![]() We had to move faster than our enemy did, and we kept the pressure on them, striking over and over again so they never felt at ease. I created a kill list-people in the Al Qaeda in Iraq network or in ISIS whom we had prioritized for capturing or taking out-and acted on it day and night. I was part of a handful of people in the American military at the time with the responsibility to pick drone targets and issue the order for their deaths. ![]() That wasn’t an easy decision, even with hundreds of missions to my name and top-of-the-line intelligence networks at my disposal. These were explosives and, knowing Bashir, they could be rigging the truck to blow up like the Fourth of July.Īt twenty-five years old, I had the power to decide whether a man lived or died. What set our team apart was knowing this: nothing in this business is a coincidence. These guys could simply be locals not connected to the Al Qaeda network at all. In the years I’ve spent hunting and watching in the cesspools of the Middle East, I have found that people do funny things. Maybe the first truck was just getting gas or maybe he was transporting the village water source. Now, a normal analyst might discount this because we couldn’t ever confirm 100 percent what those thick jugs were from the air. The men began cautiously offloading thick jugs about three or four feet tall to the first truck. All of them kissed the hands and hugged the driver of the first truck: Bashir. I took note of how they greeted the others. Within a few minutes another white bongo pulled up and three men climbed out. Why didn’t he want to smoke near the truck? When the passenger lit a cigarette, a huge light exploded, like a house on fire. Their bodies were suddenly a bright, ghostly black against the white fall desert. I had them switch the camera from electro-optical, or daytime, TV, which shows everything in brown and gray, to infrared view. ![]() “Looks like two military-aged males, wearing white dishdashas,” Jake said. ![]() These life-and-death decisions would change people’s lives in the blink of an eye, even my own. Kill or capture was always on the table, but we needed visual confirmation of Abu Bashir before we made the call, which most times didn’t get made until the very last minute. What’s he doing? Where’s he going? It was another twenty minutes before the vehicle came to a stop outside a village. The empty Rip It cans were piled at my elbow. This was when my eyes always began to blur a bit. Sometimes the first stop was the nearest major town, where the vehicle would be used to blow up the closest U.S. The guys coming across the Syrian border typically followed a predetermined smuggling route, moving their illicit explosives or suicide bombers between the villages on the way to their ultimate destination. It was mainly no-man’s-land, with some dots of villages here and there, ten to twenty people at most to a village. The road wasn’t much of a road, just some zigzagging tracks worn into the hard-packed sand for hundreds of miles. Months of our intelligence work destroyed. If our target ever heard the drone’s engine or somehow caught sight of it, he’d abandon his mission and go underground-phones tossed, email accounts abandoned, everything gone. We had the bird at a two-nautical-mile standoff from the target, trailing our target at around 12,000 feet to keep it out of sight. On the monitors, the bongo was kicking up dust everywhere and creating a huge signature visible from the sky. We had our laptops out, running a sophisticated chat program that allowed us to have about twenty different conversations with every intelligence agency running at once, our ground force elements, senior officials in the US government, and the technical side of the operations in Iraq and across the globe. ![]() Jake, an Air Force tactical controller, sat next to me he was my shadow. We sat in a cramped room with cement floors, working off a makeshift desk built out of plywood. military personnel stationed at a base nearby.Ī fleet of helicopters were on call nearby if we needed them to intercept a target fast. This trip was going to end badly, with another attack against either innocent civilians or U.S. Mostly undetected, he moved the material and components for heavy bombs into Iraq, along with foreign fighters and suicide bombers waging war against the United States. Army veteran and former military intelligence analyst with 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta. ![]()
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