29
We finally pulled into Abu Naji at 4.30 a.m., just as the sun was rising again. It was a nice feeling to step under a shower and get some fresh clothes on. I hadn’t done that since I’d last left Abu Naji almost four weeks ago. Then we had breakfast, and got our heads down. Most of the platoon slept until after sunset. Chris didn’t wake up until the next morning. That was OK though. We’d earned a lie-in.
For the next few days, the OMS alliance kept up a steady flow of mortar and sniper fire on Cimic. It meant the Royal Welch Fusiliers got the chance to get some scrapping under their belts. But after what we’d been through, it was hard to see it as anything more than keeping up appearances for Moqtada.
The enemy never attempted another proper assault on the compound. They either no longer had the men for it or no longer had the will; or both. Our all-out defence coupled with the resupply had broken the back of the insurgency in Al Amarah. They knew it, and we knew it. It gave everyone who’d been in Cimic House in August a tremendous sense of pride. We had stood up and been counted, we were tested to the extreme, and we had won.
When the ceasefire finally came a few days later, it must have been far more of a relief to them than it was to us.
Again, just as events in Najaf had started it, it took the final play of the game in the holy city to bring the August uprising to a final close.
Where the interim Iraqi government had failed after weeks of fruitless negotiations, the most influential cleric in Iraq succeeded. As the Shia’s equivalent of the Pope, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was a very powerful man indeed in the south; probably the most powerful. Luckily for the Yanks, the 73-year-old preacher with a long white beard was still a moderate who generally gave the coalition his support. The Americans’ masterstroke was to coax him into the fray on their side.
On 25 August, he was flown to Basra on an RAF C17 jet from London, where he had been undergoing heart surgery. A hospital bed abroad for three weeks had conveniently left Sistani without having to choose sides. From Basra, he set off to Najaf by road in a heralded ‘peace convoy’ to call a halt to the uprising.
Faced with having to defy the great man’s word and take him on too, Moqtada blinked. Tactically, though, he was already in deep trouble. According to CNN, the Marines had finally come up with a way of taking the Imam Ali mosque without exploding Muslim sensitivities. Elite Iraqi Army troops had been trained to storm it with the help of US special forces disguised as Arabs. The operation to capture or kill Moqtada was just hours away from being launched.
After twenty-four hours of frenzied talks, Sistani brokered a new deal. If the Mehdi Army would disarm and leave Najaf, the US Marines promised to do the same. Again, there’d be no recriminations on either side. It was a compromise that suited everyone by that stage.
Moqtada sent out a proclamation asking all loyal fighters to put down their weapons. He even agreed to rejoin the political process and take part in the elections in five months’ time. His loyal defenders in the mosque were escorted out of it by jubilant worshippers. The home of their belief system had been saved.
On 28 August, the Al Amarah OMS also declared a ceasefire, pending, of course, the outcome of their negotiations with the town’s security forces, which really meant our CO. In other words, their murdering swine wanted immunity too. With orders from above, Colonel Maer reluctantly accepted the deal, which came into effect at midday.
With the quiet, the company finally got a chance to add up the statistics. They made terrific reading. During that 23-day period of concerted attack, we’d taken a total of 595 incoming mortar rounds on the compound during 230 different bombardments, 57 separate RPG attacks and 5 barrages from 107mm rockets. We’d fought 25 different firefights out in the town, and repelled 86 enemy ground assaults on Cimic itself.
In return, we fired back 33,000 rounds, countless Challenger, Warrior and mortar HE shells, and even managed to persuade the US Air Force to drop a 500lb bomb right into the middle of a built-up city.
We’d never had the time — or the opportunity — to properly count up all the enemy dead. During the siege alone, it must have been somewhere in the mid-hundreds. Thanks to a rough Ops Room estimation, Sniper Platoon alone accounted for 40 per cent of all of Y Company’s kills.
The siege’s fighting had certainly taken our platoon tally for the whole tour to over 200 confirmed kills; double that unconfirmed. We all knew how many of them we’d hit, but you don’t often get the chance to take the pulse of some fucker you’ve just slotted when you’re in the middle of the shit.
As for the company’s casualties, we suffered one dead and six seriously wounded. How we didn’t lose dozens rather than just Ray will remain the world’s greatest mystery to all of us.
The locals in the houses surrounding Cimic had not been quite so lucky. A total of twenty-two had been killed by mortars intended for us dropping short or long.
The next day, I radioed Ads from Abu Naji to ask him to check up on the people in the corner house. They’d been playing on my mind. If any of them were still alive, I still wanted us to apologize for zeroing on their wall. Miraculously, they were all still there, albeit in little more than a pile of rubble now. They had all survived, and they had nothing but thanks for us for defeating the OMS. Amazing. Our presence next door had fucked their lives, and they still said thank you.
This time, the ceasefire held firm all over Iraq. Moqtada was well and truly a spent force now; for the rest of that year anyway.
The CO shared an anecdote with Captain Curry in the back of a Warrior on the way back to Abu Naji after the ceasefire signing ceremony in the Pink Palace.
‘Well, Charlie, I take my hat off to you and Major Featherstone. The OMS told me they thought Cimic was being defended by an entire SAS squadron. Of course, it was a misapprehension I was comfortable to leave them with.’
The greatest irony of all had come a week into the peace. Chris heard the news first and couldn’t wait to tell me.
‘Guess what, Danny.’
‘What, mate?’
He grinned. ‘You’ll love this. We’re handing Cimic House back over to the Iraqis tomorrow. All UK forces are moving out for good.’
It had been all part of the long-term strategy to give the place back to local government control as soon as it was feasible. It was about the Iraqi security forces taking on an ever greater lead. After all, we weren’t going to stay in Maysan for ever. The handover had originally been planned for midsummer. Then the uprising had begun again and everything was canned.
In peacetime, our priorities had changed again. We could hand it over now while looking all magnanimous — most importantly, at a time of our choosing, not theirs. A final fuck you to the OMS.
We knew the logic behind the decision full well. Yet Chris and I couldn’t resist a wry smile about it all the same. It was hard for us, the grunts, to not feel a little bit of Hamburger Hill syndrome after everything we’d been through there. One of our men had even died for the right to call that place British. Two weeks later, the Grand Old Duke of York had decided the hill wasn’t needed any more so we marched all the way back down it again.
In the end, nobody was really that massively bothered. We didn’t actually give a fuck about the place. A poxy few lumps of concrete in the middle of Al Amarah; they can shove it up their arses for all we cared.
The only thing that mattered was we’d done our jobs when we were really needed. That would never be taken away from us.
With nowhere else to go now but Abu Naji, the platoon spent the rest of the tour chasing camel spiders up and down the corridors of its giant tents. There was the normal dull routine to keep us occupied: guard duties, Land Rover patrols, escort trips and admin days.
The only violence we ever witnessed was the odd mortar attack. In the Abu Naji cookhouse, you could spot the people who’d been at Cimic House in a flash. At the first sound of incoming, we were the only ones to stay at the tables calmly finishing our food. The rest of the battle group scrambled under the tables and lurched for their body armour.
At the end of September, I got posted. It had come sooner than I’d expected. I was being promoted to Colour Sergeant, and sent to the Infantry Battle School in Brecon as an instructor. My leaving date was in just one week’s time, three weeks ahead of everyone else.
