History of the Urban Sniper

The Stalingrad Academy

Vasily Zaitsev grew up hunting wild game in the Ural Mountains to feed his family, and was drafted into the Soviet navy as a payroll clerk.2 He had no formal sniper training. Thrown into the 284th Rifle Division as one expendable rifleman among ten thousand, he crossed the Volga on the night of 19 September and shot forty Germans in his first ten days.2 Chuikov, commanding the 62nd Army, made that record into a program: he had Zaitsev open a sniper school at the Lazur Chemical Factory, with a rifle range and painted targets for an initial thirty students.2 Two of its graduates, Viktor Medvedev and Anatoly Chekhov, were each “credited with killing hundreds of Germans apiece”; Tania Chernova, another, is credited with 80, a count the sources do not settle.2 The school fitted the way the 62nd Army was already fighting. “Hundreds of ’shock groups’ consisting of fifty to a hundred soldiers broke into small groups to fight as highly lethal and lightly armed infantry-engineer squads of three to five personnel, moving swiftly and silently throughout the rubble or ’hugging’ the Germans near the frontlines to avoid the effectiveness of German airpower and artillery. Dozens of snipers took advantage of the destruction to find nearly perfect firing positions.”83

The German side

Oberleutnant Hans Wegener of Panzerjäger-Abteilung 389 fired across the frozen Volga in December with a scoped carbine and wrote afterward, “We German snipers were at least as good as the Russians!”2 Adelbert Holl of the 94th Infantry Division had no sniper training and a standard Karabiner 98; from a concealed position he “took aim over the iron sights of his rifle” and shot four Russians through a hole in a wall 150 meters away, then silenced a machine gun with one round from a captured Soviet anti-tank rifle.2 But the Sixth Army fielded no organized sniper program. When Soviet snipers pinned a unit, the Germans answered with mortars, artillery, airstrikes and tanks.2 German sniper schools used captured Russian training films because they had not made their own, and the German sniper corps did not match Russian quality until mid-1944, when the war was already lost.2 The only urban snipercraft their training films taught was to fire from a building with multiple open windows.2

Cause and effect

Chekhov shot ration carriers because a man down in the open drew the next men out to him, which gave him “two or three kills in the space of a few minutes.”2 Panzer commanders standing in their hatches and the vision ports of buttoned-up tanks were prime targets; a single round could blind or decapitate a crew.2

German First Lieutenant Herbert Rauchhaupt, attacking the Red October steelworks, watched a soldier beside him drop: “Head first the soldier tumbles down to us in the crater. Hit! Headshot! Dead! In the invisible battle for Stalingrad there are nearly only headshots. We are cornered in a trap.”2 At the Barrikady gun factory, a squad under radio specialist Heinz Neist was pinned on the bottom floor of a building with Russians on the floor above; friendly snipers firing from an opposite building cleared the position, and when Neist’s men searched the upper floor “they found seven Russian soldiers lying on the floor, all dead from the snipers’ well-aimed bullets.”2

On 13 December 1942 Zaitsev, Chernova and two others went after Paulus himself, at a bunker Soviet intelligence had placed for them. The lead girl in the team stepped on a mine. Paulus was at Gumrak airfield, miles away.2

Near Krasny Oktyabr, Chernova’s team killed seventeen Germans in the open. Then “the snipers’ shots exposed their position,” and German artillery brought the building down on everyone but her.2

The propaganda war

Chuikov “knew his hard pressed men needed inspiration, so he promoted and publicized Zaitsev’s exploits,” and the Russians came to call what followed “The Cult of Sniperism.”2 The Red Army’s daily newspaper printed sniper-kill tallies and photographs every day, and the Front commander, Andrei Yeremenko, and his commissar, Nikita Khrushchev, promoted the Sniper Movement themselves.2 Vasily Grossman, who took Chekhov’s account for Krasnaya Zvezda, wrote in his notebook that “The exploits of snipers were talked about and admired almost like those of football players... But the compulsion of propaganda exaggeration made the scores achieved by these Stakhanovites of the urban battlefield somewhat suspect.”34 Soviet propaganda broadcasts told the Germans across the line that “every seven seconds a German soldier dies in Russia.”2

Hides and signature

Getting to a hide alive mattered more than the shot, because “in Stalingrad, to be seen was to be killed.”2 Zaitsev went through a building’s air duct, a heating duct and the empty pipes of a petrol yard; other snipers climbed the Barrikady factory’s furnaces from below to reach the smokestacks without crossing the yard, and held them until early November, when German SIG 33B guns dropped the chimneys with 150mm fire.2 He “mastered the urban terrain and developed new tactics such as using pipes or old barrels as hide sites and making unimaginable shots.”84

The report and the flash were managed on both sides: a German sniper Zaitsev watched fired only when the submachine gunners beside him fired, so one shot was lost among many, and Chekhov built his own flash hider and set up against white walls, which washed out the flash to anyone looking.2

When Zaitsev hunted a German sniper he questioned the men who had been shot at and traced the bullet’s path back before he went looking with a rifle, a method he summed up as “measure seven times, cut once.”2 The Germans rarely answered a sniper with a sniper: “discriminate counter-sniper operations, like the ones conducted by Zaitsev, were infrequent. Instead, the Germans responded with massive force.”2

Encirclement

Operation Uranus opened on 19 November 1942 against the Italian, Romanian and German armies on the flanks, and on 23 November the two Soviet pincers met at Kalach and closed the Sixth Army inside the city.83 Battalion commanders became the only ones who could authorize their men to open fire. “While the use of mortars was cut back and machine-gunners began rationing their ammo, the snipers continued their deadly work, one bullet at a time.”2

Paulus surrendered on 31 January 1943 from the basement of the Univermag department store in central Stalingrad.W The southern pocket fell with him; the northern pocket held two more days and surrendered on 2 February 1943.83

The movement and the badge

Zaitsev was wounded by a mortar blast in January 1943 that damaged his eyes. The ophthalmologist Vladimir Filatov restored his sight through corneal transplantation, and Zaitsev returned to the front, finishing the war at the Battle of Seelow Heights as a captain.W He was awarded Hero of the Soviet Union on 22 February 1943. Between 10 October and 17 December 1942 he was credited with 225 kills.W

The sniper program Zaitsev and Chuikov built at the Lazur Chemical Factory did not stay in Stalingrad. The Red Army’s propagandists and political officers built the Sniper Movement into a competition across divisions: forty kills earned a “For Bravery” medal and the title “noble sniper.”2 By the end of the war, 428,335 individuals had received Soviet sniper training, and 9,534 obtained higher-level qualifications.W Between 1941 and 1945, 2,484 Soviet women served as snipers, of whom about 500 survived the war.W Soldiers who fought at Stalingrad and survived carried the experience forward; at the Battle of Berlin in 1945, veterans among them called themselves graduates of the “Stalingrad School of Street Fighting.”2

At Stalingrad, a two-soldier sniper team operating from a concealed position inside a ruined building drew whole platoons, mortar batteries and armored vehicles onto itself, and the firepower sent to destroy it created more rubble and better concealment for the next team.2 During the encirclement, when battalion commanders rationed every rifle round, the sniper became the most economical weapon the Sixth Army had left.2

Stalingrad “made the Germans reinstate their specialized sniper training”: by 1944 the Wehrmacht had stood up 31 sniper training companies across Germany, Austria, Hungary and Lithuania.W On 20 August 1944 it instituted the Sniper’s Badge, awarded in three grades starting at twenty confirmed kills.W In December 1944, Heinrich Himmler wrote to Albert Speer proposing incentive rewards: a wristwatch at fifty kills, a hunting rifle at one hundred, a personal hunting trip with Himmler at one hundred and fifty.2 By early 1945 the Wehrmacht ordered snipers to remove the badge before capture, because Soviet forces executed identified snipers on sight.W “There was no other battle in World War II, before or after Stalingrad, where urban sniping was practiced by both sides on such a large scale.”2

The position

In September 1961, on a balcony of the Goodall Wooten dorm, Whitman looked at the Tower and told a friend, “that would be a great place to go up with a rifle and shoot people. You could hold off an army for as long as you wanted.”87 The tower receptionist saw him on the observation deck as early as April 1966, and a separate record places him there with his brother John on 22 July.288 From the deck he had clear fields of fire in every direction and rain spouts on every side he could shoot through without showing himself.2 Firing in a full circle, he could shoot a man 500 meters east of the tower, walk to the far side, and shoot another 500 meters west.2 Each wall had three openings built to drain rain, and he used them as turrets that “effectively shielded him from return gunfire below.”6

The response

More than a hundred lawmen from the Austin police, the Texas Rangers and the local Secret Service office reached the campus within minutes.36 Their pistols and shotguns reached no more than 50 yards, and they were “distinctly outclassed by a man who could hit even an exposed head at six times that distance.”36 The Austin Police Department had no SWAT team, no commander held the ground, and a patrolman out of his car had almost no radio.289 The best the department could do was hand officers civilian deer rifles.2

On the deck

Whitman barricaded the doorway to the receptionist area with a table and chairs and blocked the deck door with the dolly.2 The parapet was “a waist-high ledge of brick and decorative concrete columns, creating many natural loopholes through which he fired.”36 He took one shot from one place and the next from another, rising over the railing to aim, firing, crouching, moving again.2 The loopholes shielded him from return fire below, and the concrete absorbed what came back: dozens of armed citizens fired hundreds of rounds at him with scoped hunting rifles, and “he was never wounded by them. Not even a scratch.”2

The people below could not locate the source. Students and staff heard a popping sound and guessed at nail-driving guns, planks slapping concrete, or the campus ROTC firing blanks.2 The 6mm Remington round left the muzzle at over 3,000 feet per second, nearly three times the speed of sound: the bullet arrived before the report, and the supersonic crack it generated came from the bullet’s flight path, not from the muzzle.W The muzzle blast echoed off the stone and concrete faces of the campus buildings and reached the ground from multiple directions at once, and the 231-foot elevation spread the reflections across a wider area than a ground-level shooter would have produced. Many below assumed several snipers.2

An armed officer and a pilot flew a small, cloth-skinned airplane past the tower, and it shook too much for the officer to aim; Whitman put two rounds through the fabric and drove it off.2 He tuned a transistor radio to KTBC to hear a reporter describe the campus, and turned it up so loud that he never heard the police taking his barricade apart.2 Ramiro Martinez, an Austin patrolman, worked to the Main Building through St. Austin’s church, ran the last open ground, and took the elevator up.89 Allen Crum, who had spent more than two decades in the Air Force and managed the floor of a campus bookstore, fell in with him on the stairwell. “And he said, ’Well you better deputize me’... I said, ’Consider yourself deputized.’”89 Officer Houston McCoy rounded the corner and fired his shotgun twice.92 Whitman died on the deck at close range.2

SWAT and New Orleans

Whitman “showed the world that the lone sniper in a densely populated area was just as deadly as a homicide bomber.”2 Police departments across the country responded by assigning one rifle-armed officer to each shift, and the early counter-sniper rifles were “as likely to be a .30-30 lever action as anything else,” chosen on personal preference.36 The St. Louis Police Department issued .30-06 BAR sporting rifles to their shift riflemen.36

In 1967, one year after Austin, the Los Angeles Police Department formed the first SWAT unit in the country. Officer John Nelson, a Marine veteran, proposed the concept; Inspector Daryl Gates championed it through the department.W Gates named it “Special Weapons Attack Team” until Deputy Chief Edward Davis rejected the word as too aggressive, and they settled on “Special Weapons and Tactics.”W The unit fielded sixty officers in fifteen four-man teams, most of them Korea and Vietnam veterans.W

Then “the lessons of Austin were pounded in again in New Orleans in August of 1974,” when Mark Essex, a twenty-three-year-old ex-sailor, killed seven people and wounded twenty-one from the roof of a Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge.36 Essex held a reinforced-concrete elevator structure on the hotel roof, the same kind of elevated hardened position Whitman had used eight years earlier. The standoff lasted eleven hours and ended when a Marine CH-46 helicopter fired an M60 machine gun into his position.36

The enemy sniper

FMFRP 12-41, Professional Knowledge Gained from Operational Experience in Vietnam, published in 1967, profiled the NVA sniper Vietnam-wide. The manual names two elements, “the team (5 men) and the cell (3 men),” each trained as snipers by the unit it operated with. They carried the K-44, a scoped 7.62mm Mosin Nagant with a five-round magazine, and engaged “at distances between 50 to 600 meters depending on the terrain.”41 Their targets were “the unit commander and men carrying automatic weapons and radios,” and they rarely fired “more than about 5 rounds, with most casualties resulting from the first 2 or 3 rounds.”41 In Hue, that rifleman operated from inside a layered strongpoint: “a three-story building surrounded by a courtyard with a stone wall,” with small bunkers for automatic weapons on the first floor, snipers in the upper stories, and spider holes in the courtyard, each manned by a soldier with an AK-47 and a B-40 rocket launcher.40 The snipers fired from the upper floors to draw the Marines’ attention high while the dug-in positions at ground level waited for the assault. “We got nailed in the assault on the treasury and hospital areas on the south side by not checking the low-ground before we went over into the assault.”4

Fox and hounds

“Working in buddy-teams in Hue, we rapidly learned to play fox and hounds with NVA snipers. The generic problem was that someone got dinged before we managed to spot the shooter that dinged him. Under fire from an unknown sniper position one man will have to serve as target while the other man spots and shoots.”4 A short, fast run between cover by the bait man drew a badly aimed shot or burst, the shot gave up the hide, and the cover man fired on it or marked it with a tracer for the squad.4 Corpsman John Loudermilk treated the cost of forgetting the drill: a Marine walked into a front room with large windows on the street, “forgot where he was for a moment and a sniper across the street shot him in the chest.”4 Once a firing slot was found, the 1967 doctrine called for “grenade, 3.5-inch rocket, M79 and 60mm mortar fire” into it, and a photograph from the battle shows a Marine of 2d Battalion, 5th Marines firing his M79 from a Hue University building at a North Vietnamese sniper.4140 Dye’s rule for the shot was aimed fire: “In Hue we frequently took fortified positions under fire causing the enemy shooter to duck and cease firing. When we moved, he was back up and shooting. The solution is to kill him with aimed rounds right into the slot.”4

Street by street

South of the river, Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Cheatham’s 2d Battalion, 5th Marines took the strongpoints one at a time, because the ground left no room to go around them.40 The enemy “defended on every other street. . . . When we would take him off one street, we would usually push through the next row of houses fairly quickly and then hit another defensive position.”40 Cheatham preferred the 3.5-inch rocket, which could penetrate 11 inches of steel, and “that thing would pop these walls.”40 His Marines learned to aim the rockets at the base of a window rather than through it, because a round fired into the opening flew through the room and burst on the far wall, away from the men standing at the window.95 An M48 tank and an Ontos, with its six 106mm recoilless rifles, “would pair up and maneuver together as a team,” one moving into a firing position while the other covered, and the pair drew fire as “rocket magnets.”4 Against those walls “two U.S. Marine battalion commanders stated that the RPG-7 was the most dangerous weapon encountered over the entire battle.”97

The prison and the wall

On 5 February, Company G cleared the provincial prison floor by floor from the top down. Second Lieutenant Michael A. McNeil’s platoon took the battalion’s first prisoner, “an NVA sniper, equipped with both an SKS Simonov and M1 Garand rifle and eight grenades.”40 The prisoner tried to jump Sergeant G. B. Zachary. McNeil wrestled him to the floor with a half nelson and bound his hands.40 Company G killed 36 NVA in the prison at a cost of one man wounded.40 At the provincial headquarters on 6 February, Marines raising an American flag over the building drew a shout: “Look out, there are snipers dug in along the wall.”40 The NVA had dug foxholes along a cement wall in the courtyard in front of the building. Within seconds six of them lay dead or dying. A live North Vietnamese soldier was pulled out of a hole and taken prisoner.40

Inside the Citadel

Inside the Citadel, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines began its attack on 13 February and took sixteen blocks in nearly two weeks at nearly 50 percent casualties.4 On the morning of 16 February the battalion pushed southeast along the Citadel wall under fire from three directions.40 “North Vietnamese snipers brought flanking fire on them from the taller building on Gia Hoi Island to the east and from walls of the imperial palace to the west. The battalion used artillery, naval gunfire, and an occasional air strike to suppress the enemy on the outer walls, but could do nothing about the snipers in the palace because the royal residence was a no-fire zone.”40 That day gained about 150 yards and cost 7 killed and 47 wounded.40

The battalion commander, Major Robert H. Thompson, described the old city as “row after row of single-story, thick-walled masonry houses jammed close together and occasionally separated by alleyways or narrow streets,” which gave the NVA hundreds of mutually supporting positions, and the palace on his right flank as a safe haven for small-arms, rocket and mortar fire.40 He eventually received permission to fire mortars, and on a “few occasions to have the ARVN fire artillery for us inside . . . the palace walls.”40

Gas

On 25 February “Marines from Charlie Company shot off three E-8 gas launchers, each carrying about 40 CS gas grenades, toward the enemy’s last known position. The next morning, 1/5 took control of the remaining twelve city blocks in about three hours, without a single casualty, because the NVA was not equipped to deal with the tear gas attack and was forced to withdraw.”495 It was the second gas action of the battle. Three weeks earlier, across the river and by a different battalion, Cheatham’s Marines had broken the Treasury Building with CS after recoilless rifles and tanks failed against its thick walls and large steel door; Camp has Major Ralph J. Salvati fetching E8 launchers from the MACV compound, each able to fire 64 canisters in four volleys, and the Marine Corps tactics manual has the Marines lobbing tear gas canisters found in the same compound.4096

No doctrine came out of it

The NVA sniper in Hue was not an independent marksman hunting from a hide. He was a component of a fortified position: a rifleman with a scoped Mosin-Nagant M1891/30 or a captured M1 Garand on an upper floor, firing to draw the assault into the kill zone of the automatic weapons and rocket launchers below.3640 The captured sniper at the provincial prison carried an SKS, an M1 Garand, and eight grenades, equipped to fight at close range, not only shoot from distance.40 No NVA unit history, no enemy sniper doctrine written for Hue, and no named enemy sniper exists in the sources read for this case.40

The Marines who fought them had no organic sniper capability at Hue. Captain Jim Land had stood up a scout sniper program at Hill 55 near Da Nang in late 1966, pulling NCOs from the division’s distinguished-marksman list with no rifles, no instructors, and no range.W Carlos Hathcock, its best-known graduate, had returned stateside in 1967 and did not redeploy until 1969.W

Hue cost 142 Marines killed in action over roughly one month.440 The formal USMC Scout Sniper School at Quantico was not established until 1977, nine years later.W No urban-operations manual published after Hue cites the battle for sniper or counter-sniper doctrine.

The one-shot rule

Sean MacStiofain, an early leader of the Provisional IRA, had watched its city snipers fire several rounds from one place and expose themselves to counter-fire: “One-shot sniping was in fact the theory of the guerrilla rifle. It turned up, struck once and vanished, presenting no target in return.”2 PIRA trained its snipers in pairs, the best shot on the trigger, and drummed in the rule that “hit or miss,” the team went to ground after one round, because “It was impossible to locate their position provided they fired only one round.”2

The car recovered on 10 April 1997 at Cregganduff Road was a stolen Mazda 626, originally maroon and painted blue, on false plates, with a CB radio on channel 26.43 “Behind the rear seat of the car was found an elaborate metal device intended for use as a firing platform for a gunman firing a rifle from the rear of the car with the tailgate propped open and the hatch raised. When he had fired, the hatch and tailgate could be closed very quickly and the steel plates forming part of the firing platform would then protect the occupants of the car from return fire.”43 The crew was three men: a driver, the shooter wearing hearing protection against the Barrett’s muzzle blast, and a passenger with an AK-47, all in balaclavas.2

Sniper teams watched approaching British patrols through “a system of lookouts that included school-age children and housewives,” predicted patrol routes, and set up to ambush at an intersection, where a shot could come from any direction.2

When the car was not available the teams built a position out of whatever the ground gave them. On 29 March 1997 three masked men entered a home at Forkhill, held the family, moved a dog kennel to the corner of the garden wall, removed a coping stone, and stacked a crate on top.43 Constable Ronald Galwey, leaving Forkhill base on patrol, was struck in the right hip by a .50 round.4342 A forensic scientist matched the footprints on the kennel roof to the boots Caraher was wearing when he was arrested twelve days later.43

The Barrett

PIRA first fired a Barrett .50 caliber rifle at a patrol on the outskirts of Crossmaglen on 16 March 1990.42 One shot at 850 meters struck a soldier’s helmet without seriously injuring him; the Army calls it “an extremely lucky shot. Few of the subsequent attacks hit at over 200m.”42 Two PIRA active service units operated over the seven-year campaign, “and, although there were some long distance shoots using the Barrett, the majority of engagements were at a range of 200–300m using a 7.62mm rifle.”42

The Barrett recovered at Cregganduff Road was a Model 90 bolt action, fitted with a ten-power Leupold Vari-X III scope. It lay in a hidden compartment under the floor of a cattle trailer, with fifty live .50 rounds and twenty-six spent ones.9843 Its serial number traced to a pair sold on 27 January 1995 and shipped to the Irish Republic less than six months into the 1994 ceasefire.98 The Ombudsman concluded this rifle “was not the same weapon used in sniper shootings in South Armagh between 1990 and 1994.”44

Kevlar body armor could not stop the .50 caliber round. By 1997 troops were issued boron carbide ceramic plates rated for .50 BMG. A set cost £4,000 and weighed 32 pounds, “making it too heavy to be worn on patrol; even soldiers at static checkpoints could only wear it for two hours at a time.”98

The Army built permanent observation posts: “the ’High Romeos’ (known by their callsigns such as R21, R23) in the Forkill area under Operation CONDOR; and then the low-lying Golf towers (G10, G20 etc) covering the approaches to Crossmaglen,” carrying “Super-Nikon” binoculars and MSTAR radar.42 Pairs of Lynx helicopters with door-mounted machine guns flew “Eagle Patrols,” and for a period overt patrols moved only under helicopter top cover, which “fixed security forces to some extent, and placed a greater burden on the usage of helicopter hours.”42 Soldiers “stopped standing at unprotected checkpoints and began observing the terrain in sniper-proof guard towers. Soldiers stopped walking from one point to another and started traveling in armored cars. Or, patrols were ferried from one point to another in helicopters.”2

The myth and the effect

The sniper “gained an almost mythical reputation: a man known locally as ’Goldfinger’, trained in the US, armed with the formidable Barrett .50” heavy calibre sniper rifle, and achieving single shot kills from a range of one mile.”42 “Republican information operations, such as the ’Sniper at Work’ signs” at Silverbridge Crossroads, “combined with media hype helped build the myth of the sniper. The attacks affected security force operations and had an impact on morale among some troops and police officers serving in South Armagh.”42

Toby Harnden wrote that “Morale plummeted during 1993 as the South Armagh Brigade perfected its sniping operations and seven members of the security forces were killed in nine single-shot attacks. Towards the end of the year, members of a Royal Scots platoon were disciplined for remaining in their base while on vehicle checkpoint duty because they had opted to falsify car registration details in preference to venturing outside.”98 Over the fifteen months from August 1992 to December 1993, six soldiers and three RUC constables were killed by single-shot attacks in South Armagh and Fermanagh.42 Between March 1990 and June 1993 the Police Ombudsman links four murders and eight attempted murders near Crossmaglen to high-velocity rifles, with no sniper death from June 1993 to February 1997.44

The Army states that “Most of the effectiveness of sniping is psychological, but there is no concrete evidence of ’sniping’ reducing the effectiveness of Army operations in South Armagh.”42 Its final assessment: “Although tragic, this episode was a relatively small blip in the statistics of the campaign.”42

Towers, plates and helicopters

The South Armagh campaign killed fewer than a dozen members of the security forces over seven years. It forced the British Army to abandon foot patrols, build a permanent observation tower network, field ceramic body armor rated for .50 BMG, and move troops by helicopter across an entire area of operations.

The rooms and the street

The east-west boulevard through downtown was Sniper’s Alley: wide lanes, tram tracks, the Miljacka River along its south side, and beyond the river the concrete apartment towers of Grbavica.2 One of the few sources of drinking water in the city stood near it, so people ran the boulevard for water, and Serb snipers “tried hard to cut the city into northern and southern halves by focusing their efforts on Sniper’s Alley.”2 Signs marked the dangerous places: “Sniper fire: Watch out, don’t go there.”31

The shooting positions were in the Grbavica high-rises overlooking the river. Ashton, a journalist who visited after June 1993, saw rooms looking across at Marin Dvor, the Holiday Inn and the Tito barracks: “It was very easy to see where people could get shot crossing the intersections,” and there were “thousands and thousands of shell casings in the rooms. There was a lot of outgoing fire from that position.”30 Van Lynden was taken into the same apartment blocks and shown dark rooms “where there were sniper rifles” alongside sandbags behind window slits, long-barrelled rifles with telescopic sights, and used cartridge cases on the floor.30 “They had walkie-talkies, small radios, and there were clearly other positions higher up or in other buildings, higher up the slope overlooking Sarajevo, who were in contact with these men on the front line positions, spotters.”30

The prosecution’s sniping expert, Lieutenant Patrick van der Weijden, testified that shooting ranges in the built-up city averaged 75 meters and that “long shots were possible only from dominating positions with an overview from above.”31 Ismet Hadzic, who commanded the ABiH 155th Brigade, testified that year after year snipers fired from one spot for a day or two, went quiet for 15 to 20 days, and then “reactivated” it, and that every one of these hot spots was on Bosnian Serb-held ground.31 The Trial Chamber found that “the primary purpose of the campaign was to instill in the civilian population a state of extreme fear.”30

Simic and Sarzinsky

Slavko Simic and Vlado Sarzinsky had shot on the same Yugoslav national marksmanship team before the war. Simic, a Serb, was called up into the Bosnian Serb army and trained its snipers. Sarzinsky, a Croat with a Muslim wife, stayed to defend Sarajevo and trained its counter-sniper teams. By West’s count those teams took out twenty Serb snipers in the first three months of the war.2

In July 1992 a new shooter began working Sarzinsky’s neighborhood. “He shot from extremely far away, an expert shooter. Must be. Four, five hundred meter. And from that distance he never missed, always hitting his target in the head.”2

A medic pulled a 7.92mm bullet from one of the victims. A week later Sarzinsky heard the report himself and knew the rifle for a Mauser K98, the weapon he and Simic had fired for years on the national team. By his own count sixteen Mausers had been in Sarajevo at the start of the war. He could account for fourteen. One of the two missing belonged to Simic.2

In late July one of Sarzinsky’s spotters saw the sniper go into a building two hundred meters from the lines. Sarzinsky took a position covering the exit and waited hours. He heard the Mauser, and shot the man as he ran out.2 Weeks later an exchanged prisoner told him the man was Simic.2

Sarzinsky’s method was observation. He organized teams of spotters who did nothing but watch the Serb lines and write down everything: “They watched windows. They watched bunkers. They watched holes in the walls of buildings,” so that every counter-sniper could study the history of the neighborhood he was stalking.2

Kulovica Street gave the Serb snipers “an open, linear kill zone,” so the Bosnians stood a giant concrete block across the Serb view of it. Someone sprayed “Pink Floyd” across the block. It came down in the 1994 cease-fire, the sniping resumed, and the street was blocked again with an enormous piece of blue cloth from the 1984 Winter Olympics closing ceremony.2 UNPROFOR armored personnel carriers “functioned as a mobile protective screen behind which people could walk in some safety from sniping.”31 On the NATO side, Italian special operations snipers found their .50 caliber rifles “simply too burdensome for the kinds of crawling, climbing, and stalking required to defeat Serbian urban snipers,” and adopted a .338-class rifle that still penetrated barriers.36

The count

The only count that separates sniping from shelling covers Galic’s command, 10 September 1992 to 10 August 1994: 699 people killed by sniping, 253 of them civilians, and 3,111 wounded by sniping, 1,296 of them civilians, against 2,160 killed by shelling.45 The Trial Chamber sentenced Galic to life imprisonment; Dragomir Milosevic, who commanded from August 1994 to November 1995, to thirty-three years.304631

Economy of force

At 75 meters average range, a rifleman behind a sandbagged apartment window with a walkie-talkie and a spotter on a higher floor had a clear shot at anyone who crossed the street below. The positions were coordinated, rotated on a 15-to-20-day cycle, and maintained for years.31

The snipers were not trying to defeat the ABiH 1st Corps; they were fixing it. A smaller force used sniping (alongside shelling) to pin a numerically larger force inside the city while the VRS took territory elsewhere.99 Lionel Beehner and Mike Jackson, after fieldwork in the city, wrote that senior Bosnian officers described the siege as economy of force: “By committing the fewest forces possible to keep the Bosnian army tied down and the international gaze fixed on the capital, they could free up forces elsewhere.”100

Sarzinsky’s counter-sniper method required no technology the Bosnian defenders did not have. Systematic observation (teams of spotters recording every window, every bunker, every hole in a wall) built a pattern of life for each Serb position that a counter-sniper could exploit when the position reactivated.2 The physical barriers (the concrete block on Kulovica Street, the Olympic cloth, UNPROFOR’s APCs) were obstacles placed to break the sniper’s line of sight across linear kill zones.

The cell

“Hugging” the Russian columns, the cells set up “from 50 to 250 meters away” and stayed safe from artillery and rocket strikes;25 from basements they sat below the depression of the tank guns.25 “Often four or five cells would work together against a single armored vehicle.”23

Chechen fighters targeted the fuel cells and engines of armored vehicles, “effecting kills with a minimum of rounds,” and avoided frontal reactive armor, hitting top, rear and sides; “the use of multiple teams helped overcome the problems presented by the RPG’s signature backblast and the time required between shots.”25 In a city that was still a battle for strongpoints around prominent buildings, intersections and factories, “Tall apartment houses were valued for their observation and sniper opportunities.”3 “The stationary combat fought from ruined buildings resembled the fighting at Stalingrad.”23

A Russian observer wrote that one experienced sniper could “disable a commander, destroy a gun or mortar crew, control one or two streets . . . and, most important, instill in the enemy a feeling of constant danger, nervousness, and expectation of a sudden shot. Everyone fears the Chechen snipers in Grozny. . . . There are many cases where a sniper wounds a serviceman, and then kills the wounded person and those who come to his aid.”24 “A real problem for Russian troops was identifying snipers who shot at them and then donned a Red Cross armband and mingled with the local populace and the Russian soldiers he was killing.”24 Russian checkpoints began making Chechen men take off their shirts, looking for a bruised shoulder from recoil, powder burns on the forearms, a silver lining on the cuffs from propellant bags, and gunpowder under the fingernails.24 Arthur Speyer found Chechen snipers the second largest producer of Russian casualties in the battle, and the first wherever Chechen fighters met Russian infantry without armor.2

Two armies

The Russian military went into the first Chechen War with SVD-equipped marksmen and few actual snipers, and fell back on the special operations units of the Ministry of the Interior and the FSB. Those men were well trained for a city, against SWAT-type targets. They were not trained in site camouflage, or for the mountains and the countryside, and they were not trained to shoot where the other side ran countersniper operations and artillery and mortar rounds were falling.23 The professional MVD and FSB snipers mostly kept “the SVD with a silencer,” while the special units carried the suppressed VSS “Vintorez,” a 9x39mm subsonic rifle effective to 400 meters.223

In the summer of 1999 the Russian Army reestablished a true sniper school, selected twelve firers from the top fifty-two in an All-Army competition, and ended the course with a month of live fire in the mountains around Bamut.23 Russian snipers were shooting at around 400 meters, but the school had not solved the army’s sniper problem, because casualties had to be replaced. Three of the first graduating class of twelve were killed in action, and four of the second class were hospitalized with wounds.23 The army “took a page from the Chechens’ notebook and began forming their own two- or three-man hunter-killer detachments” of machinegunner, RPG-7 gunner, SVD marksman and rifleman.23

Beside them worked the elite snipers of the government’s special reserves, contract soldiers and company-grade officers rather than conscripts, in pairs with a five-man security element: “The snipers go into position at night and leave at night,” prepare the position by day, sit some distance apart where each can see the other and the ambush area, and stay one or two nights.23 Each carried a flare pistol with a red flare and a grenade. “If the support group fails to cover the sniper’s withdrawal, the red flare will bring artillery fire down on his position, and the grenade will deal with the sniper and his attackers simultaneously.”23

Before the ground advance into Grozny in 1999, four Russian sniper companies, two from the Army and two from the MVD, took up positions in the city with 50 to 60 snipers each. Supported by army and MVD special forces, the teams found targets and reported the whereabouts and movements of Chechen forces, and they spotted for artillery onto suspected rebel positions.24 Against snipers dug into buildings the Russians reissued infantry with 7.62mm rounds “that would penetrate load-bearing walls and not ricochet around the room” and fired the RPO-A Shmel thermobaric rocket, built to kill people inside a building.23

Minutka Square and the generals

In January 2000 Minutka Square, where many roads and underground communication lines met, was the key terrain both sides fought for.24 “The fighting for Minutka Square was particularly bloody. Both sides sought to gain control of the ’strategic heights’: the taller five- and nine-story buildings ringing the square.”25 Commanders relied increasingly on snipers, which made the taller buildings more valuable still. The tallest in Grozny, a 12-story structure 500 meters from Minutka Square, became an objective neither side could take. Russian and rebel snipers occupied it together, and from it either could reach a large part of central Grozny.25 Chechen snipers pinned Russian assault groups near the square for days at a time and stalled the attack on the center of the city.2

West of the city, on a plateau nearly 100 meters above the Kirova housing settlement, Russian armor staged for its advance, and more than a kilometer away Chechen fighters watched it from the upper floors of factory buildings.3 Zhelen, a spotter, lay in the attic of a shelled cottage and counted 120 pieces of armor. Musa, a sniper, lay on the third floor of the next building, his SVD sighted through the branches of a tree grown up past the window. The Russian position was 1,100 meters off.3 A UAZ, a BTR and a Ural truck arrived. Soldiers stumbled from their tents pulling on boots. A figure stepped out wearing the wide red stripes of a general officer down his trousers.3 “Musa compensated for the distance, 15, 20 centimeters. He fired a single shot and the officer slumped down.”3 He fired a second round into the body. The building took two tank rounds as Musa and the others went down the rear stairwell.3

On 18 January 2000 Major General Mikhail Malofeyev was killed inspecting front-line positions in northwestern Grozny; unofficial sources at the Russian joint command reported that a Chechen sniper shot him on his rounds, and Chechen fire kept Russian troops from his body until 23 January.2 Plaster records “the January 2000 sniper killing of Maj. Gen. Mikhail Malofeyev, the commander of Russian forces in northern Chechnya.”36

From Grozny to Ukraine

In Grozny the SVD marksman was one man in a three- or four-man cell built around an RPG, a machine gun and an assault rifle, and the cell’s job was not to snipe but to kill armored vehicles. The sniper fixed the infantry with aimed fire while the RPG gunner engaged the vehicle from the flank, and four or five cells could converge on a single target.2325 When Russia rebuilt its own capability for the second war, it copied the model, and put four sniper companies into the city to scout it before the ground forces entered.2324

Plaster observed that Iraqi insurgents mimicked the Chechen hunter-killer model, combining snipers with RPG rocketeers and machine gunners for hit-and-run attacks, and that “some Iraqi terrorist videos have featured an SVD-armed sniper alongside insurgents with RPGs and AKs.”36 A U.S. military counter-sniper briefing from Iraq described insurgent sniper cells of two to four personnel: a shooter, a driver who doubled as spotter and security, and optional support for masking fire and video.120 The U.S. Army answered with its own small kill teams: a sniper or designated marksman, a machine gunner, a grenadier and riflemen, set into deliberate ambush positions to engage the cells on their own terms.121

In Ukraine the model continued to evolve. Grau and Bartles, writing in 2022 for the U.S. Army’s Infantry magazine, documented the Russian breakthrough tactical group dividing its snipers into four pairs: one for observation and target designation, three engaging from 1,000 to 1,800 meters with the SVD and the heavier 12.7mm ASVKM.119 The three- or four-man team persisted, but a new member joined it: the drone operator, using small unmanned systems for targeting, reconnaissance and securing the team’s own position.W

The hide

John Muhammad, born in 1960, was a Desert Storm veteran and a convert to Islam who had lost custody of his children; in 2000 he met Lee Boyd Malvo in Antigua and “unofficially adopted him as a second son.”2 On 9 September 2002 Muhammad bought a 1990 Chevrolet Caprice from Christopher M. O’Kupski in Trenton, New Jersey, for $250. He had looked at several cars already and rejected them because the trunk was too small.2 Before he bought this one, O’Kupski testified, “Muhammad got into the trunk and lay down.” When it was sold “the Caprice did not have a hole in the trunk or a passageway from the backseat to the trunk; the trunk was not spray-painted blue; and the windows were not tinted.”103

Muhammad and Malvo tinted every window but the windshield, “an effective form of urban camouflage.” They hinged the back seat at the top so a man could slide from the seat into the trunk and back without being seen. A hole went into the trunk lid above the license plate, “just big enough to shoot through, but small enough it did not arouse suspicion,” and a cloth stuffed it when it was not in use.2 When police searched the car on the night of the arrest, “The trunk was spray-painted blue. A hole had been cut into the trunk lid, just above the license plate. The hole was blocked by a right-handed brown glove that matched the left-handed glove found in the woods near the Johnson shooting. The trunk also had a rubber seal that crossed over the hole.”103

They carried a Bushmaster XM-15 in .223, with a 16-inch barrel, a collapsible stock, a Bushnell holographic sight built for close targets in low light rather than a telescope, and a detachable Harris bipod, stolen from Bull’s Eye Shooter Supply in Tacoma, so that no paper connected it to the men who carried it until they were caught with it.2 Ballistics tied the fragments from shooting after shooting to “the Bushmaster rifle possessed by Muhammad when he was arrested.”103 Shooting from inside the trunk through a small hole hid the muzzle flash and blast and contained the report. Witnesses took it for a backfire or a tire. The ejected brass and the powder smoke stayed in the trunk with the shooter.2 They parked with the trunk toward the target and drove away slowly afterward, and on at least four occasions Muhammad and Malvo fired from adjacent woods instead, one of them at the Caprice with a walkie-talkie calling updates to the shooter.2

The pattern and the calls

The first killings were spread across the country and across weapons: a .45 pistol in Tacoma, a rifle in Tucson, a pistol and a robbery in Maryland, a pistol and a robbery in Atlanta, and “It was only after Muhammad and Malvo stopped varying their tactics to intentionally spread terror in the D.C. area that they set a pattern and the different killings became tied together.”2

In Montgomery, Alabama, on 21 September, Claudine Parker and Kelly Adams were shot with a rifle as they closed a liquor store, and a young man ran up to go through their purses; a passing police officer chased him, and Malvo dropped an “ArmorLite” gun catalog with his fingerprints on it.103 On the morning of 9 October Dean Meyers was shot in the head by a single bullet while fueling his car at the Sunoco on Sudley Road in Manassas; a witness had seen the two men there about an hour before, police interviewed Muhammad in a parking lot across the street without arresting him, and “Muhammad’s fingerprints were on a map police found in the parking lot where Muhammad had been interviewed.”103

In the woods behind the Bowie school where Iran Brown was shot, police found a tarot card, the one for death, with “Call me God” written on it and on the back “For you, Mr. Police. Code: Call me God. Do not release to the Press.”103 On 15 October a Rockville dispatcher took a call: “Don’t say anything, just listen, we’re the people who are causing the killings in your area. Look on the tarot card, it says, ’call me God, do not release to press.’ We’ve called you three times before trying to set up negotiations. We’ve gotten no response. People have died.”103 After Jeffrey Hopper was shot at the Ponderosa in Ashland on 19 October, a note in a plastic bag demanded ten million dollars in a Bank of America account with “unlimited withdrawl at any atm worldwide,” set a deadline, and ended “P.S. Your children are not safe anywhere at anytime.”103

The investigation

The investigation “eventually included more than 20 local, two state and at least ten federal law enforcement agencies.”47 Moose on his own command post: “The JOC was built without our full understanding of what it was. We had never been trained in how to establish or operate a JOC for a case of this magnitude.”47 Tip lines took more than 100,000 calls, 10,000 of them in one day, and generated some 16,000 investigative leads.47 The FBI’s Rapid Start system tracked those leads and nothing more: “it has no basic analytic capabilities. It cannot identify and analyze possible patterns of suspect activity.”47 Witnesses reported white vans, and on 13 October, on CNN’s Late Edition, the chiefs discussed the lookout for a Caprice “but remain focused on a white box truck.”47

Robert Holmes, an auto mechanic, had been Muhammad’s friend for seventeen years. The day after the ninth victim was killed in the Home Depot lot he called the FBI and said he knew who the sniper was. Muhammad had once asked him, “Can you imagine the damage you could do if you could shoot with a silencer?”102 On 22 October agents showed Holmes a security-camera photograph and he confirmed it was Muhammad, and when they played a recorded message from the sniper he said the voice was not Muhammad’s but could be Malvo’s.102 On 23 October a DMV photograph of Muhammad reached the task force, investigators identified the make, model and tag of his Caprice, and that night the lookout went out over police radio for both men and the car.47 “CNN is the first to pick up on the BOLO and the Caprice’s tag number. Almost two hours after the BOLO is issued over the police radio, FOX News releases the make, model and tag number of the Caprice to the nation’s public.”47 At about 12:54 a.m. on 24 October a civilian who had heard the description over his van radio saw the Caprice at the westbound rest stop at mile marker 39 on Interstate 70, near Myersville, Maryland. The two men were asleep inside it. State troopers shut the interstate in both directions. Tactical officers from the Montgomery County police, the Maryland State Police and the FBI rehearsed together, and took the men from the car at about 3:30 a.m.47

The trunk and the aftermath

What Muhammad added to the vehicle firing position was concealment of the shooter’s body inside the trunk, so that no witness ever saw a rifleman, and the attacks could happen in daylight in a commercial parking lot without anyone seeing a weapon.

“Forty-five percent of residents reported going to public spaces such as parks and shopping centers less than usual and 5.5 percent reported missing at least one day of work due to the sniper attacks.”105 A study of hospital staff found levels of acute stress disorder “similar to levels of PTSD in New York City after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks.”105 Coverage ran around the clock, nationally and abroad, and PERF’s reading is that “the snipers’ random violence caused many citizens to feel an intense personal vulnerability, especially on the heels of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the nearby Pentagon and the anthrax-tainted letters mailed to the area.”47

Muhammad was tried in Virginia for the murder of Dean Meyers and executed on 10 November 2009.106 Malvo, seventeen at the time of the shootings, is serving four consecutive life terms.107

The van and the camera

Iraqis covered van windows with stickers, tint, sun blinds and curtains as a matter of course, “excellent concealment for a sniper sitting in the back of van.” There were no high-angle shots, and in every attack pedestrians and cars passed between the camera and the target, so the shooter was at street level. The camera panned the street after some shots, which no car trunk allows, so the hide was a van.2 Most of the clips show an alert checkpoint of half a dozen armed soldiers, set in the same place day after day, which gave the sniper days or months to study it. Every checkpoint in the film stood on or beside a road his van could reach.2 The Asymmetric Warfare Group’s awareness briefing put it in bullets: “Most shots take place 50 to 100m,” “Street level, opposite side of the street,” “Vehicle may have loop holes,” and over photographs of a captured taxi, “2 Layers of Metal Peeled Back to Hide Rifle,” “Seat folds down hiding compartment,” “Blanket covers everything.”110

“Inexplicably, in at least eight of the attacks, Juba shot the soldiers in their body armor. In some of these attacks Juba actually saw the soldiers get up and run away or simply bend over like they had the wind knocked out of them.”2 West took the weapon for 7.62mm or smaller from its failure against plates built to stop that round; other analysts, from a brief glimpse of the rifle in the film, called it a Tabuk, the Iraqi build of a Yugoslav Kalashnikov variant chambered in 7.62×39mm.2 The Leavenworth briefing carried the SVD’s data sheet beside the stills: a four-power PSO-1 scope, a sighting range of 1,300 meters, and a 7N13 enhanced-penetration round rated against a flak vest at 800 meters.108 Which rifle the shooter in the film actually held is unresolved.2

In one widely circulated video the narrator, calling himself the “brigade commander,” says: “The idea of filming the (result of) operations is very important because the scene that shows the falling soldier when hit has more impact on the enemy than any other weapon.”111 Leavenworth told deploying units that “THE PRESENCE OF A LOCAL NATIONAL FILMING A COALITION PATROL WITH A HANDHELD VIDEO CAMERA (WITHOUT MEDIA IDENTIFICATION) MUST BE CONSIDERED AS A POSSIBLE INDICATOR OF AN IMPENDING ATTACK.”108 Cori Dauber, for the Strategic Studies Institute, noted the audience the tapes were cut for: “these tapes, after all, were sent to CNN, not al Jazeera.”51 CNN’s Michael Ware translated the soundtrack of one on air: “’People are around them,’ warns the sniper’s spotter, who seems to be operating the video camera. ’Want me to find another place?’ ’No, no,’ comes the reply. ’Give me a moment.’”51

One sniper or more

Attacks in the same style went on after the two men in the silver van were caught, which “proved there was no single Juba, but several well-trained sniper teams using an identical methodology.”2 Jamestown’s analyst found that “some attacks are videotaped by a separate camera and not by the rifle mounted lens,” and that “Jihadi websites say that ’Juba’ belongs to a whole battalion of snipers from the Islamic Army of Iraq.”54 ABC News in February 2006: “The U.S. military said Juba does not exist. They claim he’s an urban legend, perhaps a composite of several snipers,” and of his claimed 143 American dead, “It is impossible to verify that claim.”52 Captain Brendan Hobbs, commanding Company C, 2nd Battalion, 14th Infantry, in April 2007: “Juba the Sniper? He’s a product of the U.S. military. We’ve built up this myth ourselves.”53

Jasim Husayn Nabeer, Muhammed Sabeh Latif and Mustafa Hussayn, “self-proclaimed members of Jaysh al-Islami, or the Army of Islam,” were arrested by 6th Iraqi Army Division troops in October, after two months of shooting in the Baghdad neighborhoods of Ameriyah and Azamiah, while driving a van they had modified for sniper missions. Troops recovered two sniper rifles, a silencer, ammunition, hand grenades and money.26 The van held a hidden compartment for the weapons and a porthole cut in the rear panel to fire through from concealment. A video camera and its mount came out of the van as well, and the camera carried a recording of a recent sniper operation by the three.26 Nothing in the record connects them to the name on the 2005 video.26 Iraq’s central criminal court convicted Nabeer and Latif on 22 July 2007 and Hussayn, the driver, on 25 July, on confessions to at least two coalition soldiers killed and nine shot. “Nabeer confessed to eight sniper shootings recorded on a recovered terrorist propaganda video,” and all three were sentenced to death.26

The counter-sniper

“In densely populated urban environments, the techniques used to react to a sniper in a high-threat environment will rarely be effective against the sniper, but will cause substantial casualties among non-combatants, increasing support for enemy forces, and ultimately resulting in greater friendly casualties. The use of a ’mad moment’ or ’recon by fire’ will likely cause substantial collateral damage while increasing confusion and the likelihood that the enemy sniper can successfully escape.”86 The sniper’s moment of greatest risk is the shot: “The muzzle blast can be detected with acoustic sensors at ranges from several hundred meters out to more than a kilometer,” and the flash with infrared sensors that need line of sight, “and the flash can be suppressed.”86 A PDCue system’s pointing vector was plus or minus six degrees, so a shot from 750 yards was placed inside an area “158 yards wide,” and the Boomerang II’s two and a half degrees gave “65 yards wide, still wide enough to provide for multiple potential hides.”112

The 3rd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment employed seven sniper teams in southern Baghdad, four of them school-trained, with the Barrett .50 caliber rifle and the M24, never fewer than four men to a team, and inserted with crew-served weapons.113 On 3 November 2005 L Troop’s snipers “succeeded in destroying an AIF IED cell at CP 21 on MSR Tampa. This action resulted in at least 4 AIF killed and 3 AIF wounded.”113 Later that month K Troop’s snipers, working from pattern analysis, sat on the roof of Patrol Base 2 at the predicted time and azimuth of a mortar team’s fire. They engaged it at about 650 meters, one insurgent was killed, and the base stopped receiving fire from the south.113

Ramadi and Habbaniyah

On 21 June 2004, on the roof of a two-story house 800 yards east of Combat Outpost in Ramadi, a four-man team from Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines was killed in daylight at point-blank range: “four Marines lay dead, three shot in the head and the fourth riddled with bullets. One Marine’s throat had been slit. The Marines didn’t get off a shot.”64 Corporal Tommy Parker, the team’s only trained sniper, had told his wife a month before, “They’re sending us to the same place, by the same route at the same time of day.”64 On 1 August 2005 a six-man team on a hilltop at Haditha was mortared and overrun, and the attackers’ video showed the team’s equipment laid on the ground for display: “two M40 sniper rifles, several M16s, heavy and light machine guns, radios and laser spotting scopes.”114 An Army briefing recorded the consequence: “Proven USMC two-man sniper teams are no longer allowed in Iraq, due to successful insurgent countersniper efforts (killings of 2 groups of snipers earlier in the war).”111

On 16 June 2006, near Habbaniyah, a 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines sniper section lay in a hide and watched a man in a parked car videotape a passing patrol. A rifle stock stood beside him. The section’s sniper was 21 years old, and he “recited a mantra in his head. Breathe, relax, aim, squeeze, surprise. The enemy sniper died with the gun in his lap.”65 His spotter put three rounds into the driver before the car could start. The rifle in the dead man’s lap was the M-40A1 taken from the four Marines at Ramadi two years before, almost to the day.65

The prepared defense

In Mosul ISIS turned the terrain to its advantage through keyhole and loophole firing, tunnels, bunkers and camouflage, a trunked cell network, its own aerial surveillance, concealment among the population, and thermal signature masking.70 Fighters knocked “mouse holes” through rooftops and the sides of buildings and took down the interior walls between row houses, so that they moved freely inside the block and the point of origin of their fire was hard to fix.70 They moved through tunnels and “wormholes” between buildings, which made it much harder to know whether a building held fighters or civilians.70 “They would tunnel from house to house in order to avoid detection by overhead surveillance tools,” Amos Fox wrote, and John Spencer described the countermeasure to the cameras above: “they hung sheets, plastic, and other items between rooftops to allow them to move from building to building without the fear of being seen by most military aerial assets.”11885

Dense urban terrain let the defender “engage friendly forces with multiple weapon systems such as improvised explosive devices, antitank guided missiles, and snipers from various concealed positions.”70 “On 26 November 2016, ISIL deployed snipers on rooftops of inhabited houses in the al-Baladiyat neighbourhood of eastern Mosul. ISIL threatened to kill any residents who oppose this practice. Families living in such houses feared ISF return fire.”71 On 31 December a sniper shot a 29-year-old man and his father when they left their home in Muthanna to bring drinking water from their neighbours; on 22 January 2017 snipers killed three civilians fleeing al-Rashidiya toward the Iraqi lines in Arabi.71 In the densely populated areas of West Mosul, ISIS “took full advantage of coalition sensitivity to civilian casualties and used the civilian population as shields.”70

Fires against a sniper

A battalion fire support officer who supported the Iraqis through the whole battle said the unit moved to the M982 Excalibur and the M1156 Precision Guidance Kit as it pressed into the city, for fear of collateral damage. Neither round did what it wanted. The Excalibur “would successfully penetrate through the roof and maybe one additional floor before detonating,” and the PGK, with no delay fuze, was poor at high angles.70 Fire supporters worked around it by shooting at the sides of buildings with multi-round missions. Against a sniper on the third floor of a five-story building, the first round was meant to punch a hole in the wall, and the M1156’s accuracy to send the second and third through the same hole to get an effect on that floor.70

Al Jadidah

On 17 March 2017 coalition forces conducted 81 engagements. In one, Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service troops called for close air support to destroy two ISIS snipers they placed on the roof of a building in the al Jadidah district of West Mosul.70 CTS observers had identified the two snipers firing effectively on CTS soldiers from a defensive fighting position in the southwest corner of the structure’s second story, and at 0824 a coalition aircraft dropped “a single GBU-38 precision-guided munition,” a 500-pound class weapon carrying 192 pounds of explosive, with a delayed fuse expected to confine its effect to the second floor.115 “The GBU-38 entered the roof and detonated in the second floor of the structure.”115 Its detonation ignited explosive materials ISIS had emplaced in the structure. The secondary explosion collapsed the building, killing the two ISIS snipers and 101 civilians sheltered on the bottom floors, and four more civilians in the neighboring structure to the west.115 An explosive ordnance team found PETN and nitroglycerin residue, and the crater at the rear of the building, far from the bomb’s entry, was put down to ISIS-emplaced explosive “conservatively” more than four times the weight of the bomb’s own charge.115 “Ultimately, the investigation showed that ISIS had purposefully trapped civilians in the building, placed explosives in the building’s lower levels, and then established a firing position on the second floor with the intent of drawing coalition fire, thereby triggering the explosives.”70

What the reports did

Reports “published within a few days of the event” accused the coalition of violations of the law of armed conflict and war crimes, and Amnesty International wrote that “the high civilian toll suggests that coalition forces leading the offensive in Mosul have failed to take adequate precautions to prevent civilian deaths, in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.”70 The investigation had first to find which of the day’s strikes and which unit’s authorization were involved. Then it had to reach a site still close to the forward line, and clear its findings for release. By then “the damage to the coalition’s legitimacy was not easily undone.”70 Counts of the dead differ: 105 by the command, 162 bodies recovered at the site by the UN mission’s information, “over two hundred” in the Modern War Institute’s case study.11571117

The longest shot

In June 2017 the Canadian Armed Forces confirmed that a member of Joint Task Force 2 had “successfully hit a target at 3,540 metres” during an operation in Iraq within the previous month, killing an Islamic State fighter, with a McMillan TAC-50 fired from a high-rise. The bullet took under ten seconds to arrive.116 “The shot in question actually disrupted a Daesh attack on Iraqi security forces,” a military source said. “Instead of dropping a bomb that could potentially kill civilians in the area, it is a very precise application of force and because it was so far way, the bad guys didn’t have a clue what was happening.”116