stand a spoon up in it, we had to inspect all his father’s old squadron photos. He had flown Canberra bombers out of RAF Cottesmore in Rutland. All of a sudden, his two best friends appeared. They too were huge British patriots, and shook our hands incessantly.
After half an hour of glad handing, I got sudden inspiration for a brilliant tactical move.
‘Ads, I’ve got an idea. Come with me. Excuse us for a minute, Abdul, but where’s your toilet?’
We found it on the bottom floor of the house.
‘Right, Ads. What I’m about to do in there is top secret. It’s vital you stand here and cover for me. Understood?’
‘Sure, Danny.’ He wore a frown of utter concentration. ‘I’ll follow you anywhere, mate.’
I went inside the toilet and closed the door. Presented with a nice clean porcelain toilet cistern and wooden seat, I pulled down my trousers and pants and sat down in some considerable comfort. It was a tactical bowel move. Having been up on the roof all night, I hadn’t been able to manage the morning constitutional. It was a shame to let such a good opportunity go to waste, and who knew when I might get it again? I needed Ads there just in case some mean-spirited OMS man ran in off the street and slotted me on the shitter.
‘You sneaky bastard,’ he said, shaking his head as I emerged. So I stood guard while he dropped the kids off at the pool too.
The great counterattack from Aj Dayya never came, so we took it in turns for one pair to do a stint on the roof while the other four spent the rest of the day watching TV with Abdul in his nice air-conditioned sitting room.
We were called back to Cimic at sunset. That evening, Operation Waterloo’s second phase began. The two armoured Warrior companies and the attached company of Royal Welch Fusiliers had moved into the town’s main police stations. At a synchronized time, all four companies in the city pushed out patrols to re-establish law and order on the streets.
The OMS scored an early success with an attack on Sgt Adam Llewellyn. A ten-year-old boy on a rooftop chucked a petrol bomb into his Warrior turret. The top half of his body was engulfed in flames and by the time they had got him out, there was skin hanging off all over him. His burns were awful, but the fact that it was a ten-year- old that had done him was most shocking.
Apart from that, the patrols met little resistance. The few other individual lunatics who took us on were shot dead on the spot. But there weren’t many who tried. The OMS had been given a thorough kicking. Dozens of their men lay dead and they had little ability left to fight.
We had proved two important things: we had the bigger stick and we were prepared to use it. It wasn’t a trick we could pull every day. The Spectre gunships and A Company’s Warriors together were a rare treat that we would be lucky to get again. But the OMS didn’t know that, and we weren’t going to tell them.
We’d also won the town back for the price of just three serious injuries: Sgt Llewellyn, a corporal shot in the foot, and a private fragged by a grenade hurled from a passing motorbike.
The cherry on the cake for Y Company was found in what was left of a school classroom on the north bank. A muzzle flash had been spotted from a top window in the school during the battle. So a Challenger II put a shell from its main gun straight through it. The body of an OMS sniper was found under the rubble. Next to him was a Draganov sniper rifle. It had been the fucker that shot Baz Bliss.
A few days later, it was considered calm enough for the armoured companies to pull out of the police stations and leave it to the local cops to get on with it again. The chief of police was called in by our CO and Molly Phee for a delicate fireside chat.
‘Your men have had all the training, we’ve cleared up the enemy for you, so, with respect sir, is there any reason why they can’t start earning their fucking pay now?’ the colonel asked him. And for a few days, they even did.
Out on patrols, we learnt what had been happening while we were locked down in Cimic. The OMS had enforced strict Islamic law on Al Amarah’s streets. Women who dared to show their ankles underneath their long black veils had been beaten. A man had been shot in the mouth for drinking whisky. Normal people came up to us quite openly to thank us for doing something about it. Many seemed delighted the OMS had been forced to wind their necks in.
It was important to keep up the momentum and build on what we had achieved. Basic security on the streets allowed us to go after a number of smaller targets that we’d wanted to have a crack at for some time. We carried out a series of raids, smashing doors down with a heavy metal thumper. In one house near the OMS building, we found a massive arms stash inside a false wall in the garden. RPGs and boxes of ammo were stacked from the hide’s floor to the top of the six-foot wall. The buffoon owner inadvertently put Pikey’s well-honed street antennae on to it by standing right in front of it and looking deeply uncomfortable.
Prodding him in the chest with a finger, Pikey demanded: ‘Oi jackass, why the fuck is you standing in front of that wall all the time we’ve been here?’
‘What wall mister?’
That sealed it.
14
The success of Waterloo also saw the mortaring on Cimic drop off a little bit to just a strike every couple of days. The OMS had been badly winded, and it took them a few days to get their breath. They were soon back though. Events elsewhere made that a cert.
There was still no sign of any end to the standoff between Moqtada al-Sadr and the Americans. If anything, it was getting worse. Moderate Shia leaders and tribal chiefs were still trying to negotiate a peace between the two sides. But neither seemed particularly interested. There were only two months to go before the CPA was due to hand power back to the Iraqis, and both al-Sadr and the Yanks were desperate for victory before that. Continual fighting in or around Iraq’s two holy cities, Najaf and Kerbala, threatened to spread mayhem across the country.
More than 2,000 US soldiers were now encamped on the edge of Najaf. With the threat of an all-out assault ever present, troops made regular incursions into the city’s outskirts. As May went on, US tanks were sent for the first time into Kerbala, where a Polish soldier had been killed in the Mehdi Army uprising. The tanks destroyed an al-Sadr office with heavy machine-gun fire and then took up positions just 500 metres from the gold-domed Imam Hussein shrine, the second holiest Shia site of all. In retaliation, Moqtada called for his followers everywhere to launch a new wave of attacks on coalition troops.
The national picture was leapt on afresh by the OMS, and they used it to renew their rabble rousing in Al Amarah. They were short of new recruits, after folk had seen what mincemeat the Spectre made of the last lot. Instead, they did a bit of thinking and changed their tactics. They came back out in smaller but more lethal packages.
As the battle group had learnt from Op Pimlico, the OMS learnt valuable lessons from Op Waterloo too. To take us on head to head was futile, and the battle proved to be their last big set piece. Until later, of course. From then onwards it was to be high-intensity guerrilla warfare. That meant fewer open assaults and less of a will to hold fixed patches of ground, but more hidden bombs and far cleverer ambushes. Now they’d only confront us on their terms when they knew they had more firepower than us, or could catch us unaware. It became a regular pattern of combat for the next six weeks.
We fought the OMS’s new warfare with the usual counter-insurgency tactics: arrest operations, searches, unpredictable patrols, random vehicle checks.
On the streets, we indulged in a new game of cat and mouse. The OMS watched us carefully. When we came back into camp, they would go out and do their own patrols. The kids that had been chatting to us half an hour before were slapped about. Some poor sod who’d been drinking would get shot again.
Half of it was a cold war for the city’s hearts and minds. That was just as important as the physical stuff. If we could get the local population on our side, it would deny the OMS friendly territory from which to operate. To do
