Change of plans

I’d gotten up Saturday morning at Forward Operating Base Union III, home of 1-14 Cavalry, expecting a long morning before heading over to the embassy landing zone to get going for the day. I’d learned the previous afternoon that I was going to spend Saturday afternoon with Petraeus on a “battlefield circulation” – a tour of a unit’s area of operations with the general, some of his staff, and space for four or five members of the media, including me.

The plan was for me to get a ride over the International Zone landing zone around noon, where Petraeus’ two helicopters would stop on the way up to the day’s battlefield to pick up me and the other reporters. At 0900, though, as I sat in the Union III hajji café having my breakfast (they make a very good white chocolate mocha) and reading Stars and Stripes, the squadron and brigade public affairs officers rushed up in a huff and told me to grab my armor and bags right away – there had been a change of plans and I had to be at the landing zone right away for transport to Camp Victory, where Petraeus and his staff are headquartered.

I hurriedly armored up and grabbed my gear, filling up my CamelBak on the ride to the landing zone, where Lt. Col. Yoswa was waiting for me with a bit more of an explanation: “The CG is meeting with the attorney general this morning before the battlefield circ and he wants to introduce you, so let’s go!” Oh, of course – why wouldn’t the commanding general want a 19-year-old cadet at his classified briefing to Alberto Gonzales? I climbed into the lead bird, bucked up, and we were off.

After the quick ride from the International Zone to Camp Victory, the pair of Black Hawks touched down at the landing zone next to al-Faw palace, the headquarters of Multinational Forces Iraq and Multinational Corps Iraq. A few minutes on the tarmac as the crew chief checked the various radio and internet uplinks that Petraeus’ command bird is configured with and a couple of soldiers from his security detail buckled in, and then all of a sudden there they were – Col. Meese, the other soldiers, and then Petraeus himself leaning over for a handshake.

As I got out a dazed “Honored to meet you, sir” or something else like that, the bird lifted off, then touched down again maybe a minute later at what I recognized as some part of BIAP, the airport within the vast Victory-Liberty-Striker-Slayer base complex. After peeling off our armor, the whole party jumped out of the helicopter and filed off the tarmac toward a nondescript military building, Petraeus leading the group while asking me about my fall course lineup (he seemed to approve, and said he knew the professor for my Vietnam course, retired Col. Paul Miles – not surprising since he seems to know pretty much anyone affiliated with West Point, the Woodrow Wilson School, or unconventional warfare, and Prof. Miles is all three).

The building we entered, dusty and unremarkable on the outside, was actually a nicely set-up briefing room, with a big screen at the front, a pair of flags, the Multinational Forces Iraq emblem, some tables, and rows of chairs. Two officers I’d heard about introduced themselves: Maj. Everett Spain, Petraeus’ aide, who a Special Forces officer in D.C. had told me to watch out for, and Col. Bill Rapp, a former superior of my ROTC cadre commander, who was returning to take over the Commander’s Initiatives Group (an “internal think tank” of bright officers) from Col. Meese, who has to be back at West Point in time to teach this fall. Col. Martins, the general’s easygoing rule-of-law advisor, whom I’d met earlier, was also there. After they’d all put some thought into how to arrange the chairs and tables, the door from the tarmac opened and a gaggle of people came in, guarded by nonuniformed security types with M4s. At the center of the pack was Attorney General Gonzales. Petraeus brought him up to the front table, then called me over and introduced me before having everyone take their seats and beginning the briefing.

Phantom Thunder’s aftermath

The briefing was classified, but I can give the gist of it for background. In a detailed set of maps and charts of enemy and coalition activity, Petraeus briefed Gonzales and his staff a picture of operations and conditions that was pretty similar to what I suspected in July, with a couple of significant differences and areas of expanded detail. Post-Phantom Thunder, I conjectured that US forces might, this fall, begin to focus less on the Belts and more on Baghdad proper, in particular on rolling back the Mahdi Army toward Sadr City in Dora-style clearances. This was an overly simplistic view.

The primary effect of Phantom Thunder, as intended, was to push al Qaeda and its affiliates out of Baqubah nd Arab Jabour while preventing them from moving west again into Anbar. By coordinating two division-level offensives and a major push against enemy routes into Anbar, Multinational Corps Iraq has apparently accomplished this; Baqubah nd Arab Jabour remained very difficult areas, but nobody’s planning on pulling out of them, while Anbar, and particularly Ramadi, remain phenomenally secure as a result of the Army and Marines’ cooperation with the tribes.

The question that shapes the next set of operations is: If not Anbar, where has al Qaeda been pushed to now that its urban Belt bases in Baqubah nd Arab Jabour have been reduced? I was afraid that the answer would be Mosul and Tel Afar, former al Qaeda strongholds that are now lightly held, but that hasn’t been the case, largely because of the aggressive efforts of Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Special Operations Forces task force (euphemistically known as OCF-I, or “Other Coalition Forces Iraq”). I learned a lot about how Special Operations Forces operations complemented Multinational Corps Iraq’s Phantom Thunder offensive but obviously I can’t write about that.

A second possible outcome, and the one I expected, was that once its urban bases in the Belts had been cleared, al Qaeda would be forced in toward Baghdad itself, leading into an autumn of urban operations against both al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army. That has not happened either. Instead, al Qaeda seems to have displaced into rural areas of the Belts, in particular the villages south of Arab Jabour, north of Baqubah and between Baqubah nd Tarmiyah – in the latter case, to make the whole thing more interesting, a Sunni-Shiite fault line.

Hence, the next phase of Multinational Corps Iraq operations against al Qaeda will have to focus not on Baghdad but on different, more rural parts of the Belts, and will also have to tie in with action against the Mahdi Army, which controls villages (like Husseiniyah, which recently flared up) north of Baghdad that abut al Qaeda’s new havens. Special Operations Forces, meanwhile, will have to continue pursuing al Qaeda leadership in coordination with Multinational Corps Iraq, and, despite increasing action by conventional forces against the Mahdi Army in villages like Husseiniyah, will remain the main effort against Mahdi Army leadership and weapons networks within Baghdad and Sadr City.

Multinational Corps Iraq is now in the beginning stages of Operation Phantom Strike, the follow up to Phantom Thunder, which will focus on clearing al Qaeda out of the rural areas of the Belts. Phantom Thunder lasted two months, and this new operation, also at the corps level, will probably continue into October. You can think of it as the second of two stages in clearing the Belts: Phantom Thunder to displace al Qaeda from its fortified urban strongholds in Baqubah nd Arab Jabour, and Phantom Strike to a) prevent the organization from settling into the rural areas of the Belts and b) target any Mahdi Army activity that appears in neighboring rural areas in response to US and al Qaeda activity.

Meanwhile Special Operations Forces will continue to hunt both al Qaeda and Mahdi Army leadership in Baghdad, in the Belts, and everywhere else, and US forces in Baghdad will continue to apply pressure against both sides in Dora, Khadimiyah, Rusafa, and other difficult areas. One major point that needs emphasis is that even though conventional operations have been focusing on al Qaeda and Sunni extremists, Special Operations Forces and to some extent conventional units are actively hunting the leadership and weapons supply networks of the Mahdi Army. As Petraeus put it, using an Army phrase, “We are not letting the Shiite militias take a knee.”

It seems – not from the briefing, which began to go into law-and-order issues after painting a general picture – that the major areas in the Belts that will be targeted in Phantom Strike are: the west bank of the Tigris beyond Arab Jabour, in 4th Airborne Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infanty Division’s area; the villages north of Baqubah in the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry’s area; and the area around Tarmiyah, Husseiniyah, and Bani Saad, in 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division’s area. The battlefield circulation for the day was going to be up to 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division’s area of operations.

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