For the first few days, the attacks weren't very well organized. They came at us either as individuals or small groups of five to ten. Fighters would try to creep up on Cimic as close as they thought they could. They'd use dead ground behind the dam, on the north bank or inside RPG alley.
'Enemy movement spotted, wait out,' came the warning over the PRR.
Before any sniper had a chance to get a fix on them, they'd jump out and riddle the place with full AK mags, or let rip with a wildly inaccurate RPG.
'Contact! Get your fucking heads down!' one of us would shout if the fire was at the roof. Then, as soon as they changed mags, we'd be back up again and putting down as many rounds as we could back at where the muzzle flashes were.
Pretty quickly, the attackers would have expended all their ammo and they'd have to bugger off again – if they were still alive.
The ground attacks would be peppered by almost constant single-round sniping from further away. For that, they used the rooftops of the old town, the hospital, the bus shelter or the Aj Dayya estate. It posed more of a threat because it was more accurate.
At that stage, still the only thing that really bothered us was the mortar fire. Up to ten separate barrages a day were being launched at us – one of the highest rates we'd experienced.
A mortar round had to be very accurate to kill anyone on the roof, thanks to our reinforcements. But the sheer weight of that sort of incoming was no small pain in the arse. It made every movement out of cover in Cimic very hard work, and people only ever got about by either sprinting like gazelles or crawling everywhere on their bellies. We became a company of high-speed invertebrates.
Largely thanks to its two water boundaries, Cimic came into its own as a natural defensive stronghold. They weren't ever going to breach our walls fighting like that either, and the volume of incoming wasn't unbearable yet. Also, the stronger we appeared, the sooner they'd go away, or so we thought.
'They can't do us any proper damage if they can't get close to us, boys,' I reminded them. 'Slot as many of these fuckers as you can. They might get the message it's not worth coming back.'
Every now and then, a gaggle of women in black dresses and veils shuffled out on to the dead ground waving white flags. The sight was a good morale boost and was always broadcast all round on the PRR. They were the body parties.
Some Mehdi Army were more obliging than others. There were a surprisingly large amount of looney tunes similar to the three we killed from the Snatches who seemed intent on martyrdom. They'd just charge us in full view blazing away any old how. It would have been churlish not to have given them what they wanted so the lads dispatched them to their seventy-two vestal virgins without any further ado.
Other fighters were a lot more devious and harder to kill.
On the north bank, they soon struck on a particularly cynical ploy of using the refugees' mud huts and slum housing as cover points to attack us. Old women and kids would be ordered to stand at their windows or doorways at gunpoint. Hiding behind civilians has been a coward's trick I've seen the world over from Belfast to Bosnia. How they justified that against the allegedly moral aim of their jihad was beyond me.
The scumbags hadn't counted on Fitzy though. After a day or so of us seeing this, he came up with an idea.
'I can do one of those sods, Danny. If you flush them out, I'll keep my eye on the door.'
'You sure, mate? Wasting some old Doris's kid by mistake isn't going to help our cause much, you know.'
'Positive.'
I took his word for it. There was one mud hut on the north bank that the fighters were particularly fond of, about 600 metres to our north-west. We waited for the next 'holy warrior' to go inside it and push out the human shields.
Ten minutes later, one turned up. He was a well-built bloke in his forties with a bushy beard. Most likely a longstanding OMS stalwart. Once he was inside, Fitzy and I lined up our longs on the building from Rooftop Sangar. I took aim at the open window two feet to the left of the door, where we'd seen the guy's muzzle flash. Fitzy concentrated solely on the door frame.
'Ready, Fitz?'
Thirty seconds of silence, as he studied every single centimetre of the possible target area in turn and mentally banked the lot of it.
Fitz took a last calm deep breath. 'Ready.'
I put a round right into the window's top righthand corner, behind which I could see straight on to the back wall.
There was a commotion inside. It worked. Convinced we were going to waste him in there, the gunman came out the door crouching low behind a twelve-year-old girl. Brandishing his AK in his right hand, he pulled the screaming child's body close to his with his left arm wrapped around her neck. Crablike, he began to slowly shuffle both of them along the building's front wall.
Fitzy let him move three feet before he released his round, immediately pulling the bolt back to drop another in the chamber if he needed it. He didn't.
The bullet ripped into the very middle fleshy part of the OMS man's lower neck, exactly in between both collarbones. It made a big old mess, slitting a major artery and spraying fountain arcs of blood over the back of the girl's head and down her face for a second or two until she threw off his weakening grip. He gradually sank down the wall to the floor, choking violently, and making feeble efforts to stop the blood flow with both hands; it just spurted out between his fingers instead. Thirty seconds later, he was dead.
'Sorry, mate,' came Fitz's brief verdict. 'Fucked with the wrong platoon, didn't you.'
By the fourth day of the siege, stocks in Cimic were getting low and we needed a hefty resupply. Because the violence was still increasing every day, Abu Naji decided they didn't want to make a habit of sending Warrior convoys into the city if they could possibly avoid it. Instead, they loaded an entire company of Warriors up with as much rations and ammo as it could possibly carry to last us for as long as possible.
The convoy got through to us in the early hours of the morning, after the predictable hefty slapping on the way, even though they came via the greatest round-the-houses back route possible. It took us all two full hours to unload everything from them.
'That's your lot, lads,' said C Company's sergeant major as his growling Warriors prepared to set off back to Slipper City. 'Go easy on that lot. I don't fucking fancy doing this journey again just to give you guys second helpings of ice cream.'
At that stage, we weren't particularly bothered at the prospect of not seeing them for a while. We felt very comfortable in Cimic with our veritable new powder keg. Boxes of 5.56mm, 7.62mm ball and green spot, UGLs, L109 hand grenades, 51mm HE mortar rounds and dynamite (Just in case) lined the stockroom's walls from floor to ceiling. We had enough ammo to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Anyway, the solitude was just another exciting challenge for us.
'Eh, it's just like the Alamo here now, innit?' quipped Pikey. 'Fuck 'em all. We'll do a better job without those armoured pansies interfering anyway.'
It was still early days then. A week later, Pikey had shut his big gob. We all had.
22
The resupply also brought us something else: a new OC.
Major Featherstone was exhausted. He hadn't had a break since we arrived in Al Amarah, and Ray's death coupled with the frenzy of the last four days had really knocked the remaining energy he had left out of him. Still under heavy protest, he eventually gave in to the Commanding Officer's insistence that he take some leave. It became obvious even to him that he wasn't going to be any use in command for much longer.
Out went Featherstone on the Warriors, and sadly three of my snipers with him too: Ads, DV and H. Their R&R was also long overdue. All three volunteered to stay, but since we had no idea how long this was going to last I told them to go while they still had the chance.
In came Captain Charlie Curry. Up until then, Captain Curry had been the battle group's Operations Officer based in Abu Naji. Of medium build and height, he was in his mid-thirties with short dark hair, tinged with flecks of
grey. He smiled a lot, and was generally thought of as a decent bloke. It was only when he actually got stuck into the job at Cimic that we realized what a fantastic leader he was too.
He proved this on his very first morning. After ordering everyone under cover, he walked around the whole compound personally picking up every single blind mortar round we had at that time and throwing them all in the river.
Blinds considerably hindered our movement around Cimic because you couldn't go anywhere near the bloody things. Just because they hadn't gone off when they'd landed didn't mean they were necessarily duds. The slightest movement could explode them, killing anyone within a 20-yard radius. It was a job that normally had to be done by calling out the ATO from Abu Naji. It was very dangerous, and one of the bravest things I've ever seen an officer do. It was also great leadership – as the man would have known – and won him a lot of friends immediately.
Captain Curry was not a man for all the PC bollocks that I felt had hindered us in the past. He made quick decisions with total confidence, and he let us be as aggressive as we wanted. A breath of fresh air, and the man for the moment.
The new boss bought himself more brownie points with us by insisting on joining Dale who was taking out a fighting patrol that very night.
By day, we battened down the hatches at Cimic. Night was a different matter though. We exploited the darkness to push out fighting patrols around the city to take it back to the enemy whenever we could. The best form of defence is always attack and it was important not to let our opponents feel 100 per cent comfortable on Al Amarah's streets.
There was never a need for a sophisticated plan to have a go at them. Mostly, it was just a case of stealthily creeping up on the OMS's favourite mortar base-plate sites, the places we had coded Gold, Silver and Bronze. You'd be assured of a decent contact with mortar teams setting up or their pickets. Never Zinc though, which was the park opposite the OMS building at Yellow 3. The building now doubled as the uprising's battle HQ and had been so heavily fortified we couldn't get anywhere near it.
To our delight, Captain Curry encouraged as much of this as possible.
'The CO wants us to go out and keep the enemy on their feet. You're the best fighters in the battalion, so let's give these fuckwits a bit of payback, shall we?'
That was despite Curry getting into a dirty great contact on his rookie outing with Dale on the north bank. My snipers saved his arse from the rooftop, so he swiftly found out what we could do for him too. From then onwards on their way back in, the fighting patrols would also raid RPG alley and its offshoots to blunt any night-time assaults being prepared at the time.
Bad news in Al Amarah then was never far away though. The day after Captain Curry's arrival, we got another wheelbarrow load of it.
Private Lee O'Callaghan, a young lad from the battalion's B Company, was shot dead by insurgents in Basra. He wasn't the only casualty of the battle either.
Some Royal Artillery lads got lost after a big ambush on their patrol of Snatches. They were in a right shit state and didn't even know where they were. Our guys went out in the Warriors to find them and ran slap bang into an ambush set up just for them.
The company commander had various bits of his body blown of by an RPG, including some fingers and a chunk of his shoulder. The sergeant major got a bullet in the mouth, and a couple of other blokes got badly hosed down.
Lee had been standing up doing top cover out the back of a Warrior's mortar hatch. He took a single round through the heart, dying very quickly.
Lee was only twenty years old, and Sam, Smudge and H had all been through training with him. He'd died in Basra of all places rather than up here, where the fighting had always been a lot more intense. It brought us all down a peg or two, and reminded us that this uprising had become a very serious business. It was only a week old, and already there would be two spare spaces in the dining hall at Tidworth.
Just like with Ray, the overriding emotion after we heard the grim news wasn't one of fear or panic. It was anger. The more the Mehdi Army killed our own, the more they hardened our resolve. If they wanted a fucking fight, we'd give them one.
The head shed were no different. After Lee's death, an order went out to the whole battle group from Colonel Maer's deputy, Major Toby Walch.
'I want you all to be considerably more aggressive,' he said. Major Walch was another one for not pissing about. He'd served in some pretty interesting places and was a true soldier's soldier if ever there was one.
Thanks to the new OC, we were only too happy to oblige.
For months a huge cedar tree fifty metres to the right of the front gate had been pissing us off on the roof. It degraded our view down Tigris Street, but Major Featherstone had always refused me permission to pull it down. I decided to ask Charlie Curry.
'The problem is, sir, it obstructs our view of the lefthand edge of the pontoon bridge. That's a common area the enemy use to approach the compound.'
'Yeah, do it Dan. Get the Warriors to ram it over.'
Top man.
'There's some bits at the back gate that I want to get rid of as well, sir.'
'Do the fucking lot of it. Lives are more important than trees.'
For the first time, we also got permission from Abu Naji to fire high-explosive rounds for the 51mm mortar off Cimic's roof. The condition was it had to be used only as a last resort. Plopping off mini-artillery shells into the city would win us no friends whatsoever.
Our landscape gardening proved timely. As week two of the siege began, the ground attacks on the compound began to get more organized and professional. It was clear that the OMS had begun to have the sense that, to sharpen up their effect, they needed to impose some form of order on the mayhem of different militias. Soon there were heavily armed groups of around thirty coming to have a go. They'd stay for longer, and were a lot harder to deal with.
They also had the use of a lot more of the local buildings. Our neighbours around Cimic had upped and left, either of their own accord to keep their kids alive, or at the end of an OMS sandal. All of them, that is, apart from the poor old family in the corner house. Not even the OMS wanted to be in that unlucky pile of bricks.
The quality of the enemy fighter also changed. We'd killed most of the young looney tunes as well as the crap ones, and the survivors had learnt a thing or two. They stayed behind cover a lot more and used diversion tactics to occupy our fire while they'd get closer elsewhere.
Our hardest job was to locate them. Then you had to flush them out too. For every new burst of fire, the sniper and spotter pairs facing the direction it came from would replay the same conversation.
'Can't see a thing.'
'All right then, where are they most likely going to be? Behind that bush? In that dark shadow there. That's it, put a round in there, see what happens.'
Bang. 'Nope.'
'OK, what about that window?' Bang.
'No. I've got it, how about that pile of rubble? How about I put a UGL behind it instead?'
'There they are in those ruins! Firing at us now, shit! Get your fucking head down!' And the rounds would rake the top layer of the sandbags inches from our faces.
We upped our game, however, and whenever we could too. We were stuck in a one-way struggle, and there was no backing down now.
One thing that kept them at bay for thirty-six hours or so was the sudden arrival of fast air. After Abu Naji were forced to go down on bended knee, coalition air commanders agreed to free up jets to carry out 'shows of force' for us. You don't get air assets unless there's a lot of trouble, and they initially didn't believe we needed them. Then a couple of pilots came over and had a look.
Fast air was assigned on call for short time windows, a couple of hours per morning or afternoon. They'd be anything from British Tornadoes, to American, Italian or Dutch F16s. You'd never know in advance. They were never going to drop their 500 or 1000lb bombs as we were right in the middle of a built-up area. In any case, we had no direct comms fac
ility to talk to them – a must for all close air support.
To begin with, the jets were delightfully effective. We'd pass on where we wanted them to go up the chain. Then out of nowhere, a terrifying screech. Two very pointy looking things would suddenly tear across the sky at just 500 feet, practically breaking everybody's eardrums. The enemy shat their pants and legged it in total panic. Even at that height, the jets still sounded like they were low enough to take your head off.
We'd always be able to recognize the RAF because they would fly the lowest, sometimes down to just 100 feet. The planes weren't invulnerable to a lucky bullet, so that took proper balls. The boys greeted whoever came with a barrage of whoops and air punches.
'Yeah, fucking right!' we'd all shout. 'You're gonna get some of that!'
Seeing friends as mean looking as a pair of Tornadoes gave us a cracking morale boost. Sadly, after four or five bombless flybys, the enemy soon realized they weren't actually going to get any of that and their powerful effect waned. After a while, they just tucked their heads down, stuck their fingers in their earholes, and carried on once the jets had passed.
So all we could do was to carry on giving it back quicker and faster. It was imperative our drills stayed one step ahead of the bastards.
I decided to kip on the roof at night. It meant I was half a minute closer to helping the guys out up there if they had to stand to. Desperate to do what they could too, a fair few of the lads started doing the same.
We held it together pretty well for the next few days, but the pressure was eating up huge amounts of mental and physical resources. At this pace, sooner or later, we were going to get tired. Nerves had already begun to fray a little, with the odd fractious comment emerging between platoons. And still the OMS screw tightened.
It wasn't just savvy that the enemy was gaining. It was also accuracy. It was hard to ignore that our shaves were getting closer and closer. It began to feel like only a matter of time before the Al Amarah OMS paid out its first 200-dollar bonus.