Had the pleasure of running into one of my NCOs from 1-14 Cav today during lunch. He was my senior HUMINTer after SSG Tirador was lost and did an outstanding job of focusing the Squadron's HUMINT soldiers and improving the team while at the same time keeping Brigade off our back and then later was instrumental in establishing the base defense cell for FOB Cobra. I have no doubt that my intelligence section would not have as successful as it was without this NCO and it was great to get to spend a few minutes reminicsing about the deployment.
One of the subjects he brought up was this individual who we managed to capture in the beginning of February 2010 with the assistance of the Special Forces team at FOB Caldwell. I mentioned the capture in this blog post where I commented that I was wondering if the capture would accomplish anything.
The detainment at the time was a great moment for my section and the troop responsible for the southern portion of our OE (operating environment) where this individual was conducting attacks. At the beginning of the deployment we had a sudden spike in attacks in the Niddawi tribal area that at first I believed to be due to the insurgents increasing their attacks due to my squadron being the new kids in town. Our sources quickly pointed the finger at the above mentioned individual as being the cell leader in the area and who had recently returned from being in prison. Our local security force partners were unwilling to assist us with this individual partly due to him being a relation of one of the powerful sheikhs in the area and refused to believe that this individual was a bad guy.
We worked the issue for months gathering as much evidence as we could to include plenty of HUMINT as well as SIGINT. It helped that one of our sources happened to be a low level member of our bad guy's cell. The Special Forces team was essential in our targeting because they had access to UAV systems that we did not and what systems we did have were being utilized in the northern portion of our OE; this team also did much of the grunt work in gaining the warrant for this individual's arrest. The detainment came late one night in early February with the Special Forces conducting the raid along with the Mandali city SWAT and our A troop providing the outer cordon.
As for the effect, IED attacks in the Niddawi tribal area dropped considerably and the majority of attacks that occured after the detainment were most likely the result of the tribal turmoil in the region and not terrorist/insurgent related. It was a good capture.
Which brings me back to my run in with my old NCO. He happened to mention, which I did not know at the time, that not only was our target one of our "top 10" and a brigade target, but apparently he was a Theater level target as well, meaning that he was on someone's radar up at Corps. How true that actually is I have no idea and will likely never know, but having captured a Theater level target, something few battalions ever do, is one more thing I get to brag about.
No comments:
Post a Comment