In late June 2005, McChrystal was back in the United States hosting a JSOC commanders’ conference at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, when he received a summons to the White House to brief a National Security Council session on Zarqawi. On June 29, the general found himself in the White House Situation Room briefing the president and what amounted to his war cabinet. When McChrystal concluded, Bush fixed him with his eyes. “Are you going to get him?” The JSOC commander’s response was firm. “We will, Mr. President,” he said. “There is no doubt in my mind.”1
As the National Security Council meeting indicated, Washington increasingly saw the complex struggle in Iraq, which combined traditional insurgency, Islamist terrorism, sectarian civil war, tribal conflict, and a proxy war between the United States and Iran, as a war with one man’s organization: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda in Iraq. To a degree, Washington merely reflected the thinking in Casey’s Baghdad headquarters, which over the course of a few months had shifted from doubting that Zarqawi was playing an important role to believing that removing him from the battlefield would collapse the insurgency.2
The task force had already missed a golden opportunity to test that theory. On February 20, 2005, after learning that Zarqawi was due to travel down a stretch of highway along the Euphrates between Ramadi and Rawa during a certain time window, the task force set up an elaborate ambush. But Zarqawi was late, and the U.S. troops had relaxed their guard by the time his vehicle came into view. Zarqawi’s driver blew through a Delta roadblock and approached a Ranger checkpoint at high speed. A Ranger machine gunner had the AQI leader in his sights and requested permission to fire, but his lieutenant denied the request because he did not have “positive ID” of the vehicle’s occupants. To the intense frustration of other Rangers at the checkpoint, Zarqawi’s vehicle flew past, with the Jordanian staring wildly at them. He was close enough for them to note he was gripping a U.S. assault rifle and wearing a Blackhawk! brand tactical vest. “He was shitting his pants,” a special operations source said. “He knew he was caught.”
A Predator kept Zarqawi in sight as Delta operators on the ground roared after him. Realizing they were being chased, Zarqawi and his driver turned onto a secondary road. With the Delta team about thirty seconds behind, Zarqawi jumped out and ran for it, leaving his driver, laptop, and $100,000 in euros to be captured. Staffers in the operations center tried to follow Zarqawi with the drone, but at that moment its camera suffered a glitch, switching from a tight focus on Zarqawi to a wide-angle view of the entire neighborhood. By the time the frantic staffers had refocused the camera, their target had vanished.3
There would be other close calls for Zarqawi, but for the next fifteen months he and the task force were locked in a deadly contest, as JSOC’s operators and intelligence analysts raced to devour the middle ranks of his network before he could replenish them, in the hope that this would stall his campaign and lead the task force to him. Zarqawi, meanwhile, was trying to ignite a full-scale sectarian civil war before the task force destroyed his organization, which he had presciently designed to function as semi-autonomous regional and local cells.4 Zarqawi and McChrystal each encouraged their respective organizations to take an entrepreneurial approach to warfare. McChrystal was renowned for promoting a sense of competition among the various strike forces at his disposal in Iraq, allotting the precious ISR assets to whichever commander came up with the most compelling target.5
In early January 2006, the task force’s luck began to turn. Iraqi forces captured Mohammad Rabih, aka Abu Zar, an Iraqi native and a senior Al Qaeda in Iraq leader. The task force had briefly been on his trail the previous summer, only to fall victim to a ruse: in late August, Abu Zar had faked his own funeral, complete with his apparently grief-stricken mother. Task force sources in the crowd believed the funeral was genuine, so the task force stopped looking for Abu Zar. Now he had turned up in Iraqi government hands. The task force used Defense Department channels to persuade the Iraqis to transfer Abu Zar to JSOC’s detainee facility at Balad, where he soon told interrogators that Zarqawi’s number two, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, would sometimes stay in a particular cluster of buildings in Yusufiyah, twenty miles southwest of Baghdad. The task force saw nothing untoward about the buildings. However, one intelligence analyst was convinced Abu Zar wasn’t lying and continued to observe the area whenever aircraft were available.6
While that analyst kept watch over Yusufiyah, a significant event in JSOC’s history went almost unnoticed by the public. On February 16,7 McChrystal was promoted to lieutenant general but remained in command of JSOC. By elevating the JSOC commander’s position to three-star rank, Rumsfeld had at a stroke raised the prestige and leverage of the command, and created space underneath the commander for more subordinate flag officers. JSOC’s command structure soon expanded to accommodate a two-star deputy commander in addition to a pair of one-star assistant commanders.
But while McChrystal was pinning on his third star, Zarqawi was finalizing his plan to ratchet up Iraq’s sectarian tensions several more notches. On February 22, explosives planted by his fighters destroyed the golden dome of the Shi’ite Al-Askari mosque in Samarra, one of Shi’a Islam’s most sacred places. Inevitably, the bombing initiated an intense cycle of Sunni versus Shi’a violence. Entire neighborhoods switched hands as populations coalesced along sectarian lines. Zarqawi had again stolen a march on the Coalition. By spring 2006, the task force’s hunt for Zarqawi had become a higher JSOC priority than its search for Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. “Who’s the biggest threat right now?” said a special operations source at the time. “In military terms, bin Laden has been neutralized. He’s not going anywhere. He can’t really move. His communications are shallow.… Zarqawi is a bigger threat.”8
As the bodies piled up in Baghdad trash dumps and floated down canals, McChrystal rallied his troops. On March 18, he told subordinates that the task force was “supported and well resourced,” but the lack of apparent progress in Iraq had people back home worried. He derided those people as “quitters.” Less than two weeks later, on April 1, he reminded his commanders that their mission was to “win here in Iraq.”9 The route to that victory included pressuring Al Qaeda in Iraq’s lines of communication from Syria and Saudi Arabia. The task force would occasionally undertake raids into Syria and more frequently conduct clandestine intelligence operations in the country. There were no raids into Saudi Arabia, but JSOC had people there working on a secret intelligence operation in which Saudi militants captured in Iraq would be taken back to their homeland, and then persuaded “to somehow go back to Iraq as a double agent,” said a task force officer.
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As insurgents figured out that the task force preferred to work at night, they began conducting more business during daytime. “You’d watch them on ISR during the day run around freely, make all their runs and drop their messages, take the dudes out, put them in the trunk, take them out to the desert, and execute them,” said a Little Bird pilot. The task force responded by increasing use of a favorite tactic of both Delta operators and Little Bird pilots: air vehicle interdiction, or AVI.
By March 2006, Task Force Brown had divided its Little Bird crews into day and night teams, so as to always have a team ready for a no-notice AVI mission. There were several ways to conduct such missions, but a typical vehicle interdiction involved two AH-6s, two MH-6s with snipers on the pods, and a pair of MH-60K Black Hawks full of operators. The mission began with an ISR aircraft tracking an insurgent vehicle. The pagers the pilots carried buzzed. Checking the numeric code, the pilots saw a row of 1s: “launch now.” The flight leads raced to the operations center for a quick briefing on the type of vehicle they’d be chasing, its location, and who was in it, and then went straight to the aircraft, where the operators were waiting. The helicopters launched and the race was on. The insurgents’ only hope was to drive into a heavily populated neighborhood where the task force would be loath to shoot for fear of harming noncombatants. “If the vehicle went into a populated area, we’d just pull off and hold out in the desert and wait for him to start moving again,” said a Little Bird pilot. “If he was out in the open desert, it was game on.”
After chasing down the vehicle, either the Black Hawk door gunners or the AH-6 pilots fired red tracer warning shots in front of it, to give the people in the vehicle a chance to surrender. If the insurgents took that opportunity, the Black Hawks landed behind and beside the vehicle, and the operators quickly zip-tied the insurgents and searched the vehicle while the MH-6s landed the snipers to set up blocking positions on the road. But if the vehicle occupants attempted to fire at the helicopters, the snipers on the MH-6 pods, the Black Hawk door gunners, and the AH-6 gunships were ready to render any show of resistance futile and fatal. By spring of 2006, the Little Birds were launching as many as five AVI missions a day. “If you were an adrenaline junkie it was pretty exciting,” said an AH-6 pilot. Or, as a Delta operator put it: “All the [A]VI shit was always awesome.”10
Al Qaeda in Iraq leaders knew that their hunters were the United States’ most elite forces. They were also easily identifiable—they wore beards and used aircraft and vehicles like Little Birds and Pandurs to which no other military units had access. The insurgents came up with nicknames for their nemeses: they called the operators “Mossad,” after the vaunted Israeli intelligence service, and referred to the Little Birds as “Killer Bees” and “The Little Black Ones.”11
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That spring, the task force continued to hunt insurgents moving along Anbar’s ratlines while also focusing on the “belts” around Baghdad—the suburbs and rural areas surrounding the city. Coalition presence was lower in the belts than in the cities, and Al Qaeda in Iraq used them as rear support areas from which to terrorize the capital. This was particularly the case with the southern belt, which encompassed the towns of Yusufiyah, Latifiyah, Iskandariyah, and Mahmudiyah. Sometimes known as the “Triangle of Death,” JSOC paid particular attention to this area in early 2006.12
Smack in the heart of this triangle was the group of buildings in Yusufiyah that Abu Zar had pinpointed and that a savvy, determined intelligence analyst had been monitoring for three months. On the afternoon of April 8, his patience paid off when the screen in front of him showed a line of cars pulling up to one of the buildings. That was enough to launch the daytime vehicle interdiction team on a raid. When the C Squadron operators landed at the objective shortly before 2 P.M., the men in the building opened fire. Five militants died in the fierce firefight that followed. No task force personnel were killed, but an MH-6 pilot was shot in the foot, and another got plexiglass in his face when his cockpit took a round. Both aircraft were damaged. One returned to base immediately. The operators gathered a large amount of intelligence material. (The house also held a van that had been turned into a mobile bomb.) Meanwhile, as the helicopters were en route to the objective, task force analysts had seen more vehicles arriving at a nearby building. A second raiding party launched, arriving at the target compound at 4:11 P.M. The dozen men they found there put up no meaningful resistance and were soon bundled aboard helicopters and flown back to Mission Support Site Fernandez.13
While interrogators went to work on the new detainees, who were soon flown to Balad, more raids followed. In the early hours of April 16, elements of B Squadron of the SAS, which had only begun hunting Al Qaeda in Iraq targets as an equal component of JSOC’s task force in late March, assaulted Objective Larchwood IV, a farmhouse on the outskirts of Yusufiyah. The “blades,” as SAS operators are known, were met with a burst of gunfire. After initially withdrawing, they quickly resumed the assault with renewed vigor, killing five militants, three of whom wore explosive suicide belts. The blades shot two before they could blow themselves up. The third detonated his bomb, killing only himself and injuring nobody else. The SAS detained five other men, one of whom was wounded, and suffered five wounded themselves. But there were other casualties in the house. A woman was killed. Three others and a child were medically evacuated to a U.S. military hospital in Baghdad. One of the detainees turned out to be AQI’s administrator for the Abu Ghraib region, who was the individual the SAS had targeted in the raid.14
Among the materials the British seized in the farmhouse was a video shot by Al Qaeda in Iraq’s propaganda wing that showed a black-pajama-clad Zarqawi firing an M249 squad automatic weapon, a light machine gun used by U.S. forces. Nine days later, AQI released an edited version of the video, prompting the U.S. military to publicize the raw footage, which showed Zarqawi’s inexperience with the weapon and his willingness to ignore a muezzin’s call to prayer, which can be heard in the background. The video also included a scene of Zarqawi seated beside an M4 assault rifle with an M203 grenade launcher attachment. The SAS blades had seized just such a weapon—presumably the same one—on Larchwood IV. It had apparently been lost by their maritime counterparts, the Royal Marines’ Special Boat Service, in a bungled mission during the 2003 invasion, but its presence in the farmhouse told the task force it was getting closer.15 Indeed, intelligence suggested that Zarqawi himself had been about a thousand meters away.16
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The task force continued grinding away at Zarqawi’s network. Although almost every raid was conducted in the hope that the targets would surrender peacefully, the results were often extraordinarily violent. On April 25, the same day Zarqawi released his video, the task force raided Objective Johnson Village, another Yusufiyah safe house. As they approached, a man ran out brandishing “a shoulder-fired rocket,” according to a Central Command press release. Operators shot him dead. A fierce gunfight ensued between other militants who emerged and the operators, who, supported by the helicopters, killed four more. Still taking fire from the building, the operators called in an air strike that leveled it. In the rubble, they found the bodies of seven men and a woman. Each man wore webbing holding two loaded magazines and two grenades. But the fight had not been without cost for the task force. The insurgents killed Sergeant First Class Richard J. Herrema, twenty-seven, a Delta operator, in the opening exchanges.17
JSOC’s task force was essentially the U.S. military’s offensive arm in Iraq, at least as far as operations against Zarqawi’s network were concerned. While the task force’s operations tempo was now approaching what McChrystal and Flynn had first envisioned, the JSOC commander wanted to gird his troops for a fight he did not expect to end soon.
“This has been, and will be, a long and serious war,” he wrote in a memo to his entire force (one of about five he issued during his command), which was published on JSOC’s intranet. “Although initial structures and TTPs [tactics, techniques, and procedures] have evolved tremendously from where they were even two years ago, we are still operating with manning and operating processes that need to be improved to be more effective and professional. We must increasingly be a force of totally focused counter-terrorists—that is what we do. This is as complex as developing a Long Term Strategic Debriefing Facility that feeds our in-depth understanding of the enemy, and as simple as losing the casual, ‘I’m off at my war adventure,’ manner of dress and grooming. In every case it will not be about what’s easy, or even what we normally associate with conventional military standards. It will not even be about what is effective. It will be about what is the MOST effective way to operate—and we will do everything to increase the effectiveness even in small ways. If anyone finds this inconvenient or onerous, there’s no place in the force for you. This is about winning—and making as few trips to Arlington Cemetery en route to that objective.”18
On May 11, he reiterated the message to his subordinate commanders, reinforcing the “fanatical importance” with which he expected them to treat the fight. This was the essence of McChrystal. “He expected everybody to be as fanatical about the task at hand as he was,” said one of McChrystal’s commanders. “Life is hard right now,” McChrystal continued. “Take this [war] and make it the cause.”19
Life got even harder for Task Force Brown three days later, when Lieutenant Colonel Joe Coale, Delta’s B Squadron commander, ordered a mid-afternoon assault on Objective Leadville, another building near Yusufiyah. Again the assaulters faced withering fire the moment the Black Hawks landed beside the objective. Pinned down by heavy machine gun and mortar fire, the operators fought back, with the crew chiefs on the circling Black Hawks pouring minigun fire onto the insurgent positions.
Back at Mission Support Site Fernandez, they woke Task Force Brown’s night team early to fly down to relieve the helicopters in the fight, but as the fresh Little Bird crews neared Yusufiyah, they ran into an ambush and the AH-6 piloted by Major Matt Worrell and CW5 Jamie Weeks was shot down, killing both men on Mother’s Day. Several other helicopters were so damaged that they had to land. The ground force managed to finally secure the objective and detain four men. They also treated and evacuated four injured civilian women, but the fighting was so fierce they didn’t leave the area until darkness had fallen and they had called in a series of air strikes on surrounding buildings.
There was plenty of fallout from the Leadville fight. Joe Coale was replaced as B Squadron commander with Tom DiTomasso, meaning the latter was also the new Task Force Central boss. The battle also marked a turning point in how the task force dealt with heavily defended targets. From then on Delta and Task Force Brown placed less priority on capturing targets and were more willing to use overwhelming firepower early in the fight.20 “I started telling our guys, hey, if you’re going in on a target and someone’s shooting at you, fucking kill him,” said a task force commander. Another factor behind this mental shift was the frustration the operators experienced at repeatedly encountering and detaining the same people on objectives, because the Iraqi authorities kept releasing them.21
But McChrystal’s strategy of eating away at the rings of defense surrounding Zarqawi was paying off. So was his determination to professionalize the task force’s interrogation capabilities. By the third week of May, after being subjected to several weeks of skilled, manipulative interrogation, the administrator that the SAS had captured on April 16 and an Al Qaeda in Iraq operative detained at the second April 8 target in Yusufiyah had detailed the group’s command structure around Baghdad and identified Abd al-Rahman as Zarqawi’s spiritual adviser. For three weeks, the task force monitored Rahman in the hope that he’d lead them to Zarqawi.
He did.
On June 7 a drone tracked Rahman as he was driven north in a silver sedan out of Baghdad. At Mission Support Site Fernandez, DiTomasso and his lead analyst watched as Rahman deftly switched vehicles in heavy traffic, jumping into a small blue truck in a skillful but futile attempt to throw off any surveillance. In Balad, Mark Erwin—by now a full colonel, deputy Delta commander, and Iraq task force commander—directed ISR aircraft from all over Iraq to converge on the area north of Baghdad. It was Erwin’s A Squadron that had missed getting Zarqawi because of a drone camera glitch in February 2005. He was determined not to miss out again. The aircraft followed the truck to Baqubah, where Rahman transferred to another truck and continued on to a two-story house in Hibhib, a village only a dozen miles from McChrystal’s Balad headquarters. Analysts, operators, and staffers in Fernandez and Balad watched in rapt attention as a stout man in black walked out and took a late afternoon stroll down the driveway before returning to the house. It had to be Zarqawi. An assault team prepared to launch from Fernandez, but Erwin wasn’t comfortable with a heliborne raid. Worried that the only good landing zone was so far from the house that Zarqawi might escape into a large grove of date palms, Erwin discussed the situation with McChrystal, then decided to bomb the target and have the Delta team land immediately thereafter.
A series of mishaps nearly derailed the plan. A Task Force Brown helicopter engine failed to start at Fernandez. Then, one of two F-16s that the task force planned to use to bomb the house had to break off for an air-to-air refueling; the other swooped toward the house but didn’t release a bomb, because Task Force Central hadn’t worded the bombing command properly. Finally, at 6:12 P.M., the second F-16 dropped a laser-guided 500-pound bomb on the house and followed it less than two minutes later with another bomb. The house disintegrated. A cheer erupted in the Balad operations center. Eighteen minutes later, Delta operators arrived on Little Birds to find Iraqi police loading Zarqawi on a gurney. Holding the police at gunpoint, the operators realized Zarqawi was still alive, but suffering from severe internal blast injuries. He died in front of them.22
The next several days were a blur of energy for McChrystal and the Iraq task force. The bombing, which also killed Rahman, another man, two women, and a girl, was the trigger for the task force to launch synchronized raids that night on the three vehicles in which Rahman had ridden en route to the house and the fourteen buildings he’d visited while under surveillance. The aim of the raids was to crush what one JSOC staffer called Zarqawi’s “internal network” in one night.23 The task force also plundered the rubble in Hibhib for intelligence, which added to the spike in missions. A particularly satisfying find was a handwritten document saying that the American strategy in the Triangle of Death was succeeding and senior Al Qaeda leaders could no longer count on it as a refuge.24
Zarqawi’s death caused an inevitable sense of satisfaction at all levels of command, from Task Force Central to the very top. President Bush rang McChrystal on the night Zarqawi died to congratulate him.25 But any hopes that his death would signal an immediate downturn in the violence went unfulfilled. Al Qaeda in Iraq quickly promoted Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the Egyptian who had been Zarqawi’s deputy, to replace his late boss, and the monthly civilian death tolls for the second half of 2006 all rose above the highest monthly tally (June) for the first six months of 2006, a trend that continued well into 2007.26 McChrystal’s assessment was blunt: “We had killed Zarqawi too late.”27
As the violence spiraled ever higher, the task force strove to keep pace. By 2006, the “Unblinking Eye” concept that began with Delta’s A Squadron and a single Predator in early 2004 had reached full fruition. At Flynn’s direction, the task force aimed to have up to three ISR aircraft watching a target simultaneously. Indeed, it often had enough of such aircraft over Baghdad and the major cities in Anbar that when a car bomb went off, analysts could pull the video feeds from aircraft overhead and watch them in reverse, to trace the car’s route back to its start point.28 The dynamo that McChrystal and Flynn had built was now operating almost on automatic. In August 2004, the task force had conducted eighteen missions. In August 2006 it conducted more than 300.29 Strike forces now aimed to conduct the “analyze” and “disseminate” parts of the F3EAD process within an hour of coming off target. “McChrystal would say, ‘We have to operate at the speed of war,’” said a Ranger officer. “‘Faster, faster, faster.’”
The task force was growing. It routinely included a “white” Special Forces company that specialized in direct action missions. Each Special Forces group had such a company, called a combatant commander’s in-extremis force, or CIF (pronounced “siff”), because it was designed to give a regional combatant commander an on-call counterterrorist force in case the JSOC task force was unavailable. The CIFs, which had a training relationship with Delta, all rotated through Iraq in support of McChrystal’s task force. In 2006, McChrystal also gained an 82nd Airborne Division paratroop battalion, known as Task Force Falcon. With its reinforcements thrown into the fray, his task force continued its furious pace through the fall.30 But one of its most notable fights was a defensive one. On November 27, a daytime air-vehicle interdiction mission targeting an Al Qaeda in Iraq foreign fighter facilitator went awry when an RPG downed an AH-6 between Taji and Lake Tharthar about fifty kilometers northwest of Baghdad. (The assault force was en route to a larger site in the desert to wait for the target’s vehicle when this happened.) Outnumbered and outgunned by insurgents who arrived in truck after truck, the assault force found itself with no shelter in the flat desert. The force’s remaining AH-6, piloted by CW5 Dave Cooper, did much to hold them off, repeatedly strafing the insurgents. Cooper was credited with turning the tide of the battle, and later received a Distinguished Service Cross for his efforts. The ground force remained at the site until darkness, but tragedy struck when an F-16 supporting the embattled force flew too low and crashed, killing its pilot.31
Other raids that month focused on Ansar al-Sunnah, a Kurdish-led Islamist group that was allied with, but not formally part of, Al Qaeda in Iraq. The Coalition’s efforts to reconcile some Sunni insurgent groups, thus isolating Al Qaeda in Iraq, included an effort to divide Ansar al-Sunnah from AQI.32 But although JSOC (and much of the rest of the U.S. national security community) had focused almost exclusively on Iraq’s Sunni insurgency, in particular on Al Qaeda in Iraq, since 2004, a different threat was emerging. Arguably a greater threat to U.S. forces and interests in the region than Iraq’s Sunni insurgency, it was an enemy that would hark back to JSOC’s birth, but for which its Iraq task force was singularly unprepared: Iran.