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liberating Mosul—the two northern cities would be used to resupply and reinforce army units in Baghdad once the ground war began to make its way northward from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
    Chamchamal was a far cry from As-Sulaymaniyah, which sat in the protected northeast corner of the Kurdish autonomous zone. In As-Sulaymaniyah, the city was clean. There were Internet cafés on practically every corner, satellite television was popular, and children attended schools in uniforms that reminded the Green Berets of American parochial schools. Chamchamal was the polar opposite. It was not in the safe haven of well within the no-fly zone. It was on the very fringes of Saddam’s Iraq, and here the Peshmerga people felt his brutality the keenest.
    The green line (the area that unofficially separated “Kurdish territory”) ran directly through the town of Chamchamal. A ridge to the immediate west of Chamchamal was home to a dug-in, completely fortified Iraqi Army battalion. That was their deliberate defense, and unknowingly their closest line of troops to the newly arrived Green Berets. These Iraqi positions had been manned for over a decade: well-reinforced bunkers, many trench lines, huge minefields, and one thousand five hundred meters of “no-man’s-land” directly in front of it.
    The Green Berets found a perfect home—a castle right in Chamchamal. The Special Operators watched the Iraqis across the flat, land mine–infested no-man’s-land from the parapets, and calculated their first moves. More soldiers watched from rooftops.
    No-man’s-land was ruined ground; sheep and cattle could not graze on it, and it was hated and feared as much by the people of Chamchamal as it was by the Iraqi soldiers who occupied the mountainside to the west. Not only did the minefields of the no-man’s-land frighten the people, but Iraqi troops had for years fired random shots from their trenches into the town on nothing more than a whim.
    Chamchamal was described by one of the Green Berets from ODA 083 as “comparable to ‘Barter Town,’” which was featured in the 1985 Mel Gibson film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome . When the Special Operators arrived in the spring of 2003 it was nearly deserted, yet it had once been home to over fifty thousand inhabitants.
    By April of 2003, after a decade of constant threat, the number of inhabitants had dwindled to only a few hundred solemn-faced Peshmerga fighters, who walked the streets with AK-47s and other rifles slung on their backs. No one stood around idly, and the only event that happened like clockwork, sadly enough, was that the Iraqis shelled the town daily between 1700 and 1800 hours.
    The Peshmerga had set up a vehicle checkpoint right on the edge of town, fashioned out of an old Conex-style metal shipping container. In the words of one of the operators, “That [Conex] had been hit with so many mortars [rounds] … I don’t know what kind of crazy guys could use that [Conex] as a vehicle checkpoint, because basically it was used for target practice by the Iraqis.” It resembled Swiss cheese, totally mangled beyond recognition.
    The road from Chamchamal wound west to Kirkuk through a small mountain pass. On the other side of the pass, less than a thousand meters away, sat the Iraqi checkpoint on the Kirkuk side. The Iraqis could have rolled over Chamchamal at any point, but had chosen instead to keep the citizens of the Peshmerga town under constant threat.
    The condition of the Iraqi soldiers on the ridgelines, however, was worse than the condition of the Peshmerga. The bunkers the Iraqis were forced to live in as they held guard over the town and gateway to Kirkuk were “horrible … terrible,” according to a Green Beret who witnessed the spartan squalor of the Iraqi bunkers firsthand.
    Upon arrival, the Kurds of Chamchamal were wary of the Green Berets. “You never really could trust who was who in