Iraqi police suspected of betraying U.S. in deadly attack

Part two of two-part series

Shannon Millican didn't know it as she looked at her computer screen in Anchorage on Jan. 20, but she was about to see the start of one of the most sophisticated attacks on Americans since the Iraq war began four years earlier. Her husband soon would be right in the middle of it.

It was 6 p.m. in Iraq. Pfc. Johnathon Millican sat in the command and control room of the Karbala Provincial Joint Coordination Center, about 55 miles southwest of Baghdad. It was morning in Alaska, and they were messaging. She saw his face on a webcam. There was no audio.

As Millican's father, Mitchell, tells it, Shannon Millican saw her husband stand up suddenly. Another soldier ran past the camera. Then it went dead.

"Fortunately, everything happened on the back side of the lens so she didn't see anything," Mitchell Millican said from his home in County Line, Ala.

Chaos erupted. The attack was under way.

The attackers appeared to know they had to kill or disable the people in the room before they could carry out their primary mission: capturing the senior officers next door, according to an after-battle Army investigation.

The five soldiers in the room heard a short burst of automatic gunfire inside their building, which housed Iraqi police on the second floor. Staff Sgt. Billy Wallace of Greencastle, Ind., was napping on a cot. He leapt up at the sound of the shots, he said by phone last week from his base south of Baghdad.

Before he and the others grabbed their armor, Sgt. 1st Class Sean Bennett heard the door shaking and grabbed it, Wallace said.

"The door came open a little bit. The muzzle of what we thought to be an AK-47 was in the room," Wallace said. The two soldiers pushed back but couldn't force the muzzle out.

"The guy on the other side of the door just started shooting with his AK-47, like a madman, inside the room," Wallace said.

Millican took up his rifle on one knee in the center of the room, according to the Army investigation. A grenade came bouncing through the door.

Millican "was watching it like a baseball," one soldier said. "He definitely dove on the grenade." The blast tossed up Millican, who knocked down another soldier by the door.

An autopsy later showed that Millican was killed by gunshots to the head and abdomen, not the grenade, which investigators think was a concussion grenade, designed to disable opponents, not a fragmentation grenade, which maims and kills with shrapnel. After the blast, the AK-47 muzzle disappeared. "Almost simultaneously there was an explosion in the room next to us," Wallace said.

That room held the two commissioned officers, Capt. Brian Freeman and Lt. Jacob Fritz.

"We were trying to get ourselves together," Wallace said. "We grabbed our body armor; we were attempting to put it back on again. This time the door was kicked open."

In the doorway, Wallace saw what looked like an Iraqi soldier. The man was dressed in the "chocolate chip" brown desert camouflage used by the Iraqi army, Wallace said.

Investigators found Wallace's observation significant. The men who had arrived at the compound in a fleet of seven to nine SUVs were dressed in gray U.S.-type uniforms, and they carried M-4 and M-16 rifles, not AK-47s. The observation added to suspicions that some attackers had been in the building or compound all day.

"I just got a quick glance at him. I jumped back on the door and tried to slam the door shut, but he wedged his weapon in between the door again and was shooting inside the room again," Wallace said.

The shooting lasted a couple of seconds, followed by a massive explosion in the hallway. The door was ripped from its hinges, and shrapnel zinged into the room. Wallace was struck nine times. Bennett also was seriously hurt, as was a soldier from the 127th U.S. Military Police Transition Team, based in Germany. Wallace, from Fort Richardson's Parachute Field Artillery Regiment, knew the military policeman only as Sgt. Hernandez.

The explosions and gunfire alerted U.S. military police and artillery platoons in their nearby quarters. They raced to their battle positions amid more explosions. The attackers were blowing up two Humvees before retreating from the compound. As fire consumed Wallace's Humvee, its .50-caliber machine-gun rounds fired randomly, adding to the confusion.

Men in purple uniforms

Some U.S. soldiers noticed men in purple camouflage uniforms and shot at several of them. It was the same purple uniform worn by more than a dozen Iraqis — who described themselves as a police detail from Baghdad — who had arrived shortly after noon and were seen taking pictures.

"It seemed like some stayed around and a couple were hanging back so they could be in the attack," one of the U.S. defenders from the barracks told investigators.

Another soldier, on reaching his battle position in a second-floor room, saw a short, overweight man in a purple uniform running toward him with a canister in hand. "I yelled, 'GRENADE.' " The bomb exploded, but no one was injured.

Smoke and dust filled the night, obscuring the attack. The U.S. soldiers didn't know where to shoot. The attackers seemed to know where to position themselves and their vehicles to stay out of the lines of fire.

The battle was brief, maybe 15 minutes. The SUVs fled. Before the Americans knew it was safe, they saw Iraqi police returning to normal activities.

"What was strange was ... they were all walking around like they knew everything was over," a soldier recounted to investigators.

Asked whether he'd noticed anything odd, a soldier from Alpha Company of the artillery regiment said yes.

"After it was all over, the fat little [police] colonel was talking on his cellphone in the courtyard. He was laughing. He walked out there like there was no problem, talking on the cellphone."

Another soldier said it was "odd" that no Iraqi police had died.

"Nobody even sprained an ankle running from the fight," Wallace said of the police.

Someone else heard the Karbala governor give an order on the local police radio that no one was to respond to the attack without his personal authorization, according to the Army report.

The U.S. soldiers took stock. Someone found a body bag for Millican. Medics treated Wallace, Hernandez and Bennett.

Pfc. Shawn Falter and Spc. Johnathan Chism were missing, but someone thought they might have tried to secure a helicopter landing zone. With local radio communications disrupted, it was difficult to know for sure.

Wallace said he quickly knew something bad had happened to the officers, Fritz and Freeman.

Fritz was "the kind of guy that leads from the front," Wallace said. "You definitely would've heard him in the hallways yelling something."

The computers also were missing from the officers' room.

After some difficulty, the soldiers were able to report the battle and obtained air and ground backup. But the secure telephone line to the trusted Hillah police in the neighboring province, where the SUVs turned out to be headed, was down. The line had been sabotaged.

Aiding the getaway

At 7:30 p.m., five SUVs rocketed through Iraqi army Checkpoint 21J north of the town of Mahawil, on the way to Hillah. The occupants of a Chevy Caprice and a Toyota that had been hanging around most of the afternoon yelled at the Iraqi soldiers not to shoot the SUVs "because the people in the vehicles are Israeli and American."

The three people in the two cars were arrested for aiding the fleeing attackers. One was a second lieutenant in the Iraqi police, and another was a leading local official from the Mahdi Army, the militia of radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, which is believed to have infiltrated the police.

The insurgent convoy appeared to be confounded by checkpoints, roadblocks and pursuing Iraqi security forces from Hillah, whose loyalty wasn't in doubt. If the militants' intent was to obtain hostages for bargaining or propaganda, that plan came undone.

At 8 p.m., police found the vehicles abandoned on a narrow, dead-end road near Mahawil. When they saw a canister with wires in the front seat of the lead vehicle and heard a "ding ding ding," they backed away and waited for the Iraqi army.

Iraqi soldiers and the Hillah SWAT team reached the SUVs at 8:37 p.m. The "ding" was from the keys hurriedly left in the ignition. But the bomb was genuine. They defused it and discovered the U.S. soldiers handcuffed together. Fritz, Falter and Chism had been executed, but Freeman was alive — barely — with a bullet wound to the head. He was rushed by ambulance to the hospital in Hillah but died on the way.

The Army uniforms that the insurgents had worn were on the ground. A drone circling overhead detected what appeared to be a cluster of men hiding under a tree, but they were gone by the time U.S. troops arrived.

The Army report concluded that Freeman and Fritz had been the prime targets of the operation. The investigation quoted a police commander from Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Khalid, who thought that Iranian intelligence was behind the attack.

Khalid suspected that the Iranians wanted to obtain hostages to trade for five suspected Iranian intelligence officers whom U.S. troops had seized in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil on Jan. 11.

Khalid conducted an investigation for the Iraqi police and determined that police officers "were involved in the plot."

The Army report concluded that the attackers knew plenty about the Americans before they arrived.

Senior Iraqi police leadership at the station "knew the coalition forces' battle drills and often watched them practice. The attackers knew exactly where to find the officers and which rooms were occupied by Americans," the report said.