ERBIL, Iraq — The Black Hawk helicopter pushed into ISIS territory through the pre-dawn sky. Joshua Wheeler, a veteran master sergeant with US special operations, was taking his men deep behind enemy lines. As the chopper descended on the ISIS stronghold of Hawija in northern Iraq, back in Washington, US president Barack Obama, who had been notified of the mission, waited for word of its fate.
Wheeler and his team were at the forefront of the hidden war US special operations troops are waging against ISIS. With him in the chopper were fellow members of the US Army's elite Delta Force and some of the local commandos they had trained. Decked in desert camouflage and equipped with high-tech automatic weapons and night vision, the US and local soldiers looked almost identical.
Their mission, carried out on Oct. 22, was more dangerous than most. It called for the men to infiltrate a guarded compound that ISIS had converted into a prison and rescue dozens of men who, according to intelligence reports, were scheduled to be executed that day.
ISIS militants began firing on the helicopter as it lowered toward the compound. Wheeler shot back from the bay, recalled one of the local soldiers who was beside him, a captain with a specialized Kurdish force called the Counter-Terrorism Unit (CTU), which is run by the security council of Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region.
Then — as Wheeler often did, his Kurdish partners said — he led the way.
Wheeler hit the ground first, said the 29-year-old captain, the ranking CTU officer on the chopper. Gunshots and calls of "Allahu Akbar" rang out as the militants tried to repel the commandos, firing with everything they had. The captain said he and Wheeler advanced together, "fighting side by side."
Kurdish snipers on a mountain in northern Iraq and looking for targets.
Warzer Jaff for BuzzFeed News
By the time the operation was over three hours later, around 20 ISIS militants had been killed and 69 prisoners had been saved. And Wheeler was dead, struck down by an ISIS bullet, making him the first US service member to lose his life in the ISIS fight.
When his death became public, US officials painted the combat role of the US commandos on the mission as an anomaly. The Pentagon's press secretary called it "a unique circumstance." Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said Wheeler's engagement with the enemy "wasn't part of the plan." These comments pushed Wheeler's death into line with the narrative Obama had presented to the public when the new fight began. "I ran for this office in part to end our war in Iraq and welcome our troops home, and that's what we've done," he said in August 2014 as US airstrikes against ISIS began. "And so even as we support Iraqis as they take the fight to these terrorists, American combat troops will not be returning to fight in Iraq, because there's no American military solution to the larger crisis in Iraq."
But the Kurdish soldiers who worked with Wheeler tell a different story. They say that Wheeler intended from the start to be up front in the operation — and that elite US troops like him often lead the charge against ISIS on the ground.
On risky missions like Hawija, the US commandos often have a simple command, said a CTU lieutenant: "Let us go first."
"In those operations, they put their lives ahead of ours," the lieutenant said. "They are in the lead."
Interviews in the Kurdish region's capital of Erbil with three CTU members — the captain, the lieutenant and the unit's commander — marked the first time sources with direct involvement in the Hawija mission have publicly discussed it in depth. Each requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of their work, believing that ISIS would attempt to assassinate them if it learned their names. The interviews, carried out over two weeks in July, also provided new insight into how these elite US special operations troops are taking the fight to ISIS: often on the front lines, and sometimes beyond them. Joint US and CTU teams have worked together on the ground in more than 50 operations against the militants, the three men said, performing kill-or-capture missions, conducting surveillance, calling in airstrikes, carrying out sniper attacks, and pounding ISIS positions with mortars and artillery.
These elite US forces reflect a pattern in the greater US war on ISIS in Iraq, which has seen US soldiers quietly stepping up their role on the ground, where they work in growing numbers and increasingly in harm's way. There are currently about 3,830 US service members in the country, according to the Pentagon, an increase of 17 percent in the last year. That figure doesn't include civilians, contractors, and soldiers on temporary duty, and analysts tracking the conflict often put the total between 5,000 and 6,000. In addition to specialized forces of various stripes, soldiers from the conventional US Armed Forces are posted around the country. Conversations with local soldiers and US officers — along with visits to front lines and military bases around northern Iraq, including the operations room in Erbil that oversees US airstrikes and Camp Swift, the expanding US base some 50 miles south of the ISIS capital of Mosul — showed US service members to be much deeper in the fight than White House officials in Washington commonly portray. These troops, in addition to arming and training local forces and coordinating battle plans, are a regular presence on the front lines, conducting surveillance, firing mortars and artillery, and calling in airstrikes as US warplanes rip through the skies.
Kurdish Peshmerga gathered at the front line with ISIS in Tel Asqof, Iraq.
Warzer Jaff for BuzzFeed News
In the process, they are putting their lives on the line. Sixteen US soldiers have been wounded in the war on ISIS, according to publicly available data from the Department of Defense, and two more have been killed since Wheeler's death in late October. On March 19, Louis Cardin, a 27-year-old Marine staff sergeant, was killed by ISIS rocket fire at his base near Camp Swift, where his battalion had been providing artillery support for the Iraqi military. And on May 3, Navy SEAL Charles H. Keating IV died while fighting alongside Kurdish troops in a town called Tel Asqaf after ISIS militants breached the nearby front line.
Obama came to office promising to get the US out of old wars, not into new ones — and to stop the loss of US lives in Iraq. White House officials have often downplayed the role of US soldiers in and close to combat against ISIS, keeping the narrative of US involvement focused on the drones and fighters jets that operate out of range of ISIS's assault rifles, mortars, and suicide car bombs. But while this new US war, in contrast with the last one, leaves the bulk of combat operations to local forces, for US soldiers, it carries its own set of sacrifices and risks.
"The facts on the ground simply don't align with the desired storyline."
Far removed from the politics in Washington, these troops are well aware of the danger they face. Gen. Gary Volesky, the commander of US ground forces in Iraq, is on his fifth tour in the country. He completed his first four during the Iraq War, leading soldiers first against Saddam Hussein and then against ISIS's predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq. "The fight here is a little bit different than it has been in the previous times we've been here. But let's make no mistake. We're in a combat environment," he said. "So when people talk about the soldiers aren't at risk — we know we're at risk."
Volesky ticked off some of the threats that had faced US soldiers in recent days: 20 ISIS rockets that hit at the international airport a short drive from his base in Baghdad; and a suicide car bomb "just about three kilometers from where I currently am." Artillery shells can come crashing down even on US bases set back from the day-to-day fighting. As ISIS loses territory, Volesky noted, it has also leaned more heavily on its roots in unconventional war, focusing less on holding land and more on insurgency, meaning asymmetrical tactics like car bombs and attacks on US troops behind the front lines become more of a threat. "There are no real front lines," Volesky said. "Everyone is at risk."
Volesky had just returned to Baghdad from a visit to northern Iraq that took him to the base where Cardin, the Marine sergeant, had been killed. "I went out to the place that has our artillerymen out there that are in the fight every single day, living in the desert, and said, 'Hey, what can I do for you? What do you need?'" he said. "And they just said, 'We need more targets.'"
Kurdish peshmerga gathered at the front line with ISIS in Tel Asqaf, Iraq.
Warzer Jaff for BuzzFeed News
The headquarters of the elite Kurdish unit that worked with Wheeler in Hawija is set deep inside an intelligence compound in the mountains on the outskirts of Erbil, along a road that winds past guard towers and barricades. "Warning: Military Personnel Only," reads a sign nearby. One wall in the single-story building is lined with commendations from foreign government services: the French Foreign Legion, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA.
Somewhere around Erbil — whether in the intelligence compound or at another place, the CTU officers won't say — is a base where CTU and US commandos live and train. Officially, the base doesn't exist, but it has a name: Camp Wheeler.
To his local partners, Wheeler embodied the US commitment to the new war.
Like many US service members in Iraq today, he had deployed there before. The former Army Ranger was transferred to the military's elite special operations command in 2004 and had been deployed at least 17 times, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army said after his death. Like its counterpart in the Navy, known as Seal Team 6, which killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, most of what Delta Force does is classified. Its soldiers, termed "operators," played a key role in the Iraq War, leading the hunt for Saddam Hussein and helping to decimate the leadership of al-Qaeda in Iraq with constant raids. Delta Force left Iraq when Obama pulled out US troops in 2011, and they were among the first to return when the war on ISIS began.
US special operations forces started working with the CTU shortly after its formation in 2012, but their cooperation surged after ISIS poured across the Syrian border and into Iraq in June 2014, capturing Mosul from the Iraqi army. The shock offensive woke the world to the fact that ISIS — which Obama had once called al-Qaeda's "JV team" — was a global threat. US airstrikes began two months later amid another flurry of international panic: ISIS was now pushing into Kurdish territory, threatening genocide against the Yazidi religious minority concentrated around Mt. Sinjar and closing on Erbil, where the regional government has long been a key US ally.
The operators work with the CTU in three-month rotations, training the commandos, helping them plan operations, and often accompanying them. Wheeler was the team leader on his rotation, the CTU soldiers said, and was near the end of his tour when he went into Hawija. The father of four had recently taken a short trip home for the birth of his newest son. The CTU soldiers remembered Wheeler as demanding during training and warm and open in downtime. He kept a bottle of whiskey on top of his refrigerator, said the CTU lieutenant, and had learned a little Kurdish: Are you ready? Move! Fire!
The lieutenant said that Hawija was not the only operation that saw Wheeler put his life on the line. "Of all the teams I've worked with, his was the strongest, and I can tell you that in those three months we did the biggest number of important operations," the lieutenant said. "He took part in many operations, and I took part in many with him. Our objective was detaining and removing ISIS members from the field."
When Wheeler touched down in Hawija, the lieutenant was in an operations room watching on a drone feed. He saw Wheeler's team move toward one of the two houses ISIS militants occupied on the compound as commandos from another chopper moved toward the second. The lieutenant's account is consistent with drone footage of the raid viewed by a BuzzFeed News reporter in the days following Wheeler's death. In it, infrared cameras showed commandos, described by Kurdish sources as a mix of Delta operators and CTU troops, departing two helicopters and rapidly approaching the compound's two houses as they came under enemy fire.
While the captain took some men to secure the house's ground floor, Wheeler and the others advanced toward the second story, which had its own entrance via a set of exterior stairs. From his perch at a window there, an ISIS militant was firing down on the commandos relentlessly.
Wheeler led the charge, shooting to kill the militant at the window. But a second jihadi got off the shot that killed him, hitting him in the neck. Another US operator then dispatched the assailant, and one of Wheeler's comrades began, in vain, to perform first aid.
"Josh was a very selfless guy," said the senior officer who commands the CTU.
In an interview at the CTU's headquarters, the senior officer, who helped to plan the raid, confirmed details recounted by the captain and lieutenant and provided his own. "The guy on the second floor could have killed everyone," he said.
Spokespeople for the US military declined to comment on the specifics of the raid.
After Wheeler's death, the commandos held a service before his remains were sent home, draping an ISIS flag they had taken from Hawija on the casket.
His name is now engraved on a rock at the secret base that was dedicated in his honor.
"It was as if I lost a brother," the captain said on a recent afternoon in Erbil, rolling up a sleeve to reveal a scar from a shrapnel wound he suffered in Hawija. He said his US partners continue taking risks that their fellow US citizens never see. "He got killed on the ground fighting ISIS. And Josh, if he wasn't killed, he wouldn't have wanted anyone to know."
Kurdish snipers watching the a village controlled by ISIS near Mt. Zertek.
Warzer Jaff for BuzzFeed News
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