Combat Camera

by Christian Hill

  *

  Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes cafeteria and shop.

  *

  A British security firm, G4S provided close-protection teams for Foreign Office and DfID staff, allowing them to perform their duties without the obtrusive presence of uniformed soldiers. Ex-regulars with at least seven years’ military service and two hostile operational tours under their belts manned most of their teams.

  *

  United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (online), 19th January 2010: ‘Corruption Widespread in Afghanistan, UNODC Survey Says’.

  Two-Headed Beasts

  On the afternoon of Friday 15th April a man in ANP uniform walked into the police-headquarters complex in Kandahar. He waited in the courtyard outside the office of the Chief of Police, Khan Mohammed Mujahid. A former Mujahidin leader, Mujahid had already survived two previous attempts on his life. As he emerged from his office to get into his car, the man in ANP uniform stepped forward and detonated the explosives packed into his suicide vest. Mujahid died in the blast, along with two other ANP officers. Three others were wounded. The Taliban claimed the dead bomber as one of their own.

  I read about the attack while sitting in the JMOC, wondering how long it would be before something loud and unpleasant happened at Bastion. When it came to insider attacks, there was no real fighting season in Afghanistan. They happened all over the country on a depressingly regular basis.

  The following morning, a man in ANA uniform walked into a meeting between US troops and soldiers from the 201st ANA Corps at Forward Operating Base Gamberi in Laghman Province. There were around forty people in the room. The man in ANA uniform threw a number of hand grenades at them, before detonating several more on his vest. A few of the soldiers had a split second to hit the floor, and a few managed to jump out of the windows. But only a few. Five US soldiers and four ANA soldiers died in the attack, with seventeen others injured. A US civilian and an Afghan interpreter were also killed.

  “The Afghan and foreign forces had a meeting as usual, and an explosion took place,” said Major Mohammed Osman, a spokesman for the 201st Corps. “We found one leg that we expect might be from the suicide bomber.”

  The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. Their spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said: “We had recruited this man one month ago, and he was serving as an Afghan soldier for the last month.”* He added: “Using these kinds of attacks is very useful for us in recruiting someone and working inside Afghan forces. This inflicts more casualties and does not cause any civilian casualties. We have many more youths who are already in Afghan military ranks waiting for their chance to attack.”

  Security was now being tightened at Bastion. All ISAF personnel entering Shorabak, the large ANA training base located within the camp’s boundaries, were ordered to carry loaded weapons. The ANA was expanding at a rapid rate – they were aiming for 195,000 troops by 2013 – inevitably growing the “threat from within”.

  Some of the more circumspect among us – myself included – also took to carrying a weapon in our own section of camp. The canteen, for a start, was the most obvious place for an attack, with thousands of us sitting down for breakfast, lunch and dinner at the same time every day. Russ and Ali thought I looked ridiculous fetching my Weetabix and fruit salad with a Browning 9-mm pistol on my hip, but that didn’t bother me. There was a thin line between being prepared and being paranoid, and I was more than happy to cross it.

  Two days after the killings in Laghman Province, a man in ANA uniform walked into the Defence Ministry in Kabul, hours before a visit from the French Defence Minister. He got up to the second floor before opening fire on ANA soldiers, killing two and injuring seven others. A security guard shot him dead before he could detonate his explosive vest. The unstinting Zabiullah Mujahid claimed the attacker was a Taliban sleeper agent who’d been serving in the ANA for three years and working in the Defence Ministry for six months, while the ANA’s military spokesman, General Zahir Azimi, insisted the investigation was still ongoing.

  “We don’t know whether he was a member of the army or not,” said General Azimi. “All I can say is that he was wearing an Afghan National Army uniform. It doesn’t mean he was an army soldier. You know, finding a uniform is easy. They can find it anywhere, and they can make it. People sell military equipment in the bazaar. We have collected and confiscated uniforms several times, but it’s hard to collect all of them.” He added: “We have set up a security team who is watching suspicious people inside military forces, but it’s hard to recognize them.”*

  * * *

  Two days later, on 20th April, we flew to Kabul to cover the most banal of stories. A team of civilian repairmen were visiting all the ISAF camps in the Afghan capital, carrying out maintenance checks on gym equipment. We were going to follow their progress.

  Faulkner felt it made for a worthwhile story. Apparently it would highlight the fantastic training facilities available to both British and Afghan troops. He dismissed a request from TFH for the Combat Camera Team to deploy instead on a recce with 24 Commando Engineer Regiment, who were preparing to build a bridge over the Nahr-e Bughra Canal in Nahr-e Saraj.

  “Media operations should be one big happy family,” Faulkner said, following another terse phone conversation with Colonel Lucas. “Not this two-headed beast.”

  The flight to Kabul took just over an hour. There were about forty troops in our Hercules, half of them soldiers from the ANA. They all sat together down one side of the aircraft, while the British and Americans sat down the other side. The lights were dimmed for most of the flight, making reading difficult, and the noise drowned out any attempts at conversation. Most of us just slept for the journey, our spongy little earplugs reducing the roar of the engines to a hypnotic drone.

  Kabul was much cooler than Bastion – I felt the difference at the airport, as soon as I stepped off the back of the Hercules. At the higher altitude, daytime temperatures sank by around ten degrees. Being tucked into the side of the Hindu Kush, the landscape was also very different: unlike the desert that encircled Bastion, Kabul was surrounded by mountains.

  I walked over to the terminal with Russ and Ali. All the flight baggage had been dumped on the tarmac outside a set of double doors beneath a sign that read: “Welcome to Kabul”. We picked up our kit and walked through to the terminal concourse, a bizarre hybrid of defence installation and retail hotspot. It bristled with shops and cafés, giving it the air of a militarized tourist zone. Soldiers and airmen in a mixture of uniforms – German, Polish, Estonian – drank coffee and browsed through all the strange items on sale. If you were in the market for ISAF crockery or a War on Terror chess set (the white pieces featuring the likes of Barack Obama and Donald Rumsfeld, the black pieces led by Osama bin Laden), it was a good place to waste some money.

  The city had suffered a rash of suicide bombings in recent weeks, ramping up the threat level. Our transport from the airport consisted of two Ridgebacks – chunky, heavily protected vehicles, not dissimilar to Huskies. The drivers took us to a nearby British base called Camp Souter, stopping at four checkpoints along the way. It was only 800 metres from the airport, but the journey took more than twenty minutes. We sat in the back of the second Ridgeback with a signaller returning from R&R. He was based at Souter, and had never deployed anywhere else.

  “It’s like a concrete city,” he moaned. “I’m sick of it.”

  He made concrete sound like a bad thing, but to me it meant security, electricity and decent showers. Outside the base’s accommodation block we were met by the admin sergeant, who led me to my own individual room: it had proper walls, a high ceiling with a fan and a television set. Next to the single bed was a tall window with a view across the rooftops of Kabul. It was dark now, and the lights of the city stretched out all the way to the foot of the mountains.

  I met up with Russ and Ali a short time later in the base’s coffee shop. They were sitting at the bar, chatting to a colour sergeant who looked like a leathery, m
iddle-aged version of Robbie Williams. He was based down the road at Camp Julian, training ANA officers.

  “It’s not the ANA doing it,” he said. “It’s Taliban that have infiltrated.”

  He was referring to the recent surge in green-on-blue attacks. To my mind, he was stating the bleeding obvious, but I wasn’t about to say that to his face.* I knew there were Special Forces based at Julian – we’d been told we couldn’t film there for that very reason – and I knew that some of them were involved in ANA training. With no insignia on his uniform, it was clear he wasn’t your average soldier.

  “The ANA commander on our base can usually spot any dodgy recruits,” he said, “but it’s getting harder. More and more recruits are coming through. I’ve got a bunch of ex-Mujahidin starting on Saturday.”

  “They must be getting on a bit,” I said.

  “Most of them are over fifty, but they’re pretty good,” he said. “And they’re less likely to explode.”

  Suicide bombers tended to be young men, if not children. Grizzled war veterans over the age of fifty might snap and grab a machine gun and kill everybody in the room, but they were less inclined to go down the more painstaking route of martyrdom. The ex-Mujahidin were old-school warriors: if they had a grievance with you, they would fight you, but generally try to stay alive at the same time.

  As it happened, Mujahidin Victory Day was due to be marked the following week. It commemorated the Mujahidin’s overthrow of the communist government in 1992, three years after the withdrawal of Soviet troops. As a public holiday, occasioning various parades and civic events, it was naturally a focal point for the insurgents, who always tried to mark the day with some sort of atrocity. A number of possible attacks had already been identified, and the threat level had risen accordingly.

  We were told as much the following morning, during the brief for our journey to Camp Alamo. One of the civilian repairmen was going there to fix some running machines in the gym. It was still a lame story, nothing had changed, and I had no idea where it was going. I wasn’t miserable, though. The sun was shining, and the temperature was a balmy 22°C. Breakfast had been fantastic – I’d poured a ridiculous amount of golden syrup on my pancakes and wallowed in the sugary taste of Western civilization. Life was good.

  Russ and Ali squeezed into the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser with the repairman, who was understandably bemused as to why his assignment merited the attention of a Combat Camera Team. I sat up front with the driver and we all set off for Alamo, hitting the chaotic streets of Kabul in bulletproof comfort.

  The traffic in the city centre may have been a lawless free-for-all, but it was nothing compared to the mayhem outside Alamo. The scene at the front gate was like something out of Wacky Races, with all manner of jeeps, trucks and lorries jockeying for position, everyone trying to get in and out of the base at the same time. The front gate itself, right on the Jalalabad Road, consisted of a pathetic wooden barrier, held up by a rather worried-looking Afghan soldier. Nobody wanted to sit in traffic outside any military base in Afghanistan, but this road in particular was notorious. All of the ISAF bases along a five-mile stretch out of the city centre bore the brunt of a gruelling Taliban schedule, the insurgents targeting the front gates with varying degrees of success. Camp Phoenix, a little farther down the road, had been on the receiving end of the latest attack just two weeks earlier. Their hefty fortifications put Alamo to shame, and the sentries, American soldiers from Ist Squadron 134th Cavalry Regiment, had been able to stand their ground. Two suicide bombers had charged the front gate and blown themselves up, while insurgents on the road had peppered the sentry posts with machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades. Two Americans were injured, but not seriously. Some damage was caused to the gate, but it was soon repaired.

  With no suicidal insurgents to greet us, we managed to get through the gate at Alamo unharmed. It was a joint base, shared between the Afghans and the US, with the ANA occupying the outer section. We drove past hundreds of ANA soldiers on our way in: some marching down the main drag, others leaning over the concrete balconies of their three-storey barrack blocks, elbows resting on damp laundry, and others just sitting on the grass verges in the sunshine.

  The American section of Alamo was like a base within a base. Their entrance was a good deal more secure, with Hesco fortifications and a number of unsmiling guards. We parked outside and walked through a steel turnstile into a gravelled area that led to a series of two-storey concrete offices, behind which sat the gymnasium. It was a wooden, single-storey building which the Americans shared with a small contingent of British troops. We followed the repairman inside, into a room filled with weightlifting equipment. Two men in tight, sweat-soaked T-shirts were working on their bulging arms, but the rest of the kit was unused.

  “I hope it gets busier,” said Ali.

  “The cardiovascular machines are right through here,” said the repairman.

  We followed him into a smaller adjoining room. It was crowded with running machines, but not much else. A tubby middle-aged woman in a hijab and a pink tracksuit was walking at the slowest speed possible on one of them. She looked like she was about to keel over.

  “I need to sort out the belt on this one,” said the repairman. He started to dismantle one of the machines.

  “Do you want me to film this, boss?” said Russ.

  “You might as well,” I said. “Try to get the Afghan woman in the background.”

  “She’s not Afghan, boss.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She’s got a Jordanian flag on her tracksuit.”

  I looked closer at the exhausted woman. She did indeed have a small Jordanian flag on her chest.

  “This is ridiculous,” said Ali. “I can’t believe we’re even doing this.”

  “Well, we’re here now. Let’s just shoot what we can.”

  We loitered in the cardiovascular section for a few more minutes, getting some token shots and footage, then moved back into the weights room.

  “Go fairly tight on those guys,” I said to Russ, nodding towards the two iron-pumpers. “We don’t want this place to look half empty.”

  “They’re not Brits,” he said. “They’re Americans. I heard them talking.”

  “Film them anyway.”

  The whole thing was farcical, but you had to give the lemon a bit of a squeeze before you threw it away. Faulkner hadn’t promised the material to any media outlets: he’d only made a vague reference to some fitness magazines. There were always other stories to find – we’d just have to sniff around. I’d already arranged to film with the Afghan Air Force in two days’ time, so our trip wasn’t going to be entirely wasted.

  Back at Souter, we did find something else to cover. All the British troops on the base, members of the Joint Support Unit, were holding an Easter service. About seventy of them had formed up on the main concourse running through the middle of the base, while the padre gave a reading and led them through a number of hymns.

  Ali took the pictures and I wrote up the press release. She emailed all the material to a number of news agencies back in London, in the hope that some of the shots would make the papers the following day. It was a nice little Easter story, reminding the folks back home that the boys were still out here, bringing a sense of order and decency to this chaotic country (there were no Afghans in any of the shots – which was hardly surprising – but you couldn’t have everything). The British papers were always looking for material to fill out their pages over the bank holiday, so it had a good chance of getting picked up.

  One of the British papers – the Daily Star – did indeed pick up one of Ali’s pictures. Unfortunately, it ran the image alongside a story about an April Fool’s gag in Soldier magazine that had backfired:

  Hundreds of troops fell for a hoax to convince them “sexist” ranks such as “guardsman” were to be ditched. Angry soldiers flooded Internet forums when their official magazine said they would be given new gender-neutral titles. The ar
ticle claimed a guardsman would be called a “protector”, “sentinel” or “escort” and craftsmen would be known as “artificers” or “tradespersons”. It blamed EU equality laws. But the April Fool worked too well and many squaddies fell for it, complaining on blogs and message boards.*

  I knew nothing about this story – it was fluff, really – but it was parked right alongside Ali’s picture of the soldiers at Souter, singing on Easter Sunday. There was a separate caption beneath the image to that effect, but the whole thing fell under the main headline “Armed Farces”.

  Ali was disappointed, understandably, but there wasn’t a lot we could do about it. Once our material was distributed, dropped into the laps of tabloid editors and TV producers, it was out of our hands. We just had to hope that they would use it responsibly, and within its original context. If they decided to go “off message” and come up with a banner headline like that, then we were powerless to stop them. There were no issues relating to operational security, so no one was going to die. It was just a messaging failure. We could moan about it for a while, but then we’d just have to accept it and get on with the next job.

  * * *

  On the Easter Monday we returned to the airport to film the Afghan helicopter pilots. They were members of the Air Interdiction Unit, supporting the ANP on counter-narcotics operations. More than thirty of the pilots and air crew had previously undergone training with the RAF at Boscombe Down. This gave us an angle for the British media, but we were also planning to push the story towards the Afghan media itself, targeting outlets like Kabul’s Tolo TV.

  The Air Interdiction Unit was based in a series of newly built offices and hangars to the north of the airport’s main terminal. Known as North KAIA, it was home to the headquarters of the rapidly expanding Afghan Air Force, which at the time consisted of forty-four helicopters (mostly Russian-made Mi-17s) and thirteen fixed-wing aircraft (mostly C-27A Spartan transports, replacing their old Antonovs) in serviceable condition. The compound was officially opened in May 2009, following a construction process that cost seventy-seven million dollars, making it the single largest wartime construction project in NATO’s history. Thirteen million dollars alone were spent on security upgrades aimed at thwarting bomb attacks on the gates. The opening saw more than two hundred ISAF personnel move into the compound, where they enjoyed a relatively high standard of living, working alongside their Afghan colleagues.