Under Fire on a 'Fallen Angel' Rescue
Forward Operating Base Kalsu, Iraq—"Fallen Angel" is the call that no one wants to hear on the radio. It's the Army's code name for a downed coalition aircraft.
When soldiers in the Army's 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment got that call on January 28, they began collecting the tools they'd need.
"I asked my company commanders if they had enough quickie saws to cut up the wreckage, enough flatbed trailers to haul it away, and body bags for the pilots," says Lt. Col. Barry Huggins.
When soldiers from the 2-3 arrived at the crash scene, they unexpectedly came under heavy fire from a compound of buildings and found themselves in one of the largest engagements since the fall of Baghdad.
"By the end of the night," Huggins recalls, he was asking his men: "Do you have enough mortar rounds left, and how many hand grenades do you think we'll need if we have to assault ... on foot?"
The battle against a heavily armed, well-entrenched group known as Heaven's Army left hundreds of enemy fighters–and some civilians–dead after American planes rained down bombs for hours against their compound.
The following description of that battle comes from the Army's after-action report, reviewed by U.S. News, and interviews with American soldiers and Iraqi translators who were present those days, January 28 and 29, 2007. They paint the picture of a stunningly one-sided fight against what the military calls a Shiite doomsday cult.
"The destruction," one soldier says, "was almost biblical."
It happened northeast of the city of Najaf–a city holy to Shiite Muslims–in southern Iraq. It was the beginning of Ashura, the holiest month in Shiite Islam, and a local official accompanied by a group of Iraqi policemen was meeting with a religious sect at its compound several miles outside the small farming village of Zarga.
The group had recently bought several adjoining properties and begun minor construction at the compound. Members of the group had been exhibiting what officials later called "a disturbing pattern of behavior" that concerned local officials.
Something happened during the meeting, and a gunfight broke out around 8:30 a.m.
Elements of the Iraqi Army and the Iraqi police were called to the scene. American Special Forces teams were also operating in the region, supporting the Iraqi fighters. An Apache helicopter was called in to overfly the area. At 1:30 pm, an antiaircraft gun, which had been concealed in the compound, fired on the helicopter as it was crossing the Tigris River and sent it crashing to the ground, killing the two U.S. pilots.
The 2-3, which was at Forward Operating Base Kalsu, 55 miles north of Najaf, was preparing for a series of night raids against local enemy targets. Twenty minutes after receiving the "Fallen Angel" report, the unit's three companies of Stryker armored vehicles were heading south, anticipating a recovery operation for the downed chopper.
When they arrived at the scene of the wreckage, they found both pilots dead. As the soldiers were cutting and retrieving the scraps of aircraft, they began taking heavy fire from the compound where the cult had dug in.
Between the compound of buildings and the soldiers was a complex trench system built on two levels and filled with hundreds of enemy fighters. The 2-3 pulled back to a defensive position with the Special Forces team at the crash site. By that time, the compound was surrounded by Special Forces teams to the south and west, and elements of the Iraqi Army and police in the north.
For the first time in the war, mortar men from the 2-3 were called on to fire their weapons. One mortar operator confessed that he was so nervous about shooting his weapon for the first time in combat that he failed to properly plant the base of the tube launcher. His first shot went harmlessly off target.
More helicopters arrived, and with them came the Air Force. Commanders on the ground called for airstrikes against the trench system and the compound with precision munitions and cannon fire.
It was unlikely, the Army decided, that there were noncombatants in the trench line, so that area received the heaviest bombardment. The buildings were another matter, since it was clear that an unknown number of women and children might be inside. Precision munitions were used in these cases, Huggins says. "We'd been fairly discriminating firing into the buildings because you never know who was inside, but there were no women and children in the trench lines so we were fairly harsh with the application of firepower against the trench."
The bombing continued until midnight, when Huggins sent a unit forward with loudspeakers to call for the surviving cult members to surrender. "Nobody took us up on that offer," he says. Not only did enemy fighters continue to fire on American and Iraqi positions, he says, but some fighters tried to charge their lines as well.
The next morning, two companies from the 2-3 moved toward the compound from the west and east, attacking the remnants of the trench line and "flipping bricks" in the compound—Army-speak for searching for survivors. They found hundreds of bodies—mostly fighters but women and children, too. It was a scene that still haunts many of the soldiers who fought there.
They found stores of food and ammunition, 11 mortar launchers, and an antiaircraft gun. There were so many enemy weapons that the 2-3 filled three pickup trucks with captured guns. More than 200 people surrendered in the morning, and more than 250 were reported killed. Sixteen of the wounded cult members were evacuated by helicopter, and many others were given treatment at the scene.
"We shifted from secure helicopter, defense, to hasty attack, to clear the trench, to humanitarian mission," says Huggins. "We didn't run out of ammo but did run out of medical supplies."
The motives of the cult were less clear. They were Shiites, convinced that if they killed the Shiite leadership of the country, it would bring about the arrival of the 12th Imam–a Shiite saint–whose messianic return signals the end of the world. They had compiled a target list, too, the Army report says, which included Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, hard-line cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of Iraq's largest Shiite party.