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09-28-2005, 04:19 PM
Chasing the Ghosts
With doubts about Iraq growing at home, U.S. forces are struggling to put down an elusive and inexhaustible enemy. Michael Ware reports on the state of the counterinsurgency from the front lines of the biggest battle of the year
By MICHAEL WARE
Sep. 26, 2005
The troops call it Route Barracuda, a patch of terrorist territory in the northern Iraqi town of Tall 'Afar, where thousands of U.S. and Iraqi forces have converged for the biggest battle in nearly a year. On this sweaty September afternoon, the neighborhood is living up to its name. A squad of U.S. commandos enters an abandoned house and clambers up to the roof. The 2-foot lip doesn't give much cover from the bullets raining down on them from insurgent gunmen firing from a building 200 yards to the north. Rounds flying at supersonic speed crack inches from the troops' ears. "Get down, goddammit," a Green Beret hollers to his Iraqi counterparts. On their bellies, two weapons sergeants start loading an 84-mm M-3 antitank recoilless rifle. "They got guns," says a commando shouldering a rocket launcher. "Let's f_______ do this." He kneels, exposing himself without any choice, takes aim and fires. Whump. The top of the insurgents' building blossoms black smoke. Over the cacophony of machine-gun fire and explosions, the leader of the commando team bellows to his men that the insurgents have spotted them. "Displace, displace--they got our position!" he yells, as the troops vacate the open rooftop in a stooped sprint.
The offensive in Tall 'Afar, which wound down last week, was this year's Fallujah--a mass assault involving 7,000 U.S. and Iraqi soldiers and hundreds of Bradleys, battle tanks, artillery pieces, all combined with AC-130 Spectre gunships, F-16 fighter jets and attack helicopters. Unlike the Fallujah battle, Tall 'Afar raged mostly unseen, with accounts of the fighting limited largely to the reports of U.S. and Iraqi officials in Baghdad, who declared that the onslaught had succeeded in driving out the bands of rebels--local units commanded by al-Qaeda kingpin Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi--from their latest safe haven. But almost as soon as the offensive ended, the cycle of mayhem started anew: two days after the capture of al-Qaeda's stronghold in Tall 'Afar, al-Zarqawi unleashed a retaliatory wave of 11 suicide bombings in Baghdad, killing more than 150 people in the deadliest day of attacks in the capital since the start of the war. Iraq's Defense Minister, Sadoun Dulaimi, responded to the attacks by telling reporters, "I think what is happening is the last breath of the terrorists"--an assessment that even some U.S. commanders found unduly upbeat after yet another bloody week. "We have not broken the back of the insurgency," says a high-ranking U.S. officer. "The insurgency is like a cell-phone system. You shut down one node, another somewhere else comes online to replace it."
Two and a half years since the U.S. invasion, nine months after the election of a government in Baghdad and weeks before millions of Iraqis will vote on a constitution that threatens to further split the country, this is the reality of the beleaguered U.S. mission in Iraq: a never-ending fight against a seemingly inexhaustible enemy emboldened by the U.S. presence, the measure of success as elusive as the insurgents themselves. For months, the intractability of the fighting and Iraq's momentum toward civil war have caused a gradual but still manageable erosion in public support for the Bush Administration's stick-it-out strategy, which depends on training Iraqis in sufficient numbers to take over combat duties and allow U.S. troops to begin pulling out. Senior U.S. officials say it could take a decade to quell the insurgency, with successful withdrawal years away. But the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina and the massive price tag for rebuilding the Gulf Coast have ratcheted up the sense of urgency among lawmakers and some Administration officials about finding an exit strategy. In a TIME poll taken 10 days after the hurricane, 57% said they disapproved of President Bush's handling of the war; 61% said they supported cutting Iraq spending to pay for hurricane relief. Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita downplays those figures, asking, "What is it worth to avoid another 9/11?" But privately, Pentagon officials acknowledge that the reservoir of public faith in the war effort is running dangerously low. "The issue of American staying power is forefront in our minds," says a military officer. "Everything has costs."
With the public increasingly unwilling to pay those costs, the U.S. faces hard questions. Can political success still be salvaged from an unwinnable military fight after the series of failures (see following story) that have marked the U.S. enterprise in Iraq? How can the U.S. extract itself without compounding the damage done to U.S. interests in the region? After a month in the al-Qaeda-dominated Syrian border region, TIME spent 10 days on the front lines of the war, having lived with U.S. and Iraqi troops as they prepared for the battle of Tall 'Afar, one of al-Zarqawi's biggest strongholds and, intelligence officers say, a place where he was detected in recent weeks. Waiting for the Americans were hundreds of hardened local fighters, small bands of foreign zealots and, in the notorious Sarai quarter of the city, a labyrinth of medieval alleyways laced with booby traps and roadside bombs. Two weeks after the start of the offensive, the military claimed more than 200 insurgents killed. But field commanders and top intelligence officers acknowledge that the U.S. is no closer to subduing the insurgents and the threat they pose to Iraq's stability. Although dozens of al-Zarqawi's fighters may have died in Tall 'Afar, the U.S. and Iraqi forces were unable to prevent others from getting away. In its tempo, ferocity and politically compromised outcome, the story of Tall 'Afar stands as a parable of the dangers, dilemmas and frustrations that still haunt the U.S. in Iraq. Despite the temporary tactical gains made by the U.S.'s 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, the battle refreshes doubts about whether anything resembling victory in this war can still be achieved.
Nestled close to Syria, Tall 'Afar is at the center of a vast border region rife with smuggling and anti-American sentiment. After the U.S. invasion, it became a gateway for foreign fighters entering Iraq. In time, homegrown insurgent cells came under the control of al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia organization, which transformed the city into a training and command base for foreign jihadis and a hideout for al-Zarqawi and his deputies. After the fall of Fallujah, the town became a propaganda tool for the resistance, with attacks on U.S. forces in the city featured heavily in the "top 10 attacks" videos circulated among insurgent groups. For civilians, especially the Shi'ite minority, the city became a prison under insurgent rule. Al-Zarqawi's shock troops commandeered buses, schools and businesses for military purposes, evicting uncooperative families and selling their furniture. Insurgent videos and residents' accounts detail how anyone deemed to be collaborating with U.S. forces was executed, often publicly. "The enemy has taken good people who have worked with us out into the street and cut their heads off," armored reconnaissance troop commander Captain Jesse Sellars told his replacements coming into western Tall 'Afar.
Although U.S. officers had known for months about the atrocities taking place in Tall 'Afar, they were powerless to do anything about them. Stretched thin fighting rebels in places like al-Qaim and Mosul, the military dedicated just a single infantry battalion to an area twice the size of Connecticut. In May, however, more than 4,000 troops of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, a unit with a unique combination of tanks, Bradleys and helicopters that is back for its second tour in Iraq, were hastily rerouted from the south to the Tall 'Afar region, where they began disrupting the insurgents' supply lines and safe havens. They paid a price: two platoons alone saw a third of their 50-odd soldiers killed or wounded in less than four months, and hardy Abrams tanks and Bradley vehicles burned in the streets. "A day can go from good to bad in a heartbeat in there," says reconnaissance helicopter pilot Captain Matthew Junko. And so last month the regiment's commander, Colonel H.R. McMaster, told his troops what he had been itching to say all along: it was time to take back Tall 'Afar.
The order for the main force to move comes on Sept. 2. That day, in an armored squadron pushing into the city from the north and the south, Grim Troop's Blue Platoon, dubbed the Dragoons, enters from the southeast along an artery code-named Route Corvette, into a predominantly Shi'ite neighborhood. Within 30 minutes, they come under sniper fire. A three-man sniper team from the élite Iraqi Counterterrorism Task Force (akin to the U.S. Delta Force), with a pair of U.S. special-forces liaisons, takes positions in front of the platoon, scanning for muzzle flashes, as an Abrams tank 50 yards up Corvette fires its 120-mm cannon at an insurgent mortar team, followed by a burst of .50-cal. machine-gun fire. A helicopter swoops ahead, firing a Hellfire missile at the insurgent position to help clear Blue Platoon's path. The helicopters kill at least a dozen insurgents by firing missiles into safe houses. At day's end Blue Platoon pulls out of the city to a rendezvous point in the desert, but fresh intelligence suggests the insurgents are displaying their mettle and have fallen back into well-defended positions. This enemy is not a rabble.
The Dragoons re-enter Tall 'Afar at 6 a.m. the next day, linking up with two Iraqi army infantry companies of Kurdish peshmerga and the U.S. special-force teams attached to them. The mission is to begin "draining the pond," as U.S. officers call it--clearing civilians from what is about to become a battlefield so that the insurgents could not blend back into the fold. The scenes are heart wrenching: the Kurds burst into houses as families gather for breakfast, ordering them at gunpoint onto the street with only the possessions and provisions they can grab in a few seconds. Women wail, and children cling to their mothers' sides, as they head to temporary camps on the city's fringe. Although explosions can be heard in the distance, the town takes on an eerie silence. "The city has never been this quiet," says a U.S. special-forces officer. "They're either getting ready, or they've left." Captain Brian Oman, the leader of the Dragoons, wonders if the homegrown "bad guys" are going to put down their weapons and sneak out with the civilians. "We'll be fighting them again in a week," he says.
It doesn't take that long. In the morning, the U.S. and Kurdish special forces begin moving north, toward Sarai, through the stone-paved alleyways. Within minutes, they are ambushed. The U.S. commanders rush machine-gun teams to the rooftops to pour out suppressing fire as the others advance below, clearing houses as they go. Anguished families come rushing out, caught in the cross fire and herded by the soldiers to the relative safety of the edge of town. A little girl cups her ears with her hands and wails each time firing breaks out. A 5-year-old boy gingerly waves a white flag. Insurgents duck and weave across housetops a few blocks away, trading fire as they withdraw back into their nest in the Sarai neighborhood.
The Green Berets pursue them onto Route Barracuda. Fire fights rage from one side of the street to the other, the combatants as close as 55 yards apart. Bradleys from Red Platoon pull forward, pounding the enemy firing positions; then the insurgents shift buildings and fire from new locations. Only after an Apache attack helicopter sends missiles into two insurgent buildings does the firing stop.
But the next day begins with a blistering fire fight. With the insurgents sniping at the soldiers on the front lines, the U.S. troops blast the area with cannon fire, obliterating nearby shops and houses from where gunmen had been shooting just moments before. The fighting is so close, you could throw rocks and hit the man trying to kill you. Buildings erupt in smoke and flames. F-16 fighter jets roar overhead. "We got people moving around on rooftops in the vicinity of the mosque," the Green Beret team sergeant reports on radio. Six Hellfire missiles come barreling in, detonating 80 yards away and showering rubble onto the troops' helmets. Pulling out, the Renegade Troop Apache pilot calls merrily to the team sergeant on the ground, "Stay safe, and kill some bad guys."
The insurgents withdraw, only to resurface in a flanking movement from the west, trying to snipe at Green Berets looking to the east, sparking another long fire fight. When things quiet down, it isn't for long. Although the U.S. inflicts heavy punishment on al-Zarqawi's men, the Americans also absorb losses. During a raid by Delta Force operators of Task Force 145 in western Tall 'Afar, insurgents put up fierce resistance at a house believed to be sheltering one of the city's top al-Qaeda operatives. Eight Delta men are wounded, two so seriously that an AC-130 Spectre gunship has to give a medevac covering fire to get the wounded to a combat-hospital operating theater in time to save them. Elsewhere, an improvised explosive device detonates under a Bradley fighting vehicle, blowing off its lid and killing a young medic who, though based in the rear, had volunteered to enter the fighting fray. A few feet forward, the toll would have been worse, killing the Bradley commander and his gunner. "This is a war of inches," says a shaken U.S. officer.
Across Iraq, the prize for the U.S. remains a clear-cut outcome, some indication that the U.S. is doing anything more than playing whack-a-mole with the insurgents. In Tall 'Afar, the U.S. and Iraqi troops awake on the morning of Sept. 6 to the sound of messages being broadcast over loudspeakers instructing civilians to leave. At mid-morning, families begin to emerge across Route Barracuda waving sad little white flags. As a family shuffles past, a Green Beret weapons sergeant bellows for them to be stopped. "Who's that red-headed guy?" he asks. The men are sifted out, five identified as suspicious. Flashes of defiance and anger raise suspicions. "Hey, flex-cuff 'em," orders a Green Beret. Chemical swabs read positive for explosives on two of the men. Masked informants identify three--all brothers--as snipers, the other two as a rocket-propelled-grenade team. Across the battlefield, insurgents attempting to slip out of Sarai mix with civilians. Five dressed as women are snared, one with fake breasts. Others force children to hold their hands as though they are family. Some are caught; others are not. An intelligence officer says al-Qaeda is slipping to the east and behind them to the south, and "somehow--we don't know how"--cutting through the screen line to deploy to the west.
The two-day grace for civilians to evacuate stretches to a four-day standstill, as Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafaari orders a tactical "pause." With his nation divided along sectarian lines over the Tall 'Afar operation, al-Jafaari insists on assurances from military commanders that the battle will be a decisive success. The wait leaves the troops embittered, their momentum lost to what they see as political calculations. "This is turning into a goat f___," bemoans an angry Green Beret. By the time al-Jaafari approves the dreaded assault into al-Qaeda's heartland, it fizzles. Not a hostile shot is fired, not a single enemy fighter is found. Safe houses and weapons caches are empty, cleansed like an operating room. Only one blackened corpse, left rotting for days, is found. "They've even removed their dead," said a Green Beret, not really believing it himself.
What did Tall 'Afar accomplish? At best, the picture is mixed. McMaster did succeed in driving the insurgents out, denying al-Qaeda its Tall 'Afar base and disrupting its networks. Intelligence picked up in Tall 'Afar led to the arrest last week of Abu Fatima, al-Qaeda's military emir in Mosul. The cost in U.S. lives was minimal: only four died in the two weeks of fighting since Sept. 2. At the same time, many of the insurgents who had holed up in the city got away because of the indecision of Iraqi political leaders. And while the Pentagon hailed the operation for displaying the improved mettle of the U.S.-backed Iraqi forces, the operation showed that deep sectarian and ethnic schisms still exist among the Iraqi troops. It's not hard to find commanders who fear they are training troops for a civil war. "I don't know if we're going to be able to prevent what's coming," says a front-line U.S. lieutenant colonel.
With the war wrapped into so many political knots in Baghdad and Washington and the insurgents proving so resilient, the fight in Tall 'Afar, as in Iraq, is far from over. On the ground in the deserted city, the U.S. is pouring money into reconstruction in a bid to win local opinion. But there is every reason to believe the violence will return and the U.S. will be forced to fight there again--with the insurgents betting that the Americans will lose a bit more of their will and support each time they go back. In a house overrun during the battle, a newspaper sits in a living room, its pages brimming with pictures of a U.S. assault in the city. Dated Sept. 2-10, the report could have been an account of this month's battle, but it isn't. It is already a year old.
--With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly/Washington
TIME (http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1106333,00.html)
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Saddam's Revenge
The secret history of U.S. mistakes, misjudgments and intelligence failures that let the Iraqi dictator and his allies launch an insurgency now ripping Iraq apart
By JOE KLEIN
Sep. 26, 2005
Five men met in an automobile in a Baghdad park a few weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime in April 2003, according to U.S. intelligence sources. One of the five was Saddam. The other four were among his closest advisers. The agenda: how to fight back against the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. A representative of Saddam's former No. 2, Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, was there. But the most intriguing man in the car may have been a retired general named Muhammad Yunis al-Ahmed, who had been a senior member of the Military Bureau, a secret Baath Party spy service. The bureau's job had been to keep an eye on the Iraqi military--and to organize Baathist resistance in the event of a coup. Now a U.S. coup had taken place, and Saddam turned to al-Ahmed and the others and told them to start "rebuilding your networks."
The 45-minute meeting was pieced together months later by U.S. military intelligence. It represents a rare moment of clarity in the dust storm of violence that swirls through central Iraq. The insurgency has grown well beyond its initial Baathist core to include religious extremist and Iraqi nationalist organizations, and plain old civilians who are angry at the American occupation. But Saddam's message of "rebuilding your networks" remains the central organizing principle.
More than two years into the war, U.S. intelligence sources concede that they still don't know enough about the nearly impenetrable web of what Iraqis call ahl al-thiqa (trust networks), which are at the heart of the insurgency. It's an inchoate movement without a single inspirational leader like Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh--a movement whose primary goal is perhaps even more improbable than the U.S. dream of creating an Iraqi democracy: restoring Sunni control in a country where Sunnis represent just 20% of the population. Intelligence experts can't credibly estimate the rebels' numbers but say most are Iraqis. Foreigners account for perhaps 2% of the suspected guerrillas who have been captured or killed, although they represent the vast majority of suicide bombers. ("They are ordnance," a U.S. intelligence official says.) The level of violence has been growing steadily. There have been roughly 80 attacks a day in recent weeks. Suicide bombs killed more than 200 people, mostly in Baghdad, during four days of carnage last week, among the deadliest since Saddam's fall.
More than a dozen current and former intelligence officers knowledgeable about Iraq spoke with TIME in recent weeks to share details about the conflict. They voiced their growing frustration with a war that they feel was not properly anticipated by the Bush Administration, a war fought with insufficient resources, a war that almost all of them now believe is not winnable militarily. "We're good at fighting armies, but we don't know how to do this," says a recently retired four-star general with Middle East experience. "We don't have enough intelligence analysts working on this problem. The Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA] puts most of its emphasis and its assets on Iran, North Korea and China. The Iraqi insurgency is simply not top priority, and that's a damn shame."
The intelligence officers stressed these points:
• They believe that Saddam's inner circle--especially those from the Military Bureau--initially organized the insurgency's support structure and that networks led by former Saddam associates like al-Ahmed and al-Duri still provide money and logistical help.
• The Bush Administration's fixation on finding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in 2003 diverted precious intelligence resources that could have helped thwart the fledgling insurgency.
• From the beginning of the insurgency, U.S. military officers have tried to contact and negotiate with rebel leaders, including, as a senior Iraq expert puts it, "some of the people with blood on their hands."
• The frequent replacement of U.S. military and administrative teams in Baghdad has made it difficult to develop a counterinsurgency strategy.
The accumulation of blunders has led a Pentagon guerrilla-warfare expert to conclude, "We are repeating every mistake we made in Vietnam."
THE WRONG FOCUS
It is no secret that General Tommy Franks didn't want to hang around Iraq very long. As Franks led the U.S. assault on Baghdad in April 2003, his goal--and that of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld--was to get to the capital as quickly as possible with a minimal number of troops. Franks succeeded brilliantly at that task. But military-intelligence officers contend that he did not seem interested in what would come next. "He never once asked us for a briefing about what happened once we got to Baghdad," says a former Army intelligence officer attached to the invasion force. "He said, 'It's not my job.' We figured all he wanted to do was get in, get out and write his book." (Franks, through a spokesman, declined to comment for this article.)
The rush to Baghdad, critics say, laid the groundwork for trouble to come. In one prewar briefing, for example, Lieut. General David McKiernan--who commanded the land component of the coalition forces--asked Franks what should be done if his troops found Iraqi arms caches on the way to Baghdad. "Just put a lock on 'em and go, Dave," Franks replied, according to a former U.S. Central Command (Centcom) officer. Of course, you couldn't simply put a lock on ammunition dumps that stretched for several square miles--dumps that would soon be stripped and provide a steady source of weaponry for the insurgency.
U.S. troops entered Baghdad on April 5. There was euphoria in the Pentagon. The looting in the streets of Baghdad and the continuing attacks on coalition troops were considered temporary phenomena that would soon subside. On May 1, President George W. Bush announced, "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended," on the deck of an aircraft carrier, near a banner that read MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. Shortly thereafter, Franks moved his headquarters from Qatar back to Florida. He was followed there in June by McKiernan, whose Baghdad operation included several hundred intelligence officers who had been keeping track of the situation on the ground. "Allowing McKiernan to leave was the worst decision of the war," says one of his superiors. (The decision, he says, was Franks'.) "We replaced an operational force with a tactical force, which meant generals were replaced by colonels." Major General Ricardo Sanchez, a relatively junior commander and a recent arrival in Iraq, was put in charge. "After McKiernan left, we had fewer than 30 intelligence officers trying to figure who the enemy was," says a top-ranking military official who was in Iraq at the time. "We were starting from scratch, with practically no resources."
On May 23, the U.S. made what is generally regarded as a colossal mistake. L. Paul Bremer--the newly arrived administrator of the U.S. government presence, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA)--disbanded the Iraqi army and civil service on Rumsfeld's orders. "We made hundreds of thousands of people very angry at us," says a Western diplomat attached to the CPA, "and they happened to be the people in the country best acquainted with the use of arms." Thousands moved directly into the insurgency--not just soldiers but also civil servants who took with them useful knowledge of Iraq's electrical grid and water and sewage systems. Bremer says he doesn't regret that decision, according to his spokesman Dan Senor. "The Kurds and Shi'ites didn't want Saddam's army in business," says Senor, "and the army had gone home. We had bombed their barracks. How were we supposed to bring them back and separate out the bad guys? We didn't even have enough troops to stop the looting in Baghdad."
A third decision in the spring of 2003--to make the search for WMD the highest intelligence priority--also hampered the U.S. ability to fight the insurgents. In June, former weapons inspector David Kay arrived in Baghdad to lead the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which had 1,200 intelligence officers and support staff members assigned to search for WMD. They had exclusive access to literally tons of documents collected from Saddam's office, intelligence services and ministries after the regime fell. Kay clashed repeatedly with U.S. military leaders who wanted access not only to the documents but also to some of the resources--analysts, translators, field agents--at his disposal. "I was in meetings where [General John] Abizaid was pounding on the table trying to get some help," says a senior military officer. "But Kay wouldn't budge."
Indeed, a covert-intelligence officer working for the ISG told TIME correspondent Brian Bennett that he had been ordered in August 2003 to "terminate" contact with Iraqi sources not working on WMD. As a result, the officer says, he stopped meeting with a dozen Iraqis who were providing information--maps, photographs and addresses of former Baathist militants, safe houses and stockpiles of explosives--about the insurgency in the Mosul area. "The President's priority--and my mission--was to focus on WMD," Kay told TIME. "Abizaid needed help with the counterinsurgency. He said, 'You have the only organization in this country that's working.' But military guys are not used to people telling them no, and so, yes, there was friction."
Sanchez learned that autumn that there were 38 boxes of documents specifically related to the city of Fallujah, a hotbed of Sunni rebellion. Months later, when military-intelligence officers finally were able to review some of the documents, many of which had been marked NO INTELLIGENCE VALUE, the officers found information that they now say could have helped the U.S. stop the insurgency's spread. Among the papers were detailed civil-defense plans for cities like Fallujah, Samarra and Ramadi and rosters of leaders and local Baathist militia who would later prove to be the backbone of the insurgency in those cities.
U.S. military-intelligence sources say many of the documents still have not been translated or thoroughly analyzed. "You should see the warehouse in Qatar where we have this stuff," said a high-ranking former U.S. intelligence official. "We'll never be able to get through it all. Who knows?" he added, with a laugh. "We may even find the VX [nerve gas] in one of those boxes."
MISJUDGING THE ENEMY
As early as June 2003, the CIA told Bush in a briefing that he faced a "classic insurgency" in Iraq. But the White House didn't fully trust the CIA, and on June 30, Rumsfeld told reporters, "I guess the reason I don't use the term guerrilla war is that it isn't ... anything like a guerrilla war or an organized resistance." The opposition, he claimed, was composed of "looters, criminals, remnants of the Baathist regime" and a few foreign fighters. Indeed, Rumsfeld could claim progress in finding and capturing most of the 55 top members of Saddam's regime--the famous Iraqi deck of cards. (To date, 44 of the 55 have been captured or killed.) Two weeks after Rumsfeld's comment, the Secretary of Defense was publicly contradicted by Centcom commander Abizaid, who said the U.S. indeed faced "a classical guerrilla-type campaign" in Iraq.
In a sense, both Rumsfeld and Abizaid were right. The backbone of the insurgency was thousands of Baathist remnants organizing a guerrilla war against the Americans. According to documents later seized by the U.S. military, Saddam--who had been changing locations frequently until his capture in December 2003--tried to stay in charge of the rebellion. He fired off frequent letters filled with instructions for his subordinates. Some were pathetic. In one, he explained guerrilla tradecraft to his inner circle--how to keep in touch with one another, how to establish new contacts, how to remain clandestine. Of course, the people doing the actual fighting needed no such advice, and decisions about whom to attack when and where were made by the cells. Saddam's minions, including al-Duri and al-Ahmed, were away from the front lines, providing money, arms and logistical support for the cells.
But Saddam did make one strategic decision that helped alter the course of the insurgency. In early autumn he sent a letter to associates ordering them to change the target focus from coalition forces to Iraqi "collaborators"--that is, to attack Iraqi police stations. The insurgency had already announced its seriousness and lethal intent with a summer bombing campaign. On Aug. 7, a bomb went off outside the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, killing 19 people. Far more ominous was the Aug. 19 blast that destroyed the U.N.'s headquarters in Baghdad, killing U.N. representative Sergio Vieira de Mello and 22 others. Although al-Qaeda leader Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi claimed responsibility for the attack, U.S. intelligence officials believe that remnants of Saddam's Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) carried it out. "It was a pure Baathist operation," says a senior U.S. intelligence official. "The Iraqis who served as U.N. security guards simply didn't show up for work that day. It wasn't a suicide bomb. The truck driver left the scene. Our [explosives] team found that the bomb had the distinctive forensics of Saddam's IIS."
On Oct. 27, 2003, the assaults on "collaborators" that Saddam had requested began with attacks on four Iraqi police stations--and on International Red Cross headquarters--in Baghdad, killing 40 people. The assaults revealed a deadly new alliance between the Baathists and the jihadi insurgents. U.S. intelligence agents later concluded, after interviewing one of the suicide bombers, a Sudanese who failed in his attempt, that the operation had been a collaboration between former Baathists and al-Zarqawi. The Baathists had helped move the suicide bombers into the country, according to the U.S. sources, and then provided shelter, support (including automobiles) and coordination for the attacks.
MISHANDLING THE TRIBES
By almost every account, Sanchez and Bremer did not get along. The conflict was predictable--the soldiers tended to be realists fighting a nasty war; the civilians, idealists trying to create a new Iraq--but it was troubling nonetheless. The soldiers wanted to try diplomacy and began reaching out to the less extreme elements of the insurgency to bring them into negotiations over Iraq's political future. The diplomats took a harder line, refusing to negotiate with the enemy.
Military-intelligence officers presented the CPA with a plan to make a deal with 19 subtribes of the enormous Dulaimi clan, located in al-Anbar province, the heart of the Sunni triangle. The tribes "had agreed to disarm and keep us informed of traffic going through their territories," says a former Army intelligence officer. "All it would have required from the CPA was formal recognition that the tribes existed--and $3 million." The money would go toward establishing tribal security forces. "It was a foot in the door, but we couldn't get the CPA to move." Bremer's spokesman Senor says a significant effort was made to reach out to the tribes. But several military officials dispute that. "The standard answer we got from Bremer's people was that tribes are a vestige of the past, that they have no place in the new democratic Iraq," says the former intelligence officer. "Eventually they paid some lip service and set up a tribal office, but it was grudging."
The Baathists, on the other hand, were more active in courting the tribes. Starting in November 2003, tribal sheiks and Baathist expatriates held a series of monthly meetings at the Cham Palace hotel in Damascus. They were public events, supposedly meetings to express solidarity with the Iraqi opposition to the U.S. occupation. (The January 2004 gathering was attended by Syrian President Bashar Assad.) Behind the scenes, however, the meetings provided a convenient cover for leaders of the insurgency, including Muhammad Yunis al-Ahmed, the former Military Bureau director, to meet, plan and distribute money. A senior military officer told TIME that U.S. intelligence had an informant--a mid-level Baathist official who belonged to the Dulaimi tribe--attending the meetings and keeping the Americans informed about the insurgents' growing cohesion. But the increased flow of information did not produce a coherent strategy for fighting the growing rebellion.
THE DEALMAKING GOES NOWHERE
Saddam was captured on Dec. 13, 2003, in a spider hole on a farm near Tikrit. His briefcase was filled with documents identifying many of the former Baathists running support networks for the insurgency. It was the first major victory of what the U.S. called the postcombat phase of the war: in early 2004, 188 insurgents were captured, many of whom had been mentioned in the seized documents. Although Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, Saddam's former No. 2, narrowly evaded capture, much of his Mosul and Kirkuk apparatus was rolled up. Baathist financial networks were disrupted in several provinces. The CIA, in fact, believes that Saddam's capture permanently crippled the Baathist wing of the insurgency. "A guy like al-Duri is more symbol than substance at this point," a U.S. intelligence official says. "The parade has passed him by."
Military-intelligence officers who were in Iraq at the time, however, saw evidence that the Baathists regrouped in the spring of 2004, when the U.S. was preoccupied with battling a rebellion led by Shi'ite extremist Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq's south and with the fight for the rebel-held city of Fallujah in the Sunni triangle. And the U.S. intelligence officials believe that some former regime loyalists began to be absorbed by other rebel groups, including those made up of religious extremists and Iraqi nationalists.
Al-Ahmed, say U.S. intelligence officials, is still running the support network he began building after the meeting with Saddam in the car. In May 2004 al-Ahmed set off on one of his periodic tours of the combat zone, meeting with local insurgent leaders, distributing money and passing along news--a trip later pieced together by U.S. intelligence analysts wading through the mountain of data and intelligence provided by low-level local informants. Al-Ahmed started in his hometown of Mosul, where he had been supervising--from a distance--the rebuilding of the local insurgent network disrupted after Saddam's capture. He moved on to Hawija, where he met a man thought to be a senior financier of the insurgency in north-central Iraq. After a brief stay at a farmhouse near Samarra, he met with military leaders of religious and nationalist rebel groups in Baghdad and with Rashid Taan Kazim, one of the few faces from the deck of cards (al-Duri is another) still at large, who is thought to be running a support network for the insurgency in the north and west of Iraq. Al-Ahmed's final stop was Ramadi, where he distributed $500,000 to local insurgency leaders.
What is remarkable is the extent to which the U.S. is aware of al-Ahmed's activities. "We know where Muhammad Yunis al-Ahmed lives in Damascus," says a U.S. intelligence official. "We know his phone number. He believes he has the protection of the Syrian government, and that certainly seems to be the case." But he hasn't been aggressively pursued by the U.S. either--in part because there has been a persistent and forlorn hope that al-Ahmed might be willing to help negotiate an end to the Baathist part of the insurgency. A senior U.S. intelligence officer says that al-Ahmed was called at least twice by former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi--an old acquaintance--and that a representative of an "other government agency," a military euphemism that usually means the CIA, "knocked on his door in 2004 and asked if he was willing to talk. He wasn't."
STARTING OVER AGAIN
In the middle of 2004, the U.S. again changed its team in Baghdad. Bremer and Sanchez left, replaced by Ambassador John Negroponte and General George Casey. At the same time, there was a new transitional Iraqi government, led by Iyad Allawi. Negroponte set up a joint military-diplomatic team to review the situation in the country. The consensus was that things were a mess, that little had been accomplished on either the civilian or the military side and that there was no effective plan for dealing with the insurgency. The new team quickly concluded that the insurgency could not be defeated militarily--but that it might be divided. The attempts to engage potential allies like al-Ahmed became the unstated policy as U.S. and Iraqi officials sought ways to isolate foreign terrorists like al-Zarqawi.
But progress in the effort to defuse the insurgency through dealmaking has been slow--and in some cases has led the U.S. to ease pressure on individuals tied to rebel groups. Consider the careful handling of Harith al-Dhari, chairman of the Association of Muslim Scholars and one of Iraq's most important Sunni leaders. In late 2003, several insurgent groups began to meet regularly in the Umm al-Qura mosque in Baghdad, over which al-Dhari presides. According to U.S. intelligence reports, al-Dhari--who has said he might encourage his organization to take part in the democratic process--did not attend the meetings. But his son Muthanna--who is thought to be an important link between the nationalist and religious strains of the insurgency--did. In August 2004, the son was arrested after his car scanned positive for explosives residue. But he was quickly released, a retired DIA analyst says, under pressure from Iraq's government, to keep channels open to his father. "It would be difficult to lure Harith into the tent if Muthanna were in jail," says the former officer.
By April 2004, U.S. military-intelligence officers were also holding face-to-face talks with Abdullah al-Janabi, a rebel leader from Fallujah. The meetings ended after al-Zarqawi--who had taken up residence in Fallujah--threatened to kill al-Janabi if the talks continued, according to U.S. and Iraqi sources. But attempts to negotiate with other insurgents are continuing, including with Saddam's former religious adviser. So far, the effort has been futile. "We keep hoping they'll come up with a Gerry Adams," says a U.S. intelligence official, referring to the leader of the Irish Republican Army's political wing. "But it just hasn't happened."
CIVIL WAR?
The leadership in Baghdad changed yet again this year. Negroponte left Baghdad in March to become director of national intelligence. He was replaced by Zalmay Khalilzad. But the turnover in the Iraqi government was far more important: religious Shi'ites, led by Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, took charge, a severe irritant to many Sunnis. "The insurgents see al-Jaafari as a traitor, a man who spent the Iran-Iraq war in Iran," says a senior military officer. "And many of the best officers we have trained in the new Iraqi army--Sunnis and secular Shi'ites who served in Saddam's army--feel the same way." Al-Jaafari did not help matters by opening diplomatic ties with Iran, apologizing for Iraq's behavior in the Iran-Iraq war and cutting economic deals with the Iranians.
In fact, some Iraq experts in the U.S. intelligence community have come to the conclusion that Iraqis' courageous recent steps toward democracy--the elections in January and the writing of a constitution that empowers the religious Shi'ites and the Kurds (though it is resoundingly opposed by the Sunnis)--have left the country in a more precarious position. "The big conversation in our shop these days," says a military-intelligence officer, "is whether it would be a good thing if the new constitution is voted down [in the public referendum] next month."
Iraq experts in the intelligence community believe that the proposed constitution, which creates autonomous regions for the Kurds and Shi'ites in the oil-rich north and south, could heighten the chances of an outright civil war. "A lot of us who have followed this thing have come to the conclusion that the Sunnis are the wolves--the real warriors--and the religious Shi'ites are the sheep," says an intelligence officer. "The Sunnis have the power to maintain this violence indefinitely."
Another hot debate in the intelligence community is whether to make a major change in the counterinsurgency strategy--to stop the aggressive sweeps through insurgent-riddled areas, like the recent offensive in Tall 'Afar, and try to concentrate troops and resources with the aim of improving security and living conditions in population centers like Baghdad. "We've taken Samarra four times, and we've lost it four times," says an intelligence officer. "We need a new strategy."
But the Pentagon leadership is unlikely to support a strategy that concedes broad swaths of territory to the enemy. In fact, none of the intelligence officers who spoke with TIME or their ranking superiors could provide a plausible road map toward stability in Iraq. It is quite possible that the occupation of Iraq was an unwise proposition from the start, as many U.S. allies in the region warned before the invasion. Yet, despite their gloom, every one of the officers favors continuing--indeed, augmenting--the war effort. If the U.S. leaves, they say, the chaos in central Iraq could threaten the stability of the entire Middle East. And al-Qaeda operatives like al-Zarqawi could have a relatively safe base of operations in the Sunni triangle. "We have never taken this operation seriously enough," says a retired senior military official with experience in Iraq. "We have never provided enough troops. We have never provided enough equipment, or the right kind of equipment. We have never worked the intelligence part of the war in a serious, sustained fashion. We have failed the Iraqi people, and we have failed our troops."
--With reporting by Brian Bennett/ Washington and Michael Ware/Baghdad
With doubts about Iraq growing at home, U.S. forces are struggling to put down an elusive and inexhaustible enemy. Michael Ware reports on the state of the counterinsurgency from the front lines of the biggest battle of the year
By MICHAEL WARE
Sep. 26, 2005
The troops call it Route Barracuda, a patch of terrorist territory in the northern Iraqi town of Tall 'Afar, where thousands of U.S. and Iraqi forces have converged for the biggest battle in nearly a year. On this sweaty September afternoon, the neighborhood is living up to its name. A squad of U.S. commandos enters an abandoned house and clambers up to the roof. The 2-foot lip doesn't give much cover from the bullets raining down on them from insurgent gunmen firing from a building 200 yards to the north. Rounds flying at supersonic speed crack inches from the troops' ears. "Get down, goddammit," a Green Beret hollers to his Iraqi counterparts. On their bellies, two weapons sergeants start loading an 84-mm M-3 antitank recoilless rifle. "They got guns," says a commando shouldering a rocket launcher. "Let's f_______ do this." He kneels, exposing himself without any choice, takes aim and fires. Whump. The top of the insurgents' building blossoms black smoke. Over the cacophony of machine-gun fire and explosions, the leader of the commando team bellows to his men that the insurgents have spotted them. "Displace, displace--they got our position!" he yells, as the troops vacate the open rooftop in a stooped sprint.
The offensive in Tall 'Afar, which wound down last week, was this year's Fallujah--a mass assault involving 7,000 U.S. and Iraqi soldiers and hundreds of Bradleys, battle tanks, artillery pieces, all combined with AC-130 Spectre gunships, F-16 fighter jets and attack helicopters. Unlike the Fallujah battle, Tall 'Afar raged mostly unseen, with accounts of the fighting limited largely to the reports of U.S. and Iraqi officials in Baghdad, who declared that the onslaught had succeeded in driving out the bands of rebels--local units commanded by al-Qaeda kingpin Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi--from their latest safe haven. But almost as soon as the offensive ended, the cycle of mayhem started anew: two days after the capture of al-Qaeda's stronghold in Tall 'Afar, al-Zarqawi unleashed a retaliatory wave of 11 suicide bombings in Baghdad, killing more than 150 people in the deadliest day of attacks in the capital since the start of the war. Iraq's Defense Minister, Sadoun Dulaimi, responded to the attacks by telling reporters, "I think what is happening is the last breath of the terrorists"--an assessment that even some U.S. commanders found unduly upbeat after yet another bloody week. "We have not broken the back of the insurgency," says a high-ranking U.S. officer. "The insurgency is like a cell-phone system. You shut down one node, another somewhere else comes online to replace it."
Two and a half years since the U.S. invasion, nine months after the election of a government in Baghdad and weeks before millions of Iraqis will vote on a constitution that threatens to further split the country, this is the reality of the beleaguered U.S. mission in Iraq: a never-ending fight against a seemingly inexhaustible enemy emboldened by the U.S. presence, the measure of success as elusive as the insurgents themselves. For months, the intractability of the fighting and Iraq's momentum toward civil war have caused a gradual but still manageable erosion in public support for the Bush Administration's stick-it-out strategy, which depends on training Iraqis in sufficient numbers to take over combat duties and allow U.S. troops to begin pulling out. Senior U.S. officials say it could take a decade to quell the insurgency, with successful withdrawal years away. But the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina and the massive price tag for rebuilding the Gulf Coast have ratcheted up the sense of urgency among lawmakers and some Administration officials about finding an exit strategy. In a TIME poll taken 10 days after the hurricane, 57% said they disapproved of President Bush's handling of the war; 61% said they supported cutting Iraq spending to pay for hurricane relief. Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita downplays those figures, asking, "What is it worth to avoid another 9/11?" But privately, Pentagon officials acknowledge that the reservoir of public faith in the war effort is running dangerously low. "The issue of American staying power is forefront in our minds," says a military officer. "Everything has costs."
With the public increasingly unwilling to pay those costs, the U.S. faces hard questions. Can political success still be salvaged from an unwinnable military fight after the series of failures (see following story) that have marked the U.S. enterprise in Iraq? How can the U.S. extract itself without compounding the damage done to U.S. interests in the region? After a month in the al-Qaeda-dominated Syrian border region, TIME spent 10 days on the front lines of the war, having lived with U.S. and Iraqi troops as they prepared for the battle of Tall 'Afar, one of al-Zarqawi's biggest strongholds and, intelligence officers say, a place where he was detected in recent weeks. Waiting for the Americans were hundreds of hardened local fighters, small bands of foreign zealots and, in the notorious Sarai quarter of the city, a labyrinth of medieval alleyways laced with booby traps and roadside bombs. Two weeks after the start of the offensive, the military claimed more than 200 insurgents killed. But field commanders and top intelligence officers acknowledge that the U.S. is no closer to subduing the insurgents and the threat they pose to Iraq's stability. Although dozens of al-Zarqawi's fighters may have died in Tall 'Afar, the U.S. and Iraqi forces were unable to prevent others from getting away. In its tempo, ferocity and politically compromised outcome, the story of Tall 'Afar stands as a parable of the dangers, dilemmas and frustrations that still haunt the U.S. in Iraq. Despite the temporary tactical gains made by the U.S.'s 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, the battle refreshes doubts about whether anything resembling victory in this war can still be achieved.
Nestled close to Syria, Tall 'Afar is at the center of a vast border region rife with smuggling and anti-American sentiment. After the U.S. invasion, it became a gateway for foreign fighters entering Iraq. In time, homegrown insurgent cells came under the control of al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia organization, which transformed the city into a training and command base for foreign jihadis and a hideout for al-Zarqawi and his deputies. After the fall of Fallujah, the town became a propaganda tool for the resistance, with attacks on U.S. forces in the city featured heavily in the "top 10 attacks" videos circulated among insurgent groups. For civilians, especially the Shi'ite minority, the city became a prison under insurgent rule. Al-Zarqawi's shock troops commandeered buses, schools and businesses for military purposes, evicting uncooperative families and selling their furniture. Insurgent videos and residents' accounts detail how anyone deemed to be collaborating with U.S. forces was executed, often publicly. "The enemy has taken good people who have worked with us out into the street and cut their heads off," armored reconnaissance troop commander Captain Jesse Sellars told his replacements coming into western Tall 'Afar.
Although U.S. officers had known for months about the atrocities taking place in Tall 'Afar, they were powerless to do anything about them. Stretched thin fighting rebels in places like al-Qaim and Mosul, the military dedicated just a single infantry battalion to an area twice the size of Connecticut. In May, however, more than 4,000 troops of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, a unit with a unique combination of tanks, Bradleys and helicopters that is back for its second tour in Iraq, were hastily rerouted from the south to the Tall 'Afar region, where they began disrupting the insurgents' supply lines and safe havens. They paid a price: two platoons alone saw a third of their 50-odd soldiers killed or wounded in less than four months, and hardy Abrams tanks and Bradley vehicles burned in the streets. "A day can go from good to bad in a heartbeat in there," says reconnaissance helicopter pilot Captain Matthew Junko. And so last month the regiment's commander, Colonel H.R. McMaster, told his troops what he had been itching to say all along: it was time to take back Tall 'Afar.
The order for the main force to move comes on Sept. 2. That day, in an armored squadron pushing into the city from the north and the south, Grim Troop's Blue Platoon, dubbed the Dragoons, enters from the southeast along an artery code-named Route Corvette, into a predominantly Shi'ite neighborhood. Within 30 minutes, they come under sniper fire. A three-man sniper team from the élite Iraqi Counterterrorism Task Force (akin to the U.S. Delta Force), with a pair of U.S. special-forces liaisons, takes positions in front of the platoon, scanning for muzzle flashes, as an Abrams tank 50 yards up Corvette fires its 120-mm cannon at an insurgent mortar team, followed by a burst of .50-cal. machine-gun fire. A helicopter swoops ahead, firing a Hellfire missile at the insurgent position to help clear Blue Platoon's path. The helicopters kill at least a dozen insurgents by firing missiles into safe houses. At day's end Blue Platoon pulls out of the city to a rendezvous point in the desert, but fresh intelligence suggests the insurgents are displaying their mettle and have fallen back into well-defended positions. This enemy is not a rabble.
The Dragoons re-enter Tall 'Afar at 6 a.m. the next day, linking up with two Iraqi army infantry companies of Kurdish peshmerga and the U.S. special-force teams attached to them. The mission is to begin "draining the pond," as U.S. officers call it--clearing civilians from what is about to become a battlefield so that the insurgents could not blend back into the fold. The scenes are heart wrenching: the Kurds burst into houses as families gather for breakfast, ordering them at gunpoint onto the street with only the possessions and provisions they can grab in a few seconds. Women wail, and children cling to their mothers' sides, as they head to temporary camps on the city's fringe. Although explosions can be heard in the distance, the town takes on an eerie silence. "The city has never been this quiet," says a U.S. special-forces officer. "They're either getting ready, or they've left." Captain Brian Oman, the leader of the Dragoons, wonders if the homegrown "bad guys" are going to put down their weapons and sneak out with the civilians. "We'll be fighting them again in a week," he says.
It doesn't take that long. In the morning, the U.S. and Kurdish special forces begin moving north, toward Sarai, through the stone-paved alleyways. Within minutes, they are ambushed. The U.S. commanders rush machine-gun teams to the rooftops to pour out suppressing fire as the others advance below, clearing houses as they go. Anguished families come rushing out, caught in the cross fire and herded by the soldiers to the relative safety of the edge of town. A little girl cups her ears with her hands and wails each time firing breaks out. A 5-year-old boy gingerly waves a white flag. Insurgents duck and weave across housetops a few blocks away, trading fire as they withdraw back into their nest in the Sarai neighborhood.
The Green Berets pursue them onto Route Barracuda. Fire fights rage from one side of the street to the other, the combatants as close as 55 yards apart. Bradleys from Red Platoon pull forward, pounding the enemy firing positions; then the insurgents shift buildings and fire from new locations. Only after an Apache attack helicopter sends missiles into two insurgent buildings does the firing stop.
But the next day begins with a blistering fire fight. With the insurgents sniping at the soldiers on the front lines, the U.S. troops blast the area with cannon fire, obliterating nearby shops and houses from where gunmen had been shooting just moments before. The fighting is so close, you could throw rocks and hit the man trying to kill you. Buildings erupt in smoke and flames. F-16 fighter jets roar overhead. "We got people moving around on rooftops in the vicinity of the mosque," the Green Beret team sergeant reports on radio. Six Hellfire missiles come barreling in, detonating 80 yards away and showering rubble onto the troops' helmets. Pulling out, the Renegade Troop Apache pilot calls merrily to the team sergeant on the ground, "Stay safe, and kill some bad guys."
The insurgents withdraw, only to resurface in a flanking movement from the west, trying to snipe at Green Berets looking to the east, sparking another long fire fight. When things quiet down, it isn't for long. Although the U.S. inflicts heavy punishment on al-Zarqawi's men, the Americans also absorb losses. During a raid by Delta Force operators of Task Force 145 in western Tall 'Afar, insurgents put up fierce resistance at a house believed to be sheltering one of the city's top al-Qaeda operatives. Eight Delta men are wounded, two so seriously that an AC-130 Spectre gunship has to give a medevac covering fire to get the wounded to a combat-hospital operating theater in time to save them. Elsewhere, an improvised explosive device detonates under a Bradley fighting vehicle, blowing off its lid and killing a young medic who, though based in the rear, had volunteered to enter the fighting fray. A few feet forward, the toll would have been worse, killing the Bradley commander and his gunner. "This is a war of inches," says a shaken U.S. officer.
Across Iraq, the prize for the U.S. remains a clear-cut outcome, some indication that the U.S. is doing anything more than playing whack-a-mole with the insurgents. In Tall 'Afar, the U.S. and Iraqi troops awake on the morning of Sept. 6 to the sound of messages being broadcast over loudspeakers instructing civilians to leave. At mid-morning, families begin to emerge across Route Barracuda waving sad little white flags. As a family shuffles past, a Green Beret weapons sergeant bellows for them to be stopped. "Who's that red-headed guy?" he asks. The men are sifted out, five identified as suspicious. Flashes of defiance and anger raise suspicions. "Hey, flex-cuff 'em," orders a Green Beret. Chemical swabs read positive for explosives on two of the men. Masked informants identify three--all brothers--as snipers, the other two as a rocket-propelled-grenade team. Across the battlefield, insurgents attempting to slip out of Sarai mix with civilians. Five dressed as women are snared, one with fake breasts. Others force children to hold their hands as though they are family. Some are caught; others are not. An intelligence officer says al-Qaeda is slipping to the east and behind them to the south, and "somehow--we don't know how"--cutting through the screen line to deploy to the west.
The two-day grace for civilians to evacuate stretches to a four-day standstill, as Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafaari orders a tactical "pause." With his nation divided along sectarian lines over the Tall 'Afar operation, al-Jafaari insists on assurances from military commanders that the battle will be a decisive success. The wait leaves the troops embittered, their momentum lost to what they see as political calculations. "This is turning into a goat f___," bemoans an angry Green Beret. By the time al-Jaafari approves the dreaded assault into al-Qaeda's heartland, it fizzles. Not a hostile shot is fired, not a single enemy fighter is found. Safe houses and weapons caches are empty, cleansed like an operating room. Only one blackened corpse, left rotting for days, is found. "They've even removed their dead," said a Green Beret, not really believing it himself.
What did Tall 'Afar accomplish? At best, the picture is mixed. McMaster did succeed in driving the insurgents out, denying al-Qaeda its Tall 'Afar base and disrupting its networks. Intelligence picked up in Tall 'Afar led to the arrest last week of Abu Fatima, al-Qaeda's military emir in Mosul. The cost in U.S. lives was minimal: only four died in the two weeks of fighting since Sept. 2. At the same time, many of the insurgents who had holed up in the city got away because of the indecision of Iraqi political leaders. And while the Pentagon hailed the operation for displaying the improved mettle of the U.S.-backed Iraqi forces, the operation showed that deep sectarian and ethnic schisms still exist among the Iraqi troops. It's not hard to find commanders who fear they are training troops for a civil war. "I don't know if we're going to be able to prevent what's coming," says a front-line U.S. lieutenant colonel.
With the war wrapped into so many political knots in Baghdad and Washington and the insurgents proving so resilient, the fight in Tall 'Afar, as in Iraq, is far from over. On the ground in the deserted city, the U.S. is pouring money into reconstruction in a bid to win local opinion. But there is every reason to believe the violence will return and the U.S. will be forced to fight there again--with the insurgents betting that the Americans will lose a bit more of their will and support each time they go back. In a house overrun during the battle, a newspaper sits in a living room, its pages brimming with pictures of a U.S. assault in the city. Dated Sept. 2-10, the report could have been an account of this month's battle, but it isn't. It is already a year old.
--With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly/Washington
TIME (http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1106333,00.html)
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Saddam's Revenge
The secret history of U.S. mistakes, misjudgments and intelligence failures that let the Iraqi dictator and his allies launch an insurgency now ripping Iraq apart
By JOE KLEIN
Sep. 26, 2005
Five men met in an automobile in a Baghdad park a few weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime in April 2003, according to U.S. intelligence sources. One of the five was Saddam. The other four were among his closest advisers. The agenda: how to fight back against the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. A representative of Saddam's former No. 2, Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, was there. But the most intriguing man in the car may have been a retired general named Muhammad Yunis al-Ahmed, who had been a senior member of the Military Bureau, a secret Baath Party spy service. The bureau's job had been to keep an eye on the Iraqi military--and to organize Baathist resistance in the event of a coup. Now a U.S. coup had taken place, and Saddam turned to al-Ahmed and the others and told them to start "rebuilding your networks."
The 45-minute meeting was pieced together months later by U.S. military intelligence. It represents a rare moment of clarity in the dust storm of violence that swirls through central Iraq. The insurgency has grown well beyond its initial Baathist core to include religious extremist and Iraqi nationalist organizations, and plain old civilians who are angry at the American occupation. But Saddam's message of "rebuilding your networks" remains the central organizing principle.
More than two years into the war, U.S. intelligence sources concede that they still don't know enough about the nearly impenetrable web of what Iraqis call ahl al-thiqa (trust networks), which are at the heart of the insurgency. It's an inchoate movement without a single inspirational leader like Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh--a movement whose primary goal is perhaps even more improbable than the U.S. dream of creating an Iraqi democracy: restoring Sunni control in a country where Sunnis represent just 20% of the population. Intelligence experts can't credibly estimate the rebels' numbers but say most are Iraqis. Foreigners account for perhaps 2% of the suspected guerrillas who have been captured or killed, although they represent the vast majority of suicide bombers. ("They are ordnance," a U.S. intelligence official says.) The level of violence has been growing steadily. There have been roughly 80 attacks a day in recent weeks. Suicide bombs killed more than 200 people, mostly in Baghdad, during four days of carnage last week, among the deadliest since Saddam's fall.
More than a dozen current and former intelligence officers knowledgeable about Iraq spoke with TIME in recent weeks to share details about the conflict. They voiced their growing frustration with a war that they feel was not properly anticipated by the Bush Administration, a war fought with insufficient resources, a war that almost all of them now believe is not winnable militarily. "We're good at fighting armies, but we don't know how to do this," says a recently retired four-star general with Middle East experience. "We don't have enough intelligence analysts working on this problem. The Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA] puts most of its emphasis and its assets on Iran, North Korea and China. The Iraqi insurgency is simply not top priority, and that's a damn shame."
The intelligence officers stressed these points:
• They believe that Saddam's inner circle--especially those from the Military Bureau--initially organized the insurgency's support structure and that networks led by former Saddam associates like al-Ahmed and al-Duri still provide money and logistical help.
• The Bush Administration's fixation on finding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in 2003 diverted precious intelligence resources that could have helped thwart the fledgling insurgency.
• From the beginning of the insurgency, U.S. military officers have tried to contact and negotiate with rebel leaders, including, as a senior Iraq expert puts it, "some of the people with blood on their hands."
• The frequent replacement of U.S. military and administrative teams in Baghdad has made it difficult to develop a counterinsurgency strategy.
The accumulation of blunders has led a Pentagon guerrilla-warfare expert to conclude, "We are repeating every mistake we made in Vietnam."
THE WRONG FOCUS
It is no secret that General Tommy Franks didn't want to hang around Iraq very long. As Franks led the U.S. assault on Baghdad in April 2003, his goal--and that of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld--was to get to the capital as quickly as possible with a minimal number of troops. Franks succeeded brilliantly at that task. But military-intelligence officers contend that he did not seem interested in what would come next. "He never once asked us for a briefing about what happened once we got to Baghdad," says a former Army intelligence officer attached to the invasion force. "He said, 'It's not my job.' We figured all he wanted to do was get in, get out and write his book." (Franks, through a spokesman, declined to comment for this article.)
The rush to Baghdad, critics say, laid the groundwork for trouble to come. In one prewar briefing, for example, Lieut. General David McKiernan--who commanded the land component of the coalition forces--asked Franks what should be done if his troops found Iraqi arms caches on the way to Baghdad. "Just put a lock on 'em and go, Dave," Franks replied, according to a former U.S. Central Command (Centcom) officer. Of course, you couldn't simply put a lock on ammunition dumps that stretched for several square miles--dumps that would soon be stripped and provide a steady source of weaponry for the insurgency.
U.S. troops entered Baghdad on April 5. There was euphoria in the Pentagon. The looting in the streets of Baghdad and the continuing attacks on coalition troops were considered temporary phenomena that would soon subside. On May 1, President George W. Bush announced, "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended," on the deck of an aircraft carrier, near a banner that read MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. Shortly thereafter, Franks moved his headquarters from Qatar back to Florida. He was followed there in June by McKiernan, whose Baghdad operation included several hundred intelligence officers who had been keeping track of the situation on the ground. "Allowing McKiernan to leave was the worst decision of the war," says one of his superiors. (The decision, he says, was Franks'.) "We replaced an operational force with a tactical force, which meant generals were replaced by colonels." Major General Ricardo Sanchez, a relatively junior commander and a recent arrival in Iraq, was put in charge. "After McKiernan left, we had fewer than 30 intelligence officers trying to figure who the enemy was," says a top-ranking military official who was in Iraq at the time. "We were starting from scratch, with practically no resources."
On May 23, the U.S. made what is generally regarded as a colossal mistake. L. Paul Bremer--the newly arrived administrator of the U.S. government presence, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA)--disbanded the Iraqi army and civil service on Rumsfeld's orders. "We made hundreds of thousands of people very angry at us," says a Western diplomat attached to the CPA, "and they happened to be the people in the country best acquainted with the use of arms." Thousands moved directly into the insurgency--not just soldiers but also civil servants who took with them useful knowledge of Iraq's electrical grid and water and sewage systems. Bremer says he doesn't regret that decision, according to his spokesman Dan Senor. "The Kurds and Shi'ites didn't want Saddam's army in business," says Senor, "and the army had gone home. We had bombed their barracks. How were we supposed to bring them back and separate out the bad guys? We didn't even have enough troops to stop the looting in Baghdad."
A third decision in the spring of 2003--to make the search for WMD the highest intelligence priority--also hampered the U.S. ability to fight the insurgents. In June, former weapons inspector David Kay arrived in Baghdad to lead the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which had 1,200 intelligence officers and support staff members assigned to search for WMD. They had exclusive access to literally tons of documents collected from Saddam's office, intelligence services and ministries after the regime fell. Kay clashed repeatedly with U.S. military leaders who wanted access not only to the documents but also to some of the resources--analysts, translators, field agents--at his disposal. "I was in meetings where [General John] Abizaid was pounding on the table trying to get some help," says a senior military officer. "But Kay wouldn't budge."
Indeed, a covert-intelligence officer working for the ISG told TIME correspondent Brian Bennett that he had been ordered in August 2003 to "terminate" contact with Iraqi sources not working on WMD. As a result, the officer says, he stopped meeting with a dozen Iraqis who were providing information--maps, photographs and addresses of former Baathist militants, safe houses and stockpiles of explosives--about the insurgency in the Mosul area. "The President's priority--and my mission--was to focus on WMD," Kay told TIME. "Abizaid needed help with the counterinsurgency. He said, 'You have the only organization in this country that's working.' But military guys are not used to people telling them no, and so, yes, there was friction."
Sanchez learned that autumn that there were 38 boxes of documents specifically related to the city of Fallujah, a hotbed of Sunni rebellion. Months later, when military-intelligence officers finally were able to review some of the documents, many of which had been marked NO INTELLIGENCE VALUE, the officers found information that they now say could have helped the U.S. stop the insurgency's spread. Among the papers were detailed civil-defense plans for cities like Fallujah, Samarra and Ramadi and rosters of leaders and local Baathist militia who would later prove to be the backbone of the insurgency in those cities.
U.S. military-intelligence sources say many of the documents still have not been translated or thoroughly analyzed. "You should see the warehouse in Qatar where we have this stuff," said a high-ranking former U.S. intelligence official. "We'll never be able to get through it all. Who knows?" he added, with a laugh. "We may even find the VX [nerve gas] in one of those boxes."
MISJUDGING THE ENEMY
As early as June 2003, the CIA told Bush in a briefing that he faced a "classic insurgency" in Iraq. But the White House didn't fully trust the CIA, and on June 30, Rumsfeld told reporters, "I guess the reason I don't use the term guerrilla war is that it isn't ... anything like a guerrilla war or an organized resistance." The opposition, he claimed, was composed of "looters, criminals, remnants of the Baathist regime" and a few foreign fighters. Indeed, Rumsfeld could claim progress in finding and capturing most of the 55 top members of Saddam's regime--the famous Iraqi deck of cards. (To date, 44 of the 55 have been captured or killed.) Two weeks after Rumsfeld's comment, the Secretary of Defense was publicly contradicted by Centcom commander Abizaid, who said the U.S. indeed faced "a classical guerrilla-type campaign" in Iraq.
In a sense, both Rumsfeld and Abizaid were right. The backbone of the insurgency was thousands of Baathist remnants organizing a guerrilla war against the Americans. According to documents later seized by the U.S. military, Saddam--who had been changing locations frequently until his capture in December 2003--tried to stay in charge of the rebellion. He fired off frequent letters filled with instructions for his subordinates. Some were pathetic. In one, he explained guerrilla tradecraft to his inner circle--how to keep in touch with one another, how to establish new contacts, how to remain clandestine. Of course, the people doing the actual fighting needed no such advice, and decisions about whom to attack when and where were made by the cells. Saddam's minions, including al-Duri and al-Ahmed, were away from the front lines, providing money, arms and logistical support for the cells.
But Saddam did make one strategic decision that helped alter the course of the insurgency. In early autumn he sent a letter to associates ordering them to change the target focus from coalition forces to Iraqi "collaborators"--that is, to attack Iraqi police stations. The insurgency had already announced its seriousness and lethal intent with a summer bombing campaign. On Aug. 7, a bomb went off outside the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, killing 19 people. Far more ominous was the Aug. 19 blast that destroyed the U.N.'s headquarters in Baghdad, killing U.N. representative Sergio Vieira de Mello and 22 others. Although al-Qaeda leader Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi claimed responsibility for the attack, U.S. intelligence officials believe that remnants of Saddam's Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) carried it out. "It was a pure Baathist operation," says a senior U.S. intelligence official. "The Iraqis who served as U.N. security guards simply didn't show up for work that day. It wasn't a suicide bomb. The truck driver left the scene. Our [explosives] team found that the bomb had the distinctive forensics of Saddam's IIS."
On Oct. 27, 2003, the assaults on "collaborators" that Saddam had requested began with attacks on four Iraqi police stations--and on International Red Cross headquarters--in Baghdad, killing 40 people. The assaults revealed a deadly new alliance between the Baathists and the jihadi insurgents. U.S. intelligence agents later concluded, after interviewing one of the suicide bombers, a Sudanese who failed in his attempt, that the operation had been a collaboration between former Baathists and al-Zarqawi. The Baathists had helped move the suicide bombers into the country, according to the U.S. sources, and then provided shelter, support (including automobiles) and coordination for the attacks.
MISHANDLING THE TRIBES
By almost every account, Sanchez and Bremer did not get along. The conflict was predictable--the soldiers tended to be realists fighting a nasty war; the civilians, idealists trying to create a new Iraq--but it was troubling nonetheless. The soldiers wanted to try diplomacy and began reaching out to the less extreme elements of the insurgency to bring them into negotiations over Iraq's political future. The diplomats took a harder line, refusing to negotiate with the enemy.
Military-intelligence officers presented the CPA with a plan to make a deal with 19 subtribes of the enormous Dulaimi clan, located in al-Anbar province, the heart of the Sunni triangle. The tribes "had agreed to disarm and keep us informed of traffic going through their territories," says a former Army intelligence officer. "All it would have required from the CPA was formal recognition that the tribes existed--and $3 million." The money would go toward establishing tribal security forces. "It was a foot in the door, but we couldn't get the CPA to move." Bremer's spokesman Senor says a significant effort was made to reach out to the tribes. But several military officials dispute that. "The standard answer we got from Bremer's people was that tribes are a vestige of the past, that they have no place in the new democratic Iraq," says the former intelligence officer. "Eventually they paid some lip service and set up a tribal office, but it was grudging."
The Baathists, on the other hand, were more active in courting the tribes. Starting in November 2003, tribal sheiks and Baathist expatriates held a series of monthly meetings at the Cham Palace hotel in Damascus. They were public events, supposedly meetings to express solidarity with the Iraqi opposition to the U.S. occupation. (The January 2004 gathering was attended by Syrian President Bashar Assad.) Behind the scenes, however, the meetings provided a convenient cover for leaders of the insurgency, including Muhammad Yunis al-Ahmed, the former Military Bureau director, to meet, plan and distribute money. A senior military officer told TIME that U.S. intelligence had an informant--a mid-level Baathist official who belonged to the Dulaimi tribe--attending the meetings and keeping the Americans informed about the insurgents' growing cohesion. But the increased flow of information did not produce a coherent strategy for fighting the growing rebellion.
THE DEALMAKING GOES NOWHERE
Saddam was captured on Dec. 13, 2003, in a spider hole on a farm near Tikrit. His briefcase was filled with documents identifying many of the former Baathists running support networks for the insurgency. It was the first major victory of what the U.S. called the postcombat phase of the war: in early 2004, 188 insurgents were captured, many of whom had been mentioned in the seized documents. Although Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, Saddam's former No. 2, narrowly evaded capture, much of his Mosul and Kirkuk apparatus was rolled up. Baathist financial networks were disrupted in several provinces. The CIA, in fact, believes that Saddam's capture permanently crippled the Baathist wing of the insurgency. "A guy like al-Duri is more symbol than substance at this point," a U.S. intelligence official says. "The parade has passed him by."
Military-intelligence officers who were in Iraq at the time, however, saw evidence that the Baathists regrouped in the spring of 2004, when the U.S. was preoccupied with battling a rebellion led by Shi'ite extremist Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq's south and with the fight for the rebel-held city of Fallujah in the Sunni triangle. And the U.S. intelligence officials believe that some former regime loyalists began to be absorbed by other rebel groups, including those made up of religious extremists and Iraqi nationalists.
Al-Ahmed, say U.S. intelligence officials, is still running the support network he began building after the meeting with Saddam in the car. In May 2004 al-Ahmed set off on one of his periodic tours of the combat zone, meeting with local insurgent leaders, distributing money and passing along news--a trip later pieced together by U.S. intelligence analysts wading through the mountain of data and intelligence provided by low-level local informants. Al-Ahmed started in his hometown of Mosul, where he had been supervising--from a distance--the rebuilding of the local insurgent network disrupted after Saddam's capture. He moved on to Hawija, where he met a man thought to be a senior financier of the insurgency in north-central Iraq. After a brief stay at a farmhouse near Samarra, he met with military leaders of religious and nationalist rebel groups in Baghdad and with Rashid Taan Kazim, one of the few faces from the deck of cards (al-Duri is another) still at large, who is thought to be running a support network for the insurgency in the north and west of Iraq. Al-Ahmed's final stop was Ramadi, where he distributed $500,000 to local insurgency leaders.
What is remarkable is the extent to which the U.S. is aware of al-Ahmed's activities. "We know where Muhammad Yunis al-Ahmed lives in Damascus," says a U.S. intelligence official. "We know his phone number. He believes he has the protection of the Syrian government, and that certainly seems to be the case." But he hasn't been aggressively pursued by the U.S. either--in part because there has been a persistent and forlorn hope that al-Ahmed might be willing to help negotiate an end to the Baathist part of the insurgency. A senior U.S. intelligence officer says that al-Ahmed was called at least twice by former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi--an old acquaintance--and that a representative of an "other government agency," a military euphemism that usually means the CIA, "knocked on his door in 2004 and asked if he was willing to talk. He wasn't."
STARTING OVER AGAIN
In the middle of 2004, the U.S. again changed its team in Baghdad. Bremer and Sanchez left, replaced by Ambassador John Negroponte and General George Casey. At the same time, there was a new transitional Iraqi government, led by Iyad Allawi. Negroponte set up a joint military-diplomatic team to review the situation in the country. The consensus was that things were a mess, that little had been accomplished on either the civilian or the military side and that there was no effective plan for dealing with the insurgency. The new team quickly concluded that the insurgency could not be defeated militarily--but that it might be divided. The attempts to engage potential allies like al-Ahmed became the unstated policy as U.S. and Iraqi officials sought ways to isolate foreign terrorists like al-Zarqawi.
But progress in the effort to defuse the insurgency through dealmaking has been slow--and in some cases has led the U.S. to ease pressure on individuals tied to rebel groups. Consider the careful handling of Harith al-Dhari, chairman of the Association of Muslim Scholars and one of Iraq's most important Sunni leaders. In late 2003, several insurgent groups began to meet regularly in the Umm al-Qura mosque in Baghdad, over which al-Dhari presides. According to U.S. intelligence reports, al-Dhari--who has said he might encourage his organization to take part in the democratic process--did not attend the meetings. But his son Muthanna--who is thought to be an important link between the nationalist and religious strains of the insurgency--did. In August 2004, the son was arrested after his car scanned positive for explosives residue. But he was quickly released, a retired DIA analyst says, under pressure from Iraq's government, to keep channels open to his father. "It would be difficult to lure Harith into the tent if Muthanna were in jail," says the former officer.
By April 2004, U.S. military-intelligence officers were also holding face-to-face talks with Abdullah al-Janabi, a rebel leader from Fallujah. The meetings ended after al-Zarqawi--who had taken up residence in Fallujah--threatened to kill al-Janabi if the talks continued, according to U.S. and Iraqi sources. But attempts to negotiate with other insurgents are continuing, including with Saddam's former religious adviser. So far, the effort has been futile. "We keep hoping they'll come up with a Gerry Adams," says a U.S. intelligence official, referring to the leader of the Irish Republican Army's political wing. "But it just hasn't happened."
CIVIL WAR?
The leadership in Baghdad changed yet again this year. Negroponte left Baghdad in March to become director of national intelligence. He was replaced by Zalmay Khalilzad. But the turnover in the Iraqi government was far more important: religious Shi'ites, led by Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, took charge, a severe irritant to many Sunnis. "The insurgents see al-Jaafari as a traitor, a man who spent the Iran-Iraq war in Iran," says a senior military officer. "And many of the best officers we have trained in the new Iraqi army--Sunnis and secular Shi'ites who served in Saddam's army--feel the same way." Al-Jaafari did not help matters by opening diplomatic ties with Iran, apologizing for Iraq's behavior in the Iran-Iraq war and cutting economic deals with the Iranians.
In fact, some Iraq experts in the U.S. intelligence community have come to the conclusion that Iraqis' courageous recent steps toward democracy--the elections in January and the writing of a constitution that empowers the religious Shi'ites and the Kurds (though it is resoundingly opposed by the Sunnis)--have left the country in a more precarious position. "The big conversation in our shop these days," says a military-intelligence officer, "is whether it would be a good thing if the new constitution is voted down [in the public referendum] next month."
Iraq experts in the intelligence community believe that the proposed constitution, which creates autonomous regions for the Kurds and Shi'ites in the oil-rich north and south, could heighten the chances of an outright civil war. "A lot of us who have followed this thing have come to the conclusion that the Sunnis are the wolves--the real warriors--and the religious Shi'ites are the sheep," says an intelligence officer. "The Sunnis have the power to maintain this violence indefinitely."
Another hot debate in the intelligence community is whether to make a major change in the counterinsurgency strategy--to stop the aggressive sweeps through insurgent-riddled areas, like the recent offensive in Tall 'Afar, and try to concentrate troops and resources with the aim of improving security and living conditions in population centers like Baghdad. "We've taken Samarra four times, and we've lost it four times," says an intelligence officer. "We need a new strategy."
But the Pentagon leadership is unlikely to support a strategy that concedes broad swaths of territory to the enemy. In fact, none of the intelligence officers who spoke with TIME or their ranking superiors could provide a plausible road map toward stability in Iraq. It is quite possible that the occupation of Iraq was an unwise proposition from the start, as many U.S. allies in the region warned before the invasion. Yet, despite their gloom, every one of the officers favors continuing--indeed, augmenting--the war effort. If the U.S. leaves, they say, the chaos in central Iraq could threaten the stability of the entire Middle East. And al-Qaeda operatives like al-Zarqawi could have a relatively safe base of operations in the Sunni triangle. "We have never taken this operation seriously enough," says a retired senior military official with experience in Iraq. "We have never provided enough troops. We have never provided enough equipment, or the right kind of equipment. We have never worked the intelligence part of the war in a serious, sustained fashion. We have failed the Iraqi people, and we have failed our troops."
--With reporting by Brian Bennett/ Washington and Michael Ware/Baghdad