
One of the Al Kandaris who trained in Afghanistan with Anas had a family home on Faylaka, and he would visit it frequently. Anas used him as a scout to keep track of U.S. military activities on the island. Anas went to Faylaka himself a few times with his cousin. They would play soccer, drink Pepsi and catch the ferry back to the city. On September 29, 2002, Anas called his scout and asked about the exact location of the soldiers. He also asked for information about the ferry. Anas had a plan. He was going to rent a truck, take the ferry to Faylaka and kill the Americans, just as he had been taught in Afghanistan. He had a stash of weapons ready, and his cousin Jassem Al Hajeri, a 26-year-old former Ministry of Oil employee, had volunteered to go with him.
In the days before the Faylaka operation, Al Kandari fasted and prayed. He wrote a will in which he talked about the Palestinians and advised his family to give all his possessions to his brothers in the mujahedin. He asked his mother to wish him martyrdom, and she did. On the night of October 7, Anas watched the evening news at home. An item about an Israeli military incursion into Gaza enraged him. “The Almighty is generous,” he told his family afterwards, “because we are going to slaughter the Americans like they do to us.” He spent the night at the Al Romithiya Mosque, where Abu Gaith had preached. He cleaned his Kalashnikov, dressed himself in an Afghan robe, sat in front of a video camera and recorded his martyrdom statement. After reciting verses from the Koran, he urged Muslims to stick to their faith and to fight non-believers. In the morning, he took his little brothers to school and kissed them goodbye. Then he and Al Hajeri boarded the ferry and crossed Kuwait Bay. It was 10:30 a.m. when they reached Faylaka.
Soldiers call it “pray and spray.” When the gunfire started, Corporal Simpson hit the ground and tried crawling to a concrete pavilion, but his arm was dangling and useless. A bullet had gone in the back of his arm and blown a hole in his elbow and forearm. His arm was almost broken in half and it was flopping around.
“It was probably a fluke that it hit me, just bad luck,” he says.
“It’s a rather strange sensation. It didn’t necessarily hurt like you’d think it would. I guess it was just kind of surreal. I never really looked back, I just tried to crawl. I don’t think I got very far.”
Another soldier grabbed the wounded corporal’s good arm and dragged him to cover. He was still lying there when he heard the marines returning fire with their 9-mm handguns. They were unprepared for this kind of assault, having been assured by the Kuwaitis that Faylaka was safe. The first sergeant and other members of Lima Company made a quick assessment and engaged the attackers with small arms and security ammunition. The attackers jumped back into the truck and began to speed away. Captain Matthew S. Reid took cover and directed a hasty counterattack. The most accurate fire, however, came from the command post, which had an M-16. The bullets peppered the truck. It swerved and came to a stop. Al Kandari got out and fell to the ground. By the time the marines got there, both shooters were dead. But the gunfire kept coming in. There was a third shooter somewhere.
And then the shooting stopped.
“It was over just like that.”
Corporal Simpson was badly wounded, but Corporal Sledd was worse. He was in bad shape. He had taken four rounds to the torso, and a fifth had blown off the fingertip on his right hand. Navy hospital corpsmen rushed over to treat the injured marines. They administered first aid but it was clear the soldiers needed to get to a doctor. They radioed the U.S. Army hospital at Camp Doha and called for a chopper.
While the two attackers were dead, Captain Reid was not convinced the assault was over. He organized the troops of L Company into a defensive position and sent in a request for more ammunition. Captain Reid cleared the buildings one by one and halted all passing vehicles, detaining 31 people and handing them over to the Kuwaitis. Meanwhile, an unmanned aerial vehicle was launched to provide an eye in the sky look at the island and two British RAF Tornadoes and two U.S. Air Force F-16s took to the air to provide air support. “We never found the third shooter,” says Colonel Bill Durrett, a staff advocate judge. “Nobody could find him but one of the marines actually said he thought he hit him.”
The wounded marines were loaded onto a pair of medical evacuation helicopters from the 1042nd Medical Company. They flew to the Kuwait Armed Forces Hospital but Corporal Sledd went into cardiac arrest later that day, due to heavy blood loss and shock. He died at the hospital. He was 20 years old, a year younger than Anas Al Kandari. “To lose a loving kid like Antonio has been my worst nightmare,” his mother Norma Figueroa wrote in a letter to President Bush, in which she asked why her son’s unit was not properly protected. “Last time I talked to Tony was two weeks ago. Tony promised me that he would return home soon and not to worry about him. He told me that they were doing their best to protect our country and I wonder, did the military do their best to protect our marines while they were training?”
The press lines approved by the U.S. Marines Corps that day did not identify who was behind the attack. “It is unknown at this time who the gunmen were. The incident is under investigation.” But the Kuwaitis knew right away. When Captain Abdel Aziz Saad, an officer in Kuwait’s national security department, got to the scene later in the day he found the white truck and the remnants of the gunfight—AK-47s, a shotgun, ammo clips, loose rounds. When he stared into the faces of the shooters he recognized one of them immediately as Anas Al Kandari, who was well known to the State Security Department. They had been watching his gang for some time, although they were unaware of the Faylaka plot. “We could not read their minds to know what they were planning,” he testified later. “It was difficult to keep pace with their movements because they were from the same family and they were well organized.”
Captain Saad phoned the state prosecutor and told him what he had found. The prosecutor gave his consent for Saad to round up anyone who had “close ties” to Al Kandari and had taken Al Qaeda training in Afghanistan. The Kuwaitis questioned more than 50 people, and a dozen were charged for their roles in the attack. Most of them confessed and were convicted, but they later backed away from their confessions.
Corporal Simpson was treated in the trauma unit at the hospital in Kuwait, where a regal-looking visitor, deputy premier and defense minister Sheikh Jaber Al-Mubarak Al-Sabah, paid him a visit. “He seemed quite upset about the whole ordeal,” the wounded solider said. “I don’t remember much. I was kind of in a medicated daze.” He was transferred to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, the U.S. military hospital at the Ramstein Air Base in Germany, and then to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. “I have a whole lot of hardware in my arm,” he says. But he knows it could have been worse. “They could have cut it off.”
The Judge Advocate General ruled that the shooting was a concerted and deliberate attack. “The investigation revealed incorrect assumptions about the safety/security of Faylaka Island, the lack of a robust force protection office in Kuwait, and mistakes in the rendering of quality trauma care. However, it is also assessed that were it not for the rapid and decisive actions of Lima Company personnel, the terrorist action could have inflicted much more serious injury and potential loss of life on those marines and sailors training on Faylaka Island.” Two days after the attack, Colonel Anthony Haslam, Commanding Officer of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, eulogized Corporal Sledd as “a warrior wearing the uniform of a United States Marine. He deployed without reservation during a time of great uncertainty to protect and defend his country. On the ‘tip of the spear,’ he came face to face with the enemy and was taken from us.”
The Faylaka shooting was yet another violent outcome of the careful recruitment done by Abu Gaith. It was an attack rooted in the indoctrination that Anas and Mohammed had gone through years earlier. Al Kandari’s family told reporters that Anas had acted out of his anger over the treatment of Palestinians that he had seen on television. “Every Muslim believes Americans are helping Jews, and he was burning to do something to help,” his brother Abdullah told the Associated Press. “My brother was not a terrorist,” the same brother told Agence France Press. “He was horrified by the U.S. Congress decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. My mother is proud of him.”
The truth, however, was not so tidy. Anas had not erupted in anger over Palestinians. He had been programmed years earlier to explode when the time was right. He was a walking time bomb, just like Mohammed Jabarah. The funeral was held at the Sulaibikhat Sunni Cemetery the day after the attack. Hundreds of mourners shouted “Allahu Akbar”—God is Great. Radical preachers praised the actions of Al Kandari and Al Hajeri. “They were better than us,” said one mourner. “They were better because they stood up against infidels bent on usurping our rights.” A statement posted on a jihadist Internet bulletin board said, “May God accept them both among His martyrs.”
Corporal Simpson was assigned to a reserve unit in his hometown, Dayton, Ohio, but he left the Marines in 2004. It wasn’t just the shooting. He had been planning to go to college anyway. “It beats you up pretty good. You’re always away from home and I don’t think I like that.” He married a dental surgical assistant from the local air base and they had a son. He went back to school to study political science and economics. He still has the hat he was wearing on the day he was shot. When he shakes it, sand spills out of the seams. But he hasn’t given much thought to the man who shot him. “I have never really looked into it. It just doesn’t interest me to look into him. All I know is, I guess they got what they were looking for.” Anas Al Kandari finally got the martyrdom he had wanted for so long. “It’s unfortunate that they decided to do that and Sledd died because of that.
“It doesn’t seem to have accomplished a whole lot.”
Four days after the Faylaka shooting, Jabarah’s gang of jihadis struck yet again. After the Manila and Singapore plots had fizzled due to the arrests, Hambali had continued plotting from Bangkok. He thought about striking the American, British and U.S. embassies in Indonesia, but security was tight, and he felt the chances of success were not good. He considered bombing companies such as an Exxon facility in Mojokarto, a gold mine in Sumbawa and a Caltex facility in Riau, but in the end he decided that Western tourists were his best targets.
In May 2002, Canadian intelligence had sent the information it had obtained from Jabarah during the two weeks of questioning in April to its international partners. The initial report circulated to such nations as the Philippines, however, included the caveat that the source was “of unknown reliability,” and there was no mention of any specific future targets. Australian intelligence was eager to talk to Jabarah in New York but they were not granted access to him, largely because of legal difficulties stemming from his prosecution. Nor did the FBI provide the Australians with a copy of its two-page, August 21 report detailing what Jabarah had told them about Hambali’s plans to bomb “bars, cafes or nightclubs frequented by Westerners.”
Countering terrorism is partly about finding a loose thread that, when pulled, unravels the whole sweater. The discovery of the Singapore plot and the interrogations of those arrested, who by now numbered several dozen, had been an eye-opener for security agencies. The questioning of Jabarah and bombmaker Fathur al-Ghozi had revealed the close links between Al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah. Captured Kuwaiti Al Qaeda operative Omar Al Farouq provided information that underscored that Al Qaeda had an extensive network of extremists throughout Southeast Asia upon which it could draw to execute attacks. With new information coming in daily, intelligence analysts were painstakingly trying to map out Jemaah Islamiyah and predict its next move.
AU.S.-sponsored seminar examined a number of imagined scenarios for future terrorist attacks, among them the possibility that local extremists would cooperate with Al Qaeda to strike tourist facilities in Bali. The interrogations underscored the threats in Southeast Asia, but specific details about upcoming attacks were lacking, although Indonesia seemed a likely venue. As symbols of “Western decadence,” as well as engines of the Indonesian economy, tourist areas were clearly potential targets. Western governments issued travel advisories, warning their citizens to avoid large gatherings and places that catered to tourists. Despite the warnings, thousands of travelers continued flocking to the region, and especially to Bali, which many considered safe because of its predominantly Hindu population and its longstanding hospitality to foreigners.
In August 2002, Hambali sent $5,000 to a JI operative named Mukhlas to support the operation being developed in Indonesia, and then moved to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and stayed in contact with his Jemaah Islamiyah operatives in the field through email. He received an email from Mukhlas in Indonesia advising that “the program is OK, still progressing.” Later in the fall, he got another email. “Program OK, you will hear and read from news, will happen in weekend soon.” Two weeks later, on October 12, 2002, two massive truck bombs exploded outside Paddy’s Bar and the Sari Club in Kuta, on the Indonesian island of Bali. It was a Saturday night and the bars were crowded with Western tourists and local workers. More than 200 people died; more than a third of them were Australians. The dead were still being counted a week later when Hambali received a brief email from Mukhlas.
“Operation over, success.”