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The CIA War in Kurdistan: The Untold Story of the Northern Front in the Iraq War
Written by leader of the CIA team embedded in Iraq before the war, this is a new and unique perspective on a war that remains controversial and divides opinion.
In early 2002 Sam Faddis was named to head a CIA team that would enter Iraq, prepare the battlefield and facilitate the entry of follow-on conventional military forces numbering in excess of 40,000 American soldiers. This force, built around the 4th Infantry Division would, in partnership with Kurdish forces and with the assistance of Turkey, engage Saddam's army in the north as part of a coming invasion. Faddis expected to be on the ground inside Iraq within weeks and that the entire campaign would likely be over by summer. Over the next year virtually every aspect of that plan for the conduct of the war in Northern Iraq fell apart.
The 4th Infantry Division never arrived nor did any other conventional forces in substantial number. The Turks not only did not provide support, they worked overtime to prevent the U.S. from achieving success. An Arab army that was to assist U.S. forces fell apart before it ever made it to the field.
Alone, hopelessly outnumbered, short on supplies and threatened by Iraqi assassination teams and Islamic extremists Faddis' team, working with Kurdish peshmerga, nonetheless paved the way for a brilliant and largely bloodless victory in the north and the fall of Saddam's Iraq. That victory, handed over to Washington and the Department of Defense on a silver platter, was then squandered.
The surrender of Iraqi forces in the north was spurned. All existing governmental institutions were, in the name of de-Baathification, dismantled. All input from Faddis' team, which had been in country for almost a full year, was ignored. The consequences of these actions were and continue to be catastrophic.
This is the story of an incredibly brave and effective team of men and women who overcame massive odds and helped end the nightmare of Saddam's rule in Iraq. It is also the story of how incompetence, bureaucracy and ignorance threw that success away and condemned Iraq and the surrounding region to chaos.
Table of Contents
9/11
The Plan
The Team
Getting In—Turks
Why Are You Here?
Khurmal
Missing The Shot
The Return
Security Drills and Plan for Escape
Recruiting Sources—Getting Tough
Hunting WMD
The Boneyard—Chem and Radiation
Management/Leadership and Base Life
The Turks And Tension—Border Closed—Supply Runs
Fishing For Assassins; Propaganda, Transmitters And Country Music
Chalabi And The Pentagon—BADR Corps, Marines, Supply From Space
Mutiny And Training Kurdish Teams
10th Group, Deploying Kurdish Teams, Air War And Hunting Fedayeen
The 173rd Takes Harir, Losing The Surrender
Kirkuk And Mosul
Coming Home
Lessons
In early 2002 Sam Faddis was named to head a CIA team that would enter Iraq, prepare the battlefield and facilitate the entry of follow-on conventional military forces numbering in excess of 40,000 American soldiers. This force, built around the 4th Infantry Division would, in partnership with Kurdish forces and with the assistance of Turkey, engage Saddam's army in the north as part of a coming invasion. Faddis expected to be on the ground inside Iraq within weeks and that the entire campaign would likely be over by summer. Over the next year virtually every aspect of that plan for the conduct of the war in Northern Iraq fell apart.
The 4th Infantry Division never arrived nor did any other conventional forces in substantial number. The Turks not only did not provide support, they worked overtime to prevent the U.S. from achieving success. An Arab army that was to assist U.S. forces fell apart before it ever made it to the field.
Alone, hopelessly outnumbered, short on supplies and threatened by Iraqi assassination teams and Islamic extremists Faddis' team, working with Kurdish peshmerga, nonetheless paved the way for a brilliant and largely bloodless victory in the north and the fall of Saddam's Iraq. That victory, handed over to Washington and the Department of Defense on a silver platter, was then squandered.
The surrender of Iraqi forces in the north was spurned. All existing governmental institutions were, in the name of de-Baathification, dismantled. All input from Faddis' team, which had been in country for almost a full year, was ignored. The consequences of these actions were and continue to be catastrophic.
This is the story of an incredibly brave and effective team of men and women who overcame massive odds and helped end the nightmare of Saddam's rule in Iraq. It is also the story of how incompetence, bureaucracy and ignorance threw that success away and condemned Iraq and the surrounding region to chaos.
Table of Contents
9/11
The Plan
The Team
Getting In—Turks
Why Are You Here?
Khurmal
Missing The Shot
The Return
Security Drills and Plan for Escape
Recruiting Sources—Getting Tough
Hunting WMD
The Boneyard—Chem and Radiation
Management/Leadership and Base Life
The Turks And Tension—Border Closed—Supply Runs
Fishing For Assassins; Propaganda, Transmitters And Country Music
Chalabi And The Pentagon—BADR Corps, Marines, Supply From Space
Mutiny And Training Kurdish Teams
10th Group, Deploying Kurdish Teams, Air War And Hunting Fedayeen
The 173rd Takes Harir, Losing The Surrender
Kirkuk And Mosul
Coming Home
Lessons
240 pages, Hardcover
Published February 20, 2020
41 people are currently reading
182 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
November 22, 2020
I found this book highly interesting and quite well written. There were som breaks in the seriousnes with some milder jokes and stories about life in camp, which came in nicely in a story about a pretty bleak war.
The Iraq war is not a proud part of history. If one reads up, you will see that it wasn't the first time the US attacked Iraq on the premiss of weapons of mass destruction (that could reach the US)
Seeing the story from the intelligence officers of the CIA puts some things in perspective.
I did not know how hard it was to get the war going. I have read a lot about incompetense of the whole operation and from the higher ups, but here it was shown clearly and with some humor.
Like how they needed to spare the civilians on a train, but had not qualms about bombing them the rest of the time.
It is noteworthy how they didn't accept the surrender. Looking back on it, it seems like just another one of the wars the US has started for economical gain and to justify them having the military complex they have.
The latter is a part the author mentions at the end of the book and is what made it a 4 stars instead of 3.
The author saw the war and the attack on civilians as just, but he was opposed to them declining the surrender and the whole outcome of it. His job was pretty much made "useless" by the higher ups, who in no way would cooperate and had a "who is better" show off.
The Kurds helped out, for their own gain. They helped out against ISIS as well, but there the US let them down. This year Trump and the US government removed the US soldiers around them on no notice. A lot of them were massacred, tortured, raped or all three, by the Turks. It was preventable.
Let us hope we learn from this war, and hopefully learn the right thing.
The US has a history of starting wars in the middle east and in South America. Hopefully people will not buy the propaganda anymore.
The Iraq war is not a proud part of history. If one reads up, you will see that it wasn't the first time the US attacked Iraq on the premiss of weapons of mass destruction (that could reach the US)
Seeing the story from the intelligence officers of the CIA puts some things in perspective.
I did not know how hard it was to get the war going. I have read a lot about incompetense of the whole operation and from the higher ups, but here it was shown clearly and with some humor.
Like how they needed to spare the civilians on a train, but had not qualms about bombing them the rest of the time.
It is noteworthy how they didn't accept the surrender. Looking back on it, it seems like just another one of the wars the US has started for economical gain and to justify them having the military complex they have.
The latter is a part the author mentions at the end of the book and is what made it a 4 stars instead of 3.
The author saw the war and the attack on civilians as just, but he was opposed to them declining the surrender and the whole outcome of it. His job was pretty much made "useless" by the higher ups, who in no way would cooperate and had a "who is better" show off.
The Kurds helped out, for their own gain. They helped out against ISIS as well, but there the US let them down. This year Trump and the US government removed the US soldiers around them on no notice. A lot of them were massacred, tortured, raped or all three, by the Turks. It was preventable.
Let us hope we learn from this war, and hopefully learn the right thing.
The US has a history of starting wars in the middle east and in South America. Hopefully people will not buy the propaganda anymore.
December 3, 2020
One of the best books written about the Iraq war -- starting in 2001/2002 with the initial hesitating deployment of CIA personnel to work with KDP and PUK in the no-fly zone, and continuing to the beginning of the ground war in 2003. Written by Sam Faddis, who was the head of this operation for CIA,
This book answers a few big questions: why was the initial invasion of Iraq so understaffed, especially in the North (answer: DOD kept wishing Turkey would act against its own long-term interests and repeatedly revealed preferences and support the Kurds, and somehow policymakers never accepted reality and prepared an alternative plan); what was the deal with WMD (CIA on the ground was providing accurate and inconclusive information about WMD, and never found any solid evidence; the internal USG reasons for invading Iraq were not about immediate WMD threat, but WMD threat was used to sell the invasion to the public for political reasons, which had the disadvantage of being a lie); why didn't the Kurds get to do more in the initial war anyway (DOD-CIA rivalry and a political desire to not have the Kurds appear to be invading Arab cities, even when the alternatives were worse); why was the post-invasion so bad (people like Paul Bremer at CPA, genuine incompetence and bureaucracy in Washington, and unwillingness to face reality.)
As you'd expect by a CIA officer, it's well structured, and provides a lot of interesting details of daily life in Kurdistan before the war started. The most comparable book to this is First In by Gary Schroen, who did basically the same thing in Afghanistan with much more success (due to a more supportive US Government and less meddling).
This book answers a few big questions: why was the initial invasion of Iraq so understaffed, especially in the North (answer: DOD kept wishing Turkey would act against its own long-term interests and repeatedly revealed preferences and support the Kurds, and somehow policymakers never accepted reality and prepared an alternative plan); what was the deal with WMD (CIA on the ground was providing accurate and inconclusive information about WMD, and never found any solid evidence; the internal USG reasons for invading Iraq were not about immediate WMD threat, but WMD threat was used to sell the invasion to the public for political reasons, which had the disadvantage of being a lie); why didn't the Kurds get to do more in the initial war anyway (DOD-CIA rivalry and a political desire to not have the Kurds appear to be invading Arab cities, even when the alternatives were worse); why was the post-invasion so bad (people like Paul Bremer at CPA, genuine incompetence and bureaucracy in Washington, and unwillingness to face reality.)
As you'd expect by a CIA officer, it's well structured, and provides a lot of interesting details of daily life in Kurdistan before the war started. The most comparable book to this is First In by Gary Schroen, who did basically the same thing in Afghanistan with much more success (due to a more supportive US Government and less meddling).
September 3, 2022
This is yet another of those memoirs detailing the widespread incompetency at the national decision-making level and at senior levels of the Pentagon that so negatively impacted the Iraq war.
As someone who had spent much time working in Iraqi Kurdistan in the mid-'90s, I strongly empathized with the author's frustration at the broad lack of understanding by senior leaders that the Turks would do everything possible to prevent arming and equipping of the Kurds and that entry of major US combat elements across the northern border was never going to happen.
This ignorance by senior leaders is illustrated throughout the book with vignettes of wasted efforts in backing Iraqi "opposition" with no real support in Iraq - Chalabi of course is mentioned, but he's not the only one. And the failure by leadership to pay attention to existing intelligence that was gathered over more than a decade of operations in Iraq is hammered home with even greater frustration when, as the war kicked off, the operational intelligence the author's team collected with great effort and much risk, was not provided to the US forces who eventually did enter northern Iraq.
I don't need to go over again the abject incompetence of those who made key decisions following the fall of Saddam that led directly to intensifying the emerging insurgency. This is a tale of people trying to do a hard job the right way despite a lack of operational understanding, let alone support, by leadership. The author's story describes a frustrating attempt at negotiating a path through gradually increasing incompetency and arrogance that turned his tactical successes into an operational failure and that ultimately led to Iraq's collapse into bloody chaos.
Do I recommend the book? I can't say I enjoyed the read. I've been angry about Iraq for a while. But it was worth the read.
As someone who had spent much time working in Iraqi Kurdistan in the mid-'90s, I strongly empathized with the author's frustration at the broad lack of understanding by senior leaders that the Turks would do everything possible to prevent arming and equipping of the Kurds and that entry of major US combat elements across the northern border was never going to happen.
This ignorance by senior leaders is illustrated throughout the book with vignettes of wasted efforts in backing Iraqi "opposition" with no real support in Iraq - Chalabi of course is mentioned, but he's not the only one. And the failure by leadership to pay attention to existing intelligence that was gathered over more than a decade of operations in Iraq is hammered home with even greater frustration when, as the war kicked off, the operational intelligence the author's team collected with great effort and much risk, was not provided to the US forces who eventually did enter northern Iraq.
I don't need to go over again the abject incompetence of those who made key decisions following the fall of Saddam that led directly to intensifying the emerging insurgency. This is a tale of people trying to do a hard job the right way despite a lack of operational understanding, let alone support, by leadership. The author's story describes a frustrating attempt at negotiating a path through gradually increasing incompetency and arrogance that turned his tactical successes into an operational failure and that ultimately led to Iraq's collapse into bloody chaos.
Do I recommend the book? I can't say I enjoyed the read. I've been angry about Iraq for a while. But it was worth the read.
August 8, 2020
Faddis details the early CIA mission into Northern Iraq in 2002-2003. The author lead a team of intelligence officers and Special Forces into Iraq in advance of the war. This is a story of missed opportunities in the run up to OIF. Faddis is highly critical of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his decision making to ignore intelligence reporting. Rumsfeld created an adversarial relationship between DOD and CIA. This trickled down to field grade officers in 10th SF Group who bungled a potential surrender and blew rapport with Kurdish partners. Faddis tells funny vignettes about supply from space and airborne operations to secure an already secure rural Kurdish airfield. The best lessons are captured in the book's final chapter.
July 9, 2022
An absolutely riveting non-fiction book about the first jawbreaker teams that landed in the mountains of Kurdistan. Although I began reading the book as part of my required school reading, I was quickly sucked in by Faddis' snappy, no-nonsense writing style. The vignettes he told were perfectly placed, incredibly human, and genuinely funny at times – even though the whole time I was remembering that this was the beginning of a very long, very senseless war. I absolutely loved the ease with which he relayed political/diplomatic dramas; his explanations of the Turkish government's refusals to permit flights to Kurdistan added a layer of nuance and complexity that I had never recognized.
February 4, 2021
Eh. Had a lot of potential, but failed to live up to that potential because of a self-aggrandizing author who was too concerned with proving that he was infallible.
Was hoping for more history of the Kurds and Peshmerga but it was still an interesting, yet biased, telling of the events that lead up to the invasion of Iraq and the aftermath.
It’s easy to rid of a country of a despotic ruler; creating a liberal democracy is a much harder task (especially when you remove all remnants of the former government).
Was hoping for more history of the Kurds and Peshmerga but it was still an interesting, yet biased, telling of the events that lead up to the invasion of Iraq and the aftermath.
It’s easy to rid of a country of a despotic ruler; creating a liberal democracy is a much harder task (especially when you remove all remnants of the former government).
November 23, 2025
⭐️⭐️⭐️ — The CIA War in Kurdistan by Sam Faddis (Audiobook Review)
The CIA War in Kurdistan recounts Sam Faddis’s experience leading a CIA team into northern Iraq in 2002, tasked with preparing the way for more than 40,000 US troops who were meant to partner with Kurdish forces in the north. What followed was a year of collapsing plans: Turkey blocked cooperation, the 4th Infantry Division never arrived, the Arab forces meant to assist dissolved before deployment, and Faddis’s small team found themselves isolated, outnumbered, and navigating Iraqi assassination squads. Working alongside the Kurdish peshmerga, they still managed to pave the way for a largely bloodless victory—one Faddis argues Washington squandered through incompetence, bureaucracy, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the region.
While the premise has enormous potential, the execution falls short. Faddis spends much of the book settling old scores, positioning himself as the lone voice of wisdom in a sea of poor decision-making, and insisting that senior leaders failed simply because they didn’t follow his plan. The tone often drifts into arrogance, with a notable lack of self-awareness. Despite his front-row seat to geopolitics, the reader learns surprisingly little about Kurdistan itself—its people, geography, or strategic complexity. Instead, we hear repeatedly that he and his team “knew better,” while headquarters bungled every opportunity.
The book seems, at times, more aligned with Faddis’s later aborted political ambitions than with offering meaningful insight into the Iraq War or CIA structure. And though his criticisms of national-level incompetence and Pentagon mismanagement are significant—and often convincing—the narrative feels more like personal catharsis than rigorous history.
Still, there are interesting threads: the tension between bureaucracy and field operations, insight into Kurdish motivations, reflections on the refusal of surrender, and commentary on US–Turkey–Kurdish dynamics that remain relevant today. These elements ultimately nudged it to three stars rather than lower.
In the end, this isn’t a broad overview of the war or even of the Kurdistan campaign—it’s one man’s story, told very much through his own lens. Whether you agree with him or not, it opens the door to worthwhile conversations about intelligence work, government dysfunction, and the consequences of strategic blindness.
The CIA War in Kurdistan recounts Sam Faddis’s experience leading a CIA team into northern Iraq in 2002, tasked with preparing the way for more than 40,000 US troops who were meant to partner with Kurdish forces in the north. What followed was a year of collapsing plans: Turkey blocked cooperation, the 4th Infantry Division never arrived, the Arab forces meant to assist dissolved before deployment, and Faddis’s small team found themselves isolated, outnumbered, and navigating Iraqi assassination squads. Working alongside the Kurdish peshmerga, they still managed to pave the way for a largely bloodless victory—one Faddis argues Washington squandered through incompetence, bureaucracy, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the region.
While the premise has enormous potential, the execution falls short. Faddis spends much of the book settling old scores, positioning himself as the lone voice of wisdom in a sea of poor decision-making, and insisting that senior leaders failed simply because they didn’t follow his plan. The tone often drifts into arrogance, with a notable lack of self-awareness. Despite his front-row seat to geopolitics, the reader learns surprisingly little about Kurdistan itself—its people, geography, or strategic complexity. Instead, we hear repeatedly that he and his team “knew better,” while headquarters bungled every opportunity.
The book seems, at times, more aligned with Faddis’s later aborted political ambitions than with offering meaningful insight into the Iraq War or CIA structure. And though his criticisms of national-level incompetence and Pentagon mismanagement are significant—and often convincing—the narrative feels more like personal catharsis than rigorous history.
Still, there are interesting threads: the tension between bureaucracy and field operations, insight into Kurdish motivations, reflections on the refusal of surrender, and commentary on US–Turkey–Kurdish dynamics that remain relevant today. These elements ultimately nudged it to three stars rather than lower.
In the end, this isn’t a broad overview of the war or even of the Kurdistan campaign—it’s one man’s story, told very much through his own lens. Whether you agree with him or not, it opens the door to worthwhile conversations about intelligence work, government dysfunction, and the consequences of strategic blindness.
July 9, 2024
This was a good book about the early stages of the Iraq War. The book details his time in Kurdistan and his frustrations with the mission. The author is clearly no fan of Donald Rumsfeld. The book gives insight into the lack of insight that senior policy leaders had about the dynamics of Turkish Kurdish relations. This is something that still exists today. The lack of WMD found in Iraq has long been a subject of debate within the US. Some sources claim they were found and destroyed, or the sources claim they never existed, and it was a false pretext for the war. Faddis explains why this occurred and the reasons behind it. He also tells some of the light-hearted aspects of his tour including the New York Pizza restaurant near the base.
This book is not an overview or the war nor is it even an overview of the Kurdistan campaign. Instead, it is a view of one man's part through his eyes as a key person in the CIA operation. It is well worth the read.
This book is not an overview or the war nor is it even an overview of the Kurdistan campaign. Instead, it is a view of one man's part through his eyes as a key person in the CIA operation. It is well worth the read.
February 7, 2025
Told from a CIA operative that was in Iraq prior to the invasion. Now my "part" was that I was a regular soldier being told (and prepared for) coming in from the north. Never happened and I came through Kuwait and so on. This book shows the murky life of a CIA operative and the bureaucracy that goes with it. I can't say I know but in some cases you can relate to what is being told in this book and can empathize with him. Though no I didn't serve with the CIA, Sam made a good rundown of what happened and thankfully wasn't filled with black rectangles of topics being redacted. I give credit that he obviously didn't use real names and so on, and so the book was understandable, and easy to understand the concepts that he was talking about. Really good read.
January 30, 2023
I had high hopes for this book, but was ultimately disappointed. Aside from a lot of self-aggrandizing and whining that the senior leaders didn't want to do it his way, Faddis offers little in the way of real insight. The reader learns nothing of substance about the region, its geography, its people, or its strategic nuances. According to Faddis, he and his team were high speed with lots of good ideas and a better understanding of conditions on the ground than the folks at headquarters, and they were long-suffering in trying to reconcile bad policy with their expertise. For anyone who paid much attention to what went on in Iraq, Faddis offers nothing new, and much of his supposed insider knowledge was badly dated by the time he published this memoir. I can't in good conscience recommend that anyone waste their time with this book, which seems to have more to do with Faddis' abortive attempt at a political career than it does with actually providing a useful addition to the Iraq War or the way that America's intelligence community is structured and operated.
July 7, 2023
Whether you agree with his point of view or not. It is intresting to have an insiders pov on CIA procedures. It opens an intresting conversation on whether bureaucracy is important or utterly useless in secret operations. (Whether we need secret agencies or not is an different matter)
Intresting read, takes time to pick up pace. I recommend if you like the "genre" of first hand accounts of service personnel.
Intresting read, takes time to pick up pace. I recommend if you like the "genre" of first hand accounts of service personnel.
February 8, 2023
Author is self righteous and uses book to settle personal scores. He is arrogant with a huge lack of self awareness.
Audiobook presenter chosen is also a huge let down.
One would be much better off listening to a podcast or YouTube interview on the subject.
Audiobook presenter chosen is also a huge let down.
One would be much better off listening to a podcast or YouTube interview on the subject.
October 20, 2025
Why have an intelligence operation just to ignore all of the intelligence?
The Kurds are the unsung allies of the West’s war in the Middle East and any book illuminating their involvement is welcomed and needed. This is one such book.
The Kurds are the unsung allies of the West’s war in the Middle East and any book illuminating their involvement is welcomed and needed. This is one such book.
January 7, 2025
Thanks for telling the truth.
February 22, 2025
Hopefully an experience of personal catharsis for the author? The reader is left wondering why the book was written?
March 22, 2025
Disappointing, apart from being an ego boost for the author this book contributes virtually nothing to the knowledge of the history and conduct of the Iraq war.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews