Angry Planet - Insider Attack Leaves Wounded Marine, Lingering Questions

Episode Date: August 27, 2018

Sometimes called insider, or “green on blue” attacks, when U.S. forces are assaulted by their allies, it usually makes the news. That wasn’t the case in Syria when a member of the Syrian Defense Forces shot a Marine sergeant twice in the leg. Instead, there was no mention of it by the military, no press release. Instead, there was contradictory information and a curious reporter who refused to let it lie.When Paul Szoldra of Task & Purpose first heard of the incident, the only thing that was clear was that more questions needed to be asked. He tells us what he found on this week’s episode.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Matthew Galt and Jason Fields Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. Operation Inherent Resolve, the U.S. military's ongoing mission to eradicate Islamic State from Iraq and Syria. It's a complicated mission with many different fighters and groups, each with their own priorities and concerns. In February last year, Marines in a remote outpost in Syria learned just how complicated things can get in the Middle East. Here to tell the story is the person who broke it. Paul Zoldra, who's been reporting on the story for task and purpose.

Paul, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. All right, so let's get the basics out of the way. First, what happened in Syria last year to these Marines? Well, so it was earlier this year, February 17, 2018, there was what we typically call a green-on-blue attack or an insider attack, basically a case where a partner force fires on a member of the U.S. military or in the case of Afghanistan, you know, if a Taliban infiltrator

fires on a Afghan soldier. So an insider attack obviously is something that we don't like to see. And that was the case in Syria in February of earlier this year, the first case ever of an insider attack in Operation Inherent Resolve. What exactly do that attack look like? Basically, what happened is at this outpost in Syria. It was a special forces camp. It's called a mission support site, which is what it's a euphemism for basically what a where a special forces team would operate out of.

There was a team of special forces soldiers there training up the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic forces. This is the partner force that the U.S. has basically built from the ground up of mostly Kurds, but there's also some other sort of militia types that have kind of come into the mix. And we have embraced the advise assist mission to basically give ourselves a background, a seat in the fight against ISIS. So instead of using troops directly against ISIS, we have partnered with the SDF in order to fight the battle for us. So far, that has worked out fairly well. But on this day, there was an SDF soldier that actually ultimately attacked a U.S. Marine sergeant.

The Marines that were there, there were Second Battalion's Seventh Marine Regiment out of 29 Palms. So just a basic infantry battalion. And they were there to provide security to the support site. So the Special Forces soldiers were there. There was an artillery unit, other sort of U.S. forces that were directly engaged in the fight against ISIS. and the Marines were basically there to, you know, provide security for the base. And the sergeant, his name's Cameron Halkovich, he was a, he's a combat engineer. He was attached to 27, and he was the sergeant of the Guard.

And he had a Marine who was with 27, his name's Corporal Kane Downey. He was the Corporal of the Guard. And basically the SOG, COG, these are the Marines who are in charge of the Guard force. They are the leadership for the men who are on post. So at this particular site, you had some rooftop positions where Marines were sent up and they were on shifts to watch the perimeter. You also had a position on a MRAP vehicle that was overlooking an entry control point, so the in and out of the camp. Behind the in the MRAP is a 50-Cal machine gun. and so that evening on the 17th of February they were basically going out to check on the post

and they were heading to the MRAP together at one point Halcovic stops just to take a leak downy keeps going he gets to the MRAP he goes and and basically reaches out for the door handle upon the MRAP is another Marine named Lance Corporal J. Smith and he reaches for the handle and before he can even open the door, he hears two gunshots. And it's a unmistakable sound. It's an AK-47. It's something that if you've heard an AK-47, you know exactly what that sounds like. And he turns around and he looks and he sees that Halcovic is obscured.

He can't see his face. He just sees his feet. And standing over top of him is an SDF soldier. with his AK-47 pointed at him. And at this point, Downey, you know, is basically puts up his weapon and fires two quick shots at the SDF soldier, takes him down, kills him,

and kicks away his weapon and sees that Halcovic is shot twice in the leg. It went straight through, jumps on his wound, starts doing combat, life-saving steps to save his life and, you know, sort of stabilizes him. He's yelling back to the Marine on Post and he yells. He says, how go he shot? How go he shot?

The radio, the man on the post radios back and sort of puts the word out. Marines start running towards them. And Downey picks up the sergeant and fireman carries him and runs them. and runs them back to the forward surgical team, the Army medics who were pretty close by, like maybe 100 meters away or so, and they end up saving his life. Do we have any idea why this happened? This was an incident that on first glance seems kind of strange, you know, like, why would this, you know, why would this SDF soldier shoot a Marine, what's going on here?

and it turns out that there was an incident between the Marines and the SDF that happened prior to this. And there was also some tension that was happening at the time, at least between the Marines and the SDF before the incident. How was the incident reported, the shooting of Halcovic? So it wasn't really reported by the military. that's for that's for sure so how i came upon this story was basically i got a i got a tip from from someone who basically said hey you know i see all these reports of insider attacks happening in afghanistan and the pentagon always always talks about them or makes some sort of public mention of them but i've never heard anything any talk of the incident in

Syria, which, you know, when I first got this tip, I was like, well, what the heck are you talking about? You know, there's, there hasn't been any insider attacks in Syria. And so the, in the course of my reporting and looking into this thing, it actually turns out that, you know, the Pentagon puts out press releases and statements on insider attacks, sadly pretty regularly. they're kind of a at least at some points they have been a regular occurrence in Afghanistan at times and they put out a statement that says you know so-and-so was killed in

an apparent insider attack two people were wounded these are the kind of statements that they would put out but they don't ever put anything out when it comes to somebody wounded which makes me think that maybe there's more insider attacks that we don't really know about because if you're attacked and there's only people that are wounded, they don't ever publicly announce it. And this was a case here. You had a Marine who was shot and wounded. Fortunately, he survived. If he had not, they would have made a statement, but he did survive. He subsequently was awarded the Purple Heart. And so, and there was a plight. public photograph put out of the of the sergeant in question receiving the Purple Heart,

but no information around why or what actually occurred in order to make that happen. It's kind of interesting. That sort of brings up an interesting thing. So in order to get the Purple Heart, the criteria for Purple Heart is that your wounds need to be a result of enemy fire. So when they're going and they're writing up the award and they're submitting it up the chain of command, it needs to be clear that it was a case of enemy fire that actually gave you those wounds. However, when there was an investigation into this conducted by Central Command, they never conclusively determined what the motive was for the shooting,

which, to be frank, is I find ludicrous. They offered a number of possibilities for how it might have occurred. One thing that they had tried to put out there as far as the cause is that maybe it was a negligent discharge. Like the SDF guard, basically his weapon went off unknowingly or just, you know, he pulled the trigger on accident and it ended up shooting the Marine Sergeant in the investigation that came out later. the leadership at the mission support site tried to say that the SDF guard had been had had probably had a negligent discharge and then the bullets ricocheted into Halcovich's leg a point that was also refuted in the in the report by the doctors who examined him so it was the investigation doesn't say it's conclusive however it does acknowledge and i'll just read this

verbatim, quote, the most plausible explanation is an intentional shooting based on redacted's testimony. I'm not sure whose testimony that is, whether that's Halkevich or Downey or someone else. And then the next section, you had leadership attests to the guards loyalty and claims a negligent discharge impacting into the ground and ricochets caused injuries. And then it says the surgeon confirmed two entry and exit wounds from to 7.62 rounds consistent with a direct impact. So the report says that basically they're trying to make the argument that possibly it's a negligent discharge.

However, it happened at night. The guard came up and shot this Marine Sergeant in the back. He also got the purple heart for it, which means that the, at least someone in the chain of command believed that this was an enemy attack. And last, Downey got an award. he got a joint forces commendation medal for his response in this incident incident so he fired back he shot the SDF guard and then he saved halcovich's life through his medical life-saving techniques if this were a negligent discharge the the response would not be to give downy an award it would be to court-martial him you know

it would be it would basically be an SDF soldier accidentally discharges his weapon shoots this other Marine and then Downey shoots the guy. Why would you shoot this guy? You just caused an international incident. You're messing with our partnership with the SDF. You're getting court-martialed. So there's all these conflicting kind of narratives that are happening here. And it just doesn't really jive with what actually happened, which is 100% an insider attack. And I don't have any question or about that at all in my mind. Is it really that bad for there to be an insider attack in Syria that it's worth the Pentagon going to all this trouble to create confusion?

Well, so I think there's a couple things at play here. One is that there's definitely different sort of chains of command that are not on board. They're not like they're not all working together to try to try to, keep this one under wraps. And I don't think it's necessarily being, they're trying to keep it under wraps. But I do think that if you look at the bigger picture, you know, of the, of the partnership we have, the United States, I mean, with the SDF. We've used the SDF pretty successfully in the campaign against ISIS. And so that relationship, the relationship between special forces and, you know,

the Pentagon and the U.S. military itself with the SDF, they want to keep that pretty strong. And having anything get in the way of that doesn't really jive too well. You also have the outside influence of Turkey. Turkey doesn't really like the SDF all that much. They basically think the entire idea of an SDF and our support of certain Kurdish elements of the militia, we're basically supporting terrorists. And so anything that Turkey can latch on to to sort of screw with that relationship is something that they're going to go after. So I can totally understand why the Pentagon or why Central Command would try to sort of downplay this as maybe it's an isolated incident.

It's not a big deal, which I tend to believe that it probably was an isolated incident. But regardless of that, it's still a story that should be out there. It should be told. and I don't think, you know, trying to massage the truth is, is helpful to the Marines in question. You know, this is their story. This is their lives. And trying to say that, you know, maybe it was an accident is disgraceful to the Marines involved. So I think another part of this here is that these Marines were guarding an SOF base, right? So how much does that play into it?

And is it okay that America kind of has no idea what some of their conventional forces are doing in places like Syria? And, you know, how much of a distinction is there between or should there be between those conventional forces and special operations? You know, what's interesting is on that subject, before I published the original story of the attack, I called or emailed just about everybody. That was the Pentagon, Sentcom, Marcent, Special MagTaf, which is the crisis response, which is the unit that 27 was attached to. I mean, I tried to get a hold of everybody just to, at least at a minimum, just to ask for some sort of statement or comment on what my reporting was involved. But the second, you know, if not that, to talk to.

to them about what I know here and ask them if I'm putting anybody in danger with the reporting. And I got crickets. I didn't get any feedback. I basically had all these different spokespeople basically shift me around. You got to talk to this person. You got to talk to them. And nobody really wanted to talk. And it was really interesting.

I called the Pentagon and I talked to a spokesman over. there and I know the name of the mission support site, which I won't share and I didn't share in the article. I didn't find it necessary to do so. But I talked to the spokesman and I tell him, hey, I want to talk about this mission support site and I mentioned the name and how quickly this guy clams up as if I just said, you know, I don't know, I just got the Pentagon papers or something. He was, it was a noticeable shift. And so I think with this kind of thing with a conventional unit attached to SF at a mission support site, it raises a lot of questions for me. It's just like, one, what are Marines doing there? What's their mission and how are they involved? Are they in

direct combat and you know just what are they doing on a day to day basis it's a weird sort of thing we're doing now where we take conventional units and we're we're putting them with these soft units it's something that we haven't really seen in the past you know basically it was at least in the iraq afghanistan war days you know maybe five 10 years ago you had conventional units and they do their own thing, and you had soft units, and they do their own thing. And you have your overseers over all of that, trying to deconflict them and try to figure out where everybody fits. And now they're working in these joint manners. And so it gets a little more secretive, and it gets a little bit stranger for how these missions are going.

And ultimately trying to get to the truth of what they're up to. You know, I'm not naive. I know that special operations are doing, you know, secret stuff all over the place. They're doing it in Syria. They're doing it in Africa. They're doing it everywhere else. And there's reasons why these missions are kept secret and there's offset considerations and classifications concerns and all that kind of stuff.

But for a traditional infantry unit to be in Syria and be in danger and be shot at, and for members of that unit to be getting purple hearts and for the public to not know why they got the purple heart or how or where that's a concern for me i i don't i don't think that secrecy is necessary and i think especially in a if we're going to be in a democracy then we should be knowledgeable about what kind of dangers our traditional troops face and we just don't see that lately especially when it comes to syria so you know beyond this incident there was a Marine with the follow-on unit. So this was 27.

There's 3-7. They are over in, at least I don't know about Syria, but they're attached to the Special Magtaf crisis response. And there was a Marine pretty recently who there was a photo of him getting awarded the Purple Heart. And it says, you know, the Marine's name awarded the Purple Heart and does not say where he got the Purple Heart. far as his wounds are concerned. I believe it says undisclosed location. It doesn't say anything about the nature of that. And that's, I don't really understand it. It doesn't make sense to me. These kinds of things for me, if a Marine gets shot in the world somewhere, they should, we should

probably know why and where and what the circumstances were. And it also makes it harder for you as the journalist to be, well, because you don't know what you can and can't write about, right? I know that you've made some sort of determination here, but you can't even, you have to be very careful about the way you report these stories. Well, actually, I think it has an opposite effect. I think if the military were more transparent about what it was viewing in combat zones, especially in Syria, then I wouldn't have much to write about. You know, if they put out, they put out stuff about, you know, here's what happened, you know, here's why Sergeant Halkevich was shot and here's what happened. What kind of story can I write from that point?

I have nothing, you know, and if this Marine from 3-7, he was wounded, if you put out the information out there, then it really diffuses my, me and what I can try to figure out. It's this lack of transparency, which makes especially investigative journalists, it makes them do what they do. I mean, I see Marine wounded in Syria, and I don't know the understand. I don't understand why or what happened. And all I want to do is get that understanding. And I want to figure out who to talk to and get some documents and break this story. And ultimately, it makes it a way bigger story than it would if the Pentagon put it out there and just said, yeah, he was shot, he had, you know, by small arms fire and he was, you know, he was on post and wherever, you know, something like that.

But this push for so much secrecy around Syria is, it basically gets my spidey senses going. So, you know, that's kind of, that's why I'm, I want to figure this out. You know, that's why I pushed for this story pretty hard when the, when CENTCOM was sort of trying to say this was accidental or possibly accidental, I was calling up the spokesman and saying, hey, you know, give me that investigation. When can I see that investigation? Like, I can't, I want to see what you got. And, you know, they basically released it publicly. You know, I guess it was like a week after I first, first published it. And, you know, we now know this little, small little events that happened in Syria. We now know a whole lot more about what happened. And I think that's a good thing. Paul, is there anything else coming up with this story?

Or do you think that everything that needs to be known is known at this point? The investigation has been made public. And, you know, it was, it's already put out there. You can read it off of Sentcom's website. And so there's that. So I think the story isn't really going to go much further than that. However, I put in, I put in Freedom of Information Act requests for the award recommendations for Downey's Joint Forces Combination Medal, which would show witness statements and other sort of things that show what he did, why he did it, and other people attesting to his actions that day. I also put in a FOIA request for, or Halkevich's Purple Heart Award recommendation, which would do the same thing. It would have witness statements, and I'm hypothesizing here, but it probably says something to the effect of

the SDF soldier was an enemy. So I don't necessarily think the story is going to go much further, but I think the documents that I'll end up getting through FOIA will sort of show even more how the sentcom investigation is not necessarily telling the whole truth. And, you know, so we'll see. But other than that, I also kind of, just going back to earlier, you know, I learned that when somebody is wounded in an insider attack, there isn't necessarily a press release that goes out, as it is the case if somebody gets killed.

And so that that's sort of led me to think that there's maybe more insider attacks that we don't know about. And so that's something that I'm just going to be investigating probably for a while to try to figure that out. And that's that's more about Afghanistan than it is in Syria. But I will keep looking into it. And hopefully, you know, I really hope that I, I really hope that I, am totally wrong and there hasn't really been a whole lot more insider attacks and the ones we know about are just the ones we know but i tend to think that maybe maybe there is a whole lot more out there that that maybe isn't public knowledge and i think should be and hopefully the the

whatever documents i figure out and other people that talk to me uh will uh will let me know what the what's really out there paul thank you so much for for coming on the show. You can keep following his work and read about this story and others on task and purpose. Thanks for listening to this week's show. If you enjoyed it, let the world know by leaving us a review on iTunes. We're putting transcripts to the show online at warcollegepodcast.com and you could reach us on Twitter. We're at war underscore college and on Facebook.com slash war college podcast. We'd love to hear from you. So hit us up.

War College is me, Jason Fields, and Matthew Galt. We will be back next week.