Bloody Heroes

by Damien Lewis

  There are certainly several possible explanations as to why the six hundred fighters surrendered at Mazar, and then broke that surrender agreement at Qala-i-Janghi. But none of them support accusations of a massacre or war crimes. I have argued that the prisoners launched their uprising as part of a strategy aimed at attacking US, British and allied Afghan forces. This conclusion is based on extensive research and first-hand testimony from those who were there. Carrying out such a mock surrender is treachery, and goes against the rules of modern warfare. It was certainly not the first time such tactics had been tried by the ‘foreign Taliban’ in this war.

  In the case of the Qala-i-Janghi uprising, it may have been part of a wider, but ultimately abortive, strategy to counter-attack against allied forces across the whole of northern Afghanistan. At the time of the six hundred fighters’ initial surrender, some 6,000 enemy combatants were holed up in Kunduz, to the east of Mazar, reportedly planning to withdraw from Kunduz, loop northwards overland and launch a lightning counter-attack against Mazar. The six hundred fighters could reasonably have presumed that they would be held at Mazar airport after their surrender. Had that been the case, they would then have been in position to launch an uprising and attack from the south. This would have trapped Mazar – defended at that time by only a handful of British and American troops – in a pincer movement, and it may well have fallen back into enemy hands.

  Some commentators have suggested that the six hundred prisoners had offered a genuine surrender, and that it was only their subsequent treatment by the CIA agents Dave Tyson and Mike Spann that provoked the prisoners into launching the uprising. For example, Alex Perry, of Time magazine: ‘The threats that they [the two CIA officers] made to the Taliban could quite plausibly have set off the revolt.’ Others have claimed that the six hundred prisoners were faced by American and Afghan forces who threatened to kill them, and thus they were forced to launch the uprising and fight for their survival. Some have even suggested that it was the high-profile presence of the Western – ‘infidel’ – media that provoked the prisoners into launching the uprising.

  However, a number of facts run contrary to such theories. First, the enemy combatants who had supposedly surrendered had actually hidden grenades and other weapons under their clothing. This is not the behaviour of those offering genuine surrender. Second, prisoners had launched two previous suicide attacks at the fort in the days prior to the uprising. Again, these are not the actions of genuinely surrendering forces. Third, the fact that concealed weapons were used to launch the uprising strongly suggests that those weapons were hidden with intent. Once they had taken up those weapons that changed their status from prisoners of war to armed combatants. Fourth, at no stage of the battle did any of the fighters offer to surrender, or indeed have that offer turned down. Those who did finally give up did so in part because they had run out of ammunition and to avoid being drowned.

  Certainly, both Afghan parties to the war – Taliban and Northern Alliance – had an extensive record of mistreatment of prisoners of war prior to 9/11. The Taliban had mistreated Northern Alliance prisoners and vice versa. Following the fall of Kunduz and the surrender of 6,000 Taliban prisoners there, reports of greater horrors started to emerge. Some 3,000 prisoners from Kunduz were crammed into a facility built for 800, at Sheberghan prison, in appalling conditions. But they were the lucky ones. Many hundreds of their comrades had reportedly perished on the journey from Kunduz to that prison. Crammed into airless and baking container trucks, they had been driven through the burning hot desert and suffocated in huge numbers. Many of the dead were reportedly buried in mass graves in the desert around Dasht-e-Leili.

  This event has become known as the ‘Convoy of Death’. It is still being investigated by human rights experts, aid workers, the UN and related officials. The US-based Physicians for Human Rights has been particularly rigorous in pursuing such investigations. They maintain that ‘death by container’ has been a cheap means of mass murder utilised by both Afghan forces – Taliban and Northern Alliance – for a decade or more. There now seems little doubt that the Afghan forces who fought alongside British and US special forces were involved in serious abuses in the war. This is one of the problems with fighting ‘proxy wars’ – using small numbers of special forces to direct and assist local forces on the ground. It can be argued that in the Afghan war, UK and US special forces worked alongside allies who committed what could well qualify as war crimes.

  Criticism has been levelled at US and British special forces that they are somehow culpable for such war crimes, alongside their Afghan allies. Those forces have denied such allegations. In February 2002, US CENTCOM was given copies of a Physicians for Human Rights report into the Convoy of Death. CENTCOM subsequently investigated whether US special forces were involved. ‘Central Command looked into it and found no evidence of participation or knowledge or presence [of US forces],’ said Lt. Col. Dave Lapan, a Department of Defense spokesperson. ‘Our guys weren’t there, didn’t watch and didn’t know about it – if indeed anything like this did happen.’ CENTCOM concluded that: ‘No US troops were present anywhere near that site. US troops were present in … the time frame, when the first mass graves were first discovered.’

  In all the research that I have carried out for this book, I have come across little to suggest that such abuses took place during the siege of Qala-i-Janghi. In fact, quite the reverse appears to be true. The ‘surrender’ of the six hundred prisoners was taken as genuine by the Afghan forces; no proper search of the prisoners was carried out because their surrender was treated as authentic; their imprisonment in Qala-i-Janghi took place with representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross being present; the prisoners were constrained by having their hands tied only in response to the suicide grenade attacks. The eventual surrender by the survivors of the revolt was accepted.

  On the evening of 1 December a truck arrived at Sheberghan prison bearing the eighty-six surviving prisoners from the siege of Qala-i-Janghi, including the American Taliban, John Walker Lindh. Upon arrival, it was a medic from the US 5th SOF who first treated Lindh for his wounds. By 2 December representatives of the ICRC were negotiating access to visit the eighty-six prisoners and check on their welfare. At the same time some sections of the press got a chance to interview the survivors. The prisoners included Pakistanis, Sudanese and Somalis, and fighters from the Caucasus.

  ‘It was our commander who began the fighting,’ Abdul Jabar, a defiant 26-year-old Uzbek told a reporter from Britain’s Observer newspaper. ‘It is better to be a martyr than to go to prison. Prison is painful. Our commander said we would fight to the last bit of blood. But we gave up because we had nothing left. We had no ammunition and weapons and they cut the water. Only God knows what will happen to us now.’ Most of the eighty-six survivors from the Qala-i-Janghi uprising ended up as prisoners in the US detention centre at Guantánamo Bay. Guantánamo was set up to hold what the White House terms as ‘unlawful enemy combatants’. Their fate is yet to be decided.

  John Walker Lindh had been amongst the last to give themselves up at the fort siege. It subsequently turned out that he was one of the prisoners interrogated by CIA Agent Mike Spann, just before the start of the uprising. That interrogation was videotaped and it shows Lindh refusing to respond to the CIA agent’s questions. But once he had given himself up, he did talk to the press. From a hospital bed at Sheberghan prison he told a CNN reporter that the uprising was ‘all the mistake of a handful of people. This was against what we had agreed upon and against Islam. It is a major sin to break a contract, especially in military situations.’ But Lindh also demonstrated ongoing commitment to jihad. Asked if jihad was the right cause, he answered: ‘Definitely.’ He claimed to be a member of Ansar – ‘the helpers’ – a group of Arabic-speaking fighters funded by Osama bin Laden and fighting in Afghanistan.

  After Sheberghan, he was moved to the USS Bataan, a navy warship sailing in the north Arabian Sea. After being questi
oned there, he was brought back to the US on 23 January 2002. He was subsequently tried in the US courts, but agreed a plea bargain whereby he would cooperate with US intelligence officials, telling them all he knew about the Taliban and al-Qaeda. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison for supplying services to the Taliban and carrying a rifle and grenades while fighting against Northern Alliance forces. If John Walker Lindh ever associates with terrorists again, he will be tried in the US courts as an enemy combatant.

  ‘He was a soldier in the Taliban,’ his attorney, James Brosnahan, commented. ‘He did it for religious reasons. He did it as a Muslim, and history overcame him.’

  John Walker Lindh’s story shocked America. That there could have been a white American Taliban rocked the nation. But there were countless other Western nationals fighting alongside the AQT forces in Afghanistan at the time. The only difference is that most did not get caught, or if they did they did not surrender under the glare of the world’s media. By the summer of 2002, British intelligence had identified some 3,000–4,000 British or British-based Islamists who had trained in al-Qaeda and Taliban training camps in Afghanistan. Intelligence officials reached this figure using documents recovered from the camps, and after interviewing those captured during the fighting. This shocking figure represents the total numbers that have travelled to attend the camps during the last decade.

  All recruits undertook basic military training and religious instruction. A smaller number went on to receive ‘advanced’ training on how to select terrorist targets. A ‘small minority’ then went on to undertake full terrorist training, learning bomb-making and assassination techniques. From this minority the al-Qaeda leadership drew volunteers for specialist ‘martyrdom’ operations. One of those Britons thus recruited was Richard Reid, the so-called ‘shoe bomber’ who was caught while trying to blow up a passenger airliner in December 2001. For every American Taliban that waged jihad in Afghanistan, there were as many British and other European-based Islamic extremists willing and able to fight alongside them. Scores of these British-based extremists fought against the Northern Alliance and US and UK special forces troops in the war in Afghanistan.

  By March 2002 the war had been largely won by the US, British and allied Afghan troops. Operation Anaconda was then launched, spearheaded by US special forces, a mission to flush out al-Qaeda elements from eastern Afghanistan, once again around the infamous Shah-i-Khot Valley. During Anaconda, US SOF took heavy casualties. One of those killed would have special meaning for Sam Brown, the US SEAL who distinguished himself with such heroism in the battle for Qala-i-Janghi. Neil Roberts, a fellow SEAL, was captured and killed by AQT forces in shocking circumstances. He had survived a fall from an MH47 Chinook helicopter that was hit by an RPG round, but had then been surrounded by al-Qaeda fighters. The SEAL operator had fought them off for thirty minutes, as his colleagues desperately tried to mount a rescue mission. But finally, his machine gun had jammed, and the enemy had closed in on him. He was subsequently tortured and then executed by the mob, the whole grisly scene being captured on video by a US Predator UAV. A six-man rescue team sent in to retrieve the body came under fire, and a second US soldier was killed. A further rescue attempt resulted in five more US deaths, and the area was only declared clear of enemy forces after US gunships destroyed the enemy mortar and machine-gun positions. The seven American bodies, including that of Neil Roberts, were then retrieved. The US military gave the battle location the name ‘Roberts’ Ridge’, in memory of their fallen comrade.

  After the tragedy of Operation Anaconda, Delta Force mounted a payback mission and invited several men from the SEALs to join them, as it was one of their guys who had died. The team flown in on this payback mission included one SBS soldier, on secondment to the SEALs. They were taken into an area where they knew that an al-Qaeda convoy was passing through – because the convoy was unknowingly being tailed by a UAV. The ambush team were dropped on the ridgeline, and when they spotted the five-vehicle convoy in the valley below them they opened up with everything they had. Those enemy who managed to get out of the vehicles were hardly able to raise their weapons and return fire, before they too were taken out.

  Once the firefight was over, the Delta and SEAL (and SBS) ambush force descended to the valley floor. As they searched through the twenty-odd bodies, they noticed that most were Arabs or Chechens, with few Afghans among them. Several of the dead were sporting captured US Army webbing kits. One of the enemy lying on the ground was still just alive, and as a US soldier turned him over he released a grenade. Luckily, his body took the brunt of the blast, and it caused few injuries to the ambush force. In addition to the military webbing, a US Army GPS and NVGs were retrieved from the dead. The serial numbers were subsequently traced, and these pieces of kit turned out to be from US soldiers originally killed or captured in Somalia, during the US military intervention there (immortalised in the book and then movie Black Hawk Down).

  Since Afghanistan, the SBS has been through a major rebranding exercise, in part to try to get out from under the shadow of the SAS. The cap badge has been redesigned and the original motto – ‘Not by strength, by guile’ – has been changed to ‘By strength and by guile’. During the rebranding, one of the options considered was whether the SBS should adopt a sandy-coloured beret, akin to that worn by the SAS. Requests went out to all serving – and some past – members of the SBS for cap badge redesign suggestions. Inevitably, one of the lads put in a design showing a big boot kicking a pair of balls. As most of the men agreed, it was a cracking cap badge – showing how the SBS would kick ’em in the balls every time. But when the final shortlist of ten designs was drawn up, the ‘kick ’em in the balls’ cap badge hadn’t made it on to the list.

  There were several designs utilising the dagger theme, but it was argued that the dagger was too much of an SAS symbol. However, once SBS archives were consulted it was discovered that one of the original forebear units of the SBS, the No. 2 Special Boat Section, had utilised a dagger and sea waves as its original insignia. The No. 2 Special Boat Section – whose motto was ‘United we conquer’ – had launched the very first canoe demolition raid, when, at the end of June 1941, they landed on the Sicilian coast via the submarine HMS Urge to attack a railway tunnel. The final SBS badge redesign sports a dagger pointing upwards through waves.

  And what of the MV Nisha, the ship that was seized by the SBS in December 2001? A three-day search of the ship reportedly found no evidence of terrorist activity. ‘A full security search of the ship has been completed,’ a Scotland Yard spokesperson said. ‘No noxious or dangerous substances have been found aboard the vessel.’ The ship’s owners, the British company Great Eastern Shipping, a subsidiary of the highly reputable East India Shipping Company, objected to the ship’s seizure. The company pointed out that the British authorities could have contacted any one of three parties involved in the ship’s chartering – the East India Shipping Company, the Mauritius Sugar Syndicate or Tate & Lyle – to investigate her cargo prior to seizing the ship.

  However, the UK’s counter-terrorism authorities maintain that the perceived threat from the ship was too great to have risked doing so. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, concern over terrorism was at an all-time high. Governments and intelligence agencies were desperate to stop a repeat of the horrors that hit New York and Washington, when passenger aircraft had been turned into massive bombs. With all the available evidence to hand at the time, the MV Nisha was believed to constitute a major threat. Any chemical bomb the ship might have been carrying could conceivably have caused more death and destruction in central London than even the attack on the Twin Towers in New York.

  At the time of the MV Nisha assault, politicians in Mauritius had made statements to the press about a home-grown terrorism threat. These led to headlines like: ‘MAURITIUS ISLAMISTS STOCKPILE POISON FOR TERROR ATTACKS’ (Agence France Presse). The Deputy Prime Minister of Mauritius, Paul Berenger, warned that an Islamist party in Mauritius was stockpili
ng insecticides for terrorist purposes. ‘All precautions have been taken,’ Berenger said, ‘and the people have nothing to worry about.’ Opposition parties in Mauritius have since accused their government of inflating the scare over Lannate (methomyl) and the MV Nisha’s sugar cargo, to gain political advantage. Others maintain that there is still a serious threat of Islamist terrorism in Mauritius.

  Could the MV Nisha have posed a serious danger to the UK if it had deployed a ‘methomyl bomb’ in densely populated central London? In a report entitled ‘Deliberate release of biological and chemical agents in Scotland’, the Scottish Executive lists chemical agents most likely to be used in such an attack. Methomyl is listed as one of those agents. In personal correspondence, Julian Perry-Robinson, an expert on chemical and biological warfare at Brighton University’s Science Policy Research Unit, states that ‘Methomyl is described as a carbamate, having a high anticholinesterase activity conferring use as a pesticide. It has a parallel with nerve gases, although, in terms of animal lethal dosage, some orders of magnitude less potent.’ A lethal dose of methomyl is in the order of 12–15 milligrams per kilogram. A poor man’s chemical bomb made from methomyl could pose serious dangers to humans.