They were heading for Zumbelay, a village to the east of Gereshk. It was the first time the Paras had been in that area. Blair’s intention was to meet some villagers, listen to their concerns and establish some ‘ground truth’. The journey took about ninety minutes. Zumbelay was a pleasant contrast to the terrain they passed through. It was a lush place of poppy fields, tall grass and plantations, watered by irrigation ditches that fed off a broad canal.
They stopped about a mile from the village. The FSG drove their WMIKs up to a ridge overlooking Zumbelay from the north on the far side of the village. The rest of the vehicles, together with the mortar team, followed, and parked up to the west of them.
The patrol set off towards the mud walls of the village. The working day was over and men were herding their goats back to their pens, churning up clouds of dust that hung in the late afternoon sunlight. It was very hot. The soldiers took off their helmets. All seemed quiet and peaceful. It was only afterwards that Lamb realised there was something missing from the scene. Where were the flocks of inquisitive children who invariably run out clamouring for sweets and pens whenever a foreigner approaches?
They came across a few men sitting on a bank under a mulberry tree. Blair announced through his interpreter that they were British, not Americans. They were there at the invitation of the Afghan government and they came as friends and brothers who wanted to help.
One, who seemed to have some authority, explained that there was no one around at present. They were all at prayer. If the soldiers came back two days later at ten in the morning they could hold a proper shura. They spent about twenty minutes sitting down and chatting, before the leader of the group suggested they leave the village at the opposite end to that by which they had come. There was a bridge there which would get them across the waterway. They shook hands and headed out of the village towards where the vehicles were waiting.
Blair was encouraged by the reasonably friendly attitude of the villagers. Lamb was less sure. Afghans had a reputation for hospitality. Why had they not been offered tea? Her question was answered almost immediately by the crack and rattle of gunfire coming from the ridge where the FSG was parked. Over the radio came the superfluous news that they were in contact.
The incident had begun when a satellite patrol pushed out from the main group noticed a group of about a dozen men moving towards the high ground and radioed the FSG. The group was commanded by Captain Alex Mackenzie, a witty, confident Scot who had gone to Sandhurst after studying law at Edinburgh University. Mackenzie decided to take a look, ordering the convoy vehicles grouped near by to provide cover while he and his WMIKs investigated. As they were about to set off, an RPG crashed into their position followed by a spray of small-arms fire. The air was swamped with the deafening racket of the .50-cals as two of the WMIKs commanded by Sergeant Paul McMellon opened up on the Taliban firing point inside a derelict building on the far side of the cluster of convoy vehicles.
Mackenzie left them to it and raced over to the convoy. Some of the drivers had dismounted and taken cover behind the Snatches. He ordered them to get back in and head for the cover of some dead ground to the south-east, where they would be out of the line of fire. It seemed to Mackenzie that the Taliban’s aim had been to destroy the vehicles first before turning their full attention to the dismounted patrol that had gone into the village. ‘If we lose the vehicles then we can’t pick up the patrol, and that is why we were attacked,’ he said. ‘They are not stupid, so they hit us first.’ The Snatches hurried into cover, protected by the WMIKs. All four .50-cals were pounding away, yet the Taliban kept up an impressive rate of fire, with RPGs, small-arms fire and the occasional mortar.
Down in Zumbelay, Blair and his men were watching the firefight. They had just left the village and were walking through a field in search of the bridge that had been recommended to them by the village elder.
Suddenly Kalashnikov rounds buzzed over their heads. There was a yell of ‘Helmets on!’ and the Paras and their media companions ran blindly forward. The field was ploughed and sun-baked into hard, ankle-twisting ridges. They stumbled forward with bullets singing in their ears. Justin Sutcliffe tripped and fell, landing on his back. He looked up to see an RPG scorching over his head. He struggled to his feet and lumbered on, weighed down by body armour and camera gear. A few seconds later a mortar landed just where he had been lying.
By now, the fire was coming from several different directions. The soldiers scrambled for the cover of the deep irrigation ditches that cross-hatched the fields at the edge of the village, slithering gratefully down the slimy mud walls. The patrol was scattered and the men were out of each other’s line of sight. The gunfire mingled with shouts and yells as they tried to restore communications with each other. Red and green smoke rose across the field as marker canisters were set off – even though they gave away the soldiers’ positions to the Taliban.
There was no question of staying put. The Taliban mortar men had them at their mercy. The only thing was to keep moving forward, towards the ridge and the vehicles. It was terrifying lying in the clammy ditches, with rounds snapping overhead, waiting for the mortar bombs to arrive. The fire was coming from all sides now. Fear drove everyone on. They hauled themselves and their kit up one slippery bank and down another, splashing into the muddy water.
Blair had been beseeching Bastion for close air support since soon after the start of the contact, and was initially told that two A-10s were in the area and would be overhead in twenty minutes. The relief that this message brought turned to anger when it was announced that the Thunderbolts had been diverted to the Sangin area to help out British forces who were stuck in a heavy firefight with insurgents.
Lamb found herself in a ditch with Private Kyle Deerans, a twenty-three-year-old South African who was one of the snipers. Alongside them was Colour Sergeant Mick Whordley, thirty-nine, who had only a few months left in the army after twenty-two years’ service. He had begged Blair to let him off his normal duties at base to go out on the patrol. Whordley noticed some movement behind a mound of earth and shouted out to Deerans, who swung his sniper rifle towards a man in a blue dishdasha. As the man popped up out of cover, Deerans shot him through the chest.
Dusk was falling. A haze of smoke floated over the fields from burning poppy stalks which had been set on fire by the tracer. In the middle of the battle zone, a tethered donkey serenely contemplated the madness going on around him. There was no sight or sound of aircraft. The Paras and the journalists were going to have to get out of this on their own.
It was the FSG which eventually turned the battle. Mackenzie and his men had left the convoy vehicles to the south, where they were out of harm’s way and could provide flank and rear protection. Mackenzie then returned with Sergeant McMellon and the WMIKs to try to help the patrol. It was almost impossible to see what was going on amid the tall grass and the deep ditches. The only indication of their comrades’ whereabouts was the drifting smoke from the phosphorus grenades they had set off in order to obscure their attackers’ visibility. Radio messages did not help. ‘They kept saying, “We are two hundred metres or three hundred metres from the edge of town,” but they had been saying that for a long time so I was starting to think, “Do they actually know where they are?” because there was nothing visible to me,’ said Mackenzie. Two or three times he and his men ventured into the battlefield, drawing harassing fire from hidden Taliban, but were forced out again because they could not identify targets and were in danger of getting shot up by their own side. They pulled back to the south.
Night was about to envelop the battlefield. Mackenzie thought: ‘If we keep fighting for much longer … we are going to be fighting at night or we are going to run out of ammunition. We were looking for an opportunity to change things.’ About half an hour before last light, Corporal Scott Mitchell spotted a group of about a dozen armed men moving westwards. Mackenzie led the WMIKs off up on to a low rise and as they reached the crest, there below them, only
100 yards away, were a group of about a dozen Taliban. They were bunched up together, ‘just as if they were queuing up at Sainsbury’s’, said Mackenzie. They were standing in a lane ‘like a little path in an English country garden’ that ran along a line of trees into town.
They saw the Paras just as the Paras saw them. ‘They all opened up and they all missed,’ said Mackenzie. They were firing RPGs, small arms and a ‘Dushka’, the Soviet version of the .50-cal. The only damage was a wheel cover that was whipped off a WMIK by shrapnel from a grenade.
The Paras did not miss. All four WMIKs opened up. The four .50-cals and the four front-mounted GPMGs poured a cone of fire into the hapless Taliban. ‘It was pretty brutal,’ said Mackenzie. ‘There were body parts flying everywhere and you could see people just like … exploding.’
The bass throb of the .50-cals put heart into the men in the ditches. ‘C’ Company’s sergeant major told Mackenzie afterwards that ‘when they heard us firing, they felt their whole morale lift – it was like something out of Star Wars’.
They could now see salvation in the shape of the WMIKs, which laid down a sheet of covering fire to keep the Taliban’s heads down while the exhausted patrol struggled out of the fields and into the open ground towards them. ‘When they came out they were moving very, very slowly,’ said Mackenzie. The WMIKs shepherded them towards the vehicles.
At last they heard the desperately welcome sound of aircraft engines overhead. The Apaches had arrived. But the danger was not yet over. The direct route back to FOB Price involved crossing a bridge across the Helmand. In view of what had happened it was a sure bet that the Taliban had set up an ambush there or planted an IED.
Blair decided to head out into the relative safety of the desert, keeping in constant radio contact with the Apaches to scope out the way ahead. They drove at a snail’s pace for several hours, stopping only when they were sure there was no one in the vicinity. When at last they paused, the vehicles drew into a defensive circle. Everyone dismounted and went over the events of the day. Even the old and bold like ‘C’ Company’s veteran sergeant major Mick Bolton were impressed. ‘It was quite scary,’ he said later. ‘I have never been in a firefight like that ever and hopefully I will never get into another like it. Zumbelay was a tight spot.’
There were obvious lessons to be learned. Whether through coercion or sympathy, the villagers had played their part in the ambush. They had explained the absence of people by saying everyone was in the mosque – but the time the Paras arrived was not the hour for prayer. The Taliban had shown that they could organise themselves quickly if a patrol turned up out of the blue and could mount a competent ambush. The blessing was that their marksmanship was very poor. It was decided that from now on any shuras would be conducted in open country with the elders coming out of the villages to meet the soldiers on ground of their choosing.
They had to wait several hours before there were aircraft available to watch over their journey back to base. Air assets had been tied up overnight helping out an operation near Sangin, which had run into trouble.
Just before they reached the dangerous bridge over the Helmand, two American A-10s swooped low to scare off any lurking insurgents and the convoy trundled safely across and back to FOB Price. It was first light. Mackenzie remembered that for a few minutes, as they arrived, it rained, ‘which was weird. It was the only time it rained in the entire tour.’
News of the episode had reached the camp. Everyone was anxious to hear the story. It was a dramatic one, as readers of the Sunday Times would learn when they read Christina Lamb’s epic account and saw Justin Sutcliffe’s front-line pictures. It was the first real glimpse the public had been given of how the Helmand campaign was shaping up. It did not match the rosy official picture painted before the deployment. Henceforth the campaign was to be fought mostly out of sight of the media.
8
Platoon House
On 21 June, the Paras were sent to Sangin for an operation that was supposed to last a few hours, or at the most a few days. As it turned out, the 3 Para battle group would be stuck there for the remainder of its time in Helmand. The town would come to symbolise the unexpected war they were fighting, surrounded by fanatical enemies, under constant attack, and totally dependent on outside help to keep going. The sketchy details filtering back to Britain suggested it was the War on Terror’s version of the Alamo or Rorke’s Drift. The comparisons were inaccurate. The Taliban were never to get close to overrunning the base. But Sangin was a grim, bloody, frightening and exhausting place to be in the summer of 2006.
Once again, the Paras were acting at the behest of Governor Daoud. His supporters in the town were in trouble. Two days before, the Taliban had ambushed a convoy carrying Jama Gul, a former district chief in Helmand, near the town, killing him and his four bodyguards. A large group of Gul’s relatives set out to retrieve the bodies. They too were attacked and twenty-five were killed.
Among the wounded was the son of the district chief, who was said to be in a critical state. Daoud asked Charlie Knaggs if he could send a force to evacuate him for treatment. As commander of the Helmand Task Force, Knaggs had a close relationship with the governor. According to the commander of British Forces, Ed Butler, Knaggs ‘invested hugely in [the relationship], a lot of time drinking tea and reassuring, persuading, cajoling, correcting, advising and empathising’.
The Paras’ orders were to find the injured man and take him back to Bastion for treatment. They were also initially tasked with extracting the local police chief. He was in danger of being lynched after being accused of raping a little girl.
Everyone was understandably uneasy about going to the rescue of an alleged sex offender. It was hardly likely to endear the British to the locals. According to Martin Taylor, ‘there was definitely a feeling among the blokes of “why the hell are we going to support this guy? We should go and kill him, then we would get the locals on our side straight away.”’
The police chief’s alleged behaviour came as little surprise. The ANP had a reputation among much of the local population for abusing the people they were supposed to protect. They were notorious for stealing, extortion and the molestation of juveniles. From what the Paras could see, they contributed little to the security of the town and were suspected of collaborating with the Taliban when it suited their purposes. It was no wonder that the local population were said to hate them more than they did the insurgents.
There were other reasons to feel anxious about the operation. Intelligence reports said that there were swarms of Taliban in the area who would almost certainly react forcefully to the appearance of a large British force.
Tootal was concerned about the risks to his own men and also about the possible damage that would be done to Sangin and its inhabitants in the event of a major fight with the insurgents. He passed this up the military and political line to Kabul. The judgement was that it was essential to support the authority of President Karzai and Governor Daoud in Sangin. The district governor’s position was precarious. His predecessor, Amir Jan, had been murdered while visiting Musa Qaleh on 3 March. The operation was more than a rescue mission. It would help preserve the Afghan government’s position in the town.
The problem with the police chief was resolved when the elders of Sangin expelled him themselves. That still left many worries, notably the possibility of a major clash with the insurgents when the helicopters put down. The final decision was left with Tootal. Despite the risks, he recognised the political imperative.
Once again, he chose ‘A’ Company for the job. They had been first into theatre and the first to move on to the ground. They had also been the first of the battle group to get involved in a major fight, at Now Zad during Operation Mutay.
Preparations began on 18 June and the plan was trimmed and altered several times before it was finalised in the early hours of 21 June. The Paras were expecting the Taliban to be waiting for them, and the 105mm battery at FOB Robinson and air support were warned to st
and by to strike if needed. Martin Taylor, who sat in on the deliberations, walked away from the last meeting glad that he would not have to listen to any more calculations of ‘significant casualties’ on the helicopter landing site.
Pre-operation nerves were not helped by a delay in the departure time, meaning that the Paras took off in daylight. Twenty-five minutes after leaving Bastion, four Chinook-loads of anxious men settled down in great clouds of dust in a wadi south-west of the Sangin district centre.
Jacked up with adrenalin, the Paras sprang off the back ramp and into a scene of bucolic tranquillity. The predicted mayhem had failed to materialise. 1 Platoon under Hugo Farmer led the way to the district centre, 400 yards from the landing site. When they got there they were welcomed by the beleaguered district governor and his entourage, ‘who were all very happy to see us’. They warned Farmer that there were ‘Taliban all over the area’. 1 Platoon pushed on and set up a cordon between the centre and the edge of the town, a few hundred yards away, while the rest of the men took up positions round the buildings.
The wounded district governor’s son was examined by Harvey Pynn, the 3 Para MO. The final order to move had been given just twenty-five minutes before take-off, and it was only when Pynn heard movement outside his tent during the night that he realised the operation was definitely on. He grabbed the ‘A’ Company medic, Corporal Paul Roberts, and another medical specialist, Sergeant Brian Reidy, and reached the landing site just in time to catch a helicopter.
Now he was looking at the cause of all the fuss. The young man was accompanied by two young doctors from the local hospital. Pynn noted that his stomach had been operated on efficiently, the internal wounds patched up and the debris removed. There was ‘a bit of tummy discomfort’ but he was ‘actually very, very stable’. Pynn concluded that ‘he didn’t need any intervention from me other than another shot of antibiotics, a bit more fluid and some pain relief’.
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