VIKING HAMMER (AND THE UGLY BABY)

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01.Masters of Chaos Pages 8/17/04 12:00 PM Page 305 Viking Hammer (and the Ugly Baby) haps the entire government. Many of its senior NCOs had served in northern Iraq during the Kurdish refugee crisis after Desert Storm. Officers like Tovo, who had spent virtually all of his seventeen years in the Special Forces in 10th Group, had a great depth of understanding of the region. They had been prepared to return, just as 5th Group’s veterans had been prepared for a sequel to Desert Storm. The wars in the Balkans in the intervening years had greatly added to their experience in managing ethnic tensions, sectarian violence, and shattered communities. Lieutenant Colonel Tovo was ordered to attack and destroy Ansar al- Islam (AI) before the main assault on the thirteen Iraqi divisions behind the Green Line. The secret mission began with surveillance of the shadowy group, which had at least 700 armed fighters. It controlled about 300 square kilometers called the Halabja salient, a finger of land poking eastward into Iran from Halabja, the city where Hussein had previously bombed the Kurds with mustard gas, sarin, and other chemical weapons. Information about Ansar al-Islam was still sketchy, but it had been formed sometime around September 2001 with the help of a Palestinian Jordanian named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi was a somewhat autonomous Al Qaeda associate who received funding from the group, had a network of operatives around Europe, and reportedly had attempted to develop or procure chemical and radiological weapons. Shortly before the war intelligence had indicated that Ansar al-Islam might be harboring senior Al Qaeda members and possibly a chemical weapons facility. The White House decided that the stronghold must be attacked at the outset of the war. For Tovo, as battlefield commander, the tactical reasons to remove the Ansar al-Islam threat were just as compelling. His Kurdish allies were frequently attacked by the group, and flatly refused to divert their fighters from the AI front to the Green Line until it was neutralized. Tovo needed every body he could to supplement his meager forces. Furthermore, Ansar had already unleashed suicide bombers, and Tovo did 305
01.Masters of Chaos Pages 8/17/04 12:00 PM Page 306 306 M asters of C haos not want them creeping up behind them in the middle of the battle on the Green Line. One of Tovo’s teams, ODA 081, was chosen to conduct reconnaissance on the group from an outpost at Gurdy Drozna, on the edge of the Ansar territory. The first time Tovo visited the collection of crude stone bunkers, a greeting from the Ansar militants—a hail of mortars— fell around him as he stood on one of the bunker’s roofs. Many of the AI forts sat on bare mountaintops, which afforded them a commanding view of Gurdy Drozna, Halabja, and the surrounding valleys but also made them an easy mark for air strikes. ODA 081 pinpointed these and other entrenched fighting positions and relayed the coordinates of the targets. The Kurdish commanders told the Special Forces that Ansar fighters had also occupied mosques and schools in the region’s villages and were using them as bunkers and command posts. The Kurds urged that these be included in the target list, but the Americans refused. They could not add such targets without provocation and without positively identifying military use of such buildings. At midnight on March 21, waves of Tomahawk missiles were launched from aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf and flew through the darkness across the length of Iraq toward the targets that ODA 081 had identified. The soldiers stood on the rooftop of the Gurdy Drozna bunker and listened to the strange buzzing of the cruise missiles as they passed a few hundred feet over their heads. A few moments later, the men saw flashes of light and then heard explosions as the missiles slammed into the nearby mountaintops. They were awed by the precise and lethal display of American technology. But the sixty-four missiles arrived in intervals over three hours, and the soldiers watched as Ansar fighters fled in droves by truck. The opening salvo was war by remote control; the next stage would be up close and personal. Tovo’s original plan had been to attack right after the air strikes, but most of his men and equipment were still sitting on the runway in Romania. He was forced to wait until they had the minimum manpower and weaponry to launch the assault. In the coming days, the advance party called in air strikes on Ansar positions and fortified the post at
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VIKING HAMMER (AND THE UGLY BABY)

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