Operation Citation, as the mission was designated, called for the joint Special Forces unit to be divided into twelve-man teams and inserted deep into specific, pre-selected enemy positions in the north and west. By now the whole country had exploded into insane violence as the disparate factions and tribes started fighting not only the Coalition invaders but each other as well. The war had sparked off a lot of old grudges. Against this backdrop of absolute chaos the dedicated jihadist groups were flourishing and becoming ever more effective at disrupting military efforts to stabilise the country.

Of these, the group that had become known as JTJ was one of the most active, and its key players were now top targets. The main purpose of Operation Citation was to take as many of them as possible off the table. Dead, or preferably alive, because dead men couldn’t be persuaded to rat on their friends.

Ben was in command of Task Force Red, the codename of his twelve-man team consisting of four SAS men including himself, and the rest operatives from Delta. Task Force Red’s objective was to proceed to a remote village in the desert some twenty miles west of Tikrit, which US intelligence had reason to believe was being used as a meeting place for key JTJ personnel including Nazim al-Kassar and several of his top aides. Their orders were simple enough: scout the location, take up position, identify the threat and move in for execution.

It had been an unlucky mission right from the start. The most senior of the Americans was a Delta Master Sergeant called Tyler Roth, who made it obvious that he felt he should have been made Team Leader rather than this Brit guy, Hope. Roth took every opportunity to challenge Ben’s command, and Ben often felt that the Americans had their own agenda in the mission. All of which compounded the sense of mistrust and division that already existed between the SAS and US troopers. Ben could only rally his team together as best he could, in the hope that they’d focus when it was most needed. He also had to hope that the American intel was right, which it frequently wasn’t.

Before dawn on September 20 the heavily armed task force took up their positions around the remote village, little more than a cluster of ramshackle stone dwellings at the centre of a rocky basin. The place appeared completely desolate and abandoned, and at first it seemed to them as if they’d been sent on a wild goose chase. But then, in the blood-red hue of sunrise they spotted a line of four vehicles approaching from the west, and another three incoming in single file from the south-east, each convoy sending up a plume of dust.