Читать книгу Ground Truth: 3 Para Return to Afghanistan - Patrick Bishop - Страница 13

A successful influence operation brought its own satisfaction, but so too did a good fight. It was a prospect that the soldiers looked forward to. No one joined the Parachute Regiment who did not relish the chance of combat. The news that they were to be sent on a risky daylight mission to grab a Taliban commander who had so far eluded the grasp of special forces snatch squads was very welcome.

The operation required exhaustive planning and crisp timing and coordination if it was going to come off. The target was Haji Sultan Agha, code name ‘the Hobbit’. The ID mugshot issued to the troops revealed that, unlike his Tolkien namesake, he had a glossy black moustache and grey beard, thick eyebrows and warm brown eyes. His guru-like appearance belied his reputation as the number-one bomb-maker in the Zari district, a bucolic stretch of vineyards and poppy fields that lay along the Arghandab river near Highway One. His activities had placed him on Regional Command South’s wanted list.

The task was given to ‘A’ Company, who had finished their tour of duty in Hutal and were in a holding pattern following the decision to suspend search operations in Band-e-Timor. The RCS planners were hoping that their luck would change with Operation ‘Sur Kor’ (‘Red House’). Specialist teams had launched several missions to collar the Hobbit and his men, who were believed to build the IEDs that were found constantly along Route Fosters, a track that led south off Highway One into the Green Zone.

The raiders had been dropped at a distance from their targets and tabbed in on foot, hoping to surprise them. Instead, when they reached the target compounds their quarry had disappeared. Once they found a group of males of fighting age still in their beds. But there was nothing to link them to any insurgency activities and the conclusion was the men had received a tip-off in time to clean up any evidence.

The Paras’ plan was based on boldness rather than stealth. According to Jamie Loden, ‘the idea was that we were going to go in in daylight and instead of putting down some way off to give them loads of warning time, we were going to land right on top of them and give them no chance of getting away’.

The hope was that they would be able to catch the Hobbit in the act of making his bombs. Intelligence reports said his IED factory was in a compound, one of a cluster that lay by a fast-flowing irrigation canal in the middle of some vineyards not far from Route Fosters. The location was named ‘Gold’. Three hundred and fifty metres to the west lay compound ‘Silver’, which was also believed to be connected to the Hobbit’s operation. Beyond that was ‘Bronze’, home to the band’s wives and children.

The site presented many practical difficulties. Landing on top of the target sounded like a good, if potentially dangerous, idea. The Taliban had so far managed to shoot down only one helicopter in southern Afghanistan, but it seemed only a matter of time before their luck improved. The immediate difficulty, though, was the terrain, which made landing a Chinook very difficult. The land to the south of the compound was more promising, but it was bounded by a canal. It was 6 feet deep and 5 wide and there was no question of even the most athletic soldier being able to jump across it burdened with body armour, weapon and the usual mountain of kit.

The only way across was via three footbridges which it was prudent to assume were mined. Clearing the route would take time, giving the Hobbit and his men the chance to escape. The pathways leading away from the compound were sheltered by trees which gave good cover. The problem facing Loden and his men was ‘how were we going to isolate these three compounds simultaneously to prevent anyone getting away and also land relatively close, given the limitations we had on landing zones?’

Finding a solution was complicated by the restrictions that the different elements taking part in the action placed on their men. Like almost every major operation in Afghanistan, Sur Kor was a multinational effort. The political benefits of having many nations engaged in the coalition to stabilise Afghanistan were often cancelled out by the military disadvantages as each contributing country imposed its own caveats on what its troops would and would not do.

In this case it was the British who were causing difficulties. The policy of the joint force command that controlled the RAF, army and navy helicopters was different to that of the pilots, who Loden had always found to be ‘fantastically willing and wanted to do everything we wanted’. British helicopters, though, were providing only part of the lift. Another two Chinooks were being supplied by the Dutch. Their commanders were willing to let their pilots land as close as physically possible to the compound walls.

The British imposed another condition on daylight assault operations. They insisted on especially thorough surveillance. These preparations took time, delaying the start. In the leaky atmosphere of KAF this was plenty of time for news of the operation to trickle out.

The operation was eventually slated for the morning of 16 April. Loden had 150 men in his group. As well as his own company platoons he could call on the heavy machine guns of the Fire Support Group (FSG) and a mortar team carrying three barrels. They were supported by explosives experts from the Royal Engineers, a Royal Military Police team, and an Afghan anti-drugs team. The force also included Corporal Sainaina Wailutu, a twenty-nine-year-old Fijian company clerk who had joined the British Army seven years before, to search any women they detained. Loden planned to fly one of his platoons in Sea King helicopters to the west of the compounds to cut off anyone fleeing in that direction. The others would put down in the Dutch helicopters next to objective ‘Gold’, where, it was hoped, they would find the Hobbit at work. Loden, his headquarters team and the mortar men would land in the British Chinooks in an open field several hundred metres to the north-east of the target, to mop up any fugitives and give indirect fire if needed. A reserve platoon of Canadians would be waiting to the south of the canal, providing a blocking force. The Canadians had a special interest in the operation. Route Fosters was one of their main access roads to the fighting area and they had suffered several casualties as a result of the Hobbit and his IEDs.

They took off from KAF at 7.30 a.m. Half an hour later the Chinook carrying the headquarters group settled on what looked like a firm, dry poppy field. The Paras scrambled down the ramp, high on adrenaline and excitement, and immediately sank up to their knees in mud. Next off was a quad bike, used to carry ammunition around the battlefield and extract casualties, which stuck fast in the glutinous soil.

At the same time, the Dutch helicopters were touching down inside Gold compound only 33 metres from the main building. 8 Platoon, the company point men, bundled out of the back door, crouching and levelling their rifles as soon as they hit the ground, bracing for the first gust of AK47 rounds. But if anyone was inside the house they were holding their fire. As the Chinooks lifted off, they advanced cautiously towards the silent, mud-walled building. The platoon commander, Lieutenant Lev Wood, approached the door with an Afghan anti-drugs officer and peered into the dark and stuffy interior. ‘The place was completely bare,’ said Wood later. ‘It was as if it had been stripped of everything.’ They moved on to the outhouses. Several of them were piled to the roof with bundles of dried marijuana, which in an area awash with opium was considered hardly worth mentioning.

The Paras pushed on rapidly to Silver compound, leaving the engineers and military police team to go through the house. At the second location they found about twenty women and children but no fighting-age males. It was the same at Bronze. The adrenaline fizz subsided. The soldiers resigned themselves to a day of combing through the grape storage sheds and numerous mud-wall enclosures that dotted the fields and vineyards, searching for weapons and stores. It was a delicate task. The Canadians, who had been operating in the area since 2006, warned them of the risk of booby traps in the grape houses. They were also on the alert for IEDs laid along the pathways, covered by innocuous-looking cooking pots. The insurgents had developed a technique by which they waited for a patrol to approach then buried a small plastic anti-personnel mine just below the track surface and near the hidden bomb. The pressure of a footfall would set off the mine and detonate the bigger charge.

But just as they were about to begin the search, the Taliban announced their presence. Back at the helicopter landing site (HLS), Company Sergeant Major Andy Schofield was supervising the effort to extract the quad bike from the mud. At 8.45 a.m. their work was abandoned as bullets began to buzz around them. The fire was coming from the fields to the north but no one could see the gunmen. The HQ group and mortar team who had set up near by began shooting back. Corporal Wailutu was caught in the open next to the quad bike when the firefight began. Normally her duties kept her behind a computer in the company administration office in Colchester. She had been sent to Afghanistan for a one-month tour; now she was flat on her stomach in the middle of a soggy poppy field with only the stranded quad for cover while rounds whipped over her head. ‘I’d never been in a contact before,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t help feeling that one of the rounds was going to get me. I didn’t want to risk putting my head up to see what was going on. I just lay there with my face down in the mud waiting for it to stop.’ Eventually, when the firing faded, she ran over to the treeline to join the others.

Loden had moved down to Gold compound. He was on the roof of the main building when the shooting started. Amid the flat crack of rifle fire he heard a sound he remembered only too well. The Taliban were engaging with RPGs. ‘It reminded me immediately of Sangin,’ he said. ‘There was the old pop and whizz and this thing went flying over the top. Everyone ducked. We heard the bang behind us and that was that.’

Loden’s initial thought was that the Taliban were preparing to attack. Something was hidden in their base that was so valuable to them they were prepared to launch a full-on assault to recapture it. The pilot of an Apache attack helicopter that had been on station overhead since the start of the operation reported seeing men entering and leaving what appeared to be a bunker system. It was some distance away, however, 1500 metres to the north of Gold compound, and too far to pose an immediate threat.

The shooting began to fade but Loden was concerned that the HQ group and mortar team, who had not yet had time to set up their barrels, might come under attack again. He ordered Lev Wood to stop searching the compounds and to take his men over to the HLS.

More reports were coming in from the Apache. At 9.04, nearly twenty minutes after the initial contact, the pilot picked up further activity around the bunker. Eight men were moving around outside. He described seeing ‘a guy walking away from it, going a certain distance out, putting something in the dirt, coming back’. Loden surmised that he was laying a mine and that the inhabitants of the bunker ‘were preparing themselves for a fight’. Eight minutes later the pilot spotted six men entering the bunker through a hole in the wall. The pilot was eager to engage. Instead of requesting permission from the company commander on the ground, however, he asked for clearance from Kandahar. The killing of innocent civilians by Coalition forces had soured relations between President Karzai, America and ISAF, and the president was insisting greater care be taken, particularly in air attacks. The helicopter had to wait while the request was passed up the chain of command. Eventually the message came back that the pilot was not to engage.

As Loden absorbed this, Kandahar passed on an intelligence alert, stating that the Hobbit was still in the area and was holed up at a location 800 metres to the north. The report gave a rough location. British troops operated with maps taken from aerial photographs on which all the features were numbered. The trouble with the map in Loden’s hands was that the imagery had been captured eighteen months before at the start of the Afghan winter. In the meantime foliage had grown, compounds had been built up and knocked down and the reality in front of him sometimes differed markedly from the representation. Eventually he matched the reference to the landscape and made his next move. It seemed clear that if the Apache was not going to take out the bunker they would have to do so themselves. By pushing forward they were also moving towards where the Hobbit was said to be lying up. Loden decided to order an ‘advance to contact’.

He would need all his men. He called the Canadians and asked them to cross the canal and secure the compounds, freeing up his two platoons to come forward. They gathered for a conference at the HLS. The bunker would have to be dealt with before they could move on to the Hobbit’s supposed location. To reach the bunker meant passing through a straggle of compounds connected by a long alleyway.

The lead section had gone only a few dozen metres when a gunman popped up from behind a compound wall ten metres away and sprayed AK47 fire in their direction. ‘How the hell he missed I have no idea,’ said Loden. ‘He was that close that he really should have hit someone.’ The Paras hit the ground. After a few minutes, Sergeant Shaun Sexton from 2 Platoon took one of his men, raced forward to the door of the compound and flung in a grenade. When the smoke cleared they peered in. The only thing visible was a tethered goat, which looked up calmly from its feed to check out the intruders.

The advance continued. The Paras came to an irrigation canal, part of the web of arteries and capillaries that channelled the waters of the Arghandab into the vineyards and poppy fields. It was too wide to jump. As they waded across, someone noticed a plastic disc glinting on the stream bed. It looked like an antipersonnel mine. Everybody hopped rapidly on to the opposite bank.

The landscape was empty now. The workers who had been dotted about the fields when the helicopters first arrived had all disappeared. Occasionally a head would pop up on a distant rooftop as a Taliban dicker tried to spot the Paras’ movements. Each time he would be scared away by a volley of rifle fire.

The Apache had gone back to KAF to refuel, taking its devastating Hellfire missiles with it. Loden halted the company 400 metres south-west of the bunker. He told Lev Wood to take his platoon forward while the rest provided covering fire. They set off across the fields until they came to a wall and ditch. One section ‘went firm’ behind the cover while the other, led by Corporal Shane Coyne, set off on a crouching run straight towards the low, humped structure that merged almost invisibly with the surrounding earth and mud. They hurled grenades at the firing slits and doorways and threw themselves down to avoid the blast. When they raised their heads there was no returning fire. Coyne closed on the bunker and ducked inside. The place stank of cordite from the explosion. As the smoke and dust subsided they could see that the place was empty.

‘They were obviously very good at guessing what we were going to do and bugging out,’ said Captain Mike Thwaite, the company second-in-command. The bunker was impressive, just like the ones they came across when training on the mock battlefields of the Brecon Beacons. It was well dug in with overhead cover, small firing slits that gave the occupiers good fields of fire and tunnels that led out the back into zigzag trenches allowing them to escape from it unseen, as they appeared to have just done.

The Paras set off again, towards the Hobbit’s last known location, about 450 metres to the west. By now there was little expectation of finding him, however. When they reached the target compound it too was empty. There were a few old men near by who watched them carry out a search. Loden went over with an interpreter and started talking to them. They were dignified and courteous, as the soldiers found the Afghans usually to be, but had no information they were willing or able to pass on. It was nearly 1 p.m. The sun was high and the Paras were hot and thirsty. The silence was heavy and, Loden thought, eerie. Abruptly it was split by a deafening cry of ‘Allahu Akhbar’ as the loudspeaker on the minaret of a tiny mud-walled mosque burst into life with the call to prayer. The recorded voice of the muezzin was immediately overlaid by the ripple of automatic fire coming from behind. Loden had left the Fire Support Group to his south to provide cover, and they now joined in, firing at the flashes lighting up the foliage with their General Purpose Machine Guns (GPMGs). Eventually the exchange died out and Loden took stock of the situation.

It appeared that, contrary to early indications, the Taliban were not interested in a stand-up fight and did not feel that anything they may have hidden in the area was worth the losses involved in trying to force the Paras out. The search of the initial compounds had turned up some bomb-making components, such as car batteries and circuit boards. On their journey north the Paras had recovered an RPG launcher and destroyed it with a plastic explosive bar mine. All this was easily replaceable. The real object of value in the area was the Hobbit, and it looked as if he had got away. The Taliban seemed content to harass the Paras while minimising their own exposure to danger.

It was now getting on for 2 p.m. Time was running out. The helicopters were due to extract everyone at 4 p.m. from a new landing site on the far side of the canal from Gold compound. That was nearly a kilometre away, a fair distance when you had to cover it on foot, carrying a ton of kit, over soggy, obstacle-cluttered ground, manoeuvring to protect yourself as you went. Any further delay now meant they would have to stay the night. They had enough rations to last them, and if they ran out of water they could drink canal water treated with purification tablets. Loden’s main concern was radio batteries. They were heavy and used up power fast. If he decided to stay they would have to switch the radios off to save electricity, turning them on only when, as seemed likely, the Taliban launched a night-time attack.

As he was deliberating there was another burst of fire from behind as another gunman popped up, sprayed bullets in their general direction and disappeared. The search continued a little while longer before Loden decided they were going to try to make the rendezvous. He led the two platoons with him back to the mortar position, just by the field where they had landed six hours previously. The quad bikes were useless in the boggy ground; all hands would be needed to carry the unused mortar bombs, packed in plastic ‘greenies’, to the new HLS.

As Loden and his HQ team reached the mortars it seemed that the end was in sight. ‘I think we were slightly lulled into a false sense of security’ he said. ‘We’d had these fleeting glimpses of the enemy that hadn’t really materialised into anything.’ The Taliban, however, were saving their best effort for last. ‘They had looked at where we were, seen where we’d gone, worked out where we were going to have to come back to and set up an ambush.’

The insurgents opened up just as the last element of the company arrived at the mortar position. It was a fortunate mistake on the insurgents’ part. If they had attacked early the company would have been split in two, with 8 Platoon bringing up the rear. The soldiers dived flat as bullets whipped in low, shredding the poppies a few inches above their heads and kicking up mud.

The fire was coming from a compound 200 metres to the north. Instead of another ‘shoot and scoot’ this contact was a determined, sustained attack with machine guns and rifles. 8 Platoon were belly down in the mud with little scope for returning fire. Lev Wood was in the middle of the line. He raised his head to see a ruined storehouse in the middle of the field and made for it. ‘It was quite convenient for me but not so convenient for the rear section,’ he said. The rear was being brought up by the platoon sergeant, Danny Leitch. He brought his men forward in a crouching run while his comrades battered the firing point with rifle fire and underslung grenades. Among them was Private Ollie Schofield, who had volunteered for 3 Para after hearing about their previous exploits while in training. Now he was ‘living the dream’. He found the experience ‘kind of scary’, but at the same time he was feeling ‘the biggest buzz you will ever get. You can’t match it anywhere.’

The Paras paused for a few minutes then scrambled forward again another 33 metres, heading for a drainage ditch at the edge of the field. They tumbled in, gasping for breath, while the rounds continued to crack and buzz overhead. There was fire coming the other way now from the sniper team left to protect the mortars, who were also engaging the compound, and the fields echoed with the thump of heavy 8.6mm Lapua Magnum rounds. Loden had run forward with his mortar fire controller, Corporal Pete Preece, to get better ‘eyes on’ the Taliban position. They took cover in a ditch, but for a while the weight of fire was too heavy for Preece to get his head up long enough to obtain a precise fix on the location. Eventually he was able to work out the coordinates and brought in smoke rounds on the compound, which covered the Paras’ withdrawal.

Corporal Wailutu watched the contact from the mortar line. She had learned a lot during the day. At one point she had been ordered to fire warning shots over people approaching their position. As the latest fighting flared up, her first instinct was to join in. ‘It was very exciting,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t wait to use my weapon.’ With so many friendly forces spread around there was less chance of hitting an insurgent than one of her own side, however, and she held her fire.

Loden now asked Wood whether he thought it was possible to assault the compound head on. It was, undoubtedly, ‘a big ask’. It meant charging over more than two hundred metres of open ground through thick, slippery mud in full sight of the enemy. ‘As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t [on],’ said Wood. He told Loden it was ‘pretty suicidal’ to go straight at the compound but suggested approaching it with a right flanking movement instead. Loden accepted his judgement, declined the offer and told 8 Platoon to stay put, ‘watch and shoot’.

As they waited, the firing from the compound stopped. It was replaced by shooting from the south. The Canadians had come under fire and were replying with everything they had. Loden had an hour and a quarter until the rendevous with the helicopters. The aircraft would soon be taking off and if they weren’t going to make it he should tell Kandahar immediately. By now there was air cover overhead to suppress any further attempt to slow their withdrawal. He decided to go for it. They picked up the ‘greenies’ mortar round containers and began hobbling back across the fields, covered by the snipers, who were the last to ‘collapse’.

The helicopters arrived at 4 p.m., putting down in a wadi south of the canal. It had been a day of mixed results. They had missed the Hobbit and failed to uncover his cache of materiel. The Taliban had avoided the temptation to come out and fight, as they would certainly have done a few years before. To the veterans of 2006 it was becoming clear that the days of pitched battles were probably over.

On the other hand, the Paras had performed skilfully and professionally and, most importantly of all, had come through without a single casualty. It was a good feeling. ‘The company got back to Kandahar that night on a real high because they’d finally done something,’ said Loden. ‘The previous two weeks had been patrolling around Hutal with nothing much happening. I think for the first time everyone realised that the role we were in could offer significant variety.’ For his deputy it was ‘a good run out’. Now the rest of the battalion were about to get theirs.