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My latest with @zachsdorfman reveals the operational details of Soleimani's killing, including the presence of Delta Force and Task Force Orange and the crucial role of Kurdish counterterrorism operators at the airport. More below. https://news.yahoo.com/conspiracy-is-hard-inside-the-trump-administrations-secret-plan-to-kill-qassem-soleimani-090058817.html
One of the main aspects of this story revealed for the first time is that the Kurdish Counter Terrorism Group (CTG) was intimately involved with this op on the ground, and it likely could not have succeeded without them. Here are some details about them not in the article:
The unit's inception goes goes back to the CIA and later JSOC and 10th SFG inserting into Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion. Most people know about op Viking Hammer in which 10th Group linked up with the Kurds and battled Ansar al-Islam, suspected of having a chemical weapons lab.
Fewer know that the CIA trained Kurdish sabotage teams to go wreak havoc behind enemy lines. They infiltrated in small cells into Saddam's regime to conduct their missions. https://www.audacy.com/connectingvets/news/special-ops-and-cia-sabotage-missions-may-shape-future-wars
They put a transmitter in the trunk of a car that blared out American propaganda on local radio waves, they identified key targets in the city, blew up an intelligence officers office, and even sabotaged a rail line that laid down a 90-car train on its side as the invasion began.
After the invasion, the Kurds sought to retain these types of capabilities that the Americans had helped them develop. The Counter-Terrorism Group (CTG) was born. Polad Talabani had been living in the UK at the time but when he heard about something stirring back home.
He returned to support the effort during Viking Hammer. He became the commander of CTG and developed strong ties with the CIA, Delta Force, 22SAS and other western Special Ops units.
CTG recruits out of the Peshmerga, especially from Cobra units, but it is important to point out that CTG is not part of the Pesh. They are their own distinct element and reports to the PUK's intel agency, once run by Polad's brother Lahur who is now co-President of the PUK.
Over the years I've spoken with many CIA officers who worked with CTG, and Delta operators who had gone out on ops with them. Interestingly, the Soleimani operation was not the first op that CTG has run in Baghdad.
In 2009, criminals kidnapped a kid in Sulaymaniyah from a wealthy family. CTG operators loaded inside civilians vans and drove into Iraq where they borrowed humvees from an Iraqi unit and hit Sadr City.
“We had four enemy killed, a bunch of guys injured, and rescued the kid,” Polad told me back in 2015. Things went kind of downhill for CTG as the US forgot about them after pulling out of Iraq around that time.
“We all thought that the United States would at least leave a small element behind after the war. Instead, they packed their bags one day and said goodbye,” Polad told me. Guns and night vision began breaking down. All this changed when ISIS appeared.
Their phone was ringing off the hook. CTG lots of ops, including a hit on a mosque in Jalula. “On that mission, we killed Chechens, Uzbeks, and even a guy from Hackney,” Polad said. They did tons of raids, assisted the Pesh, had snipers on the front lines racking up kills.
In 2017 it almost looked like CTG was getting their wish of going back to running high risk HVT strikes deep behind enemy lines when pictures of unit members showed up in Syria for the recapture of the Tabqa dam.
Unfortunately, a U.S. Special Forces source informed me that this was really just a PR stunt and that it had to do with trying to patch up relationships between the various Kurdish factions.
But with the Soleimani operation, it appears that CTG is definitely back in the game now and this joint CTG/JSOC op may represent the future of American clandestine and covert operations, largely done via surrogate with U.S. support.
And with that, I think there is a message here for those who don't value our international alliances, think they are a waste of time and money, and that America "doesn't get anything out of it." That's just empirically wrong and incorrect.
Our article has been updated with a statement from Lawen Azad, a spokesman for Lahur Talabany, co-president of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party and a former intelligence chief who denied that Kurdish operatives were involved in the Soleimani killing cont:
writing in an email to Yahoo News that the Counter Terrorism Group "categorically rejects claims" that it was involved in the operation.
If you liked this article, you may also like my article at Yahoo News about a CIA covert operation gone wrong in the South China Sea. https://www.yahoo.com/news/the-cia-sent-a-team-of-four-operators-on-a-spy-mission-targeting-china-none-came-back-090041816.html
I have deleted a few tweets that came from a PUK spokesperson offering a statement on this story, that statement appears to have been retracted at this point and is no longer in our article.
