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Seasoned Vet
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Just a typical day at the office for these warriors in Iraq.
Tips. Rumors. Hand holding. Since Saddam’s ouster, U.S. Special Forces are carrying out some unlikely behind-the-scenes activities in Iraq
By Arian Campo-Flores
May 14 — The Iraqi college student arrived agitated. “Your guards are stupid,” he told a Special Forces intelligence specialist who came one recent morning to meet the young man—a recently cultivated informant—at a U.S.-occupied compound in southern Baghdad
WARY AMERICAN GUARDS had kept the student waiting for over an hour before letting him in. The SF soldier soothed the student’s temper, then got down to business with him on a dusty hallway floor—the only available space they could find. “I have today many issues to talk about,” began the student, a sharp and loquacious young man who spoke decent English and sported a baseball cap with the American flag.
The student had a tantalizing tip on a brigadier general with the Al Quds militia who was on the Iraqi most-wanted list (though not in the top 55). “If he is wanted, I can help,” said the student, who then pinpointed the general’s house on a high-resolution map. The place was at times a hive of suspicious activity, the student reported, and the general’s roughneck son was also bullying the neighborhood. Three days later, the soldier’s SF team raided the house, discovering a weapons cache—including rifles and rocket-propelled grenades—and nabbing the general. (The SF team wouldn’t say where they took the general or to whom they entrusted him.)
These days, this is a typical operation for one particular SF Operational Detachment Alpha team, or A team, that a NEWSWEEK reporter was permitted to live and ride along with for five days. Operating out of a safe house in southern Baghdad—a walled-in mansion complete with pool, gym and manicured gardens, most likely abandoned by a Saddam loyalist—the team covers a vast swath of the Iraqi capital. While the war was still hot, the team focused on reconnaissance and unconventional-warfare missions. Now they’ve shifted to stability operations, tapping the sentiment on the Iraqi street and, more importantly, trying to root out troublemakers ranging from run-of-the-mill street thugs to top-level Saddam henchmen. To do this, they rely heavily on local sources, some of them “walk-ins,” others diligently courted. (The SF intelligence specialist’s recent morning with the student also yielded tips on weapons caches, fedayeen hideouts, arms smugglers, and Wahhabi militants.) “The hardest part is sorting through the good and bad information,” says the A team detachment commander, noting that many Iraqis are more intent on avenging age-old grievances than helping out the Americans. There are plenty of dead ends, but occasionally, the team collars a guy like the general.
It’s a job ideally suited to the A team, an American military creation and, in the opinion of an SF battalion operations officer, “the most powerful small-unit organization in the world.” Each team typically has 12 members, including specialists in weapons, demolitions, communications and medical care. Most are expert marksmen. Apart from two officers, all are noncommissioned officers and were in the regular U.S. military for years before joining SF. Their training is physically and intellectually rigorous, as well as culturally nuanced. With Iraqis, for instance, the assistant operations sergeant recounted how “you have to be touchy-feely with them,” holding men by the hand when escorting them to a meeting place—not an easy gesture for the average American male.
The A team can be deceiving in its appearance. SF soldiers are notorious for their long hair and unkempt beards. When they’re off assignment, they’re likely to sun themselves on the patio in shorts and flip-flops. But when they’re on, they’re portraits of brow-furrowed intensity. They barrel their Humvees through neighborhoods at breakneck speed, blasting music ranging from Black Sabbath to Madonna and riding in such tight formation that their bumpers almost kiss. The vehicles bristle with weaponry: .50-caliber machine guns, Mark-19 grenade launchers, Javelin missiles, antitank rounds, sniper rifles, shotguns. When they dismount to clear a building or conduct a raid, they’re a marvel of feline agility and balletic synchronicity.
They are also savvy cultural brokers. Consider the April 24 mission of a group of SF officers in the battalion that this A team belongs to. The officers set out to deliver a delicate message to the man known as Abu Tabai (real name: Harth El-Sammary), head of the Baghdad company of the Free Iraqi Forces. The FIF, backed by Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress and functioning under the tutelage of the U.S. Army, had recently begun working in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. But the group’s ties to Chalabi, who hasn’t exactly received a warm welcome in Iraq, were potentially problematic. The SF men went to clarify to the FIF that they worked for the United States, not Chalabi.
They were greeted by Tabai in a dim room at FIF headquarters in the wealthy Mansour district of Baghdad. Over the next hour—filled with cordial chatter, a heaping feast of lamb and rice, and a digestif of sweet tea and cigarettes—the SF battalion commander, a smooth-talking Southerner, gradually tiptoed his way to his point: “My real concern—and I’m being honest here—is the linkage the Free Iraqi Forces have with Chalabi,” he said. The FIF had to adhere to its security mission rather than advance Chalabi’s political ambitions, the commander stressed. “You can’t try to do both.” Tabai made it clear he understood the message. “I am INC with my political thinking,” he replied. But, “I am really careful. I am an officer before I am” a Chalabi supporter. Once the meeting was concluded, the SF team went around the corner to the Baghdad Hunting Club to deliver a similar message about the FIF’s future to Chalabi himself, as well as to huddle with the U.S. Central Command’s liaison to the FIF.
“Today was a classic SF mission,” the SF commander said afterward. “Working in a gray area.” Pursuing a rather imprecise mission—trying to insulate U.S. military objectives from the jockeying of Iraqi power-brokers—he visited the relevant parties, scrutinized their intentions and ensured they understood the American forces’ position. Such work is typical SF fare—”very interpersonal, very culturally aware,” said the commander. “We’re more coaches and mentors in many ways than we are shooters.” Only since the war’s end have such SF teams drawn on these skill sets. The soldiers in the A team tracked by NEWSWEEK say their role during the war was circumscribed by how events unfolded. Afghanistan was a perfect war for the SF, requiring the organization of foreign opposition armies, moving stealthily through inhospitable terrain to call in airstrikes and rooting out Al Qaeda and Taliban members from their mountain redoubts. The Iraq conflict, by contrast, was essentially won through two heavy punches delivered by the Third Infantry Division and the First Marine Expeditionary Force. The SF teams found no uprising to abet and guide, and in any case, Saddam’s regime fell quickly. Before the war’s start, some military analysts suggested that commandos would lay the groundwork by bribing and bullying Republican Guard officers into submission or minimizing the threat of Scud launchers in western Iraq that could target Israel. But if that happened, this A team says it wasn’t part of those efforts. “We had enabling effects on the conventional fight,” says the battalion commander. “But it was a conventional fight.”
Still, those enabling effects were valuable, and in the course of providing them, the A team had a sometimes harrowing ride up to Baghdad. The men infiltrated deep into Iraq, far ahead of the advancing Army, one night at the war’s outset. They flew in low in two MC-130 planes that were so loaded down with the team’s four 13,000-pound Humvees—2,500 pounds beyond their rating—that “we basically crash-landed,” says one of the medical sergeants. Once the planes disgorged their cargo, the team set off immediately for the Karbala Gap southwest of Baghdad—a chokepoint that U.S. forces were planning to cross and that military strategists considered a prime spot for an Iraqi ambush or chemical attack. The soldiers traveled by GPS and night-vision goggles over the next two nights, camouflaging themselves by day amid sandy knolls. Once at the gap, they delivered daily reports on enemy movements and other potential hazards that the Third Infantry could encounter. Based in part on the team’s intelligence, the Third Infantry decided it was safe to pass through the gap as planned.
The A team then linked up with the conventional forces and rode to Baghdad at the tip of their thrust. Though the team was never able to foment the insurgencies it had hoped for, it did continue to support the Army with reconnaissance missions—and put its weapons to use. While moving through the town of Al Musayyab near the Euphrates River, the SF men stumbled into a vicious firefight with Iraqi soldiers who vastly outnumbered them. The team blazed through the town, supported by close air support, and, according to a subsequent battle-damage assessment, ended up leaving 262 kills in its wake without suffering a single casualty.
Weary from battle, the SF soldiers arrived in Baghdad and watched as the regime crumbled within days. Since then, they’ve settled into their safe house and are focused on creating order in a city racked by disorder. So far, they’ve captured one blacklisted Iraqi, the Al Quds general and were on the verge of seizing another—the director of military intelligence, the seven-of-hearts in the deck of cards—before he turned himself in two weeks ago. “Every day, I get someone who says he knows Saddam’s cousin,” says the intelligence specialist, adding with a laugh that Saddam has hundreds of cousins. But as he well knows, out of that flurry of rumor may emerge the nugget that leads to the team’s next big catch
------------------------------------------------------------ Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. ------------------------------------------ 
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Hard Charger
Group: Community Supporter
Last Login: 6/18/2007 2:59 PM
Posts: 2,321,
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Hell yea I could. And I would be loving it!
"I have the Americans with me, and they have their death ray. Surrender or die!" Gen. Abdul Rashid Dotsum. Afghan Warlord.
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