James Ashcroft - Making a Killing - The Explosive Story of a Hired Gun in Iraq

Unfortunately, it was only the calm before the storm.

I woke every morning to the voice of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer over the loudspeakers in Aradisa Idah. On the eve of Ashura, 1 April 2004, the Shi’ite mosques across the city erupted in an explosion of hysterical shrieking and ranting that went on all night and we didn’t manage to get any sleep at all. Not for the first time, Les threatened to take his wire cutters to the speakers on our local mosque. The trick, he said, wasn’t just to cut them but to hack out large sections of the wiring so they would take a few days to repair.

Ashura had effectively been banned in Iraq under Saddam, and next day when the Shi’ites celebrated their holy festival for the first time in decades, cold-blooded surprise attacks were launched on unarmed Shia worshippers in Baghdad and Karbala, killing more than 140 and wounding some 400 people. The Jordanian Sunni Abu Musab Al Zarqawi was named as the most likely perpetrator behind the attacks. Blood was flowing in the streets again. This time it wouldn’t stop. At Christmas 2003 the level of attacks had dropped to an average of eighteen per day. By summer 2004 there would be 180 a day, ten times as many. Al Zarqawi would be killed in an American bombing raid in June 2006, but his legacy lives on and now, at the time of writing, Iraq is closer than ever to civil war.

The insurgents had been observing Coalition Forces, regrouping, and re-organising themselves. They had developed new tactics and there were new groups with diverse objectives and a new commitment to attacking foreign troops, PSDs, foreign interests, as well as each other, right across the country. In the space of a few weeks there were suddenly dozens of private security contractors killed from companies across the board.

In arguably the most well-known incident involving the deaths of contractors, Blackwater lost two vehicles and four men in Fallujah. The bodies of the men were mutilated, burned, dragged through the streets by the mob and strung up on the bridge in the centre of town, the entire gory episode filmed by the insurgents and screened on televisions across the world. We watched the footage in silence, flipped channels and watched it again.

Four days after the Ashura massacre, on 4 April, Colonel Faisal stamped into our office meeting first thing in the morning pissed off about something, which was not unusual.

‘The revolution is come. They are a fucking people!’ He drew himself up to his full five foot four inches and quivered with rage and indignation.

‘Calm down, mate, do you fancy a cuppa?’ said Seamus. He was full of beans since he had spent the previous afternoon in plasticuffs.

Without being asked, Raheed, the chai wallah , popped up magically with a tray of sickly sweet tea for all of us.

Faisal was one of the nicest men I had ever met, but his pilot’s training in England had ruined him as an Iraqi. He returned disgusted by the corruption he found in his own country, the rubbish in the streets, the medieval mentality of the tribal and ethnic groups. Everyone to him was ‘a fucking people’. The Iranians, Kurds, Syrians, Saudis, Kuwaitis and especially any Iraqi who did not measure up to his standards; he hated them all with a passion.

Seamus was sitting at the table counting how many ‘Vitamin V’ tablets he had left. Sammy had revealed that Viagra was twenty times cheaper on the black market in Baghdad than in the UK, and brought in a bin liner full of packets for us.

I tried my usual negotiation with Raheed for a cup of mai haar , hot water, in which I could make up my own brew. Despite making us cups of tea every day for four months, Raheed was still dismayed that I only took one sugar in my tea instead of the eight or nine favoured by the locals. The biggest danger I was facing in Baghdad at the moment was diabetes.

‘Oi, Ratty,’ Les said. ‘Hop it and bring our poof Rupert some English tea, awright mate?’ Les called Raheed ‘Ratty’ or ‘Rodentay’ because he looked like a rat. One day someone was going to tell Raheed what it meant and he would kill Les in the middle of the night.

‘ Na’am, Mister Les. Chai Ingilisi .’ Ratty winked at me. ‘ Wahed shekir .’ One sugar. He disappeared down the hall cackling away to himself. I knew he would slip in three or four sugars.

‘Come on, Colonel Faisal,’ said Seamus, looking up from his pills. ‘Sit yourself down on the sofa and tell us what’s wrong. Let me guess, half the guards at Site Echo decided to sleep all night and the other half didn’t bother to turn up at all.’

‘Sack the fucking lot of ’em,’ muttered Les.

‘No. No. No. I tell you the revolution is come,’ said Faisal. ‘This is very problem. The Mahdi Army, he take the south of the country over the night. This morning they are in charge of Basra, Nasiriyah, Najaf, Diwaniyah, Kut…’ he counted off the cities on his fingers. Shit.

‘ Yissss !’ Hendriks shook his head and absent-mindedly went to light up a Gauloise before observing Les’s glare. No smoking in the office. We had to think about our health.

I was amazed yet again at the efficiency of the Iraqi gossip network. The news that the Mahdi Army was on the move had undoubtedly come up with drivers from the south. I wondered if Mad Dog knew about this.

‘Aren’t they Moqtada al-Sadr’s mob?’ asked Les as I dialled Mad Dog on my IRAQNA. ‘I don’t know why they haven’t caught that cunt yet.’

Moqtada al-Sadr was the charismatic son of a clerical dynasty and controlled Sadr City, a Shia district that had tolerated Saddam. According to Shia tradition, the Mahdi is the twelfth Imam. Shia preachers were teaching that the spirit of the Mahdi was returning and the Americans had invaded Iraq, not for WMD or oil, but to destroy the Mahdi. The supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr believe him to be the son of the Mahdi, or the Mahdi spirit, and al-Sadr had said in speeches that the Mahdi Army could never be disbanded because it belonged to the Mahdi. There is no reasoning on questions of faith, and the blind allegiance of al-Sadr’s followers was just one of many complex facets of a multi-faceted culture where the very notion of establishing a Western-style democracy in what was a cauldron of medieval beliefs and Byzantine social structures wasn’t merely optimistic, it was foolhardy.

It was fortunate that Mad Dog McQueen was still at breakfast since phone reception in Task Force Fountain’s office was terrible, much like the rest of the palace. He answered on the second ring.

‘Ash, how are you doing, buddy?’

‘Hello, mate. Are you lot aware of what the Mahdi Army’s up to?’

‘You bet. I was just about to call you guys. There’s been fighting in Sadr City all night. Look, I got a briefing right now, I’ll fill you in as soon as I got some more.’

I stuck the phone back in my pocket. ‘The Americans know,’ I said.

‘Must be serious,’ said Hendriks.

‘Sadr City’s been at it all night.’

Sadr City was a large block of Shia slums in the northeast of Baghdad, a murderous no-go area and where Ibrahim bought most of our weapons. It was strange that I had not heard any shooting the previous night; maybe I had got used to it. Most nights in Baghdad you would lie there listening to explosions and distant gunfire. You would wonder what poor sod was catching it and also when the buggers were going to stop. After all, people were trying to sleep. The biggest worry was that if the explosions got too close you might actually have to get out of bed and do something about it.

Seamus called Spartan HQ and spoke to Angus. They already knew about the Mahdi uprising from their own Iraqi network. We agreed to lock down and suspend all movement until further notice.