Redders.
‘Whisky 28 OK,’ he finally said to a group exhale in relief. ‘Extracting now.’
Somehow they had got away with it.
Many others hadn’t though. A total of five Warriors were also lost with enormous battle damage throughout the operation, and there were six serious casualties.
The whole thing lasted twenty-three hours, almost double the time planned. All call signs from the battle group including those inside Cimic were contacted by the enemy no less than 103 times that day — a modern record for the British Army.
It was also appallingly hard and hot work. The entire crew and dismounts of another sorry Warrior went down as heatstroke casualties and had to go back to base early, vomiting and slurring their words.
As for the operation’s outcome, nobody could say it was anything more than a score draw for each side. The pluses were that a lot of enemy were killed. With the armour drawing them off us, we also got our little respite. It was just miraculous again that in the most intense furnace of combat, no British soldiers had been lost.
On the downside, one or two bad boys were arrested but a lot more weren’t home. We also knew we wouldn’t be getting Spectre again in a hurry with the conflict in Najaf still going at full tilt.
Worst of all, the thorough pasting the column got had confirmed our fears: we couldn’t rely on a resupply any more because the Warriors were no longer guaranteed to get through to us. Effectively, we were on our own.
Then, the day got even worse. A double whammy was waiting for us in Captain Curry’s O Group.
‘I’m afraid it’s the bad news, then the really bad news tonight, guys. A 21-year-old private from the Black Watch was killed earlier today in Basra. Roadside IED, followed up by small arms fire ambush.
‘Unfortunately, what’s happening in Najaf right now makes the loss of that poor sod pale into insignificance. The US Marines have gone and done us no favours whatsoever today.’
In their bid to crush Moqtada with an iron fist, the US Marines had surrounded and sealed off Najaf’s Old City, putting the ultra-precious Imam Ali mosque fully under siege. Moqtada and the rebels barricaded themselves inside it. Then a Marine artillery shell damaged two of the mosque’s golden minarets and hurled shrapnel into its courtyard.
Meanwhile, all of this was being pumped live into every Al Amarah sitting room courtesy of Al Jazeera TV. Moqtada had seen to that. Tactfully, he added: ‘The final battle for humanity has begun.’
We knew we’d feel the backlash the next day, if not later that night. Our position in Cimic was balanced on a knife edge, thanks yet again to events elsewhere controlled by our ‘coalition partners’. Worse, there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about any of it.
We were just holding out against the insurgency’s current level of force and violence. But if the Yanks went into the mosque, it would effectively mobilize most of the male population of southern Iraq. In Al Amarah, they would descend on Cimic House like killer flies on cow shit.
Sure, we’d kill truckloads of them as they tried to get over the walls. But we couldn’t kill thousands; we simply didn’t have enough bullets. If the Challengers and Warriors didn’t get through then, we would soon be overrun.
Charlie Curry’s final bit of O Group news: the whole miserable day had been Moqtada al-Sadr’s thirty-first birthday. I only hoped he choked to death on his cake.
23
As it turned out, we got our first vote of no confidence the next morning from our own Iraqi workers inside Cimic. Just watching Al Jazeera overnight proved enough for them. No matter what else was to happen in Najaf, they had decided our time was already up.
I was in the Ops Room discussing our ammo supply with Captain Curry when Daz ran in.
‘Danny, sir; you’ve got to come and have a look at this. It’s something else.’
Daz led us out to the balcony that overlooked the back gate, the entrance the locals used. There below us were the interpreters, the two laundry men, the gardener, the cleaners, the water plant operators and its guards. They were going backwards and forwards from the abandoned accommodation blocks to the gate in two lines like ants.
Poised precariously in their arms or over their shoulders were washing machines, spin dryers, air conditioning units, mattresses, shelves, bedside cabinets, TVs. Then they came back for second helpings. They were having away everything and anything that wasn’t bolted down. It wasn’t just that they were nicking our stuff, but they were doing it in broad daylight and right in front of our very eyes. Rasheed the porn merchant even waved at me with a smile when he saw us looking down.
It meant one very obvious thing. They no longer gave a ha’penny if they got fired because they were convinced there soon wouldn’t be anybody left to pay them anyway. Like all good Arabs, they weren’t going to let a good business opportunity pass them by. They were taking what they could, then and there, while they still had the chance.
‘Cheeky bastards!’
‘Like rats abandoning a sinking ship.’
‘Fuck them,’ said Captain Curry, shaking his head. ‘Most of that stuff is so badly fragged it’s no use to us anyway. Sooner they’re all out of here the better.’
He was right. Nobody had any interest in doing any washing and spin drying right then. Having Iraqis inside the camp was also no longer a great idea either. We couldn’t trust any of them. After the morning’s plunder, none of them came back. But two had the brass neck to ask for that day’s wages.
They’d done us a favour anyway. When the frequency of attacks against us inevitably increased that day with the new developments in Najaf, Curry ordered the disposal of any loose obstacles about the compound. Anything that we might trip over while sprinting from A to B, or that could become secondary shrapnel underneath explosions. Patio chairs, the table tennis table and the gym equipment all went over the wall for locals to scavenge.
The day was filled by fresh calls of ‘Allah Akbar’ from around the surrounding streets. Sniper fire on us from the old town’s rooftops increased to pretty much constant and the rebels turned up with renewed vigour to discharge whatever arms they had at us. From then onwards, we stopped going out at night.
Events in Najaf had perched southern Iraq on the edge of an awfully steep precipice. After smashing up the minarets, the Yanks were for the moment holding back from a full storming of the Imam Ali mosque. Nobody knew for how long though. Neither did it stop them from issuing ever more incendiary threats against Moqtada and the Mehdi Army on an almost daily basis.
For his part, Moqtada had ordered his offices all over the nation to empty their coffers and secure the services of as many combatants as possible. Intelligence came through that young men were now being paid as much as US$50 a day to fight the coalition; a king’s ransom.
Added to that, we heard that many of the new recruits to the jihad in Al Amarah were also high as a kite. OMS leaders were feeding them with a lethal combination of amphetamines and opiates that made their brains tell them they were invisible. Then they let them loose on us.
We were now so busy that the platoon’s system of shifts on the roof became irrelevant. If everyone wasn’t stood-to together at any given time, then the likelihood was they would be soon enough. Instead, I sent a pair or two down for a couple of hours’ kip during a lull. When they came back, another lot would go down. If they were unlucky, it would be only five minutes before someone screamed ‘Stand-to’ again.
The other platoons would be doing the same around the rest of the camp: in the sangars, on the lower balconies or at the two Warriors. With the adrenalin kicking in the moment you woke, an hour or two of sleep a day was all we actually needed. Your body gets used to replenishing itself in the time it has. Nobody really needs eight hours’ sleep. It’s a bad civilian habit.
At that stage, the drug-addled loonies we could handle. However, the OMS were also training up dozens more mortar teams to ramp up their endless bombardment on us. That made things far worse. The sheer volume of stuff they began to lob in was just unbelievable. Between 11 and 13 August alone, 400 separate mortar rounds were launched on Cimic House — an average of one every eleven minutes for three full days in a row.
