Capt. Trey Smith during a patrol of a village in rural Diyala province. Smith took command of F Troop, 2nd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment after Capt. Torre Mallard was killed by an improvised explosive device on March 10. (Michael Gisick / S&S)
Capt. Trey Smith during a patrol of a village in rural Diyala province. Smith took command of F Troop, 2nd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment after Capt. Torre Mallard was killed by an improvised explosive device on March 10. (Michael Gisick / S&S)
The shadows of soldiers from F Troop, 2nd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment are reflected on a compound's walls by a spotlight from a Bradley Vehicle during a late-night raid that netted two detainees. (Michael Gisick / S&S)
Soldiers detained four people over two days as they hunted the two brothers believed responsible for the March 10 blast. Aided by the vast distances of rural Diyala province, the two brothers have so far avoided capture. (Michael Gisick / S&S)
A Bradley Fighting Vehicle belonging to F Troop, 2nd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, manuevers in the shadow of a mountain range that marks the Iraq-Iran border. Patroling a vast rural domain, it often takes F Troop several hours to reach its destination. (Michael Gisick / S&S)
NIDAH TRIBAL AREA, Iraq — It was just after 9 p.m. on Wednesday as Capt. Trey Smith came on the radio to announce the beginning of “Operation Payback” — his troop’s hunt, as he later put it, for their brothers’ killers.
The troop’s collection of Humvees, Bradley fighting vehicles and M1 Abrams tanks passed through the wire of this base in rural eastern Diyala province a few minutes later. But it would be more than three hours before they reached their destination.
In one of the largest company-level areas of operation in Iraq, the hunt for the men believed responsible for a March 10 blast that killed three soldiers and an interpreter — including the troop’s commander — confronts nothing so much as vast distances.
Still, after detaining four men in two days of raids, soldiers from the Fort Hood-based unit, part of the 2nd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, believed they were closing in.
“We’re tightening the noose, and the closer we get the more motivated we get,” said Sgt. 1st Class William Morgan, 33, of Corsicana, Texas.
The hunt has come to focus on two brothers believed to operate with an al-Qaida in Iraq cell in a vast, dusty swath of land near the Iranian border, known as the Nidah Tribal Area. On Tuesday, the troop raided the brothers’ home, detaining their father and a cousin and finding bomb making material, said Smith, F Troop’s commander.
Under questioning, the father told the troop that his sons had been home but had fled after seeing the column of dust kicked up by the Americans’ approach, Smith said.
“One of the challenges in an area this large is that it’s hard to keep the element of surprise,” he said.
On Wednesday, acting on a tip that the brothers had taken refuge in a compound, the troop moved at night, kept their lights off and tried to keep down the dust. After a long, airless night sweating on the road, the troops surrounded the compound in the early hours and sent in two teams on foot from Morgan’s platoon.
A pair of flash-bang grenades echoed over the compound’s walls, announcing their arrival.
Neither brother was at the house, but the troops detained a father and son related to the two brothers by marriage and themselves accused of insurgent activity.
Lying face down in the compound’s courtyard, the men said they hadn’t seen the brothers in a year and hadn’t done anything wrong.
“There’s just one man who hates us and he’s making up stories,” the younger man said. A woman in an adjacent room cried and said there would be no one to protect her and the other women if the Americans took away the men.
The father and son were loaded into Bradleys and the whole convoy hit the road. They took a more direct route, but it would still be the better part of two hours before they were home.
“When you’ve got to drive three hours to execute a raid, it takes a lot,” the squadron’s commander, Lt. Col. Paul Calvert, said.
But for this mission, at least, they’d drive twice as far.
“Everybody’s fired up,” Smith said. “They want to find the guys who killed their brothers.”
