TIME: Battling Terrorists
in the Hills
Sunday, March 30, 2003
By MICHAEL WARE / I SHRAM MOUNTAIN
The battle rages, fierce and bloody, perhaps the
heaviest fighting northern Iraq has seen so far in
this war. U.S. special forces are here, along with
their Kurdish allies, facing down Ansar al-Islam, the
diehard terrorist group based in Kurdish-controlled
Iraq that the Americans believe is linked to
al-Qaeda. "There are three or four isolated pockets
of Ansar on very high ground. We're closing in on
them from everywhere we can," says an American
commando named Mark, who declines to give his rank or
surname. The fire coming down from the craggy peak is
torrid. Machineguns rattle from above. Ansar snipers
pin down troops, their rounds pinging off rocks and
buzzing past heads. In return, Kurdish artillery
fires in from the flat plains about 2 miles below.
Thick whistles sound uncomfortably overhead as a
shell passes the Americans' position. It thwacks into
the mountainside. "If we can get the blocking force
in place, we can smoke them," shouts a U.S. soldier.
Ansar's best assets are their snipers. The day
before, a single shooter halted an entire advance of
Kurdish soldiers, known as peshmerga ("those who face
death"), belonging to the pro-American Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan, one of the main Kurdish political
parties. The American commandoes have taken to
calling the P.U.K. "the Puck" and the Peshmerga "the
Pesh." "We were doing well until that sniper," a
Special Forces soldier tells his buddy. "I wanted to
drop some mortar on top of him but the pesh were too
close." On this day's battle, three American snipers
lay behind a rock, patiently waiting to sight their
Ansar counterparts far above in the Shram Mountain.
"There's a sniper playing with us," says a soldier.
The American snipers' high-powered rifles crack
intermittently. After the incoming rounds seem to
cease, they pick themselves up. "I think between us
we smoked three guys, sir," one says. "Oh, at least,"
adds another.
Through four hours of battle, I saw U.S. forces drill
the three Ansar positions with mortars, heavy
machinegun and anti-aircraft artillery, 40mm grenades
and 500 pound bombs dropped from planes overhead.
Still, the fire was returned by an enemy clearly
visible through binoculars. At one point, three Ansar
fighters simply stood on a mountain ledge, not
flinching at the torrent of fire poured at them. At
one stage one defender screamed "God is Great," even
as grenades and heavy rounds peppered the cave he had
ducked into.
In spite of the bravado, Ansar has found itself on
this day on the defensive on the snowy mountains on
Iraq's border with Iran, driven from its lowland
frontline by a week of pummeling by Tomahawk and
Cruise missiles. For a year, Ansar had fought PUK
forces in trenches and bunkers on the plains below
Shram mountain. Indeed, until Friday, the lowland
village of Biarra was Ansar's base. But on at 2 p.m.
that day, a mosque used as a terrorist headquarters,
replete with a gunpit on top, was flattened by U.S.
bombing. The Puck captured it an hour later. Locals
guess that Ansar has 800 footsoldiers. "That's an
underestimate," says Mark, "the numbers we've seen
reinforcing their positions indicates they had a much
larger pool than that to draw on. It's taken everyone
by surprise." He sees the influence of Osama bin
Laden. "The tactics are so clearly al-Qaeda trained,"
says Mark, pointing to Ansar's way with propaganda
and terrorist strikes behind the lines, even its
manner of mutilating prisoners. "I recognize it from
the Chechnya-Georgia border, the border area between
Tajikistan and Afghanistan, and on the Macedonian
border. It screams al-Qaeda training," he says.
Within 24 hours of the U.S. attack, Ansar appeared to
have been overwhelmed, fleeing to a last line of
defense 4,000 ft. high among the peaks. The area,
near the town of Halabja, has always been a redoubt:
it is full of deep caves and secretive routes for
escape and supply (nicknamed "rat-lines") across the
rugged frontier with Iran. "They're ex-filling across
the Iranian border," says one Special Forces soldier,
using commando lingo for "escaping." For despite the
acumen of Ansar's snipers, the peshmerga offensive
had succeeded and hundreds of Kurdish troops—along
with about 100 American commandoes—advanced into the
terrorist stronghold. "My perception is that Ansar's
delaying action was not as effective as they thought
it would be," says Mark. "They didn't account for our
air attack hitting them in front and behind. This
allowed the Puck to push right through."
The peshmerga are as tough as Ansar is ruthless.
"These guys literally walk up the mountain, get
wounded and walk back down," says a U.S. medic.
"They're tough sons of bitches." On Friday, as the
medic worked at a casualty collection point, he says
one wounded Kurdish soldier with a head wound simply
straggled in, walked up and just "died on me."
The assault clearly took a toll on Ansar's militants.
Politburo member Mahmood Sangarwi of the P.U.K. says
60 dead were left behind after Friday's battles. In
the rocky terrain of Saturday's exchange I saw eight
more slain Ansar fighters. Some had died in their
bunkers; others were cut down as they fled over open
ground or among relatively exposed rocky outcrops.
Their corpses remained where they had fallen
throughout the assault.
In the end, however, the battle for Halabja seemed
inconclusive. President Bush last week referred to
the destruction of Ansar's base as one of the war's
important early achievements. But it may be a limited
achievement. In Halabjah, U.S. Commando Mark says, "A
lot of the senior cadre fled a long time ago leaving
a fanatical hardcore to stay for the last stand. They
had little intention of surviving." The Americans
blasting away at the holdouts recognize this and
lament past opportunities lost. "This is my second
time in northern Iraq," says a Special Forces
soldier. "I should be in Tampa with my wife enjoying
spring break. Instead I'm here, and I wouldn't be if
we'd done this right the first time."