AllFreeNovel
Share Us
In fact he had been assassinated by two suicide bombers, ultra-fanatical Moroccans pretending to be journalists with stolen Belgian passports, and sent by Osama bin Laden as a favour to his friend Mullah Omar. The Saudi had not thought of the ploy; it was the far cleverer Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri who realized that if Al-Qaeda did this favour for Omar, the one-eyed mullah could never expel them for what was going to happen next.
On the eleventh four airliners were hijacked over the American east coast. Within ninet
y minutes two had destroyed the World Trade Center in Manhattan, one had devastated the Pentagon and the fourth, since its rebellious passengers invaded the flight deck to rip the hijackers from the controls, had crashed in a field.
Within days the identity and inspiration of the nineteen hijackers had been established; within a few more days the new American President had given Mullah Omar a flat ultimatum: yield up the ringleaders or take the consequences. Because of Massoud, Omar could not capitulate. It was the code.
In the West African hellhole of Sierra Leone, a long period of civil war and barbarism had left the once-rich former British colony a vista of chaos, banditry, filth, disease, poverty and hacked-off limbs. Years earlier the British had decided to intervene and the UN had been prevailed upon to ship in fifteen thousand troops who, broadly, just sat in their barracks in the capital, Freetown. The jungle beyond the city limits was regarded as simply too dangerous for the UN force. Only the in-country element of the British army was under national command and was prepared to go there, so it was they alone who patrolled the back country.
In late August 2000 a patrol of eleven men from the Royal Irish Rangers were lured off the main road and down a track to the village which acted as the headquarters of a rebel band calling themselves the West Side Boys. They were, in effect, out-of-control psychopaths. They were relentlessly drunk on pure-alcohol native hooch; they rubbed their gums with cocaine or cut their arms to rub the dope into the cuts and get a faster ‘hit’. The horrors they had inflicted on the peasantry over a wide area were unspeakable; but there were four hundred of them and they were armed to the teeth. The Rangers were quickly captured and held hostage.
Mike Martin, after a stint in Kosovo, had brought One Para to Freetown where they were based at Waterloo Camp. After complex negotiations five of the Rangers were ransomed but the remaining six seemed destined to be chopped up. In London the Chief of Defence Staff, Sir Charles Guthrie, gave the word: go in there by force and get them out.
The task force was forty-eight SAS men, twenty-four from the SBS and ninety from One Para. Ten SAS men in jungle camouflage were dropped in a week before the attack and lived unseen in the jungle round the bandit village, watching and listening. Everything the West Side Boys said and did was overheard by the SAS men in the bush a few yards away and reported back. That was how the British knew there was no further hope of a peaceful exfiltration.
Mike Martin went in with the second wave after an unlucky rebel mortar had injured six including the commander of the first wave who had to be evacuated without ceremony.
The village – or in fact twin villages of Gberi Bana and Magbeni – straddled a slimy and stinking river called Rokel Creek. The seventy-two special forces took Gberi Bana where the hostages were located, rescued them all and fought off a series of manic counter-attacks. The ninety Paras took Magbeni. There were, at dawn, about two hundred West Side Boys in each.
Six prisoners were taken, trussed and brought back to Freetown. A few of them escaped into the jungle. No attempt was made to count the bodies, either in the wreck of the two villages or the surrounding jungle, but no one ever disputed a figure of three hundred dead.
The SAS and the Paras took twelve injured and one SAS man, Brad Tinnion, died of his wounds. Mike Martin, having lost the CO of his first wave, arrived in the second Chinook and led the final wipe-out of Magbeni. It was old-fashioned fighting, point-blank range and hand to hand. On the south side of the Rokel Creek the Paras had lost their radio to the same mortar blast that hit the attack leader. So the circling helicopters overhead could not report on the fall of their own mortar shells and the jungle was too thick to see them drop.
Eventually the Paras just charged, blood pumping, screaming and swearing until the West Side Boys, happy to torture peasants and prisoners, fled, died, fled again and died until there were none left.
It was twelve months later almost to the day that Martin was back in London when lunch was interrupted by those unbelievable images on the TV screen of fully loaded and fuelled airliners flying straight into the Twin Towers. A week later it was plain the USA would have to go into Afghanistan in pursuit of those responsible, with or without the agreement of the Kabul government.
London at once agreed that it would provide whatever was needed from its own resources and the immediate requirements were air-to-air refuelling tankers and special forces. The SIS Head of Station in Islamabad said he would also need all the help he could get.
That was a matter for Vauxhall Cross, but the Defence Attaché in Islamabad also asked for help. Mike Martin was taken from his desk at Para HQ Aldershot and found himself on the next flight to Islamabad as Special Forces Liaison Officer.
He arrived four weeks after the destruction of the World Trade Center and the day the first allied attacks went in.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Izmat Khan was still commanding in the north, on the Badakhshan front, when the bombs rained on Kabul. As the world studied Kabul and diversionary tactics in the south, the US Special Forces slipped into Badakhshan to help General Fahim who had taken over Massoud’s army. This was where the real fighting would be; the rest was window dressing for the media. The key would be Northern Alliance ground forces and American air power.
Without ever taking off, Afghanistan’s puny air force was vaporized. Its tanks and artillery, if they could be spotted, were ‘taken out’. The Uzbek, Rashid Dostum, who had spent years in safety across the border, was persuaded to come back and open a second front in the north-west to match Fahim’s front in the north-east. And in November the great break-out began. The key was target-marking, the technology that has quietly revolutionized warfare since the first Gulf War of 1991.
Hidden, invisible among the allied forces, Special Forces specialists squint through long-range binoculars to identify the enemy’s dug-in positions, guns, tanks, ammunition dumps, reserves, supplies and command bunkers. Each is marked or ‘painted’ with an infra-red dot from a shoulder-held projector. Via radio an air strike is called up.
In the destruction of the Taliban army facing the Northern Alliance these strikes either came from far away in the south where US Navy carriers hovered off the coast, or with A-10 tank-busters flying out of well-rewarded Uzbekistan. Unit by unit, with bombs and rockets that could not miss as they followed the infra-red beam, the Taliban army was blown away and the Tajiks charged in triumph.
Izmat Khan retreated and retreated as position after position was devastated and lost. The Taliban army of the north began with over thirty thousand soldiers, but were losing a thousand a day. There was no medication, no evacuation, no doctors. The wounded said their prayers and died like flies. They screamed Allahu akhbar and charged into walls of bullets.
The original volunteers for the Taliban army had long been used up. Few were left. Taliban recruiting squads had pressed tens of thousands more into the ranks, but many did not want to fight. The true fanatics were dwindling away. And still Izmat Khan had to pull them back, each time convinced that, being in the forefront of every combat, he could not last another day. By 18 November they had reached the town of Kunduz.
By a fluke of history Kunduz is a small enclave of Gilzai southerners, all Pashtun, in a sea of Tajiks and Hazaras. Thus the Taliban army could take refuge there. And it was there they agreed to surrender.
Among Afghans there is nothing dishonourable in a negotiated surrender and, once agreed, its terms are always honoured. The entire Taliban army surrendered to General Fahim and, to the rage of the US advisers, Fahim accepted.
Inside the Taliban were two non-Afghan groups. There were six hundred Arabs, all devoted to Osama bin Laden, who had sent them there. Well over three thousand Arabs had already died and the American attitude was that they would not weep salt tears if the rest went to Allah as well.
There were also about two thousand Pakistanis who were clearly going to be a thundering embarrassment to Islamabad if they were discovered. The Pakistani ruler, General Musharraf, had been left i
n not a shred of doubt after 9/11 that he had a choice: become a dedicated ally of the USA with billions and billions of dollars in aid; or continue to support (via the ISI) the Taliban and thus bin Laden and pay the direct consequences. He chose the USA.
But the ISI still had a small army of agents inside Afghanistan and the Pakistani volunteers fighting with the Taliban would not stint on revealing the encouragement they had once been given to go north. Over three nights a secret air bridge exfiltrated most of them back to Pakistan.
