> Taliban ambush: 'Get us out of here'

Taliban ambush: 'Get us out of here'
GRAEME SMITH
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
May 19, 2007 at 1:04 AM EDT
SANGIN, AFGHANISTAN — Shots cracked over barricades in the dark, and the night filled with sounds of men shouting and running. The defenders of a small outpost in the town of Sangin slammed mortars into firing tubes, sending up flares that cast a ghostly light over the confused scene.
The smoky phosphorescence revealed British and Afghan soldiers watching nervously over the walls, toward an empty graveyard that Taliban fighters had used as cover to sneak up on a guard post. It was only a probing attack, intended to gauge the strength of the government forces now desperately holding a town on the front lines of this year's fight against the insurgents.
But the attack seemed to fray the nerves of the British troops, who had narrowly escaped an ambush a few hours earlier. As the flares winked out and darkness returned, a soldier walked up to a journalist and tried to give him a handgun.
The offer was declined, but the soldier insisted: “You might need it,” he said, holding out the weapon, its black polish gleaming under his headlamp. “We don't know what will happen tonight.”
The valley of discord
With support from Canadian artillery, U.S. and British troops took control of this half-ruined town and its strategic valley in northern Helmand province in early April. Starting last week, the Taliban launched a major drive to take it back.
The insurgents' new offensive brought them to the doorstep of Captain James Shaw, of the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards. He commands one of several British teams working with Afghan forces in Sangin, sleeping alongside the local troops in a crumbling mud building near the town's market.
Capt. Shaw committed what he later acknowledged was a potentially fatal mistake on a hot afternoon last week. Acting on a tip from an old woman, he allowed his men to search for a rumoured cache of Taliban weapons in a village about five kilometres north of town.
The bumpy route leading north from Sangin had been cleared of insurgents many times, and fighting earlier in the week was concentrated much further north, in the river valleys leading to Kajaki and Musa Qala. The battles swept southward as the days passed, however, and Capt. Shaw hoped he could find the weapons dump quickly and retreat back into town.
Unlike the Canadians who roar through Afghanistan in heavily protected troop carriers, the British rely on light jeeps, whose improvised armour often makes them look jerry-built. That afternoon, Capt. Shaw had only three of these vehicles and a few Afghan pickup trucks.
The patrol rolled past bombed buildings on the outskirts of Sangin, past shuttered stores and a mosque with a missing wall. The vehicles accelerated as they broke into the open countryside, churning a haze of dust over the farmland that sloped away to the left. Children hauled bundles of dry poppy stalks through the fallow fields.
A craggy hill rose to the right of the road. A few minutes outside of town, the hill seemed to explode in a shower of grey smoke streaked with beige dirt. Several more rocket-propelled grenades screamed toward the convoy from a line of trees in the distance, accompanied by the clatter of automatic weapons.
“Contact left!” shouted Lance Sergeant Matt Robinson, standing up in his jeep and raking the trees with bullets. “In that tree line over there! Five hundred metres, four hundred metres! Tree line!”
The young soldier squinted through his scope and banged more rounds downrange, then swore heartily as another British vehicle slammed into his, throwing him off balance.
In the first moments of the ambush, the British were jamming their vehicles into reverse and pulling back. For them, it was standard procedure: Get out of the Taliban's sights and return fire.
The Afghans did the opposite, bailing out of their vulnerable pickup trucks and charging forward. They took shelter in a ditch and looked back at the retreating British with undisguised scorn. Two Afghan soldiers had been wounded, and many others had barely avoided injury when an anti-tank mortar slammed into the tailgate of their truck. It was a dud; the explosion only shattered the rear window. The mortar's tail fin remained stuck in the vehicle, which sat empty in the road as the Taliban continued to sweep the area with gunfire.
Despite the Afghans' bravery, it was the British who answered the insurgents with the most firepower. After pulling a short distance away, they started hammering the tree line and an adjacent compound with their 7.62-millimetre machine guns. One soldier crouched behind a vehicle and set up a spindly communications device, calling for help from artillery or aircraft.
Sergeant Sam Brooks ducked out from the cover of his vehicle to set up a 51-mm mortar. He tried to steady the short tube while finding the range, slowly tilting the weapon until a tiny bubble in greenish liquid indicated that he had the correct angle. Taliban bullets punched the air around him, ringing off a British vehicle nearby with a high-pitched singing note. The sergeant's legs wouldn't stop shaking.
He dropped a high-explosive mortar into the tube and sent it thudding into the tree line, smoke and dust rising a storey above the foliage.
A strange euphoria seemed to overtake Sgt. Brooks and a few of his comrades as they felt themselves gaining the upper hand on their attackers. He pulled out a small camera, started a video recording, and laughed wildly into the lens before setting the device on the front bumper of his jeep to capture the image of himself fighting.
“This is great!” a soldier shouted, above the concussive din.
Capt. Shaw remained grim. The radio told him no aircraft or artillery were ready to hit the Taliban positions; the airspace was blocked by incoming medical helicopters, ferrying wounded from another recent battle. Nor did the British captain have any way of talking to the Afghan troops, who seemed intent on facing the enemy despite having suffered casualties.
He needed to pull them back, but he didn't have any way of communicating the message. Finally, the captain charged forward with another soldier, ducking low through the Taliban's arcs of fire, and hauled the Afghans back to their vehicles.
A red flash and a bang kicked up smoke as something exploded in the middle of the road, perhaps a dozen metres from the British vehicles.
Soldiers manning the machine guns ran out of bullets, fumbling as they slammed in fresh boxes of ammunition. One burned his hands as he inadvertently touched the hot barrel of his gun.
Another gunner shouted and waved at a small girl wearing a purple dress, yelling at her to move away as she led a donkey through the crossfire about halfway between the British and Taliban positions. She was too distant to hear him, just a tiny figure ambling slowly through a dry poppy field. At one point she appeared to stop, as if unsure which direction led to safety, and a moment later she disappeared amid the brown stalks.
British soldiers fall back
Another group of British vehicles soon arrived to cover Capt. Shaw's retreat, and his convoy started to return south along the gravel road.
As they got moving, however, Lance Sgt. Robinson noticed two men in black turbans and black waistcoats cresting the hill about 100 metres away, on the opposite side from the original ambush. They looked like civilians at first glance; then they pulled out Kalashnikov rifles and sprayed the British. The attackers went down in a cloud of dust as the troops retaliated, driving away at full speed.
“Go, go, go, go, go!” a soldier shouted. “Get us out of here.”
Lance Sgt. Robinson said that was the worst moment, for him, getting outflanked at the end of the fight. “It's a good thing they can't aim,” he said. “That was point blank.”
The last time Capt. Shaw had taken fire was during urban battles in southern Iraq, and he said Afghanistan's open terrain is a better place to face insurgents. Still, he said, watching the first volley of incoming rocket-propelled grenades was terrifying.
“I saw the first explosion, and I thought, ‘bloody hell, I'm here in an open-top vehicle,' “ Capt. Shaw said. “Imagine what that would do to me.”
That night, after a medical helicopter had taken away the injured Afghans, and after the probing attack on the guard post had passed, Capt. Shaw held a meeting with his counterpart in the Afghan National Army, a platoon commander named Khudai Dad.
An ethnic Tajik, the ANA commander was anxious to reassure his foreign friends that he had correctly judged the situation here in the Pashtun south. The intelligence about a weapons cache was good, he insisted; the woman who gave him the tip was embittered against the Taliban because the insurgents killed her sons.
“Well, I think we did find the weapons,” Capt. Shaw said with a rueful smile. “They were fired at us.”
The ANA commander estimated that the ambush was set by more than 30 insurgents, judging by their willingness to stand and fight instead of using their typical hit-and-run tactics. Capt. Shaw was skeptical of the number, guessing the Taliban group was smaller, but in any case he concluded that many more troops will be required next time he ventures north of town.
“It's way out of our league,” he said, and the ANA commander nodded.
Echoes of war get closer
After a restless night, sleeping with the thudding noises of fighting in the distance, the soldiers woke to the news of a roadside bombing not far from their base. It was the second in as many days. At another small outpost nearby, tribal elders had brought the bodies of three children killed in recent battles to the north. The girl in the purple dress was not among them.
That day, Capt. Shaw paid a visit to Sangin's central administration compound, where Major Jamie Nowell commands forces patrolling the town. The fighting is getting closer to the community every day, Major Nowell said, but the fact that the town itself remains friendly territory can be counted as a victory. The last district chief sent here by the government saw his home reduced to rubble, he said, but last week, a new chief was installed and appeared to be gaining acceptance. A few modest reconstruction projects have started, mostly fixing electricity systems.
“Sangin is a success story, because we cleaned out the insurgents, held it, and we're getting reconstruction back in,” Major Nowell said.
After a cup of tea, Capt. Shaw returned to his base. His men counted the ammunition spent during the previous day, which included roughly 1,000 machine-gun bullets and 50 mortar rounds.
The old woman whose information led to the ill-fated patrol showed up in the afternoon. She was unapologetic about the ambush, saying the ANA had failed to call ahead as arranged so she could guide them safely through the area.
She repeatedly urged the foreign troops to try again with a bigger force, because her village, Kotezai, had been overrun with insurgents who demanded food and shelter at gunpoint. The Taliban had exiled her family and many others to a nearby desert, she added.
The ANA commander guessed that his men had killed at least one Taliban fighter during the ambush, but the old woman looked at the floor and cocked her head sadly. No, she said, they all escaped.
But she did bring a bit of good news. The girl in the purple dress arrived home safely, she said. The woman's leathery face crinkled into a smile. “Her injury was a small wound on her finger.”