Ready, Set...Gone

By Alex Perry/Kuwait City

In special-forces circles they call Captain Mark's 12-man team a force multiplier. Military commanders use terms like quick-reaction force or special ops when discussing his work, but mostly they convey its nature with knowing looks. Captain Mark, a pseudonym, simply says he has a "cool-guy job." However you describe him, you have only to study Captain Mark's travels in the past few years--Haiti, Georgia, Afghanistan--to work out what the bearded 33-year-old does. His 5th Special Forces Group "A team" of language specialists, weapons trainers, logistics men, forward bomb spotters and CIA paramilitary intelligence gatherers is essentially a fuse, a fire starter, a 12-man conflict catalyst. If your country pops up on Captain Mark's deployment orders back at Fort Campbell, Ky., and you're not already at war, chances are you soon will be. And by now, Captain Mark has been inside Iraq for more than a month.

His war has already begun. Just as they did before the 1991 Gulf War, British and American commanders are doing everything they can to soften up Iraq for invasion. "We're on the offensive," says a senior Western diplomat in neighboring Kuwait. "We're in there. This war starts on our terms."

In Iraq's northern and southern no-fly zones, from which Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's planes have been barred since shortly after the 1991 war's end, the number of missions flown by British and American warplanes has jumped sharply in recent months. Pilots are flying four missions a week, and they've expanded their target list from Iraqi air defenses that actually lock on to their jets to all surface-to-air installations, threatening or not. They're also hitting military headquarters and surface-to-surface missile systems.

Psy-ops have also been stepped up. Propaganda leaflets are dropped daily, promising punishment or death to Iraqi troops who resist or who unleash chemical or biological weapons. In the Kuwaiti desert, Western camera crews that taped 3rd Infantry Division troops storming a mock Iraqi street were being co-opted by military media strategists, who privately say street fighting forms no part of the war plan. The exercises were designed to spook Baghdad.

There are actual plans for ground fighting, though, in conjunction with Iraqi opposition groups, similar to the special-forces linkups with the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan against the Taliban in 2001. In the northern Iraqi autonomous zone of Kurdistan, U.S. troops are readying the various Kurdish militias for war. They are conducting weapons training and policing an alliance among them. And since September, at Taszar air base in Hungary, the U.S. has also been providing combat training to 5,000 Iraqi rebels, including Kurds and Shi'ites from the south. Another group trained at Taszar will become advisers to the special forces and are expected to help form any post-Saddam military administration.

In southern Iraq, however, reconnaissance on the key city of Basra is proving difficult. Overhead surveillance can help identify targets and track large weapons and troop movements. "We know where everything is," the Western diplomat asserts. But Special Forces Groups face a much harder task, forging local alliances and even gauging what the mood is on the ground. "Southern Iraq is an intelligence black hole," says a senior British military source, noting that Marine assault units will be guided into the area by Iraqi exiles, some of whom haven't been inside their native land for a decade.

While leaders of Iraqi rebel groups in the south make grand predictions of a spontaneous Shi'ite-and Iraqi-army uprising against Saddam, many of them are refusing to join forces with the Americans. Sheik Jamal al-Wakil of the Islamic Accord Movement, an opposition Shi'ite group, says there is widespread distrust of the U.S. because coalition forces did nothing to stop Saddam's brutal suppression of the Shi'ites' 1991 and 1995 uprisings, even though it was George Bush Sr. who encouraged them. "There is no need for any communication with the Americans," says the Syria-based al-Wakil. Given such attitudes, says the senior British military source, it's tough even to make contact with the Shi'ites. So far, the Special Forces Groups are largely hiding out in the desert, minimizing contact with locals until any fighting starts. "We still don't know if people will welcome us or shoot us," he says.

Of course, it is precisely these sorts of delicate situations that Captain Mark and his team live for. "We get to go all over the world doing this cool-guy stuff," he says. The difficulty of hanging on to your wife--"all the guys are divorced now," says Captain Mark--or your life seems to be no deterrent. Nor is the lack of public recognition, although one 5th-grouper did achieve fame of sorts last year when a picture of him in Afghanistan was used on the packaging of a new doll called Tora Bora Ted, available online. If these soldiers have their way, the Baghdad Mark action figure will be on shelves this spring. --With reporting by Simon Robinson/Kuwait City

With reporting by Simon Robinson/Kuwait City