Michael Asher (2 page)

CHAPTER two THANKS TO THE UN SANCTIONS there were no scheduled flights to Baghdad and we were obliged to drive in overland from Amman, Jordan, in cumbersome GMC vehicles provided by our fixers, Goran and Deilan: trim, energetic, quick-witted young Kurdish brothers who had worked for the BBC before shifting to escorting-visit�ing film-crews. We left Amman on a hot day in May, and soon the built-up suburbs of the city fell away, to be replaced by the green, brown and red plains of the desert, a desolation stretching as far as the eye could see on both' sides. Although this desert spans part of Syria, Jordan and Iraq, it is all of one piece geographically, and is prop�erly referred to as the Badiyat Ash-Sham, or the Syrian Desert. Around 3000 BC, when the pyramids were being built in Egypt, the fringes of this desert were inhabited by a people called the Amorites, who had cattle, donkeys, sheep and goats. A thousand years later, having acquired the camel, the Amorites were able to colonize the desert interior, and so the Badu � literally, the people of the Badiya, now known as the Bedouin � were born. When most people think of deserts, they imagine sand dunes rolling on endlessly like the waves of a sea, but the Syrian Desert is nothing like that: in fact, there is very lit�tle sand. It is more like desolate, arid moorland, basically rocky or muddy, with stunted hills and high plateaux here and there, occasionally cut by steep-sided wadis. Although there are virtually no trees, the soil is fertile, raising sparse desert vegetation and often cultivated by the Bedouin after the rains On the way to the Iraqi border we passed through Azraq, once a beautiful oasis of palm trees around a silver pool, and the site of the Roman castle that was T. E. Lawrence's base during his desert campaigns of 1917-18. The castle is still there, almost lost among streets of breeze-block housing, and a brief visit reminded me of the long experience the British had of fighting in this desert. Lawrence himself provided a comprehensive handbook on campaigning here, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which outlines the extreme conditions to be experienced in this desert in winter. 'Nothing in Arabia could be more cutting than the north wind,' Lawrence wrote. 'It blew through our clothes as if we had none, fixed our fingers into claws.' Describing how he had to light fires under camels' bellies to revive them in the biting cold, Lawrence also said he sometimes had to drag his Bedouin soldiers up by their hair to prevent them from falling into the stu�por that hypothermia brings. 'The winter's power drove leaders and men into the villages,' he wrote. 'Twice I ven�tured up to taste the snow-laden plateau . . . but life there was not tolerable. In the day it thawed a little, but at night it froze. The wind cut open the skin: fingers lost power and sense of feel: cheeks shivered like dead leaves until they could shiver no more, then bound up muscles in a witless ache . . . ' Seventy years later, McNab echoed Lawrence, writing, 'I had known cold before, in the Arctic, but noth�ing like this. This was lying in a freezer cabinet feeling your body heat slowly slip away." Although McNab says that 1991 saw the coldest winter in the region in thirty years, winter temperatures in the western desert are com�monly below freezing, and have been known to dip to an incredible minus fourteen degrees .Celsius. Bearing in mind that two of the patrol reportedly died of hypother�mia, it seemed to me that Lawrence's experience might have proved a lesson worth learning. Although David Stirling is credited with founding the SAS, the principles on which the Regiment operates were developed by Lawrence during the Arab campaign in 1916-17 against the Ottoman Turks. The Turks' lifeline in Arabia was the Hejaz railway, completed in 1908, which connected their garrisons there with the outside world. But the railway ran through 800 miles of desert in which the Bedouin could come and go as they pleased. Lawrence saw that the way to victory for irregular fight�ers was not to confront superior forces, but to hit the enemy with a small, mobile force at its weakest points �bridges, locomotives, watering-stations � and run away into the desert where the Turks could not follow. He had discovered desert power. It was this strategy that David Stirling took up when he formed L Detachment of the Special Air Service Brigade in North Africa in 1941. When his original idea of dropping trained saboteurs by parachute failed, however, he turned to the real desert experts, the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), who had perfected the techniques of desert motoring and navigation. With the LRDG as their transport and navi-gation arm, SAS patrols were able to hit enemy airfields and supply dumps and disappear back into the desert, just as Lawrence had done on his camels. The raiding part�nership between the LRDG and the SAS was brilliantly successful, and accounted for more German aircraft on the ground than the -RAF did in the air. The key to desert power, whether by camel or car, was mobility. As the. CO of the LRDG, Guy Prenderghast, told Stirling after his first abortive parachute drop, 'Once actually on the ground, a .party of men moving about on foot in the desert cannot get far.' The SAS is proud of its history and traditions, yet some of the very principles on which it had been founded seem to have been forgotten in the Bravo Two Zero affair. THE OFFICIALS AT THE IRAQI border were gruff, but no gruffer than such men are almost everywhere, and the formalities took up no more than an hour and a half. The only bugbear was the compulsory AIDS test, which none of us had particularly been looking forward to, but for which we had prepared by bringing our own sterile nee-dles. As it happened, we didn't need them. A judicious handshake from our twenty-two-year-old Kurdish fixer, Goran, seemed to have settled the matter. Once through the frontier checkpoints, it was as if a prison door had slammed shut behind us, and it was difficult to rid myself of the idea that we were entering enemy territory. Perhaps it was the succession of giant portraits of a stern-looking Saddam Hussein that set my mind on edge, but it was an effort to forget that some dark things had hap-pened in this country not so long ago. No doubt they were still happening. Goran told me that the Iraqi national football team had recently lost a match against Turkestan. Way, the President's son, and Chairman of the team, had had his players tortured to make sure they never lost again. The story made me laugh, until I remembered that there was no British Embassy in Baghdad to run to if things went wrong. From now on we were on our own. The light was already dwindling as we sped away from the border along a superbly built multi-lane highway with virtually no other traffic on it, taking us straight into the heart of Iraq. The highway had been constructed by a German company and had been completed, but not opened, by the time the Gulf War broke out. In January 1991 it had proved a major obstacle to a motorized SAS patrol � commanded by RSM Peter Ratcliffe � which had needed to cross it in order to reach the target, a missile command and control station nicknamed Victor Two. The desert here was punctuated by the black tents of Bedouin, who, but for the motor vehicles parked outside, appeared to be living much the same lives as their Amorite ancestors had 4,000 years ago. As darkness descended across the desert I fell asleep in the passenger seat, and when I woke again we were in Baghdad. Having seen the surreal, shell-shocked streets of west Beirut in the early 1990s, I had been expecting something similar in Baghdad. In fact it was a bustling, pleasant, modern city on the banks of the Tigris, with well-stocked shops and packed restaurants, showing few scars of the Allied bombing of recent years. There was nothing more out of the ordinary, indeed, than the occasional S60 anti-aircraft battery on the high buildings. There was no heavy military or police presence on the streets, and we were allowed to come and go without restrictions, wandering across the Tigris bridges � all rebuilt since 1991 � and through the flea-market and Ottoman bazaars. The first thing that struck me about the Iraqis was their extreme friendliness and courtesy. I'd been prepared by-the western media for fanatics capable of lynching a foreigner at the drop of a hat. Instead, I found open, ordinary, civilized folk getting on with their lives as best they could, without any apparent animosity towards me at all. Twice I entered an old teashop in the centre of Baghdad � a place of crude wooden benches, with a bank of gas-jets heating water in battered brass vessels, where men sat chatting quietly or nodding over hookah-pipes. Several men came over to ask me where I was from, and when I told them, they questioned me without the slight�est hint of malice. There was little obvious poverty in the main streets, but UN officials had recently reported an alarming rise in infant mortality, and unemployment in Baghdad was reckoned to be at fifty per cent. The soups were full of valuable items that were going for a song � gold watches, cameras, Dunhill cigarette-lighters � no doubt ditched by their owners in a desperate last attempt to get some capi-tal. It was as if the contents of everyone's attics had suddenly hit the market at rock-bottom prices. For six dollars I bought a British-made prismatic compass in per-fect condition, which in London would have cost me three hundred dollars. The features I encountered most frequently were the ubiquitous portraits of Saddam Hussein, which glared or smiled down from every street corner. These portraits represented the President in various guises: the paternal Saddam cuddling a child, the military Saddam in bemedalled uniform, the Arab prince in stately robes, the Iraqi Fellah in knotted headcloth, the sociable Saddam squatting with a glass of tea, the devout Saddam per-forming his prayers, and the westernized, modern Saddam resplendent in a white suit � there was even a relaxed Saddam talking on the telephone. There was something for almost everyone here � a man for all sea�sons, I thought. The real Saddam, however, appeared to be keeping a low profile, and sometimes I began to won�der if he actually existed at all. Uday was the number two or three at the Ministry of Information, a grave-looking man who had been a pro-fessional journalist in Paris before the war, and who had the rather disconcerting habit of addressing me as 'my dear'. In his spacious but spartan office on the top floor of the Ministry building he welcomed us with a prepared speech about the resilient nature of the Iraqi people and how you could not defeat a nation with a civilization going back 6,000 years. It was propaganda, but I took his point. The earliest civilizations known to man �Babylon, Sumer, Akkad, Assyria and others � had flour�ished in the valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris thousands of years before Christ. Beside them, even the ancient Egyptians were newcomers, and the British and Americans little more than literate barbarians. When I went over what I had come here to do, and emphasized that I wanted to follow the routes of the Bravo Two Zero patrol on foot, he shook his head and looked worried. `That is difficult,' he said. 'Very difficult indeed.' I assumed he had thought it would be enough for me to pursue my research in Baghdad. When I continued, say�ing that I hoped to find eyewitnesses � the shepherd-boy Ryan and McNab said had spotted them, the driver of the bulldozer who had approached their LUP, local mili�tia involved in the initial firefight, the driver of the taxi they had hijacked, witnesses of the battles the patrol had fought near the Syrian border, the men who found Vince Phillips's body, personnel who had interrogated the patrol � he actually laughed. 'I have read your CV, my dear,' he said. 'You should know very well that people such as this shepherd-boy are nomads. They move on all the time. It is very unlikely that they will be in the same place now, and how will you find them? As for the mili�tary personnel involved, we are talking about ten years ago, when we had a huge conscript army. Since then peo�ple have died and moved all round the country, records have been lost or burned or blown up, and the whole sys�tem of administration has been changed. How will you find a taxi driver when you don't know the man's name or even the number of his car? There are thousands of taxi drivers in Iraq. You are looking for needles in haystacks � it is most unlikely that you Will find any eyewitnesses. Why don't you stay in Baghdad, shoot some film here instead?' I left his office feeling depressed. Nobody in the Ministry of Information seemed to have heard of the SAS or Bravo Two Zero. In the scale of a war in which at least 100,000 Iraqis died and 63,000 were captured, I real-ized suddenly, an eight-man patrol was very small fry indeed. And yet McNab wrote that the patrol had accounted for at least two hundred and fifty Iraqi casual�ties, so someone, somewhere, must have felt the impact of the operation. For the next few days I hung around the hotel discon�solately waiting for news, and it began to occur to me that the Iraqis had no intention of letting me wander around their deserts. The government had applied for the UN sanctions to be lifted again and in some quarters opinion was shifting in their favour. Probably, I reflected gloomily, they had seen an opportunity to get a British film-crew into Baghdad and score some sympathetic foreign cover�age free of charge. My mood wasn't heightened when Ahmad, a stringy, reserved and rather morose man from the Ministry of Information, suggested a visit to the Amiriya Bunker to pass the time. It was a civic air-raid shelter situated in a residential area of Baghdad that had been hit by American missiles in February 1991, and 400 civilians � among them many children � had been killed. It was a sobering experience, to say the least. The place had been left almost exactly as it was when it had been hit, with a vast hole punched through a roof of stressed concrete ten feet thick. The walls and floor were still blackened from the blast, and Ahmad told me that the rescue services hadn't been able to open the vast steel doors, so by the time they had cut through them with oxyacetylene torches, most of the survivors had been burned to ashes. Actually, the bunker had been hit by two laser-guided missiles: an incendiary rocket that had come through the air-vent and the explosive missile which had caused the gaping wound in the roof. Photos of the dead children decorated the walls, as well as pictures of the scorched and mutilated bodies being removed. The Coalition had claimed that the bunker was being used by Saddam Hussein's military
command, and even that the apparent civilian casualties had been 'invented' by the Iraqis. However, foreign reporters who were allowed to inspect the place at the time found no evidence that it had been used by the military, and Alan Little of the BBC, who watched the mangled bodies being carried out, concluded that this was something totally beyond the ability of the Iraqi Ministry of Information to stage-manage. 'This morning we saw the charred and mutilated remains of those nearest the door,' he told viewers. 'They were piled into the back of a truck: many were barely recognizable as human. Men from the district pushed and jostled through the crowd to find news of their families, many distressed to the point of panic.' Whatever the case, Amiriya was a salutary reminder that modern war is not an affair of lone warriors, but of billions of dollars-worth of technology, and its end result is too often places like this. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for those trapped in here when the missile struck, and turned away with a shudder., The only high point of those days of waiting was when Ahmad insinuated himself into the lobby of my hotel one morning clutching a newspaper article in Arabic. The piece, dating from earlier in the year, was an interview with a man called Adnan Badawi, who had been a pas�senger in a taxi that had been hijacked by a group of `British commandos' near Krabilah in western Iraq, on 26 January 1991. The article excited me � it was the first independent evidence from an Iraqi source that the Bravo Two Zero mission had actually happened. Moreover, the article included not only Adnan's name, but that of the taxi driver and � even better � the registration number of the taxi itself. The first needle in the haystack had at least been glimpsed, if not found, and Ahmad told me that he was taking steps to contact Adnan, who lived in Mosul in the far north of Iraq. The bad news was that further per-mission from the Ministry of Defence was required before I could visit the Anbar region of western Iraq, where the action had taken place. But in any case, he concluded, I should probably be able to start on Wednesday. Wednesday came, but permission did not. Ahmad told me the expedition was rescheduled for Saturday. I had already been hanging around for more than a week and my time was slipping away. It was May, and incredibly hot in Baghdad, and if I waited any longer it would be high summer, and almost suicidal to travel on foot in the desert. I asked Ahmad for a meeting with Uday, was granted one, and went up to see him with my associate producer, Nigel Morris. 'Look, Mr Uday,' I said, as politely and firmly as I could. 'We were given visas on the basis of this project � the Bravo Two Zero story � and I sent you a full outline before we came. I understood we had permission to do it already. We have been com�pletely open about what we intended to do from the beginning and there is no secret about it. If it is not the case that we were given permission, then please tell us now Our time is running out and I have to say that unless we really do leave on Saturday we shall have to return to the UK.' Uday's face turned black and I waited for the axe to fall. I knew I was sticking my neck out; I thought of the footballers the President's son had had tortured for losing against Turkestan. 'You have to realize this country is still at war, my dear,' he said, dryly. 'We are suffering under UN sanctions and things can't be organized just like that. It is the military who are dragging their feet, not the Ministry of Information. The problem is that you cannot go into that area without a representative from the mili�tary, and nobody is going to walk in the desert at this time of year.' I smiled. 'That's no problem,' I said. 'The representa�tive can travel in our GMC vehicles with the film-crew while I walk.' `Yes,' he said. 'But then how are they going to be able to see what you get up to?' `I can rendezvous with the vehicles every few hours.' Uday considered this and said he would see what he could do. He picked up the telephone. By the time I had reached the door, he was bellowing into the receiver like a bull. CHAPTER three WE LEFT ,ON SATURDAY AS scheduled, heading north towards the Anbar region in a convoy of four GMCs with five film-crew and four drivers. There were also two mind-ers: Ali from the Ministry of Information and Abu Omar from the Ministry of Defence. The minders were so dif�ferent in personality and approach that I sometimes wondered if they were deliberately working the 'good cop, bad cop' routine. Ali, the civilian, was tall, moon-faced, pot-bellied and dishevelled-looking, an exuberant, talka�tive extrovert who spoke no English but was for ever slapping people on the back and roaring out their names. Abu Omar, the military man, was small and dapper with immaculately pressed suits and carefully combed and oiled hair. He was aloof and disdainful, taciturn to the point of rudeness, and gave the impression that the last thing in the world he needed was to accompany a bunch of Englishmen into the desert. We drove up the Euphrates Valley, through smoky industrial towns and villages hud�dling in palm groves, and halted at the area headquarters at Rumadi to meet our military escort: a detachment of six soldiers under a lieutenant, in an ordinary Toyota pick�up with a machine-gun mounted on the back. When I quizzed Ali about the escort, he told me it was for our pro�tection. The place is full of wolves and bandits,' he said. Ali had served in an infantry battalion during the Iran�Iraq war, and shivered when I asked him about it. 'It was terrible,' he said. 'It was hand-to-hand fighting, up close so you could see the enemy, butchering them with knives and bayonets, and them butchering us. May God protect us from the devil, I never again want to see any�thing like that!' The Iran�Iraq war lasted eight years, but did not resolve any of the issues over which it had been fought. Saddam Hussein's original excuse for his 1980 invasion of western Iran was to end the Iranian monopoly of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, conceded to her in a treaty of 1975. The war consisted mainly of bloody World War I-style offensives against immovable tiers of trenches, in which the attack�ers were frequently mown down like sheep. Both sides used chemical weapons, and in 1985 both began lobbing missiles against each other's capitals. In 1987 Iran made the fatal mistake of targetting Kuwaiti tankers in the Gulf, bringing down upon her the wrath of the USA, which had hitherto been covertly supplying her with weapons. Reviled by world opinion, and finding it increasingly difficult to buy arms, Iran was obliged to negotiate a peace treaty in 1988. Saddam Hussein crowed over the masses of Iranian armour and artillery his armies had captured, but it was a Pyrrhic victory: up to 1.7 million people had perished in the war, but not an inch of ground had been gained. In 1990 Kuwait, a tiny but oil-rich desert princedom on Iraq's southern border, pressed Saddam Hussein for repayment of certain loans she had made to her neigh-bour during the war. In reply, Saddam accused the Kuwaitis of contravening the OPEC agreement by over-producing oil, costing Iraq fourteen million dollars in lost revenues. He also claimed that Kuwait had been pumping crude oil from the Ramailah oilfield, whose ownership was disputed and, throwing in Iraq's traditional claim on Kuwaiti territory for good measure, invaded the prince�dom with one hundred thousand troops and twelve hundred tanks. It was 2 August 1990. The UN Security Council promptly denounced the invasion, declaring a trade embargo against Iraq, and by 14 August the spearhead brigade of the US 82nd Airborne Division had arrived in Saudi Arabia to secure the country's oil-reserves. The first phase of the Coalition operation � Desert Shield � was a protective action designed to block an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia, and to gain time for a massive concentration of men and materiel from thirty-two countries, including Britain, France, Italy, Egypt, Syria, Qatar, Oman, the UAE and Bahrain, as well as Saudi Arabia and the USA. The build�up of Iraqi forces continued, however, and by November the Coalition was facing no less than twenty-six divisions in the Kuwait theatre, comprising more than 450,000 men. It -was becoming clear to Allied Commander-in�Chief H. Norman Schwarzkopf and his political bosses that nothing short of a counter-offensive would oust the Iraqis from Kuwait, and by mid-November he had final- ized his plan of attack. On 29 November the UN Security Council lit the fuse of war by authorizing the use of force if the Iraqis did not pull out of Kuwait by 15 January 1991. General Schwarzkopf, nicknamed 'The Bear', had devised a two-phase offensive against the Iraqis, desig�nated Desert Storm. First, wave after wave of Allied bombers would go in, hitting strategic targets, cutting the command infrastructure and gaining control of the skies. When this had been achieved, the Air Force would turn its attention to the Iraqi army, pounding their artillery, armour and static defences mercilessly until the morale of Saddam Hussein's troops had been comprehensively worn down. Only then would the massed divisions of the Coalition ground forces go in for the kill. Within days of the invasion of Kuwait, the two avail�able squadrons of 22 SAS, G and D, were put on standby in Hereford, and while the SAS Intelligence Unit began a frantic round of briefings and reports, G Squadron was despatched to the United Arab Emirates to begin refresher training in desert warfare. B Squadron � to which McNab and Ryan belonged � was currently hold-ing down the Regiment's Special Projects or counter-revolutionary warfare role, and A Squadron was in Columbia, training teams to fight the drug barons, but each was duly scheduled to desert retraining in turn. For the first five months of the war, the SAS had no designated role: the US 5th Special Forces Group and US Marine Corps were handling reconnaissance on the Kuwaiti frontier, and the only suitable job for the SAS that was vacant was the rescue of hostages. There were more than sixteen hundred British citizens in Iraqi cus-tody in Iraq and Kuwait, so freeing them would hardly be an easy business. Indeed, a British team tasked with plan-ning a hostage-recovery operation calculated that it would require a force of at least Brigade strength � more than three times the manpower of all three SAS Regiments combined � and would still probably result in more casualties than the number of hostages released. The plan was scrapped in December, when Saddam Hussein released the hostages anyway. A, B, and D Squadrons were all deployed in the Gulf by 2 January, but they still had no official role in the General's concept of Desert Storm. To Schwarzkopf, who had seen the bungling of US Special Forces in Vietnam and Grenada, this was to be an air and missile operation, backed up by heavy armoured and mechan�ized infantry units. What the hell could Special Forces do, he demanded, that a Stealth fighter could not? In the second week of December, the Commander of British forces in the Gulf, General Sir Peter de la Billiere � a former CO of 22 SAS � had given the Regiment -instructions to start devising plans for deep-penetration raids behind Iraqi lines, saying that they should be ready to go by 15 January. It was only shortly before this dead-line that de la Billiere managed finally to win Schwarzkopf over, with a formal presentation involving detailed maps and graphics. The SAS task, he explained, would be to 'cut roads and create diversions which would draw Iraqi forces away from the main front and sow fears in the mind of the enemy that some major operation was brewing on his right flank'.4 The presentation might have convinced Schwarzkopf, but to the Regiment's rank and file it did not disguise the fact that there was still nothing specific for the SAS to do. It was certainly the concept upon which SAS founder David Stirling had based the original Regiment back in 1941, but since the regular unit had been reconstituted for the Malayan Emergency in 1949, it had generally used its skills for more strategic roles. But it was better than nothing: the SAS Regiment is a very expensive outfit to keep up, and despite de la Billiere's decree that he would not send in the SAS unless there was a proper job for them, this was the biggest deployment of troops since World War II and the Regiment had to be seen to earn its pay. Not since 1945 had such a large contingent of British Special Forces been assembled in one place. The SAS group had been reorganized after the Falklands War into UK Special Forces, commanded by a brigadier, and including 21 SAS, 22 SAS and 23 SAS, as well as the Royal Marines Special Boat Service (SBS), and 63 and 264 SAS Signals Squadrons. The three SAS regular `sabre' or operational squadrons 'deployed in the Gulf were supported by fifteen men of R Squadron, the little-publicized territorial unit whose members are trained to provide individual replacements for the regular squadrons in time of need. This brought the operational strength of the SAS to about three hundred men, though with special forces aircrews from the RAF, supporting arms and an SBS Squadron, the UKSF contingent num-bered almost double that. At 0247 hours on 17 January 1991, General Schwarzkopf received word that the first targets of Desert Storm � two Iraqi early-warning radar installations on the Saudi Arabian border � had been taken out. A dozen Apache helicopters of the 101st Airborne streaked in only ten metres above the desert floor and hit them from five kilo�metres away with deadly laser-guided Hellfire missiles. The Apache flight had been followed up by eight F-15 fighters tasked to skewer the nearest Iraqi air-defence command centre, opening up a brace of blind corridors through which thousands of Coalition jets would swarm to hit 240 strategic targets all over Iraq. While the Allied airstrikes continued, the SAS was transferring on C130 transport planes from its HQ in the United Arab Emirates and forming up at its FOB (forward operating base) at al-Jauf in Saudi Arabia, a day's drive south of the Iraqi frontier. Equipped with Land Rover 110s fitted with Browning machine-guns, GPMGs (gen�eral-purpose machine-guns) and Milan missiles, A and D Squadrons were preparing to launch their deep-penetra�tion raids, but wondering if there was really any place for them in the midst of this hi-tech circus. The air war already seemed to be going the way Schwarzkopf had pre�dicted,' Peter Ratcliffe wrote. 'Who needed. Special Forces?" On 18 January the situation changed dramatically for the SAS. At 0300 hours that morning Iraq fired seven Scud missiles at Israel, to be followed later by another three. Israeli casualties were,