Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command by Sean Naylor

Author:Sean Naylor [Naylor, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781466876224
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

19

Snake Eyes

The Euphrates lapped against the sides of the small boats as, cloaked in darkness, they pulled up to the riverbank beside the farm in Anbar province. The men in the boats wore kaffiyehs and looked from a distance like local farmhands. But they weren’t. They were Delta operators on a mission to capture a top Zarqawi lieutenant—a mission of the type others said would never succeed.

The man they were after, Ghassan Amin, was close enough to Zarqawi to have recently arranged for a relative to host the Al Qaeda in Iraq supremo for five days. Amin was Zarqawi’s enforcer in Rawa, a strategically important town on the north bank of the Euphrates that he ran as his personal fiefdom. With its bridge across the river, Rawa was key terrain for Zarqawi. Whoever controlled the town could influence the flow of foreign fighters from Syria into the dense urban battlefields of Fallujah, Ramadi, and Baghdad. His forces having destroyed the Rawa police station, Amin’s effective counterintelligence network allowed him to terrorize the town’s population of about 20,000. “He … used to publicly execute one person—snitch—per week in the market,” said a senior special mission unit officer. “We saw him on a Predator shoot a source [of ours] right in the head in his vehicle. He was a bad, bad guy.”

He was also very difficult to catch. “We couldn’t figure out how to get the guy,” the officer said. But intelligence that Amin owned a farm west of Rawa on the banks of the Euphrates gave Delta operators an idea. “Some of our sources said, ‘Hey, they’re coming up to harvest season and he goes down and he visits the farm certain days literally to watch the workers bring the harvest in,’” the officer said. An assault troop in C Squadron led by Captain Doug Taylor, a former enlisted Delta operator who had received a commission from Officer Candidate School and returned to the unit, proposed snaring Amin by driving up to the Euphrates from Al Asad air base, floating down and across the river in small boats, then posing as workers on his farm. It was a classic out-of-the-box Delta plan: simple, yet elegant. It was also the type of plan that rarely got approved. But the United States was not winning in Iraq. Unconventional ideas that senior commanders would previously have dismissed were now getting a fair hearing. “By that time we had carte blanche to do anything we liked,” said a Delta source. Taylor’s plan was given the green light. So it was that he and his men—including several Arabic speakers—found themselves sneaking onto Amin’s farm before the day heated up. It was the morning of April 26, 2005.

The operators quickly sequestered the real farmworkers in the farmhouse. Taking the farmhands’ places, they worked the fields—even driving a tractor—and waited. After some time, their prey approached. “Ghassan Amin and his two henchmen drove right up to the guys,” said the special mission unit officer. Amin walked to within

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