Free Hunting Down Saddam by Robin Moore Page A

Saddam’s forces before the Green Berets of TF VIKING were ready.
    Objective STONE
    Every day, the numbers of the Kurdish forces grew in VIKING’s sector. The ranks of Mustafa’s indigenous fighters swelled significantly after they witnessed the devastation that the Special Forces unleashed on the Iraqis’ defenses, and the precision with which the air strikes were directed. The Green Berets’ air assets flew in from every direction in support; from Navy carriers, and from airfields practically everywhere: Jordan, Afghanistan, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, to name a few. The Peshmerga realized they would finally have a fighting chance against their oppressors.
    By April 3, TF VIKING’s commander and General Mustafa agreed that they had enough forces in their sector to start launching multiple hit-and-run guerrilla attacks on the front lines of Iraqi armor, which were dug in to protect a bridge at Aski Kalak.
    10th Group’s ODAs began sending recon elements to find weak points in the Iraqi lines near the bridge. Probing the Iraqi defenses was not without its dangers; there were a large number of Iraqi troops in the area, and the A-Teams and their Kurdish allies came under heavy volumes of fire, from both enemy small arms and tank rounds. The Green Berets were lucky; they came out unscathed. The Pesh suffered casualties, but very few. The bridge at Aski Kalak and the Iraqi armored company that stood their ground there was code-named Objective STONE, and was the focus of a combined Special Forces/Pesh offensive operation.
    It was ODA 065’s mission to seize Objective STONE. ODA 065 was commanded by MSG (Master Sergeant) Pat Quinn and CPT (Captain) Carver. The battle over the bridge lasted a bloody seven days, with vicious fighting back and forth. On three occasions that week, a QRF (Quick Reaction Force) consisting of two ODAs (043 and 045) and a force of Kurds had to roll into the area surrounding the bridge, because ODA 065 was on the verge of being overrun by the Iraqis.
    On April 5, the last day of the fighting on the bridge, MAJ Howard observed from a hilltop as the Green Berets and the KDP guerrillas advanced six times, were beaten back six times, and finally took the bridge at Aski Kalak on their seventh try. The Green Berets and their Kurdish allies took heavy fire from machine guns, mortars, and artillery. Iraqi tank rounds ricocheted down the streets at the troops, tearing the bumpers off cars parked along the street to the bridge and wreaking great havoc.
    The Iraqi armored task force that was dug in around the Aski Kalak Bridge attempted numerous counterattacks, but the Green Berets were unstoppable. Every piece of enemy armor was destroyed with CAS and the Green Berets’ Javelin man-pack missile systems. “Not a single [Coalition] tank was available, nor needed,” said one Special Operator, to support Task Force VIKING in their attacks on the entrenched Iraqis.
    Before the end of the first week, the combined U.S./Kurdish forces and their QRF had fought their way through the Iraqi armor, and were on to planning an offensive operation on an enemy stronghold near the town of Debecka, the gateway to the city of Mosul.
    Objective ROCK
    The next fierce assault on Iraqi armor units took place along the ridgeline of the Debecka Gap, code-named Objective ROCK. The first time the Special Forces laid eyes on the massive expanse of embedded Iraqi armor, it was, in the words of one of the operators, “phenomenal, and pretty scary.” There were literally entire battalions, perhaps even a division, dug in and protected, as far as the eye could see.
    Debecka was an extremely hard TIA (Target Interdiction Area). Hard-core Ba’ath Party commandos dug into a remarkable system of three- to four-feet-deep trenches along the ridgelines. Bomb after bomb was dropped on the enemy ridgelines by U.S. Air Force B-52 bombers that circled the area in lazy figure eights, barely visible at their