Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

EVEN AS a Shiite rebellion spread across Iraq, the White House remained determined to crush Sunni Fallujah. The Blackwater ambush had provided the administration—enthusiastically encouraged by Paul Bremer in Baghdad—with the ideal pretext to launch a massive assault on a population that was fast becoming a potent symbol suggesting that the United States and its Iraqi proxies were not really in control of the country. To back down in the face of the boldest insurrection to date among antioccupation Sunnis and Shiites and talk of a Mogadishu redux, the administration reasoned, would have sent the message that the United States was losing a war that President Bush had already declared a “mission accomplished.” Bremer and the administration had calculated that in “pacifying” Sunni Fallujah and making an example of the Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, they could surgically eliminate organized resistance in Iraq. While Washington’s disastrous policies resulted in the deaths of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of U.S. soldiers, they simultaneously facilitated an extraordinary business opportunity for Blackwater and its mercenary friends (which will be discussed in depth later in this book).

The first U.S. siege of Fallujah began on April 4, 2004, the day of the Blackwater firefight at Najaf. It was code-named Operation Vigilant Resolve. That night, more than a thousand Marines and two Iraqi battalions surrounded Fallujah, a city of about 350,000 people. U.S. forces positioned tanks, heavy machine guns, and armored Humvees at the major routes running in and out of the city. They set up blockades with concertina wire, effectively locking people in, and Marines set up “camps” for detainees.¹ American forces commandeered the local radio station and began propaganda broadcasts telling people to cooperate with U.S. forces and to identify resistance fighters and positions. Iraqi police distributed leaflets to mosques in Fallujah announcing a weapons ban and a mandatory curfew from 7 p.m. to 6 a.m.² and passed out “Wanted” posters featuring pictures of men alleged to have been involved with the Blackwater attack.³ On the city’s outskirts, the Marines dug trenches near a Muslim cemetery as sharpshooters took up positions on the roof of a mosque.⁴ “The city is surrounded,” Lt. James Vanzant of the First Marine Expeditionary Force told reporters. “We are looking for the bad guys in town.”⁵ U.S. commanders announced their intent to conduct house-to-house raids inside Fallujah to find the killers of the four Blackwater contractors. “Those people are specially targeted to be captured or killed,” said Marine spokesman Lt. Eric Knapp.⁶ U.S. commanders sent their Iraqi proxies into the city to instruct Fallujans not to resist when U.S. forces entered their homes and to gather everyone in one room during a raid.⁷ If they wanted to speak with the invading troops, they must first raise their hands.⁸ Thousands of Fallujans fled the city ahead of the imminent American onslaught.

The next morning, the U.S. forces made their first incursions into Fallujah—first sending in special operators to hunt “high value targets.” Then came the full-on assault carried out by twenty-five hundred Marines from three battalions, backed up by tanks.⁹ U.S. forces soon found themselves in fierce gun battles with resistance fighters. As the fighting raged on, the Marines called in for air support. On April 7, an AH-1W Cobra attack helicopter attacked the Abdel-Aziz al-Samarrai mosque compound, which the U.S. said was housing resistance fighters who were attacking the invading forces.¹⁰ A Hellfire missile was launched at the base of the mosque’s minaret.¹¹ Eventually, an F-16 warplane swooped in and dropped a five-hundred-pound bomb on the mosque compound, ¹² an alleged violation of the Geneva Convention that prohibits the targeting of religious sites. The Marines issued a statement defending the attack, saying that because resistance fighters were inside it, “the mosque lost its protected status and therefore became a lawful military target.”¹³ Witnesses reported that as many as forty Iraqis were killed in the mosque attack,¹⁴ while a handful of American soldiers died in the fighting that day.

Meanwhile, the military had seized Fallujah’s main medical facility, preventing its use in treating the wounded.¹⁵ “U.S. forces bombed the power plant at the beginning of the assault,” recalled journalist Rahul Mahajan, one of the few unembedded journalists to enter Fallujah at the time. “[F]or the next several weeks, Fallujah was a blacked-out town, with light provided by generators only in critical places like mosques and clinics.”¹⁶ Food supplies were running out in the city, and a local doctor said that sixteen children and eight women had been killed in an air strike on a neighborhood on April 6.¹⁷ The siege of Fallujah was under way. “We are solidly ensconced in the city, and my units are stiffening their grip,” said Marine commander Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne.¹⁸ If anyone resists, he said, “We will break their backs. We will drive them out.”¹⁹ Fallujah, Byrne said, had become a haven for resistance fighters and smugglers because “No one ever took the time to clean it out properly.”²⁰ Byrne’s battalion “was the first to persuade the U.S. Army Psychological warfare teams to initiate scatological warfare,” recalled Bing West, a military author who was embedded with U.S. forces around Fallujah.²¹ Platoons “competed to dream up the filthiest insults for translators to scream over the loudspeakers. When enraged Iraqis rushed from a mosque blindly firing their AKs, the Marines shot them down. The tactic of insult-and-shoot spread along the lines. Soon the Marines were mocking the city as ‘Lalafallujah’ (after the popular stateside concert Lollapalooza) and cranking out ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ by Guns ‘n’ Roses and ‘Hell’s Bells’ by AC/DC.”²²

As images from inside Fallujah emerged, primarily via journalists from Arab television networks, portraying a dire humanitarian crisis in the city, protests began spreading across Iraq, with U.S. forces using violence in an effort to shut them down.²³ Mosques in Baghdad and elsewhere began organizing humanitarian convoys to Fallujah and stockpiling blood.²⁴ By April 8, local hospital officials inside the city painted a horrifying picture of the human suffering, saying that upwards of 280 civilians had been killed and more than 400 wounded.²⁵ “We also know of dead and wounded in various places buried under the rubble but we cannot reach them because of the fighting,” said Dr. Taher al-Issawi.²⁶ The U.S. military denied it was killing civilians and accused resistance fighters of trying to blend into the broader population. “It is hard to differentiate between people who are insurgents or civilians,” said Maj. Larry Kaifesh. “It is hard to get an honest picture. You just have to go with your gut feeling.”²⁷

Byrne, according to the Washington Post, “said any bodies were those of insurgents. He estimated that 80 percent of Fallujah’s populace was neutral or in favor of the American military presence.”²⁸ That optimistic pronouncement, however, did not match the ferocity of the resistance that succeeded—at an incredible human cost—in keeping the United States from totally capturing control of the city. “The enemy was better prepared than the Marines had been told to expect,” wrote veteran Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks.²⁹ He cited an internal Marine summary of the battle. “Insurgents surprise U.S. with coordination of their attacks: coordinated, combined, volley-fire RPGs, effective use of indirect fire,” the summary stated. “Enemy maneuvered effectively and stood and fought.”³⁰

As the siege neared a week, bodies began piling up in the city and, according to witnesses, a stench of death spread across Fallujah. “Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw in Fallujah,” recalled a doctor from Baghdad who made it into the city with a peace delegation. “There is no law on earth that can justify what the Americans have done to innocent people.”³¹ Independent U.S. journalists Dahr Jamail and Rahul Mahajan, meanwhile, managed to make it into Fallujah—unembedded—a week after the siege began. Upon entering the city with a humanitarian convoy, Jamail described the scene at a makeshift emergency room at a small health clinic. “As I was there, an endless stream of women and children who’d been sniped by the Americans were being raced into the dirty clinic, the cars speeding over the curb out front as their wailing family members carried them in. One woman and small child had been shot through the neck,” Jamail wrote in a dispatch from inside the besieged city. “The small child, his eyes glazed and staring into space, continually vomited as the doctors raced to save his life. After 30 minutes, it appeared as though neither of them would survive.”³² Jamail said he saw one victim after another brought into the clinic, “nearly all of them women and children.”³³ Jamail called Fallujah “Sarajevo on the Euphrates.”³⁴

Mahajan, meanwhile, reported: “In addition to the artillery and the warplanes dropping 500, 1000, and 2000-pound bombs, and the murderous AC-130 Spectre gunships that can demolish a whole city block in less than a minute, the Marines had snipers criss-crossing the whole town. For weeks, Fallujah was a series of sometimes mutually inaccessible pockets, divided by the no-man’s-lands of sniper fire paths. Snipers fired indiscriminately, usually at whatever moved. Of 20 people I saw come into the clinic I observed in a few hours, only five were ‘military-age males.’ I saw old women, old men, a child of 10 shot through the head; terminal, the doctors told me, although in Baghdad they might have been able to save him. One thing that snipers were very discriminating about—every single ambulance I saw had bullet holes in it. Two I inspected bore clear evidence of specific, deliberate sniping. Friends of mine who went out to gather in wounded people were shot at.”³⁵ Jamail reported that “the residents have turned two football fields into graveyards.”³⁶

The War on Al Jazeera

While most of the world came to understand the siege of Fallujah as an earth-moving development in the occupation, the story of the extent of the human suffering endured by Iraqis was downplayed in the “mainstream” U.S. press. Embedded corporate journalists reported exclusively from the vantage point of the invading U.S. forces and relied disproportionately on military spokespeople and their Iraqi proxies. The graphic verbiage that had peppered the media landscape following the ambush and killing of the Blackwater men days earlier was now absent from the reporting on the civilian consequences of the assault. As battles continued to rage on and spread to the outskirts of Fallujah, New York Times correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman—totally avoiding mention of the humanitarian disaster—wrote that the fierce fighting “showed not only the intensity of the resistance but an acute willingness among insurgents to die.”³⁷ [Emphasis added.] Coming alongside U.S. military claims that “90 to 95 percent” of Iraqis killed in Fallujah were combatants,³⁸ such embedded reporting from the U.S. “paper of record” appeared almost indistinguishable from official U.S. military propaganda. “It’s their Super Bowl,” Maj. T. V. Johnson, a Marine spokesman, was quoted as saying in Gettleman’s story. “Falluja is the place to go if you want to kill Americans.”³⁹

But while the embedded U.S. press focused on the “urban warfare” story, unembedded Arab journalists—most prominently from the popular Al Jazeera network—were reporting around the clock from inside the besieged city. Their reports painted a vivid picture of the civilian devastation and gave lie to U.S. commanders’ pronouncements about precision strikes. Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya broadcast images of corpses in the streets and destruction of the city’s infrastructure. In fact, when Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt was doing a phone interview on Al Jazeera, insisting the United States was observing a cease-fire, the network simultaneously aired live images of continued raids by U.S. fighter jets on residential neighborhoods inside Fallujah.⁴⁰ The images Al Jazeera’s cameras captured in Fallujah were not only being broadcast widely in the Arab world but also on TV networks across the globe. Veteran Al Jazeera journalist Ahmed Mansour and cameraman Laith Mushtaq had entered Fallujah on April 3 and were the primary source of footage of the civilian devastation in the city. They regularly filmed scenes of women and children killed by the U.S. offensive—in one case broadcasting a story about an entire family in the al Jolan neighborhood who had allegedly been killed in a U.S. airstrike. “The planes bombed this house, as they did for the whole neighborhood, and they brought the corpses and bodies to the hospital,” Mushtaq recalled. “I went to the hospital. I could not see anything but, like, a sea of corpses of children and women, and mostly children, because peasants and farmers have usually a lot of children. So these were scenes that are unbelievable, unimaginable. I was taking photographs and forcing myself to photograph, while I was at the same time crying.”⁴¹

Mansour, who is one of Al Jazeera’s best-known personalities, said he realized early on that there were only a handful of journalists inside the city and believed he had a responsibility to remain in Fallujah, despite the enormous risk. “I wanted to report this reality to the whole world. I wanted the whole world to know what’s happening to those besieged people. I wasn’t thinking about leaving the city at all. I decided to stay and let my destiny be as those of people. If they die, I’ll be with them; if they escape, I’ll be with them. I decided not to think about any possibilities, what the U.S. forces will do with me if they catch me, and not to think about my family or anything. I only think about those people.”⁴² In the midst of the siege, Mansour reported live from Fallujah, “Last night we were targeted by some tanks, twice… but we escaped. The U.S. wants us out of Fallujah, but we will stay.”⁴³ Despite its firm grip on embedded U.S. correspondents, Washington was losing the global propaganda war—so U.S. officials attacked the messenger. On April 9, Washington demanded that Al Jazeera leave Fallujah as a condition for a cease-fire.⁴⁴ The network refused. Mansour wrote that the next day “American fighter jets fired around our new location, and they bombed the house where we had spent the night before, causing the death of the house owner Mr. Hussein Samir. Due to the serious threats we had to stop broadcasting for a few days because every time we tried to broadcast the fighter jets spotted us [and] we became under their fire.”⁴⁵

On April 12, Kimmitt, facing questions about the footage being shown on Al Jazeera depicting a civilian catastrophe in Fallujah, called on people to “Change the channel. Change the channel to a legitimate, authoritative, honest news station.” Kimmitt declared, “The stations that are showing Americans intentionally killing women and children are not legitimate news sources. That is propaganda, and that is lies.”⁴⁶ Dan Senor, Bremer’s senior adviser, asserted that Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya “are misreporting facts on the ground and contributing to a sense of anger and frustration that possibly should be directed at individuals and organizations inside of Fallujah that mutilate Americans and slaughter other Iraqis rather than at the Coalition.”⁴⁷ On April 15 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld echoed those remarks in still harsher terms, calling Al Jazeera’s reporting “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable.”⁴⁸ A reporter asked Rumsfeld if the United States had a “civilian casualty” count. “Of course not,” Rumsfeld shot back. “We’re not in the city. But you know what our forces do; they don’t go around killing hundreds of civilians…. It’s disgraceful what that station is doing.”⁴⁹ It was the very next day, according to a British government memo stamped “Top Secret” reported on in Britain’s Daily Mirror, that President Bush allegedly told British Prime Minister Tony Blair of his desire to bomb Al Jazeera.⁵⁰ “He made clear he wanted to bomb al-Jazeera in Qatar and elsewhere,” a source told the Mirror. “There’s no doubt what Bush wanted to do.”⁵¹ Ahmed Mansour said he believed that what Al Jazeera was providing in its reports from inside Fallujah was balance to a story that otherwise was being told exclusively from the vantage point of embedded correspondents and U.S. military spokespeople. “Is it professionalism that the journalists wear U.S. [military] clothing and they go with them in the planes and tanks to cover this and report this?” Mansour asked. “The battles have to be reported from both sides. We were among the civilians, and we reported, and they had embedded journalists with those who launched this attack from the U.S. forces who occupied Iraq, and they reported what they wanted. We were trying to create an equilibrium or a balance, so that the truth is not lost.”⁵²

Collective Punishment

The horrors unfolding in Fallujah, coupled with the U.S. failure to take control of the city and the bold resistance of Fallujah’s residents, was encouraging other Iraqis to rise up. As the siege went on, people from across Iraq began coming to Fallujah to help in the defense of the city. “The battle of Fallujah is the battle of history, the battle of Iraq, the battle of the nation,” Harth al-Dhari, of the Muslim Scholars Association, told thousands of worshipers at Friday prayers in the midst of the siege. “Merciful God, take revenge for spilled blood. Take revenge for slaughter. Send your army against the occupiers. Kill all of them. Don’t spare any of them.”⁵³ By the time what U.S. officials called a “cease-fire” had set in the weekend of April 9, some thirty Marines had been killed. But it was Iraqis who paid the highest price. After the weeklong U.S. siege, some six hundred were dead in Fallujah, among them “hundreds of women and children.”⁵⁴ On April 13, President Bush delivered a prime-time address on national television in the United States. “Terrorists from other countries have infiltrated Iraq to incite and organize attacks,” Bush declared from the East Room of the White House. “The violence we have seen is a power grab by these extreme and ruthless elements… it’s not a popular uprising.”⁵⁵

But half a world away, as thousands of Fallujans escaped their city and fled to other parts of Iraq, they brought with them tales of horror and civilian death that no amount of propaganda could combat. Despite U.S. rhetoric about liberating Fallujah from “foreign fighters” and Baathists, it was not lost on Iraqis that the stated justification for the destruction of Fallujah and the deaths of hundreds of people was the killing of four U.S. mercenaries—seen by most Iraqis as the real foreign fighters. “For only four individuals, the Americans killed children, women, elderly, and now a whole city is under siege?” asked Haitham Saha, while at a Baghdad dropoff point for humanitarian supplies to Fallujah.⁵⁶ “We know who the people were who killed the American contractors,” a cleric at a local mosque told a reporter. “But instead of negotiating with us, Bremer has decided to have his revenge.”⁵⁷ Even members of the U.S.-installed Iraqi Governing Council expressed outrage. “These operations were a mass punishment,” said Governing Council president Adnan Pachachi,⁵⁸ who three months earlier sat next to First Lady Laura Bush, as her special guest, at the State of the Union address in Washington, D.C.⁵⁹ “It was not right to punish all the people of Fallujah, and we consider these operations by the Americans unacceptable and illegal.”⁶⁰

As Vigilant Resolve continued to exact a deadly toll on the people of Fallujah, Iraqis in the U.S.-created security force began deserting their posts; some joined the resistance to the siege, attacking U.S. forces around the city. “In all, as many as one in four of the new Iraqi army, civil defense, police, and other security forces quit in those days, changed sides, or stopped working,” according to Anthony Shadid.⁶¹ When the United States attempted hastily to hand over “responsibility” for Fallujah to an Iraqi force, some 800 AK-47 assault rifles, twenty-seven pickup trucks, and fifty radios the Marines gave the brigade ended up in the hands of the resistance.⁶² Lt. Gen. James Conway would later admit, “When we were told to attack Fallujah, I think we certainly increased the level of animosity that existed.”⁶³ In the midst of a worsening public relations disaster for the United States, Kimmitt said, “I would argue that the collective punishment on the people of Fallujah is those terrorists, those cowards who hunker down inside mosques and hospitals and schools, and use the women and children as shields to hide against the Marines, who are just trying to bring liberation from those cowards inside the city of Fallujah.”⁶⁴ For most of the world, though, it was the United States that was responsible for the “collective punishment”—a phrase in Arabic that evokes images of the Israeli policy against Palestine—of the people of Fallujah. In fact, those were the exact words that the UN envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, used when he declared, “Collective punishment is certainly unacceptable, and the siege of the city is absolutely unacceptable.” ⁶⁵ Brahimi asked, “When you surround a city, you bomb the city, when people cannot go to hospital, what name do you have for that?”⁶⁶

In the end, perhaps as many as eight hundred Iraqis died as a result of the first of what would be several sieges of Fallujah.⁶⁷ Tens of thousands of civilians fled their homes, and the city was razed. And yet the United States failed to crush Fallujah. Far from asserting U.S. supremacy in Iraq, Fallujah demonstrated that guerrilla tactics were effective against the occupiers. “Fallujah, the small city at the heart of the Sunni Arab insurrection, was considered something of a hillbilly place by other Sunni in Iraq,” wrote veteran Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn in a dispatch from Iraq in late April. “It was seen as Islamic, tribal and closely connected to the former regime. The number of guerrillas probably totaled no more than 400 out of a population of 300,000. But by assaulting a whole city, as if it was Verdun or Stalingrad, the US Marines have managed to turn it into a nationalist symbol.”⁶⁸

Testifying before Congress on April 20, Gen. Richard Myers, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defended the operation. “As you remember, we went in because of the atrocities on the Blackwater security personnel, the four personnel that were killed and later burned, and then hung on the bridge. We went in because we had to and to find the perpetrators. And what we found was a huge rat’s nest, that is still festering today—needs to be dealt with.”⁶⁹ The April siege of Fallujah would be followed a few months later, in November 2004, by an even greater onslaught that would bring hundreds more Iraqi deaths, force tens of thousands of people from their homes, and further enrage the country. In all, U.S. forces carried out nearly seven hundred airstrikes, damaging or destroying eighteen thousand of Fallujah’s thirty-nine thousand buildings.⁷⁰ Approximately 150 U.S. soldiers were killed in the operations. Meanwhile, the “perpetrators” of the Blackwater ambush “were never found,”⁷¹ as political and military officials had vowed, further underscoring the vengeful nature of the U.S. slaughter in Fallujah. The Marines renamed the infamous bridge “Blackwater Bridge,” and someone wrote in English in black marker on one of its beams: “This is for the Americans of Blackwater that were murdered here in 2004, Semper Fidelis P.S. Fuck You.”⁷² Journalist Dahr Jamail later concluded, “[I]n April of 2004, as a city was invaded and its residents were fleeing, hiding, or being massacred, there was considerable public awareness in the United States of human beings whose bodies had been mutilated in Iraq, thanks to our news media. But among thousands of references to mutilation in that month alone, we have yet to find one related to anything that happened after March 31… [M]utilation is something that happens to Blackwater-hired mercs and other professional, American killers, not to Iraqi babies with misplaced heads.”⁷³