in

Australians At War

In his new book, Mosul: Australia’s Secret War Inside The ISIS Caliphate, Ben Mckelvey takes us from the suburbs of western Sydney and Australia’s military army bases, to the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq and to the brutal battle to regain Mosul in Iraq. This edited extract gives us a glimpse into the secret involvement of Australians on both sides of the war against ISIS…

Identifying and then killing Islamic State fighters was an important part of the work that Australian commando Nathan Knox and his police contacts were doing, but it was only the first of a two-step process. The second step was to retrieve and bio-enrol the bodies. This was often done deep in the night when resistance was less likely. Men such as Captain Ihab Yousef – one of Nathan Knox’s contacts, a young Sunni man who joined the police force after Al Qaeda in Iraq killed his father and two of his uncles – would drive to grid locations given to them by the strike cell and there they would extract or exhume the bodies of the Islamic State fighters who had been killed. The bodies would be piled up in the back of a police utility vehicle and driven to Al-Asad Airbase in Anbar Province where they could be processed. This collection work was dangerous and gruesome, but important for the coalition allies. These bodies were not only potentially a good source of battlefield intelligence, but they were also one of the key links between Iraq and domestic intelligence-gathering operations across the world.

The bodies were received and processed by both US intelligence officers and the Australian commandos. As one of the Five Eyes nations, Australia could be involved directly in the intelligence processing and gathering in Iraq, which could be shared simultaneously with the FBI, CIA, MI5, MI6 as well as ASIO and ASIS and Canadian and New Zealand security organisations. From there, the intelligence could be processed and selectively disseminated to external agencies in Europe and with allied countries around the world.

Of the utmost importance was discerning the identities of dead foreign fighters; especially those who had a file at an external law enforcement or intelligence agency. Once a death was confirmed, the fighter’s file could be closed and case officers reassigned.

Knox would meet Ihab or Hassan al-Sayyab (a young and suave Sunni police captain who joined the Iraqi Security Forces after Al Qaeda in Iraq attacked the Haditha police station a few years earlier, killing his uncle and two cousins) just outside the gates of the Al-Asad base, sometimes daily, and after pleasantries and an update on how the fight was going outside the wire, he would receive a small graveyard’s worth of dead men. After the corpses were on the base it was Knox’s job to put rubber gloves on and dig through the pockets of the dead men, looking for phones, radios, passports, maps, letters; anything that could help identification or be useful to build up the intelligence picture. After that it was up to Knox to biometrically enrol the dead men. “It was gruesome, f–king horrible work. Every day you get a Hilux with 20 dead dudes and it stinks to high hell. Flies, 50-degree heat. It was just gnarly.”

The United States first started using elementary battlefield biometric scanners in Iraq in 2007 and, in the seven ensuing years, they had expanded the amount of information that could be gleaned and where and how that information could be shared. By 2014, the battlefield scanners could register the fingerprints, retinas and DNA of the dead fighters and then that information could be cross-referenced against a number of international bio- metric databases including a nearly 750,000 person-strong database of Iraqis whose biometric information was collected during the US occupation of Iraq.

During his rotation, Knox biometrically identified Islamic State fighters from Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Morocco, Indonesia, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Belgium, the United Kingdom, France and more, alongside scores of Iraqis and Syrians. Hundreds of anonymous dead fighters suspected of coming from outside of the theatre were prioritised for further investigation. These men were sometimes prioritised because of their skin colour, or facial features, or their clothing or items found on their person, and later in the rotation, the dead fighters were sometimes prioritised because of what their penises looked like.

“When the Iraqis would bring [the Islamic State fighters] in, they’d sometimes tie their ankles with electrical cabling or whatever to the back of their trucks and drag them to me. During the course of that drive, the dead bloke’s pants would fall down. They’d arrive to me with their pants down round their ankles, and their dicks flopping around,” Knox says. When Knox biometrically enrolled these corpses, they found that men with foreskins were quite often registered by a European security agency. “We found that the dudes who had foreskins, that usually meant they weren’t from Iraq or born into the Muslim faith,” says Knox. “That meant I’d have to start checking dicks every day. I’d get a call on the radio and it’d be like, ‘Guess what, Knoxy? Got 12 dicks coming in for you.’”

Knox had been trained in languages, signals intelligence and gun fighting, but not this type of intelligence gathering. Operating in such small teams, however, on such a large and complex battlefield as the Australian commandos were in Iraq, many of the men had to learn a lot, quickly. With the help of a Green Beret intelligence officer, Knox learned how to handle the biometric scanners and the accompanying software, but he never got used to the sight of extreme violence that he was greeted with nearly every day.

Most of these Islamic State fighters had been killed by air ordnance. Some died from blast concussion and only showed the bloated, purple, otherworldly effects of internal death, but most had suffered grievous blast or shrapnel wounds and, furthermore, some of the men’s fingers, hands or feet had been hacked off so their watches, rings or boots could be stolen from their swollen appendages.

The police and Knox needed each other; Knox to fulfil his duty and the police for their very survival. They had come from very different places and lived very different lives but they had a common goal and found friendship of a sort. The Australian and the Iraqis joked regularly; the humour was dark and in any other context would be considered off-colour and unnecessarily extreme. It helped bring them all together and take the edge off the situation. One day, when Knox was enrolling a large group of dead, half-naked Islamic State fighters he posed for aphotograph with the Iraqi police. He and the police gave thumbs-up signs for the photograph. Later, investigators from the Inspector General of the ADF’s office heard about the photograph and contacted Knox, asking him to justify his participation in the image.

“I told them, ‘Look, you sent us to do this. You gave me this job and it’s not one I’m trained for. I took a photo of me in a sea of dead dudes with their dicks out and maybe you call it a coping mechanism, whatever, but that was the job, every day. You want to charge me? F–kin’ charge me. Otherwise, just let me get back to my work.’” The IGADF has so far chosen not to charge him. “It was horrible work, but I wanted to do it and do it thoroughly. There were Aussies out there like that ginger f–kwit from Western Sydney then. If he turns up, then we can drop him off the list [so] we can concentrate on other people,” says Knox.

Knox was referring to Abdullah Elmir, a Condell Park High School dropout who worked at a butcher’s shop in Bankstown before he, at age 17, became radicalised and travelled to join Islamic State. He gained some notoriety when he fronted a propaganda video on the banks of the Tigris River after the group took the city of Mosul, and another propaganda video filmed after air strikes started. Elmir’s young, beardless face and long red hair stood out in contrast to the dozens of fighters behind him in the professionally created videos.

“I deliver this message to you especially to people of Australia… you threaten us with this coalition of countries. Bring every nation that you wish to us… It means nothing to us… To the leaders, Obama and Tony Abbott… We will not stop fighting, we will not put down our weapons until we reach your lands, until we take the head of every tyrant and until the black flag is flying high,” Elmir said in the video. Elmir was eventually killed in an air strike in Syria in 2015. His body did not come through Al-Asad.

By 2015 the question of what to do with Australian Islamic State fighters who were discovered via signals or human intelligence by Australian soldiers in the field was a tricky one. Legally Australian soldiers couldn’t prejudicially target Islamic State fighters who were from Australia, and there was an open question as to how much intelligence they could gather about the Australian fighters, because an increased interest in a fighter means they are perhaps more likely to be killed.

In 2014 Australian domestic law dictated that Australian Islamic State fighters could only be targeted by ADF members when they were taking a direct and active part in hostilities. This was certainly not the standard that the coalition strike cells were operating under, but those were the rules for Australian military forces. Then, in 2016, it was announced that there had been bipartisan support in Australian parliament for a change in the law, which allowed the ADF to also target Islamic State support personnel. This meant almost all Australian men who had joined the Islamic State in Syria or Iraq could be targeted.

There were a number of steps that led the Australian government toward that decision, and one of those steps likely happened on December 15, 2014. It was a day that Nathan Knox remembers well. He had been in the Al-Asad strike cell that day and on most of thescreens on the front wall, drone imagery of rolling desert could be seen. One screen, however, showed Martin Place in Sydney’s CBD, framed by the chyrons of a US cable channel. Normally Martin Place is an area full of workers and shoppers, but on the screen was a largely empty thoroughfare, cordoned off on both ends by police. Through the window of a cafe, hostages could be seen, and an Islamic State flag was pressed up against the window. Sometimes, fleetingly, a gunman was visible.

This was Man Haron Monis, the Iranian – Australian self-styled cleric who had previously sent threatening letters to Luke Worsley’s parents as well as other military personnel. Monis, a diagnosed schizophrenic who also suffered from paranoid delusions, was well known to police, and when he stormed into the Lindt Café, he was awaiting trial for twenty-two counts of aggravated sexual assault and one accessory-to-murder charge. Monis had previously been on an ASIO terrorism watch list but by December 2014 was not being monitored by the organisation despite, in October 2014, contacting Australian Attorney-General George Brandis and asking what his legal exposure would be if he contacted Islamic State fighters in the Middle East.

As a Shiite (Monis had been a Shiite his whole life but claimed to have converted to Sunni Islam a week before the siege), he would have been considered an apostate by Islamic State, and it’s highly unlikely he ever had any contact with the organisation. It seems his own brand of delusion and desperation dovetailed well with Islamic State’s apocalyptic and suicidal messaging.

As soon as the siege started, 2 Commando’s Tactical Assault Group (TAG East) was alerted, and they quickly put together a plan to storm the cafe – but it was decided by the NSW government that this was not a situation that was appropriate for a military intervention. The NSW Police were presented with an extremely difficult environment when they were forced to storm the cafe. The clearance resulted in the death of the gunman, but also cafe manager Tori Johnson, who was executed by Monis, and Sydney lawyer Katrina Dawson, killed by police bullet fragments.

During downtime in the Al-Asad strike cell the men had an opportunity to go online and check their email and social-media feeds. In the days after the Lindt Café siege, Knox saw a friend on Facebook asking what Australia was doing to stop events like the Lindt Café siege from happening again. “I was thinking to myself: “F–k, mate, settle. We’re doing it right now.’”

BY BEN MCKELVEY

Mosul: Australia’s Secret War Inside the ISIS Caliphate by Ben McKelvey, published by Hachette Australia rrp$34.99 is out now

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ben Mckelvey is a freelance writer and editor from Sydney. He has been embedded with the ADF in East Timor and Iraq and has worked independently in Iran and Afghanistan.

For the full article grab the November 2020 issue of MAXIM Australia from newsagents and convenience locations. Subscribe here.

Dirt 5

Doctor In-Chief