Dan Mills - Sniper One

A few groups of men hanging around on street corners gave us the evil eye as we drove past. The uprising in Najaf led by Moqtada al-Sadr’s militia had swiftly hardened the population’s stance to our presence.

If there was one thing Al Amarah people do care for it was their religion. For a lot of them, Islam and Moqtada were inseparable. The biggest thugs in town were the holy nutcases, hired guns and vicious gangsters of Al Amarah’s Office of the Martyr Sadr (OMS). Named after his father, this was Moqtada’s official fan club and local HQ for the Mehdi Army. People did what they said — they paid no attention to the police who were by and large an irrelevance.

Depending on the political climate around Iraq, the OMS’s fighting strength numbered anything from a hardcore of around 400, to several thousand. They dressed in black. The OMS was also a convenient umbrella under which people who wanted to resist the coalition’s presence grouped. They welcomed all comers, from tribesmen with blood feuds against us to settle, to frustrated former Ba’ath party officials and jobless young men just wanting to earn a few dinars. With a lot of the male Iraqi population having undergone conscription at some stage under Saddam, most of the OMS’s ranks had some form of military training.

It may be only nine miles from Abu Naji, but Cimic House took up to an hour to get to. Convoys in and out varied their routes as much as possible to avoid being caught by improvised explosive devices (IEDs), also known as roadside bombs. That could mean crossing the river three times.

When our convoy pulled up at Cimic House, the city was peaceful. During the daytime over the last few days, it had been quiet. The bad boys came out to play at night.

CIMIC stood for Civil and Military Cooperation, the army’s term for reconstruction projects, improving the infrastructure and general tree-hugging. Getting Iraq back on its feet, and all that. It was the basic reason we were all there. The whole compound is around 200 metres long, from north to south, and 100 metres across from east to west, at the widest point.

On two sides, there is water. The vast River Tigris runs past its northern perimeter, and one of its tributaries passes by its western edge. Since the Tigris stretches from the northern mountains of Kurdistan down through Baghdad as well as a dozen other towns, it was thoroughly filthy by the time it reached Al Amarah. It escaped into the Arabian Gulf just past Basra. It wasn’t uncommon to see dead dogs and cows floating by, as well as the odd badly bloated human body.

The main road that approaches Cimic House from the south also snakes past its southern and eastern boundary, a thick concrete wall six feet high and reinforced by Hesco bastion bollards and sand-filled bollards.

You get into the place by two gates, each preceded by a series of 50-metre-long chicanes. All traffic is filtered through them to stop suicide bombers. The front gate, two sheet metal doors, is at the southern end of the compound and was used most often. It opens onto a long wide paved driveway that leads up to the main house. It was used as the vehicle park, and it was where we debussed from the eight tonners.

Cimic was a hive of activity. But we would have to hit the ground running.

Dale had gone in ahead of us, and he was in the vehicle park to greet us.

‘Right lads, listen up. You’ve got twenty minutes to sort your shit and then we’re in the sangars on guard. The Light Infantry are getting out right now. So let’s look faarkin’ lively. Sentries, have your weapons cocked, but don’t take your safety catch off unless you’re going to fire.’

The plan was to take the Light Infantry out on the trucks we had come in on. They were pissed off, and couldn’t get out fast enough. It was hard to blame them.

The rioting they had faced was up there with the worst sort of stuff the army had to contend with during the darkest days of Belfast and Londonderry, including bullets and bombs. Heavy crowd aggro was never good to come up against, but that too was all new to us and seemed pretty exciting at the time. We’d done a huge amount of public disorder training during OPTAG so we were full of confidence and determined to give a good account of ourselves.

There was just time for a quick guided tour so we knew where everything was.

As he showed us around, the Light Infantry NCO pointed out a crater where a mortar round had landed inside the camp perimeter. There was the odd bullet hole in the wooden frames of the sangars (fortified lookout posts) too. We pretended we weren’t much interested in all his battle chat. But of course, we were fascinated.

In a line to the right of the driveway before the main house itself there were a series of ten prefabricated Portakabins, eight of which were single-storey. These were the shower and toilet blocks, or offices for the Cimic teams, which were largely made up of British TA soldiers, who in civilian life were accountants or engineers. The Light Infantry NCO said Cimic House was a cushy posting for them.

‘If they’ve got to do a tour of Iraq, then what better way to spend it than safely behind a desk with us guarding their arses, eh?’ he suggested. ‘And they still get a campaign medal to go home with.’

The double-storey blocks were much larger, and were our accommodation area. Each floor was just one long dormitory, divided up into sections of four beds in each to give a little privacy. That’s where we were to sleep, said the NCO.

Only Molly Phee and Major Featherstone had their own rooms, inside one of the single-storey Portakabins. With a big grin, our guide even gave us a good look inside them too, just to make sure we knew what we would be missing out on from the start.

Molly Phee was head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) for Maysan, the province’s de facto emperor. A senior US State Department official in her late forties, Molly was liked by everyone — Iraqi and British. She was a small woman, but she had a reputation as a seriously tough negotiator, and spoke fluent Arabic. Molly presided over a team of twenty CPA officials, most of them Yanks too.

‘Molly’s all right, but you’re going to love her close protection mob,’ said the NCO. ‘A load of septics called Triple Canopy. What a bunch of fucking nob jockeys they are.’

They were Molly’s twenty bodyguards for when she went out and about. Most were ex-elite US military and of all different ages, he added. Apparently one guy claimed to be an ex-SEAL and had served as far back as Vietnam. They dressed in their own uniform of khaki slacks and black polo shirts. They all wore Oakleys or wraparound RayBans, and walked around tooled up to the eyeballs. They sounded just terrific neighbours, and we couldn’t wait to meet them.

Then it was on to Cimic House itself. A large and rectangular 1960s concrete building, 30 metres long and 15 metres wide. It’s not much to look at now, but it was probably the coolest thing in southern Iraq when it was built. For Maysan, it would have been an estate agent’s wet dream.

On the ground floor were a series of generously sized meeting rooms, which were full of CPA officials’ desks, shaped around a central courtyard of a few square metres in size, right in the middle of the building. There was even a small number of servants’ rooms.

A wide staircase alongside one of the inner courtyard walls ran up to the second floor, where there were further substantial rooms that must have been originally designed as state bedrooms. They were large and airy with big windows to allow their original occupants to take advantage of the great views over the water. Several of them were en-suite, and had big air-conditioning units pumping cool air into them. A wide balcony with white railings ran the whole way around the level. All the floors in the building were made of marble.