How SAS captured al Qaeda's Iraq executioners

Daily Mail:

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The documents seen by The Mail on Sunday show ‘approximately 50 operations were run out against him [Rami] with no jackpot’. 

To succeed where others failed, Sergeant A – his identity cannot be revealed – went undercover, joining a group of Iraqi counter-terrorist personnel called Apostles and setting up a car dealership in an open-air market in the Rusafa district of Baghdad. 

His hair dyed, his face blackened by layers of fake tan – or Bisto gravy granules when he ran out – and wearing brown contact lenses, Sergeant A mingled with Rusafa’s movers and shakers, bought and sold cars and recruited sources. 

Details of all Sergeant A’s sources were logged by the ACE (Analysis and Control Element) at the Baghdad Operations Centre. 

Scrupulous cross-referencing of phone, residential and criminal records paid off when it was discovered that a brother of Abu Rami was serving a prison sentence at Camp Bucca – a US detention facility at Umm Qasr on Iraq’s coast. 

Sergeant A flew to the prison and briefed troops from the UK’s Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR) who entered Camp Bucca and waited to intercept anyone visiting Rami’s brother. 

When his mother arrived they confiscated her phone – a standard procedure for visitors – and while she was speaking to her son stripped every detail from the SIM card and placed a tiny geo-locating device in the handset. 

Rami’s mother returned to Baghdad and was tracked to a house in a northern neighbourhood.
Next, Sergeant A arranged for Rami’s brother to be moved from Camp Bucca to Camp Cropper – a US detention facility at Baghdad International Airport. 

As hoped, the frequency of family visits increased and Iraqi undercover teams called Mohawks followed cars and watched addresses. Still there was no sign of the man himself. 

In late September 2008, it struck Sergeant A that as a practising Muslim, Rami would be obliged to see his family during the festival of Eid, which fell on October 1 and 2. 

Sergeant A briefed the team for a night raid. 

The mother was at home and Rami’s sister was tailed to another house nearby. It was noted by the Mohawks that a car made two journeys between the addresses, on each occasion appearing to ‘do a counter-surveillance loop’. 

Sergeant A and an assault force from D Squadron drove to the second address. Ducking into position, A trained his night-sight across the windows and doors of the two-storey house, and studied the pick-up trucks parked outside. 

Sergeant A gave a signal and a Mohawk raised a megaphone. ‘The house is surrounded, Abu Rami, come out, everyone come out now, you will not be harmed,’ he said in Arabic.
For a few minutes nothing happened, then the front door opened and children scampered outside. 

A message crackled in Sergeant A’s earpiece: ‘We’ve got one times mam (military aged male) and one times echo (female) leaving the building. Do not fire, the mam is holding a child, repeat, the mam is holding a kilo (child).’ 

Wearing a flowing cotton shirt, and carrying a child in one arm, the man shuffled slowly and silently towards a gate and the front of the compound. ‘Show your other arm! Show your other arm!’ said a Mohawk through the megaphone. 

Suddenly the man raised his hidden arm to reveal a pistol. Immediately he fired and a round passed through a Mohawk’s leg. He fell to the ground. 

Sergeant A pulled his rifle into his shoulder and squeezed off a 5.56mm round. The man fell dead. The child ran screaming inside the house. 

When another young male confirmed Abu Rami was inside, and was armed, an SAS trooper took lethal action. He lifted a 66mm rocket launcher on to his shoulder, flipped up a plastic sight and pulled the firing lever to send a missile flashing through an upstairs window. ‘Entry team: go!’ said Sergeant A into the radio microphone. 

Suddenly SAS troopers dressed in black kit scaled the rooftop and swung down. 

They were armed with short-barrelled machine guns and carried alsatian dogs. The remaining windows were smashed and the dogs thrown inside. 

A ground assault team charged through the front and back doors. 

Abu Rami, the most wanted active terrorist in the world, the Al Qaeda leader who had foiled the Americans and the Russians, was gunned down by the SAS during the house clearance.
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While not as dramatic, this reminds me of a case I brought against a conman in San Antonio, Texas who bragged to his victims that he had never missed Christmas with his kids in Los Angelos.  I contacted the LAPD which also had a warrant against the guy and they arranged a Christmas morning surprise.  When the kids came to the door, they started yelling "Pigs daddy. Pigs."  He went running out the back door and was caught trying to climb a fence.  A little later I got a call from a public defender in LA asking where Bexar County, Texas was located.

The linked story has more on the capture of another al Qaeda executioner.  The SAS did some good investigative work to stop these guys.