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The Weekly Standard
Operation Phantom Strike
How the U.S. military is demolishing al Qaeda in Iraq.
by Mario Loyola
09/03/2007, Volume 012, Issue 47
Falluja, Iraq
On August 15, several hours after night fell over Baghdad, an air assault
squadron of the 3rd Infantry Division launched the first attack of
Operation Marne Husky. A dozen darkened transport and attack helicopters
took off and headed south along the Tigris River, carrying a full company
of infantry -- about 120 young riflemen with night goggles and weapons
loaded. Their objective was a hamlet several dozen miles away. At about
11 P.M., the force landed and rapidly surrounded several small
structures. The occupants were taken by surprise. Five suspected
insurgents were captured. By 4 A.M., the entire team was airborne again.
Every night since then similar scenes have unfolded at dozens of
locations in and around Baghdad--all part of a larger operation named
Phantom Strike. The attacks involve units of all sizes and
configurations, coming in by air and land. In some cases, the units get
out quickly. In others, they pitch tents for an extended stay. The idea
is to keep the enemy -- al Qaeda and its affiliates -- on the defense and
constantly guessing, thereby turning formerly "safe" insurgent areas into
areas of prohibitive risk for them.
Time and space
The impetus for Phantom Strike was, in a way, born in Washington, where
Congress created a series of benchmarks for progress in Iraq by mid-
September, at which point an "interim report" is required from Gen. David
Petraeus, the U.S. commander. The legislation inadvertently (perhaps
"negligently" is a better word) created a "Tet" opportunity for al Qaeda
here. If it can dominate headlines with spectacular mass-casualty suicide
attacks in the days and weeks leading up to the report, the political
climate in Washington might turn irretrievably against the military
effort, thereby snatching a victory for the terrorists that they have
failed to win on the ground. (Just as the Viet Cong's Tet offensive in
1968, while a military debacle for them, convinced U.S. media and
political elites that that war was lost.) With this in mind, operational
planners earlier this year began laying out a strategy to disrupt al
Qaeda's ability to carry out the expected attacks.
Learning from past mistakes, commanders of the "surge" forces now take
territory only if they can hold it. But for certain elements of Phantom
Strike, they are making an exception to that rule. Divisional commands
across Iraq have been instructed to cash in their accumulated intel and
attack insurgents where they are most likely to be hiding -- whether it
makes sense to hold the territory or not. In planning rooms across the
central third of Iraq, commanders looked at their target wish-lists --
places where they had taken fire in the past, or tracked possible
insurgents, or gotten credible tips from the population -- and chose the
most enticing ones.
The Joint Campaign Plan, a document that operationalizes the surge in
accordance with Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy, calls for
coalition forces to give the government of Iraq "the time and space that
it needs to succeed," according to military officers. The practical
emphasis has been on "space." By pushing coalition forces out from their
bases and into neighborhoods across Baghdad and other major urban centers
in Iraq, commanders have sought to establish "area security" through
"clear, control, and retain" operations. Key to retaining these areas is
the participation of Iraqi Security Forces and other nonmilitary Iraqi
government support.
The success enjoyed in places like Anbar province has come because
security forces convinced people that they were there to stay. Those
populations have shown their appreciation by joining the fight against al
Qaeda in their neighborhoods, joining the police, and establishing
neighborhood watch systems. Purely disruptive raids in which neither
control nor retention is sought have thus fallen somewhat into disfavor.
But there is one good reason not to abandon them altogether. Disruption
is a way to seize and maintain the initiative. Disruptive attacks keep
the enemy off-balance, guessing as to your next move. That makes him
concentrate on defense, and put off his own attacks. It's like a boxer
keeping his opponent on the ropes with a flurry of jabs until the right
moment for a knock-out blow.
Operation Marne Husky is just such a disruptive operation. Most of
General Rick Lynch's 3rd Infantry forces are committed to massive "clear
control and retain" (CCR) operations in his area. He was therefore
somewhat short of troops to contribute to Phantom Strike activities. But
he wasn't short on targets. His operations have produced a steady stream
of al Qaeda and other insurgents fleeing further south for safety, mostly
to an area on the Tigris known as the Samarrah jungle. Flushed from their
safe havens, and tracked by intel, the insurgents were now vulnerable --
in some cases, sitting ducks. Once the Phantom Strike guidance gave Lynch
the order to attack, all he needed was a little ingenuity to come up with
the right assets.
The 3rd Infantry Division headquarters has a combat air brigade with more
than a hundred helicopters. Marshalling other support services, and
mustering a company of crack infantry freed up by the dramatically
reduced tempo of operations in Anbar, Lynch put together an ad hoc unit
for targeted strike operations, rather like a special forces contingent.
In the first week of operations, this small force killed seven fighters
and detained 64 suspects including 14 high-value targets, clearing nearly
120 structures in the process.
Such results are an early return on investment for the doctrines
developed by Petraeus. The Counterinsurgency Field Manual, formulated
under his command and released last December, chews through a lot of
theory to arrive at one basic practical tenet: "Intelligence drives
operations." The counterinsurgency manual specifies that being able to
distinguish between insurgents and civilians is the key to victory.
The only way to do that is to provide protection for the population,
enfranchise them, and enlist their help in identifying the insurgents.
This creates a virtuous circle -- security operations produce good intel
which produces better security operations and in turn better intel. The
CCR operations in and around Baghdad have produced a trove of actionable
intelligence on al Qaeda -- its movements, its senior leaders, and the
sources and locations of its weapons, explosives, and bomb-making
equipment. Phantom Strike has capitalized on that intel, further reducing
al Qaeda's capacity to attack, which has improved security and increases
the population's confidence in the Coalition and in the Iraqi Security
Forces.
Of course, al Qaeda has not taken all of this lying down. All the good
news coming out of Iraq recently is even more depressing for al Qaeda
than it is for Harry Reid, if that is possible, and al Qaeda could smell
that something like Phantom Strike might be coming. It had to pull off a
spectacular attack -- and it did. On August 14, four near-simultaneous
car bombs destroyed whole rows of mud-brick houses in a pair of small
farming villages in Yazidi, killing on the order of 400 Iraqis, and
wounding many more -- a horrifying toll even for today's Iraq.
But the site of the terror attack -- in the far northwest of Iraq, 75
miles west of Mosul beyond the upper Tigris -- was very interesting.
Lay of the land
To understand why, it is necessary to know something of the human
geography of Iraq. Baghdad sits at the confluence of the Tigris River and
its main tributary, the Diyala; these both flow from the north. The
Euphrates River travels across Iraq from west to east, curving sharply
south in the southwest suburbs of Baghdad. From there, the Euphrates and
the Tigris converge gently, finally issuing, far to the south, into the
Persian Gulf. Because Iraq's populated areas hug its great rivers, the
human geography of the country lies along five corridors all connected to
a central hub -- Baghdad.
Outside those fertile corridors lies a scorching, lifeless desert -- in
many places no further than three miles from the nearest river. Because
the desert has no water, it favors the army that can most easily maneuver
over long distances with its own water. The Americans are thus masters of
the desert in Iraq.
The insurgents, by contrast, don't do so well there. Even when they
disguise themselves as Bedouins, their patterns of congregation and
movement are easily detected by the scores of unmanned aerial vehicles
constantly on the prowl overhead. And they can't move around readily,
because the desert is largely impassable and in any case totally exposed,
its few roads easily monitored. This means both the insurgency and the
counter-insurgency center on Iraq's five river corridors.
Of these, the one where al Qaeda has suffered its clearest and most
humiliating defeat is along the western Euphrates -- the corridor
stretching from Baghdad to Falluja, Ramadi, Haditha, and on to Al Qaim
near the Syrian border. Not too long ago the heart of the Sunni
insurgency, the entire corridor has fallen to coalition forces.
Insurgents are finding that they can't get past the outer checkpoints far
enough to approach any of the main cities, and even crossing from one
side of the Euphrates to the other has become extremely difficult. Indeed
the situation in Anbar has advanced to the point where the Marine
Expeditionary Force has hit all of its major "intel targets" and had
virtually none to nominate for the Phantom Strike campaign.
Moving counterclockwise, the corridors formed by the southern Euphrates
and Tigris rivers, and the irrigated land between them, are mainly Iraq's
Shiite heartland. But this twin corridor is dominated at its northern end
by a belt of Sunni settlements, running along the outer perimeter of
southern Baghdad. Saddam Hussein contrived this as a defense-in-depth of
his precious capital. In this Baghdad belt, Lynch's division has been
conducting a series of enormous CCR operations. Insurgents are fleeing
south, but will soon start running into the Shiite wall, where (after
years -- indeed decades -- of abusing the Shiites) they are likely to
suffer a fate far worse than getting captured by coalition forces.
The next river corridor to the north is the Diyala valley, which leads
from Baghdad to Baquba, Muqtadiya, and Mansuriyah, finally hitting the
Kurdish region where the terrain becomes mountainous. Starting in mid-
June with Operation Arrowhead Ripper, which focused on Baquba, this area
has seen the heaviest fighting in Iraq since the start of the surge last
February. It is also the site of the most complex and interesting of the
Phantom Strike operations -- Lightning Hammer -- which focuses on the
upper Diyala River valley from Baquba to the Kurdish region.
These four corridors, which only a year ago were wide open to the
insurgents, have become increasingly nettlesome and dangerous for them
since the start of the surge. The large areas shown on intel maps as
"safe" for the insurgents only last year have been whittled down to small
pockets here and there. Al Qaeda and its affiliates are increasingly
desperate for safe havens from which to operate and lines of
communication they can rely on.
Increasingly the insurgents' only option is the fifth corridor, the
northern Tigris River valley stretching from Baghdad to Samarrah, Tikrit,
and Mosul in the far north. This is why the location of al Qaeda's August
16 attack, 75 miles west of Mosul, was so telling. The car-bombs were
likely assembled near Mosul because of the increased risk of trying to
assemble them anywhere else in Iraq. And they were "delivered" locally
because al Qaeda probably decided that the long journey down the Tikrit-
Samarrah-Baghdad highway was too dangerous.
Al Qaeda understands how to manipulate western media well enough to know
that they don't always need to attack in Baghdad. Indeed, the bombing
dominated the headlines in the United States in the dramatic opening days
of Operation Phantom Strike. But because of where it occurred, it told
the coalition's planners that they have been effective, too.
Hammer and anvil
No current fighting shows the ingenuity of U.S. planners better than the
Lightning Hammer operations in the Diyala River valley. The focus of
Lightning Hammer at the moment is an elegant and dramatic attack on the
suspected havens of the al Qaeda elements that were forced north out of
Baquba earlier this summer.
The attack unfolded in two phases, the first of which was the rapid
concentration of forces at several different points along the upper
Diyala River valley. Two air assault squadrons, one from the the 25th
Infantry Division out of Kirkuk, and another of the 82nd Airborne out of
Tikrit, took off for the western side of the valley. Consisting of
several dozen helicopters and some 240 soldiers, the two squadrons
converged on five locations among the maze of canals and broken farmland
that runs along the western edge of the valley. Their purpose was to
establish a screen to block the most likely escape routes for the
insurgents who were about to be flushed out of the valley.
Meanwhile, snatching helicopters from other units in the area, another
air assault squadron was attached to a battalion of the armor-heavy 1st
Cavalry Division at Forward Operating Base Normandy, in the northern
Diyala River valley. The entire force then headed south out of the FOB,
some 300 soldiers in a column of tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles,
Humvees and helicopters. They pushed through Moqdadiyah and plunged
towards the valley.
Simultaneously, another battalion of the 1st Cav pushed northeast from
Baquba in a small operation dubbed Pericles (also part of Lightning
Hammer and Phantom Strike) meant to attack specific intel targets within
one of the few remaining pockets of safety for insurgents in the area.
The operation had the secondary effect of putting a full battalion of
heavy infantry in the field at the bottom of the Diyala River valley just
above Baquba, to act as an anvil for the coming operation.
The two battalions wasted no time in launching the second phase of the
battle, moving towards each other from opposite ends of the valley, in a
simultaneous, massive, and rapid CCR operation. In six days, the two
battalions flooded 28 specific targets -- including whole villages -- in
a fast-moving combination of ground and air assaults.
Many al Qaeda fighters appear to have had just enough warning to make
good their escape. But in so doing, they were forced to abandon their new
"operations center" north of Baghdad -- a command post, medical clinic,
scores of rockets and mortars, dozens of IEDs, and even their personal
weapons.
The prospects for these fighters are not good. The north and south end of
the valleys are blocked, as is the valley's western border. The eastern
escape from the valley is open for them, but that leads them into a bowl
of farmland that is regularly scoured by patrols from FOB Caldwell, and
is ringed to the northeast by the Kurdish "wall," to the south by the
Shiite "wall," and to the southwest by coalition forces operating in
strength between Baghdad and Baquba. Their only solution is to travel
without their weapons and explosives -- the things that make them
dangerous.
Meanwhile, not beset by the force limitations that constrain General
Lynch south of Baghdad, General Benjamin Mixon's Multi-National Division-
North has orchestrated the Lightning Hammer attack as a CCR on the
pattern developed by the Marines in Anbar. Close behind the American
units came units of the Iraqi Security Forces, aiming to stay, and behind
them, government officials and technical advisers meant to levee the
population into the organized neighborhood watch programs that have
proven fatal to al Qaeda in Anbar. Planners told me that the coalition
forces were greeted warmly, and locals pledged to help, as the Sunni
tribes have in Anbar.
The way forward
Al Qaeda in Iraq had many initial advantages -- including a message that,
though false, was superficially appealing. But they never achieved
national scope. They have never looked to anyone like they could actually
govern a country. They never gained the open support of any foreign army.
And now, after giving the people of Iraq a taste of their brutal sadism
-- after executing children for playing with American-donated soccer
balls, after chopping the fingers off young men for smoking, after
murdering entire families in front of the youngest son, so he would live
to tell the tale -- Al Qaeda in Iraq is more widely hated than feared.
In the words of one soft-spoken coalition planner in Baghdad, "We are
demolishing them." After four long years, the coalition has finally
grasped the keys to victory. Al Qaeda has begun to lose the staging areas
it needs for attacks in Baghdad. Just staying alive and avoiding capture
is becoming a full-time occupation for them. As security envelops
Baghdad, and calm spreads along the river corridors that extend out from
the capital to the furthest reaches of the country, what is already clear
to many people here in Iraq will become increasingly impossible for the
rest of the world to ignore.
Because they have finally learned how to protect the people of Iraq --
and help them to protect themselves -- the United States and its allies
are winning this war.
Mario Loyola, a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies,
is embedded with the Marine Expeditionary Force in western Iraq.
