Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
CBS
October 12, 2008
60 Minutes (CBS), 7:00 PM
LESLEY STAHL: One of the reasons violence in Iraq has subsided so dramatically was a significant battle that US forces won in Sadr City just five months ago. Sadr City, part of Baghdad, is home to two million Shia and turf of the fiercely anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. For years, insurgents in Iraq have been stymieing US troops with homemade, low-tech weapons, like car bombs and improvised roadside explosives. But in the battle of Sadr City, as we learned in a high level debriefing with the US commander in Iraq, the Americans overpowered the Shiite militias with high-tech, the most advanced, sophisticated whiz-bang hardware and software on Earth: electronics, lasers, high-resolution cameras that can literally cut through the fog of war.
When we were in Iraq to interview the new commanding General Ray Odierno, we went with him as he surveyed the former battlefield, through neighborhoods now pacified, and into a market returning to life. At his side was the brigade commander who led the battle here, Colonel John Hort.
COLONEL JOHN HORT: This was some of the heaviest fighting that we had experienced during our two months in Sadr City.
STAHL: Right where we're standing?
HORT: Right where we're standing.
STAHL: Standing there, or any place in Sadr City, could not have been done just five months ago. This was off-limits to Americans. For years, the fiery cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Shiite militia controlled the streets. Last March, they began using the neighborhood as a launching pad to lob rockets into the nearby green zone, the seat of the Iraqi government and site of the US Embassy.
HORT: Not just one or two, but we're talking 20 to 30 rocket attacks coming out of Sadr City.
STAHL: Colonel Hort gave General Odierno his first briefing on the battle, and we were invited to sit in. It's rare that reporters can videotape sessions like this one. We were asked to turn our cameras off only once and were allowed to broadcast only a few slides that were later declassified for us like this one.
HORT: And you can kind of see kind of some of the locations they were coming out of throughout all of Sadr City against the green zone.
STAHL: The US military had wanted to mount an attack, but Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki balked for a year because the militias are Shiites like him, and that made a decision to fight them politically risky)
STAHL: But you waited for him.
GENERAL RAYMOND T. ODIERNO [Commanding General, Multi-National Force – Iraq]: It was his decision.
STAHL: To give you the--his decision to give you the go ahead.
ODIERNO: Right. I think--I think what he finally realized were that the militias that had safe havens in Sadr City were really trying to destabilize the government of Iraq, and he realized that it would add instability to his own government.
STAHL: Once Maliki gave the go-ahead, a US Stryker battalion went in. But they confronted a steady stream of militia reinforcements.
HORT: Every day it was 20, 30, 40 new guys that were coming down to fight.
STAHL: So Hort and his men had to do something to keep them out. They decided to build a wall, a barrier straight across Sadr City. It would also create a buffer zone wide enough to prevent the militia rockets from reaching the green zone. To build the wall, Colonel Hort's Charlie Company began putting up massive T-shaped concrete slabs. Fighting erupted almost immediately as sniper fire came in from every direction. Charlie Company retaliated with massive tank fire.
HORT: We fired 800 tank rounds in this fight. We haven't fired that many tank rounds since the start of the war.
STAHL: Colonel Hort said the building of the so-called T-wall became a magnet for every bad guy in Sadr City. This was one of the most intense engagements in the entire war. Yet even as the battle raged, the wall went up.
HORT: It was literally concrete barrier by concrete barrier. In a--it just wasn't going out there putting up some barriers. I mean, it was a fight every inch of the way in.
STAHL: Did you put them up under fire?
LT. COLONEL BRIAN EIFLER: Guys would climb the ladders to unhook the crane chains from the wall, unarmed, while people are firing at them. So it was high adventure.
STAHL: Lieutenant Colonel Brian Eifler's team laid down cover fire while some soldiers, wide open and exposed, unhooked the chains from the crane. On days when the shooting was particularly fierce, they were able to put up only eight slabs.
HORT: Every type of weapons system the enemy had, they tried to use against us up at the wall. I mean, it was step by step by step and fighting literally every hour of the day.
STAHL: They called in sniper teams from the elite Navy SEALs and air support, F-18 fighter jets and Apache helicopters that protected the flanks. But here's what really made the difference: an arsenal of advanced, high-flying technology, UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles with highly improved camera systems so sensitive they can see the enemy even at night, through clouds and gunsmoke from high up. They can spot someone smoking or a weapon on someone's side, and they have sensors so advanced they can hear enemy radio transmissions and pinpoint their location.
ODIERNO: In 2003, we didn't have all the systems that are now available. We had some. But we didn't have all the UAVs that allow...
STAHL: In the battle for Sadr City, they used two different UAVs. One was the Shadow Drone, depicted here on one of Colonel Hort's slides. Twenty or 30 seconds after a militia team fired a rocket, the Shadow locked on them, shadowed them, watched them move and set up for their next shot. Then an armed UAV, the Predator, was activated. These are actual pictures of the battle on the streets of Sadr City. As you can see, a group of militia fighters rushed to a car that had just been hit by a US Hellfire missile. They remove a mortar tube from the trunk and load it into a second car which they drive through the streets to an open field. At that point the Predator locks it site onto the vehicle and fires off another missile. According to the Army, this killed two fighters inside the car and destroyed the mortar tube. War by remote control. This is how Charlie Company hunted down the militia rocket teams and whittled down their numbers.
HORT: You know, they went from 20 to 30 man groups down to five, four and then in some cases only one or two. The Predator and the Shadow were just phenomenal in their ability to see the enemy, particularly after we shot a rocket.
STAHL: We have learned from other sources that Colonel Hort's ground troops were supported by a secret, special ops unit called Task Force 17. Using their own Predators along with Iraqi undercover operatives and eavesdropping, it was able to take out some of the militia leaders who were based north of the wall, hiding among the civilian population. With the help of the drones and their high powered cameras, Army commanders were able to see or map the entire theater of operations and figure out the enemy's tactics and patterns with so-called persistent surveillance.
HORT: And in come cases we would--we would wait four, six, even 10 hours to do the engagement because we didn't want to kill the guy...
ODIERNO: Collateral damage.
HORT: Right. We wanted to go after the whole group, you know, the company chain of command, as you want to call it that, where they would actually pick up the rail, drive in their vehicle, go to another location and do an after action review on what they did.
STAHL: In other words, after a long skirmish, all the individual militia rocket teams would rendezvous in a large group with their leaders. In this video, you can see how Colonel Hort's men would be tracking as the militia fighters went to a set location for a battle assessment and their new assignments.
HORT: So once they got to that site, that's when we would do the engagements. Sometimes that took six, eight, 10 hours to wait. And that's what Predator allowed us to do. It truly preyed on the enemy.
STAHL: May I ask--they had no idea? How far away...
ODIERNO: The Predator is about--it flies about 10,000 feet?
HORT: Yes, sir.
ODIERNO: It's a--it's a UAV, it's a military...
STAHL: And no noise.
ODIERNO: It's so high up, they can't--they have trouble hearing it.
STAHL: They can't hear it. Wow.
ODIERNO: Sometimes they can, but it's pretty hard. It's very difficult.
STAHL: Can't hear anything.
STAHL: This was the first time UAVs were used this way at the brigade level, allowing soldiers on the ground to manage and synchronize the information themselves. They call it "find, fix and finish."
HORT: All of this was pushed down to the brigade commander and used in this fight and primarily focused north against the rocket teams.
STAHL: Colonel Hort and his men were able to watch, in real time, as the enemy planted over 300 armor-piercing roadside bombs, or IEDs. And so they made the decision early in the battle to use tanks and Bradleys fortified with thick reactive tiles. They were so effective, said Colonel Hort, that even while they actually struck 120 IEDs, the crews were all protected.
HORT: It went from literally 60 attacks down to three or four attacks, and that was...
STAHL: Talking a day, a week, or?
HORT: Sixty attacks a day.
STAHL: So the battle of Sadr City was won with a combination of high-tech and no-tech. Lasers and electronic eyes in the sky, and cement. Over the course of the fighting that lasted eight weeks, the number of US troops grew from 700 to 2,000, up against roughly 4,000. An estimated 700 of the militia fighters were killed; six Americans died. Near the end, in May, Colonel Hort says as many as 40 of the militia leaders fled and a cease-fire was negotiated.
HORT: You know, it's my opinion at the brigade level that the cease-fire was declared because they really didn't have a whole lot left to throw at us.
STAHL: By the end of the battle, the T-wall was finally finished.
HORT: It's 4,000 meters, so close to two miles, in terms of where the wall started and finished. And that's just the exact width of Sadr City.
STAHL: It seals off about a quarter of Sadr City, and it's been beautified with local artists painting murals of peaceful, happy scenes that have to be approved by the US Army. To get from one side of the wall to the other, the locals have to go through entry points.
Checkpoints. They have to be checked to go back and forth?
ODIERNO: Yeah, you check--that's right.
STAHL: Oh.
ODIERNO: And that's--but it's easy. And it's usually just showing of an ID, but it is a checkpoint.
STAHL: Right.
ODIERNO: And again, that's to limit the freedom of movement of the--of the insurgents, for the most part.
STAHL: Merchants and traders are back in business here. This is a wholesale market in Sadr City, where trucks deliver fresh produce from the countryside every day now. The militias used to shake down the vendors. That's over. But still, the local businessmen are not happy about the wall.
Tell me about the T-wall.
Unidentified Man #1: (Foreign language spoken)
Unidentified Man #2: They feel that they're cut off from the other side, which is affecting their businesses.
ODIERNO: And you can tell them I think when we're able to get more security forces, over time we will take the T-walls down.
STAHL: Yet local citizens are providing intelligence, solid tips that have led to the capture of weapons caches, IED caches. But General Odierno says the situation is fragile.
ODIERNO: You eliminate the safe haven and now we're--now we can start to build. But it takes time. I mean, that's the issue. It just--it just takes time.
STAHL: Many of the fighters who survived, the general told us, fled to Iran and Syria to try and regenerate. The idea, he says, is to create a neighborhood that doesn't want them back.
October 12, 2008
60 Minutes (CBS), 7:00 PM
LESLEY STAHL: One of the reasons violence in Iraq has subsided so dramatically was a significant battle that US forces won in Sadr City just five months ago. Sadr City, part of Baghdad, is home to two million Shia and turf of the fiercely anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. For years, insurgents in Iraq have been stymieing US troops with homemade, low-tech weapons, like car bombs and improvised roadside explosives. But in the battle of Sadr City, as we learned in a high level debriefing with the US commander in Iraq, the Americans overpowered the Shiite militias with high-tech, the most advanced, sophisticated whiz-bang hardware and software on Earth: electronics, lasers, high-resolution cameras that can literally cut through the fog of war.
When we were in Iraq to interview the new commanding General Ray Odierno, we went with him as he surveyed the former battlefield, through neighborhoods now pacified, and into a market returning to life. At his side was the brigade commander who led the battle here, Colonel John Hort.
COLONEL JOHN HORT: This was some of the heaviest fighting that we had experienced during our two months in Sadr City.
STAHL: Right where we're standing?
HORT: Right where we're standing.
STAHL: Standing there, or any place in Sadr City, could not have been done just five months ago. This was off-limits to Americans. For years, the fiery cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Shiite militia controlled the streets. Last March, they began using the neighborhood as a launching pad to lob rockets into the nearby green zone, the seat of the Iraqi government and site of the US Embassy.
HORT: Not just one or two, but we're talking 20 to 30 rocket attacks coming out of Sadr City.
STAHL: Colonel Hort gave General Odierno his first briefing on the battle, and we were invited to sit in. It's rare that reporters can videotape sessions like this one. We were asked to turn our cameras off only once and were allowed to broadcast only a few slides that were later declassified for us like this one.
HORT: And you can kind of see kind of some of the locations they were coming out of throughout all of Sadr City against the green zone.
STAHL: The US military had wanted to mount an attack, but Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki balked for a year because the militias are Shiites like him, and that made a decision to fight them politically risky)
STAHL: But you waited for him.
GENERAL RAYMOND T. ODIERNO [Commanding General, Multi-National Force – Iraq]: It was his decision.
STAHL: To give you the--his decision to give you the go ahead.
ODIERNO: Right. I think--I think what he finally realized were that the militias that had safe havens in Sadr City were really trying to destabilize the government of Iraq, and he realized that it would add instability to his own government.
STAHL: Once Maliki gave the go-ahead, a US Stryker battalion went in. But they confronted a steady stream of militia reinforcements.
HORT: Every day it was 20, 30, 40 new guys that were coming down to fight.
STAHL: So Hort and his men had to do something to keep them out. They decided to build a wall, a barrier straight across Sadr City. It would also create a buffer zone wide enough to prevent the militia rockets from reaching the green zone. To build the wall, Colonel Hort's Charlie Company began putting up massive T-shaped concrete slabs. Fighting erupted almost immediately as sniper fire came in from every direction. Charlie Company retaliated with massive tank fire.
HORT: We fired 800 tank rounds in this fight. We haven't fired that many tank rounds since the start of the war.
STAHL: Colonel Hort said the building of the so-called T-wall became a magnet for every bad guy in Sadr City. This was one of the most intense engagements in the entire war. Yet even as the battle raged, the wall went up.
HORT: It was literally concrete barrier by concrete barrier. In a--it just wasn't going out there putting up some barriers. I mean, it was a fight every inch of the way in.
STAHL: Did you put them up under fire?
LT. COLONEL BRIAN EIFLER: Guys would climb the ladders to unhook the crane chains from the wall, unarmed, while people are firing at them. So it was high adventure.
STAHL: Lieutenant Colonel Brian Eifler's team laid down cover fire while some soldiers, wide open and exposed, unhooked the chains from the crane. On days when the shooting was particularly fierce, they were able to put up only eight slabs.
HORT: Every type of weapons system the enemy had, they tried to use against us up at the wall. I mean, it was step by step by step and fighting literally every hour of the day.
STAHL: They called in sniper teams from the elite Navy SEALs and air support, F-18 fighter jets and Apache helicopters that protected the flanks. But here's what really made the difference: an arsenal of advanced, high-flying technology, UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles with highly improved camera systems so sensitive they can see the enemy even at night, through clouds and gunsmoke from high up. They can spot someone smoking or a weapon on someone's side, and they have sensors so advanced they can hear enemy radio transmissions and pinpoint their location.
ODIERNO: In 2003, we didn't have all the systems that are now available. We had some. But we didn't have all the UAVs that allow...
STAHL: In the battle for Sadr City, they used two different UAVs. One was the Shadow Drone, depicted here on one of Colonel Hort's slides. Twenty or 30 seconds after a militia team fired a rocket, the Shadow locked on them, shadowed them, watched them move and set up for their next shot. Then an armed UAV, the Predator, was activated. These are actual pictures of the battle on the streets of Sadr City. As you can see, a group of militia fighters rushed to a car that had just been hit by a US Hellfire missile. They remove a mortar tube from the trunk and load it into a second car which they drive through the streets to an open field. At that point the Predator locks it site onto the vehicle and fires off another missile. According to the Army, this killed two fighters inside the car and destroyed the mortar tube. War by remote control. This is how Charlie Company hunted down the militia rocket teams and whittled down their numbers.
HORT: You know, they went from 20 to 30 man groups down to five, four and then in some cases only one or two. The Predator and the Shadow were just phenomenal in their ability to see the enemy, particularly after we shot a rocket.
STAHL: We have learned from other sources that Colonel Hort's ground troops were supported by a secret, special ops unit called Task Force 17. Using their own Predators along with Iraqi undercover operatives and eavesdropping, it was able to take out some of the militia leaders who were based north of the wall, hiding among the civilian population. With the help of the drones and their high powered cameras, Army commanders were able to see or map the entire theater of operations and figure out the enemy's tactics and patterns with so-called persistent surveillance.
HORT: And in come cases we would--we would wait four, six, even 10 hours to do the engagement because we didn't want to kill the guy...
ODIERNO: Collateral damage.
HORT: Right. We wanted to go after the whole group, you know, the company chain of command, as you want to call it that, where they would actually pick up the rail, drive in their vehicle, go to another location and do an after action review on what they did.
STAHL: In other words, after a long skirmish, all the individual militia rocket teams would rendezvous in a large group with their leaders. In this video, you can see how Colonel Hort's men would be tracking as the militia fighters went to a set location for a battle assessment and their new assignments.
HORT: So once they got to that site, that's when we would do the engagements. Sometimes that took six, eight, 10 hours to wait. And that's what Predator allowed us to do. It truly preyed on the enemy.
STAHL: May I ask--they had no idea? How far away...
ODIERNO: The Predator is about--it flies about 10,000 feet?
HORT: Yes, sir.
ODIERNO: It's a--it's a UAV, it's a military...
STAHL: And no noise.
ODIERNO: It's so high up, they can't--they have trouble hearing it.
STAHL: They can't hear it. Wow.
ODIERNO: Sometimes they can, but it's pretty hard. It's very difficult.
STAHL: Can't hear anything.
STAHL: This was the first time UAVs were used this way at the brigade level, allowing soldiers on the ground to manage and synchronize the information themselves. They call it "find, fix and finish."
HORT: All of this was pushed down to the brigade commander and used in this fight and primarily focused north against the rocket teams.
STAHL: Colonel Hort and his men were able to watch, in real time, as the enemy planted over 300 armor-piercing roadside bombs, or IEDs. And so they made the decision early in the battle to use tanks and Bradleys fortified with thick reactive tiles. They were so effective, said Colonel Hort, that even while they actually struck 120 IEDs, the crews were all protected.
HORT: It went from literally 60 attacks down to three or four attacks, and that was...
STAHL: Talking a day, a week, or?
HORT: Sixty attacks a day.
STAHL: So the battle of Sadr City was won with a combination of high-tech and no-tech. Lasers and electronic eyes in the sky, and cement. Over the course of the fighting that lasted eight weeks, the number of US troops grew from 700 to 2,000, up against roughly 4,000. An estimated 700 of the militia fighters were killed; six Americans died. Near the end, in May, Colonel Hort says as many as 40 of the militia leaders fled and a cease-fire was negotiated.
HORT: You know, it's my opinion at the brigade level that the cease-fire was declared because they really didn't have a whole lot left to throw at us.
STAHL: By the end of the battle, the T-wall was finally finished.
HORT: It's 4,000 meters, so close to two miles, in terms of where the wall started and finished. And that's just the exact width of Sadr City.
STAHL: It seals off about a quarter of Sadr City, and it's been beautified with local artists painting murals of peaceful, happy scenes that have to be approved by the US Army. To get from one side of the wall to the other, the locals have to go through entry points.
Checkpoints. They have to be checked to go back and forth?
ODIERNO: Yeah, you check--that's right.
STAHL: Oh.
ODIERNO: And that's--but it's easy. And it's usually just showing of an ID, but it is a checkpoint.
STAHL: Right.
ODIERNO: And again, that's to limit the freedom of movement of the--of the insurgents, for the most part.
STAHL: Merchants and traders are back in business here. This is a wholesale market in Sadr City, where trucks deliver fresh produce from the countryside every day now. The militias used to shake down the vendors. That's over. But still, the local businessmen are not happy about the wall.
Tell me about the T-wall.
Unidentified Man #1: (Foreign language spoken)
Unidentified Man #2: They feel that they're cut off from the other side, which is affecting their businesses.
ODIERNO: And you can tell them I think when we're able to get more security forces, over time we will take the T-walls down.
STAHL: Yet local citizens are providing intelligence, solid tips that have led to the capture of weapons caches, IED caches. But General Odierno says the situation is fragile.
ODIERNO: You eliminate the safe haven and now we're--now we can start to build. But it takes time. I mean, that's the issue. It just--it just takes time.
STAHL: Many of the fighters who survived, the general told us, fled to Iran and Syria to try and regenerate. The idea, he says, is to create a neighborhood that doesn't want them back.