Harold M. North - Hunting Muqtada: Iraqs Most Dangerous Man

For many years, Warrant Officer North has been both a good friend and a greatly valued contact within the Military Intelligence community. Hes lived what techno-thriller authors only write about. You can count of one thing with this most excellent book on the Iraqi conflict: hes giving you the real story.

James Cobb

Author of The Arctic Event and the

Amanda Garret techno-thriller series

Hunting Muqtada

Harold M. North

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Bloomington

Hunting Muqtada

Iraqs Most Dangerous Man

Copyright 2009 Harold M. North

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ISBN: 978-1-4401-2463-1 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-4401-2464-8 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009924013

iUniverse rev. date: 3/4/2009

Contents

To Joe, Paul, Sami and Leyla

The True Heroes of This Story

Thanks for Watching my Back

For reasons of Operations Security, and in the interests of the safety of the Military Intelligence professionals depicted in this book that have had contact with members of listed terrorist organizations, and in the interests of the safety of their families, the names of those individuals have been changed.

Terrorists in custody at the Guantanamo Bay holding facility in Cuba have spent many hundreds of hours with U.S. Military Intelligence personnel in interrogations and debriefings. The terrorists have been caught attempting to write to contacts in the Middle East, giving the names of their captors, the names of their other family members and children, and where in the United States they lived. Assassins were to be dispatched to the Soldiers homes to kill every man, woman and child there.

The threat is real.

If there must be trouble,

Let it be in my day,

So that my children may have peace.

~Thomas Paine

The contents of this book have been reviewed and approved for publication by Department of Defense officials in accordance with applicable security regulations. This book contains no classified information.

The views expressed in this book are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. Army, the Pentagon, or the U.S. government.

This book was written in diary format day-to-day during the war, from the perspective of a Soldier in the field, reflecting on the events as they happened, as well as the thoughts, feelings and comments of the other Soldiers around me. This not just my story, but theirs as well.

KUFA AND NAJAF

DAY 146: SUN 5 OCT 03

I was surrounded by history. I had been walking, eating and sleeping on the decaying ruins of the ancient city of Babylon beside the Euphrates River for the past six weeks. The crumbling foundations of the Tower of Babel were only yards from my desk. The wall of King Nebuchadnezzars throne chamberwhereupon God had written with His fingerwas only a stones throw from my sleeping tent. This same chamber was the last known resting place of Alexander the Great, before his remains had disappeared into the sands of history.

But just as ancient history surrounded me, there was modern history here as well. One of Saddam Husseins 70-plus gaudy desert-colored palaces stood on a perfectly rounded hilltop overlooking the ruins. Much to the dismay of archeologists, bulldozers had scraped up ruins into the huge pile to form the hill. Countless artifacts that archeologists had never had an opportunity to examine had been destroyed and lost forever so Saddam could have his hill. Looters from the nearby town of Hilla had stripped the palace down to its bare Italian marble walls long before the coalition had arrived. It now resembled a cool, dark cavern wherein one could escape the brutal heat of the day, even without any functioning air conditioning.

Untold further damage was done when Saddam had directed the construction of a convention center and its entire supporting infrastructure at the base of his palace hill. Archeological destruction was multiplied exponentially when Saddam directed the resurrection of the ruinsby literally building on top of the remaining crumbling walls. Babylon was ringed with a number of brick factories that had been commissioned to provide all of the bricks to rebuild the entire citysupposedly as close to the original as was possibleby piling his new bricks on top of the 4,000-year-old originals. Nebuchadnezzar had a limited number of special bricks with his name inscribed on them claiming responsibility for building Babylon. Saddam had some patterned after Nebuchadnezzars, taking credit for its resurrection that were found in walls randomly throughout the ruins. I wondered if God, annoyed with Saddam for rebuilding Babylon in his own image, was using us to symbolically destroy it once again.

Saddams goal was to transform Babylon into a worldwide tourist attraction, a vacation resort for the rich and famous. Instead, the area had served as the headquarters of the First Marine Division, United States Marine Corps. The Marines had been here since the end of major hostilities in May 2003 until September, when they rotated back home. Camp Babylon, as it had been christened, was now the headquarters for the newly-formed Multi-National Division, or MND. Led by a brigade from the Polish army, who provided the largest contingency of any other nation, the MND was responsible for security in the five provinces identified as South-Central Iraq.

South-Central Iraq was practically void of U.S. forces. The coalition commander, Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, wanted American eyes and ears on the ground to provide him directly with ground-truth intelligence. This was where our little group of Soldiers came in. I was part of a Military Intelligence company of less than 40 Americans, all mobilized reservists. We were spread throughout the five provinces, tasked with tracking not only insurgents, but keeping an eye on our coalition partners as wellnot so much to spy on them as to keep General Sanchez apprised of their activities, or lack of them as the case may be.

Our recent experiences in the Balkans had taught us that our coalition partners did not always act in open faith or in the best interests of the coalition. Some partners in Bosnia had been caught running guns, drugs and/or prostitution rings, and were now also represented in our newly formed Iraqi coalition as well. And of course, despite the outward faade of being coalition partners, many of them spied on us as much asor even more so thanthe enemy. One coalition partner had brought along their signal intercept vans and placed them on some hills in the camp. However, instead of facing their collection dishes outwards towards town, they pointed into the camptowards us.

Our company had already been in Iraq for six months, since the end of major hostilities in May 2003. We had spent those months in a camp northeast of Baghdad screening over 4,000 freedom fighters classified by our illustrious State Department at the insistence of former President Clinton as terrorists, in a failed effort to curry favor with the evil terrorist mullah regime of Iran, as these freedom fighters referred to them. With only 12 hours notice we were ordered to leave the camp and head south to Camp Babylon and conduct our current mission. We had been here six weeks so far.