'No one knew about it’

The untold story of the battle against the ‘Soldiers of Heaven’

January 28th, 2007, the SF team members had no clue they were racing into a 24-hour battle, vastly outnumbered and outgunned by a heavily armed militia of about 800 cult-like Shiite warriors (‘Soldiers of Heaven’) willing to fight to the death.

But our guys closed the gates to heaven and opened the gates to hell.

The battle has since been reconstructed in some media accounts ,but the fight against the Soldiers of Heaven remains little known outside the circles of those who were there.

This is their story...

The call to Special Forces came at 7 a.m. from Iraqi soldiers and policemen who had come under fire from a surprisingly large force of insurgents. Within minutes, the insurgents had killed 18 Iraqi troops and sent the rest fleeing.

Capt. Eric Jacobson was team leader for Operational Detachment Alpha 566, 2nd Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group, a token U.S. presence in Najaf province that worked closely with scout platoons from an Iraqi army battalion based nearby. It was one of those scouts who called him for help.

After alerting an SF team from 1st Battalion in the area for possible backup, Jacobson headed to the fight with his team of 10 U.S. soldiers. Small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenade rounds greeted them on arrival as dozens of insurgents blasted away from entrenched positions atop 15-foot sand berms.

“We immediately were engaging 50 to 60 people at a time from a berm position to our front and we helped our scouts get back,” Jacobson said.

Undetected by U.S. or Iraqi forces, hundreds of fighters had somehow managed over a period of several months to set up protected fighting positions and a command and control complex within a large compound six miles north of Najaf. Iraqi forces had stumbled into the hornet’s nest earlier in the day when they went there thinking they would be arresting a group of about 30 men.

Enemy fire quickly disabled the SF team’s three Humvees. Master Sgt. Raymond Lancey, Master Sgt. Petter Jacobsen and Staff Sgt. Gregory Keller jumped out and organized support-by-fire positions to help Iraqi soldiers pinned down by enemy fire.

RPG fragments hit Keller in the face, but he and the other SF troops continued to fight alongside their crippled vehicles with the 25 remaining Iraqi scouts out of a force of about 40; the others had been killed or were too wounded to fight. The only people still in the Humvees were the SF soldiers manning .50-caliber machine guns.

The U.S. and Iraqi soldiers blasted away many of their attackers, but fresh waves of fighters came in behind the dead and wounded to take positions on the berms.

The Americans and Iraqis did not realize it then, but they were battling the so-called Soldiers of Heaven, a radical cult led by a man whom the fighters believed to be the 12th Imam, or the rightful heir to the prophet Muhammad. Followers hoped to install him in the Najaf shrine.

Succeed or die trying — no other options existed for them in this mission.

Though based less than four miles away from the clandestine camp, the battalion of Iraqi soldiers remained unaware of the slow build-up of insurgent forces, supplies and weaponry inside the 3-square-mile camp surrounded by 15-foot sand berms.

“Absolutely no one knew about it,” Jacobson said.

A look at post-dated satellite photos, he said, revealed trenches and tunnels, tree lines and a cluster of buildings inside the walled area.

In that redoubt, the insurgents had armed themselves for an apocalyptic battle, with hundreds of AK-47s, PKC machine guns, a variety of automatic weapons, at least 500 RPGs and 50 launchers. They also manned larger crew-served weapons, such as the Soviet DShK, and three vehicle-mounted heavy machine guns.

Gina Cavallaro gives us the complete story here.

The U.S. Army awarded more than 100 combat decorations for bravery that day, including at least eight Silver Stars and a Distinguished Flying Cross.