3 Para. Patrick Bishop

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СКАЧАТЬ Hanif, a spokesman for the elusive Taliban leader Mullah Omar, boasted to The Times: ‘We are here to destroy the British. We will hunt and kill them. We will not let them go back to England and say that they have defeated the Afghans.’ It was telling that he couched the fight in nationalist terms. For propaganda purposes, the Taliban presented themselves as patriots rather than Islamic warriors. Hanif’s claim that ‘the British don’t have the capacity to fight us face to face’ suggested a degree of confidence that the new arrivals lacked the resources to challenge the Taliban head-on.

      Soon after he spoke, the Taliban had an indirect encounter with British troops. The Pathfinders, 16 Air Assault Brigade’s elite reconnaissance unit, had been in the Musa Qaleh area at the time of the attack, scoping out possible landing sights. They were ordered to go and give what help they could to the beleaguered policemen. They arrived in darkness as the battle was dying out. It had lasted eight hours, but eventually the Taliban had pulled back. The next morning the ANP, bolstered by the deputy governor, Amir Akhunzada, and his personal militia, who had arrived from the south, piled into pick-up trucks and set off for Baghran, where the attackers had apparently retreated. The thirty-strong Pathfinder force followed in 2.5-ton Pinzgauer troop carriers and armoured Land Rovers. As they approached, they announced their arrival with a show of force. A coalition aircraft dropped a 2,000lb bomb on a hillside near the town. This prompted the Taliban to flee. The ANP then went into town for a shura with the elders.

      The Taliban had not given up, however. Intelligence revealed that they had prepared five bombs along the convoy’s return route. A suicide bomber was also standing by. The convoy avoided these traps but was still caught in an ambush that left two of the Afghan police dead and several wounded. The Pathfinders’ sergeant major, Andy Newell, was impressed by the ANP’s determination. ‘They weren’t shy of getting amongst it,’ he said. ‘One of them was shot through the calf and one through the shoulder and after they were patched up they wanted to get straight back to the fighting which I thought was quite hard of them.’ He had also had a chance to see the Taliban close up. ‘They put up a good fight,’ he said. ‘They obviously had some tactical awareness and knew how to use the country.’ The clash ended when the Pathfinders called in an air strike by American A-10 Thunderbolts. After the Afghan casualties had been evacuated by helicopter the convoy carried on back to Musa Qaleh with no further trouble from the Taliban.

      The poppy-harvest lull was definitely over. On 20 May, a four-vehicle convoy carrying Afghan soldiers, their American trainers and French troops was attacked on Route 611, which connected the important towns of Kajaki and Sangin. Initial reports indicated that up to fifteen ANA soldiers and two Frenchmen had been killed. The convoy eventually limped into FOB Robinson and a Chinook with a medical Immediate Response Team (IRT) on board was flown up to Bastion to bring back the casualties.

      A number of Afghan soldiers were thought to be stranded somewhere along the route, at the mercy of the Taliban. Tootal was asked to send a force to secure the area and rescue the remaining men. It was a job for his ‘Ops One’ company, who were on permanent short notice to jump off on a mission. It was a rotating task and at the time ‘A’ Company were in the role. They set off in two Chinooks, protected by Apache attack helicopters, which were going into operational service with British troops for the first time. Finding the remnants of the convoy, if any, was going to be difficult. The French survivors, who were badly shaken by their ordeal, gave different grid locations for where the attack had taken place.

      In fact there had been several attacks along a long stretch of road and there was no obvious place to put down. Looking down from the Chinook as it scudded at 60 feet over the valley floor, it seemed to Will Pike, the OC of ‘A’ Company, that the rescue plan was ‘enormously difficult and the risk threshold was high’. The road ran along the Helmand river. On either side was a swath of irrigated land, about a mile wide, of orchards, small fields and enclosures, criss-crossed by irrigation ditches. ‘It was all very flat, very, very difficult country to operate in,’ he said. ‘It’s very good for them, but hard for us to get in there in any secure way, or be able to surprise them. It’s a maze and you are facing a threat from three hundred and sixty degrees.’ They carried on a fruitless search until low fuel forced them back to Bastion.

      The following day, at first light, they set off again. This time they found three of the four trucks in the convoy. Two were burned out. An Apache fired a Hellfire missile into the last one to destroy any sensitive equipment that might remain.

      There was no sign of bodies, but the following day local people handed over the corpses of the two dead Frenchmen and the nine missing Afghans to the troops at FOB Robinson.

      Afterwards, the story of what had happened became clearer. A first attempt to drive south had been made on 19 May. Trucks carrying ANA troops, an American team who was mentoring them and the French forces had set off from Kajaki, near the hydroelectric dam that generated electricity for the province, for FOB Robinson and soon came under fire. Two vehicles were lost but no one was hurt. The convoy turned round and tried again the following day. The plan was to take the main highway for the first leg of the route then branch off east into the desert to avoid contact with the locals. Some vehicles appeared to have missed their turning, blinded by the clouds of dust thrown up by the trucks ahead of them. The Taliban had been warned of their approach and proceeded to shoot at them along a 6-mile stretch of road.

      When the incident was analysed it revealed some disturbing realities. It underlined the fact that any vehicles moving along the roads of Helmand were liable to attack. The battle group was already aware of the risks from IEDs. But this was a full-on ambush. It made even clearer the value of helicopters over convoys when inserting large groups of men or carrying out resupplies. Local people appeared to have joined enthusiastically in the Taliban attack. According to Pike, the survivors reported that ‘everyone was coming out of their houses and having a go – quite why, who knows – but the valley in that area kicked off’.

      The search-and-recovery mission had used up precious helicopter hours. This meant a further delay in establishing the ‘Sangin effect’. As preparations resumed, another emergency blew up, requiring another diversion from the programme. A panicky message from the governor claimed that the town of Now Zad, about 60 miles north of his seat in Lashkar Gah, was in imminent danger of falling to the Taliban. It seemed the Taliban had not been deterred by the setback at Musa Qaleh on 18 May. Daoud’s office claimed that there had been several clashes and the police station in the centre of town had come under fire. ‘B’ Company was tasked to fly in and stiffen the meagre resistance that was all the contingent of ANP who were in the town were expected to be able to put up.

      The laconic Giles Timms set off with about half his men. They were pleased to be doing something definite at last. The reports suggested that they would meet strong resistance from the Taliban on arrival. When they landed in Now Zad on 22 May, everything was calm. The smiling chief of police was there to escort them in. At the police station there was little evidence of an epic battle. ‘There was a reasonable amount of brass and empty cartridge cases lying around,’ said Timms. ‘But there was no real evidence that Taliban had tried to make a concerted effort to take the place.’

      Now Zad seemed to be dealing with the crisis admirably. It was ‘a bustling little market town. Not every single shopfront was open for business but maybe two-thirds were.’ They undertook an initial vehicle patrol through town. ‘We got some funny looks, some scowls from people. But we didn’t get taken on. It was just like a normal market town and still was when we left.’

      ‘B’ Company stayed for twelve days. They got to work building up the defences of the police station, which sat on the main street, refreshing themselves with Zam Zam, a sickly, strangely addictive soft orange drink. They were starting more or less from scratch. The existing fortifications amounted to no more than a few rice sacks filled with dirt. The police contingent had been in the habit of standing at their posts for only half an hour each evening before retiring to smoke dope. They were all from elsewhere in the province, Lashkar СКАЧАТЬ