INTRODUCTION
This is a short book about a big war that upended the Middle East, killed tens of thousands of civilians, brought a new wave of terrorism to Europe, led three American administrations to send thousands of troops to a distant battlefield, and prompted the United States to pioneer a new way of war. The military gave the conflict a name that read like it was generated by a committee and never caught on: Operation Inherent Resolve. Most people simply know it as the campaign against the Islamic State and by the names of its signature battles: Mosul, Raqqa, Kobani, Ramadi, Sinjar, Tabqa, and Baghuz.
Numerous books have chronicled the rise of ISIS and of its diabolical leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. This book is different. My focus is on the American-led campaign, whose members were known somewhat grandly as the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. It is an intricate, dramatic, and largely untold story of policy wars in Washington and actual wars on the battlefield—one with important and hard-won lessons.
The campaign, waged principally from 2014 through the end of the caliphate in 2019, was unforeseen at the White House, where President Barack Obama presided over the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011 and avowed repeatedly that the conflict there had been brought to a “responsible end.” Once the battle was joined, however, the objective Obama established in September 2014 was unambiguous: the United States and its partners would “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State.
From its inception, this was no mere drone campaign in which targeted killings were directed by pilots a hemisphere away. But neither was it 1991’s Desert Storm, in which General Colin Powell’s overwhelming force chased Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guards away from Kuwait after weeks of day-and-night bombardment. Rather, it was a bloody but politically low-risk form of war. What emerged by fits and starts was a strategy that relied principally on the use of proxy forces in Iraq; the recruitment of new forces in Syria, where none existed; the careful placement of American advisors; and the prodigious use of American and allied firepower in both countries: artillery, surface-to-surface missiles, attack helicopters, AC-130 gunships, and an armada of warplanes, ranging from tank-killing A-10s, stealthy F-22s, and Predator drones to lumbering B-52s. It was the new face of Middle East warfare for a United States that had grown weary of sacrificing so many of its own in seemingly unending confrontations with militant groups. The generals had a name for the unorthodox way of waging war: it was a “by, with, and through” strategy, in which operations were carried out against a common foe by a diverse array of local allies, with support from American forces and their coalition partners, and through a U.S. legal and diplomatic framework. U.S. forces had worked with proxies before, but never on such a scale or with such intensity.
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump proclaimed that he had a secret plan to supplant this approach, throw away the old rules of engagement, and finish off ISIS. But as commander in chief, he essentially continued the Obama strategy. As his predecessor did in the case of Osama bin Laden, Trump presided over a raid that cornered and killed a top terrorist leader: Baghdadi. But also as with bin Laden, that operation did not end the movement, and the policies Trump put in place as the campaign wound down opened a new phase of competition for influence in the region among Russia, Iran, Turkey, and Israel while undermining Washington’s ability to shape the outcome.
I observed much of this war firsthand on the battlefield and in the command centers as a correspondent for The New York Times. Later, as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, I spent more years peeling back the veneer of official Iraqi and coalition statements and boastful claims by ISIS. My effort to get at the truth led me to a Kurdish paramilitary force whose members brought me with them in November 2015 when they forged a path down a rugged mountain to retake Sinjar in western Iraq. It also took me to the October 2016 battle for East Mosul, where the Peshmerga from the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq allowed me to embed with their fighters. After ISIS struck back with suicide bombers in Kirkuk, I rushed there to interview combatants and civilians. Iraq’s elite Counter Terrorism Service took me to their front lines during the battle for West Mosul in April 2017, and again in July for the climactic fight for the area known as the Old City.
I was also able to travel with Lieutenant General Steve Townsend, the commander of the American-led task force that helped the Iraqis retake Mosul, and Colonel Pat Work, who led the 2nd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne and advised Abdul Amir Rasheed Yarallah, the head of Iraq’s counter-ISIS fight. On two occasions, I crossed the border into Syria, visiting Tabqa, which American-backed Kurdish and Arab fighters wrested from ISIS in May 2017, and command centers in the northeastern part of the country, where I met some of the senior leaders of the Syrian Democratic Forces and their commander, General Mazloum Abdi.
Along the way, I visited the American-led air war command center in Qatar, the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, operations in Jordan, and U.S. military command centers in Baghdad, Erbil, and Kuwait. Trips in the region with Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretaries Ashton Carter and Jim Mattis, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) leader General Joseph Votel, and senior State Department envoy Brett McGurk also gave me a look into diplomatic and military operations. I fleshed out the story with extensive reporting in Washington.
I was not able to interview Baghdadi or his top ISIS lieutenants, but I talked with Sunnis who were rescued from an ISIS prison in Hawija, Iraq; visited refugee camps near Mosul; studied the militants’ texts; and learned about the inner workings of the caliphate from Western officials familiar with allied intelligence.
This volume is my best effort to assess the tumultuous events that brought the American military back to Iraq and onto the battlefields in Syria to combat a bold and cruel adversary the United States had thought it had all but defeated years earlier. The Pentagon has a poor record of probing and documenting its latest wars, especially in the years immediately following a conflict. These days, the military is focusing much of its attention on Russia and China, and much of the U.S. government appears to be trying to put its counter-ISIS war in the rearview mirror. Yet the tactics, procedures, and strategies that were forged in the conflict are likely to serve as a template for operations against terrorist foes in distant reaches of the globe. In that sense, this book is not just about the recent past: it is also a window into the future.
I am grateful to the members of the Iraqi and Kurdish forces who enabled me to join them on some of their most daring operations, and to the U.S., British, and other allied officials who took me into their confidence and brought me with them to newly reclaimed areas in Iraq and Syria. On a personal note, this is my fourth book on conflicts in and around Iraq, but my first without my friend and partner Bernard Trainor—a retired three-star general in the Marine Corps, former New York Times military correspondent, and Harvard University professor—who passed away in 2018 at the age of eighty-nine. I have sought to live up to the standard we set of making tough but fair judgments, free of ideological bias and grounded in assiduous reporting and research.
1 IMPALA RIDER
In February 2014, Major General Mike Nagata flew to Baghdad for a stocktaking mission. The head of special operations in the Middle East, Nagata had extensive experience in battling militant cells, lawless militias, and terrorists whose fanaticism magnified their lethality. Name the fight, and Nagata had been there. As a young trooper he had mastered martial arts, and after a stint in South Korea he had taken command of a Special Forces A-team at Fort Lewis, in Washington State. Forging a path in the world of special operations, Nagata had joined Task Force Orange, a classified unit that gathered human and electronic intelligence and in the years that followed worked with the Central Intelligence Agency in Mogadishu during the Black Hawk Down clash that had led to the deaths of nineteen American soldiers. That assignment had been followed by a stint hunting war criminals in the Balkans and eventually command of Orange as it gathered intelligence in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Africa. By June 2013, Nagata had become the commander of SOCCENT, the special operations component of Central Command, which oversaw U.S. military operations throughout the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Also making the visit was an up-and-coming colonel: Chris Donahue, a West Point graduate who had forged his own path through the special operations community. After stints with the Army Rangers, special operations, and conventional units, Donahue had become the commander of Delta Force, one of the military’s elite units for carrying out secret raids to kill and capture insurgents and conduct hostage rescues. That assignment was listed only euphemistically on Donahue’s official résumé but was well known among the military’s shadow warriors.
The trip to Baghdad by Nagata and Donahue had not been officially announced, but to the small circle of officials in the know, it was clear that this was an unusually experienced, high-powered, and operationally minded team.
What made the trip truly exceptional was that, more than two years before, Washington had declared the Iraq War to be over. After eight hard years, American forces had left the country at the end of 2011. The Obama administration’s overarching strategy was summed up by a mantra that the president and his aides had recited in their speeches and included in their party’s political platform: “The tide of war is receding.” There was turmoil in Iraq to be sure—the very name of the country had, in the American mind, become synonymous with trouble—but nothing was taking place that the White House considered a danger to the United States.
Still, the situation in Baghdad was tense. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had aggravated sectarian passions in the country and was struggling to hold off a marauding band of militants who deemed themselves participants in the new Islamic State. The group had profited from the civil war in Syria—a magnet for would-be jihadists who had flocked to the country to fight President Bashar al-Assad and those who were also drawn by ISIS’s mission to build a caliphate there and in neighboring Iraq. In Iraq, the militants had orchestrated a series of brazen jail breaks at Abu Ghraib and Taji in July 2013, freeing thousands of their former comrades and demonstrating the fecklessness of the country’s security forces. Their ranks bolstered by former prisoners of war, the fighters had moved on Ramadi and Fallujah, two of the bloodiest battlefields in the U.S. military’s years of battling Sunni insurgents. The Americans had taken the cities at great cost, and now they were in danger of being lost again.
After arriving in Baghdad, Nagata and Donahue helicoptered to the U.S. embassy compound, the better to avoid the airport road, which Iraq’s sovereign government was often not able to secure. Their meeting with a CIA hand at the embassy revealed few apprehensions about the militant threat. A different picture emerged, however, when they went to the headquarters of General Talib Shaghati al-Kenani, the commander of Iraq’s Counter Terrorism Service, which the acronym-loving Americans dubbed the CTS.
Over the course of the Pentagon’s many decades in the Middle East, Arab armies had been neither formidable foes nor powerful partners. The American military had rolled over Saddam Hussein’s divisions in its 2003 invasion of Iraq and then dismantled the country’s armed forces, only to mount a multibillion-dollar effort to rebuild them so they could deal with the hydra-headed threats that had sprung up. A bright spot in the endeavor had been the CTS, which the American military had created in the image of its own special operations forces. U.S. officers had selected many of the CTS’s field officers and had equipped its soldiers with vehicles, assault rifles, machine guns, body armor, and tactical radios. Attached at the hip to their American partners, who often fought with them and whisked them to their door-busting missions on Black Hawk helicopters, the Iraqi commandos had been enthusiastic partners—so much so that some had taken not only to affixing patches of the U.S. Special Forces A-teams they had worked with to their uniforms but also to sporting baseball caps and sleeve tattoos. During the heyday of the collaboration, when General David Petraeus commanded forces in Iraq, the Special Forces teams had been supplemented by one hundred American advisors positioned at all levels of the CTS.
To ensure that its operations were not compromised by leaks from within Iraq’s multisectarian government, the Americans had arranged for the CTS to have a unique chain of command: it reported directly to the nation’s prime minister instead of to the minister of defense. The CTS cadre had been carefully vetted. Its members were not allowed to belong to political parties, and they received $800 a month in pay, far more than run-of-the-mill Iraqi soldiers or policemen earned. The Americans had insisted that the CTS recruits undergo high-level training, and to that end, they had revamped Area IV, a former regime compound at Baghdad International Airport that was modeled on the U.S. Special Forces schoolhouse at Fort Bragg—the Iraqis called it Academiya. But after the Americans left Iraq in 2011—taking their intelligence, air strikes, logistics capabilities, and medical care with them—the CTS had struggled. On the surface, it had maintained its elite identity, going so far as to repaint its Humvees black and replace its desert camouflage uniforms with menacing-looking black fatigues. The organization posted music videos on Facebook and reveled in its past glory as an elite fighting force. Without American air support and advisors, however, Iraq’s army and police had begun to fray, and Maliki had responded by saddling the CTS with a burgeoning array of missions that included manning checkpoints, escorting convoys, protecting voting centers, and doing battle with militants in densely populated Iraqi cities. A specialized force that had been designed to carry out lightning raids against terrorist cells (with considerable American support) had become a jack-of-all-trades that was being tasked to deal with the upheaval in Iraq.
To take the measure of the force, Donahue headed west on an Iraqi convoy with General Kenani. The two officers disembarked on the outskirts of Ramadi to confer about the situation, while the vehicles drove on to resupply Iraqi units inside the embattled city. Within minutes, the convoy was ambushed. The Iraqi Humvees were ripped apart by armor-piercing rounds. Some of the soldiers were captured by ISIS militants, who demanded that they FaceTime their families on their cell phones to say their final goodbyes. Much of the mayhem was recorded by the surviving Iraqi troops on their iPads and cell phones, and Donahue set about collecting copies of their videos to share with the U.S. military.
Nagata, meanwhile, huddled with Major General Fadhil Jamil al-Barwari, a chain-smoking Kurd from Duhok, who led the 1st Iraqi Special Operations Force (ISOF) Brigade, which reported to the CTS. Barwari was no longer the confident commander the Americans had known in years past, Nagata later confided to one U.S. officer.
After Donahue returned to Fort Bragg that February, his Delta Force began to redouble its focus on the streams of jihadists who were flocking to the region to join ISIS. It renewed its contacts in the region, drew up contingency plans for joining the fight, and began to eye potential bases, even beginning to establish some in the region.
Nagata, for his part, drafted a memo that reported on the emerging danger and sent it up the chain of command. Years later, the visit was still seared in Nagata’s memory. “I will say it very bluntly. It scared the shit out of me,” Nagata told me. “My response was, ‘What in heaven’s name is going on here?’ The Iraqis were now telling me about enemy tactics, weaponry, and a degree of combat sophistication that was alien to me even though I spent three years doing multiple rotations in Iraq.”
Few officials involved in the policy wars in Washington sensed where events were headed, but for those special operations officers who had visited the battlefield two points seemed to be apparent: first, an old terrorist nemesis had been reawakened, and second, the United States was on a path toward yet another Middle East war.
* * *
WINDING DOWN THE Iraq War had been among Barack Obama’s signature promises when he ran for president in 2008. His rhetoric was intended to mark more than just a pivot from the strife-ridden Middle East and toward the economic challenges in Asia. It also represented an effort to deemphasize the use of American military force and its potential for quagmires and distraction from the unattended problems at home. To carry out his agenda, the United States could not simply withdraw its forces from Iraq but had to do so in a way that ensured the Iraqis could handle security on their own—what Obama called a responsible end.
Obama’s opening gambit was to take the Bush doctrine and stand it on its head. George W. Bush had seen his American-led 2003 invasion of Iraq as a way to deal with the scourge of terrorism by implanting democracy in the heart of the Arab world; in this scenario, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would turn a totalitarian Iraq into a catalyst for change in the region. “The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom,” Bush asserted. Obama, in contrast, vowed to engage personally with the leadership of Iraq’s autocratic neighbors, including Syria and Iran; he would calm the situation from without. With a yellow legal pad in hand and a retinue of loyal aides standing by, Obama outlined the concept for me in his Chicago office in November 2007: “Once it’s clear that we are not intending to stay there for 10 years or 20 years, all these parties have an interest in figuring out: How do we adjust in a way that stabilizes the situation.” The idea, not an entirely new one, reflected a growing consensus among the war’s skeptics and even the foreign policy establishment about how to bring the conflict to a close. Both the Bush and Obama theories, however, were more of a projection of Washington’s hopes than a reflection of the hard realities in the region. Once in office, Obama was forced to confront the fact that the insurgency by al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)—the Sunni jihadist group formed in 2004 by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—was reduced but not fully defeated and that Iraq’s Syrian and Iranian neighbors were more interested in meddling than in cooperation. He tempered his heady campaign talk about removing all U.S. combat forces within sixteen months, and moved toward a policy that would enable him to declare an end to the U.S. intervention but that accepted the premise that some elements of the U.S. military might need to remain, at least temporarily, to train Iraqi forces so that they could stabilize the country.
Copyright © 2022 by Michael R. Gordon
Maps copyright © 2022 by Jeffrey L. Ward
