Many times on this blog I have discussed how counterinsurgency is difficult, possibly one of the most difficult endevors a modern military can embark upon...unless you go the Mongolian route which is to just raze everything that stands in your way.
I have also mentioned how challenging it was for 1-14 CAV to conduct targeting and capture key individuals. Many parts of our battlespace were, if not openly hostile, certainly disagreeable to U.S. forces and while most of the population agreed that the people we were targeting were "bad" they rarely assisted us. The security forces were frustrating in that while they could be helpful in occasionally providing information on our targets, and on a couple of occasions even conducting missions against individuals on their own, the Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police preferred to target the "low hanging fruit"...people they could capture immediately but who often had little intelligence value on the larger network.
There was also the headache inducing issue of operational security with the local security forces. It wasn't that I believed that many of them were actively assisting the insurgency, there were some, it was that as soon as one jundi or shurta got word that he was doing a mission the next day he was calling all his buddies and his family telling them where he was going and what he was doing. Word would eventually get out allowing time for a target to either hide or get out of town for awhile.
This happened with several of our missions. Sometimes I believe it was our own selves shooting us in the foot. For example, on a mission to capture an IED cell leader it was decided that not only would 1-14 be involved, but the SF team, the Iraqi Army commando company, and an element from the Iraqi Army brigade would all participate. When everyone arrived on the objective the Qara Tapa police were already on scene since they had heard about the mission and wanted in on the action as well. What should have been an effort of perhaps the SF team, the Commando Company, and maybe a platoon from 1-14 turned into a circus of several hundred personnel all stepping on eachother's toes.
The mission wasn't a complete failure. This was early into the deployment and we were still working on a lot of the information and intel that had been passed on from 5-1 CAV and so we were able to use the information gathered to further develop the situation and rule out some individuals and homes we thought may be involved in attacks.
In the next 4 months we would target this individual 5 more times. Each time we would get word that he had returned to his parent's house we'd spin up and conduct some hasty planning, gather up some forces, and head out to the village...only to learn that we had just missed him.
The B troop commander finally decided enough was enough and worked another course of action. He took our target's father aside and told him that if he did not force his son to turn himself in or inform us when his son had returned then B troop would return the next night, and the night after that, for 1000 nights. As he left the house, the commander slapped a Bronco troop sticker on the door (the stickers were leftover from the previous deployment, look like the logo of the Denver Broncos, and were used in 06/07 to mark homes that had been searched. They do not come off easily).
Within a week the target turned himself in to the Qara Tapa police.
Bronco would go on to use this same technique on a few other individuals with varying success. I took away from the situation a valuable lesson in counterinsurgency which is that while force and constant raids don't always work, annoying regularity can. Targeted raids that upset the lives of a single family that are fully aware of a member's guilt will eventually lead to enough annoyance and shame that the family forces the targeted individual to turn himself in. No other enemies were made, the rest of the village was not disturbed, and we no longer bothered this family in any way. After this individual was detained, IEDs in that specific area dropped to zero for approximately four months.
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