Like the other platoon houses Musa Qaleh was largely reliant on choppers for its resupplies, and one of the Pathfinders’ most vital, and contentious, activities was securing the helicopter landing sites when they came in. The RAF were unhappy about flying into the base. There was plenty of landing space at a site directly to the north of the compound. The Pathfinders believed they could easily provide security by pushing out a patrol, and would be able to suppress any attack with fire from the sangars around the camp if things turned nasty. The RAF’s preference was to put down in the wadi, half a mile away to the west of the town. This meant that the Pathfinders had to drive past the green zone, favourite haunt of the Taliban, to get there. They also feared that the predictability of the arrangement would increase the chances of a helicopter being shot down – something that intelligence reports suggested the Taliban were itching to attempt.
Nick Wight-Boycott and his men were having an interesting and eventful time in Musa Qaleh. But it was not what they were in Afghanistan to do. The essence of their function was mobility. Their purpose was to roam the province, searching for the enemy, reporting on their actions and intentions and, when appropriate, shooting them up. What they were certainly not intended to be was a holding force. Yet this was what occupied them. It was extremely good news, then, to be told that they were about to relieved by G Battery, 7 RHA, the Paras’ airmobile artillery support unit.
The plan was that the relief convoy would just drive in. The first attempt to break through was made on 6 July. The column was coming from the west. That meant passing by the green zone. By now the Taliban were well set up there and intelligence reports suggested they knew about the operation and were planning to disrupt it. Despite his previous experience, Wight-Boycott decided to include the Afghans in the operation. For all their shortcomings, they could hold and fire rifles. And one of the main objects of the deployment was supposed to be to involve the Afghan forces in securing their own country.
The Pathfinders set off from the base and lined up their WMIKs on the approach route, providing a battery of. 50-cals to give supporting fire. The Afghans were tasked with probing into the green zone. As soon as they moved in, a firefight erupted. The WMIK line was hit from the side and rear. Wight-Boycott had not been expecting too much from the Afghans. Their orders were basically to locate the Taliban. If they came under attack they were to extract themselves and let airpower or the American artillery do the job of crushing the Taliban positions. The Afghans, however, had other ideas. They were ‘shouting, running and charging all over the place. Command and control basically broke down.’ The Pathfinders had to stay put to cover them, enduring Taliban fire, until the Afghans finally withdrew. ‘It was quite dicey taking it until they got out,’ said Andy Newell. Wight-Boycott learned a ‘massive lesson … trying to do an attack where you have got Afghans doing the attacking and Brits doing fire support doesn’t work very well. In fact you are probably best just letting them crack on with their own objectives, rather than trying to do a coordinated attack.’
The relief operation was abandoned. Another attempt was made the following day, but this also failed. Eventually, some fresh troops were flown in and the Guards Platoon were flown out. The Pathfinders, however, stayed put. At least Wight-Boycott now had twenty gunners from I Battery, RHA, ten Afghan army soldiers and fifteen engineers at his disposal. They were all extremely welcome. The engineers were put to work shoring up the Musa Qaleh defences. The Pathfinders had done what they could, buying cement locally to beef up the sangars, and wood to build ladders and walkways to the rooftop positions.
The sappers could also carry out some much-needed improvements to the sanitation situation. ‘We were basically crapping into a cut-off oil drum and burning it out with diesel every day,’ said Wight-Boycott. The facilities for ablutions amounted to one dodgy shower. Security for the base was handed over to 7 RHA. The Pathfinders were still desperate to leave. By now they had been in the field for four weeks. Wight-Boycott worried that his men were reaching the end of their endurance. Their equipment was also starting to degrade – the radios were overheating. Above all, stuck in Musa Qaleh they were not able to do their job. Wight-Boycott argued that with the arrival of the reinforcements and with the ANP presence, he and his twenty-five men were no longer needed. Their departure would also reduce the strain on the overburdened supply helicopters. He asked for the Pathfinders to be withdrawn to FOB Price, where they could get on with their long-range patrolling activities. The appeal was turned down. The Pathfinders were staying put.
Wight-Boycott accepted the decision gracefully and turned his attention again to taking the fight to the Taliban. On the week leading up to 11 July he had been mounting patrols every night, creeping around the wadi trying to set up ambushes. The Pathfinders’ freedom of action was extended by a change in the rules of engagement which came into force on the following day. This had major implications for how the Pathfinders went about flushing the Taliban out from their lairs in the green zone. The new rules applied to all forces deployed north of Highway One, the ring road that swept through southern Afghanistan. That meant everything beyond Gereshk – Sangin, Now Zad, Musa Qaleh and Kajaki.
On 16 July, Wight-Boycott decided to send out two patrols at one o’clock the following morning. Beforehand, he ordered the .50-cal that was normally sited on top of the Alamo to be mounted on the Outpost to support the ambush. They waited until darkness to move it, to avoid being spotted by the Taliban. At 11 p.m., he got a call from his sergeant major, Andy Newell, who was on stag at the Outpost with Sergeant Adie Summerscales, a transport expert attached to the Pathfinders. Through his night vision equipment Newell could see shadowy figures moving in a wooded area to the west. He also picked up a couple of figures on a rooftop, pointing in the direction of the base. It seemed that the Taliban were preparing to take advantage of the bright moonlight to launch a major attack. Wight-Boycott told Newell to take extra precautions and lay down on the floor, hoping to snatch some sleep before setting off on the early morning ambush.
Newell resumed his guard duty. Suddenly the night was pierced by ‘a flash and the first of the RPGs flew towards me’. The sergeant major opened up with a GPMG as the grenade swished overhead, exploding harmlessly in the compound. It was followed by three or four others, and a wall of green tracer streamed towards the base, slowly at first, almost floating, then whipping up speed alarmingly as it got closer. Wight-Boycott leapt up and stumbled into the compound. Most of the fire was coming from the area opposite the Outpost. Three of the Pathfinders grabbed their kit and ran across open ground swept by fire, up a ladder and along a 30-foot makeshift bridge that led to the roof of the Outpost. They began returning fire. Among them was Lance Corporal Tony Robinson, an Australian on an exchange posting. Robinson was keen to fire the 51mm mortar located on the Outpost, something he had never done before. He dropped a bomb into the barrel and it soared off into the night. But there was no explosion.. Someone asked him whether he had removed the safety pin. He replied, ‘There’s a safety pin on these things?’ The collective shout of ‘Knob!’ could be heard over the gunfire.
A group of Taliban were spotted going into a building in the green zone near the wadi. The American FLE base was contacted and an artillery strike requested. The building they had sheltered in turned out to be a mosque. It was badly damaged in the shelling, and a large number of insurgents were killed.
Coco learned that three vehicles laden with Taliban had set off from the Sangin area to join the action. An aircraft was already overhead. It peeled away and soon found the convoy, driving without lights along the wadi road towards Musa Qaleh, and destroyed at least one of the trucks. The rest disappeared into a built-up area and the aircraft returned to base.
The sangars stayed fully manned all night with the sentries taking it in turns to sleep. The Taliban, though, were still restless. During the night, a vehicle appeared in the bazaar to the west of the base and was engaged from Sangar Three, while two more fighte
rs were spotted creeping up to the Outpost and were immediately killed with fire from the .50-cal.
It had been a hard night. ‘Hopefully we have given these fuckers a bloody nose,’ said Wight-Boycott in a report to Kandahar. That seemed to be the case. Intelligence revealed that the Taliban had ‘left many friends behind’. The operation appeared to have been ordered and controlled by Taliban commanders in the south and reinforced with fighters from the Sangin area. Some of the Musa Qaleh element did not seem to know the people they were fighting alongside. In the morning the smell of burning wood drifted over from the bazaar to the west of the base. Tracer had set the flimsy wooden shacks and stalls alight.
Wight-Boycott had no doubt that despite the ‘bloody nose’ the Taliban would soon be back. In fact they took only two days to regroup and try again. On the afternoon of 19 July, intelligence picked up that they were moving stocks of RPGs around the town. As darkness fell, the defenders settled down for another long night. It was not long before all the lights in the town went out. The Taliban had cut the electricity. Over to the west the sentries could see the insurgents signalling to each other across the wadi with red and white lights.
The mortars fired ‘illume’ rounds to light up the ground. All was still. Wight-Boycott ordered an artillery strike on the wadi, even though the Pathfinders were under close scrutiny following the shelling of the mosque. The Canadians had sent up a UAV the following day to carry out a battle damage assessment. Wight-Boycott felt that the shelling had been justified. They had not known it was a mosque, and the Taliban had been carrying weapons when they entered it.
On this occasion, the brief barrage delivered by the Americans did little damage. It did, however, frighten the Taliban. Two shells had landed very near one of their positions. There were also aircraft about, flying over Musa Qaleh on some unconnected mission. At 11.18 p.m. the lights of the town went on again. It seemed the insurgents would not be attacking that night and another game of cat-and-mouse came to a close. The Pathfinders were approaching exhaustion. They were getting only intermittent resupplies and were supplementing their rations with food bought from the few locals who were left. Mostly it was spaghetti and tomato paste and nan bread. One day some of the gunners bought a goat and made a stew. Wight-Boycott was ‘on about three hours’ sleep max. That was an hour’s sleep at first light and two hours at night.’ Andy Newell, whose ten years’ experience in the Pathfinders had been invaluable to the OC in his first weeks of command, was getting the same.
On 16 July they had been told, once again, that they would shortly be relieved. The Danish reconnaissance squadron serving with the coalition forces had agreed to take over the Musa Qaleh garrison. A small advance party of five men had already flown in with the engineers. The rest were to arrive on 21 July, guided in by Newell. They were due to break in from the west. The Pathfinders watched them arrive. Through his binoculars Wight-Boycott could see the Taliban running into their ambush positions. He called in an air strike. A Harrier appeared and dropped a 500lb bomb with lethal precision on the insurgents. Most of them were killed. The others fled. The Danes decided that they did not have enough troops to clear the green zone on foot while the vehicles passed through. They broke off the insertion and drove back out into the desert. They had been within 1,000 yards of the base. Newell was frustrated and disappointed. He knew how badly the resupplies they were bringing were needed. ‘I was going nuts at this point as the blokes had run out of batteries for their night vision devices and were low on ammo and food,’ he said. The mood inside the base was bleak. ‘You can imagine the morale of the blokes,’ said Wight-Boycott. ‘They had been there six weeks at that stage. We were meant to be there ninety-six hours and we had been told on three or four occasions, “You will be relieved tomorrow.”’
Wight-Boycott had been left to his own devices for much of the time. Now he got a call from Ed Butler asking him how much longer he could hold on for. He replied, stoically, that they could hang on for another five to seven days, giving the Danes another chance to drive in.
Before they could do so the Taliban launched their heaviest attack so far. Since 17 July they had been mounting small, harassing attacks every evening as the light started to fade. This time there was no feinting or probing, but a full-on assault.
On the morning of 24 July intelligence picked up information that the Taliban were moving weapons around, a sign that an operation was imminent. The attack began in the afternoon. It opened, spectacularly, with two RPGs hitting the sangar on the Outpost and destroying it, and demolishing the western edge of the roof, which collapsed on to the ground below. It took with it the 50-cal., the GPMG, a sniper rifle, two radios and a night vision sight. There were two Danes from the advance party on the roof at the time. It seemed to Wight-Boycott that they must both be dead. But when the smoke cleared, one of them could be seen doggedly trading fire. The other, Lieutenant Thomas Rydahl, had fallen two storeys into a pile of rubble below the sangar where he lay, armed only with a pistol, in direct line of sight of the attackers. One of the Pathfinders, Private Mark Wilson, together with a medic, Corporal Johan Wessels, and the Australian, Tony Robinson, ran under fire along the walkway connecting the compound to the Outpost to help.
When they arrived they saw that the man in the pit was hurt but alive. Wessels threw down a field dressing to him then took over a GPMG and with Robinson began driving the attackers back. Mark Wilson, meanwhile, went to the Dane’s rescue. According to Wight-Boycott he ‘got over there, looked down, said to himself, “I can do something about this”’. There was an old bedstead lying on the roof. Wilson hung it over the side and, ignoring the incoming fire, shinned down to where the wounded man lay, bleeding from the head and with a broken leg. Wilson retrieved a ladder from among the debris and shoved the Dane up and out. He was to win the Military Cross for his courage.
Musa Qaleh was under attack from all sides. It was reckoned later that as many as three hundred fighters had taken part in the assault. The defenders had called for air support but it was a long time coming – it was ninety minutes before they heard the aircraft engines. This was the first time the base had been subjected to such a concerted effort. It seemed miraculous that the defenders had suffered only three wounded.
The attack seemed to indicate that Musa Qaleh had moved yet higher up the Taliban’s target list. Wight-Boycott reckoned that by now there were about ten Taliban units in the area, each with a strength of 10 to 20 fighters. They had proved to be good at using cover and – as the Outpost incident showed – firing accurately. They had coordinated well and would have mounted an even heavier operation if reinforcements they had called in from Now Zad had not been intercepted by the Danish force still deployed out to the west, waiting to insert.
The convoy bringing the full Danish recce squadron finally arrived at 1.30 on the morning of 26 July after a forty-eight-hour trek from Bastion that involved a long detour and an attempted Taliban ambush. They approached the town from the east. Before they got there, aircraft dropped six 1,000lb bombs on known Taliban areas. There was no opposition when the 1,000-yard-long chain of vehicles arrived in town. The only casualty was the redoubtable Andy Newell. The Danes had been cautious about advancing through the dark, silent town up the road leading to the district centre’s main gate. Newell had gone ahead to lead the way. About forty yards from the gate there was a burst of automatic rifle fire and Newell felt an impact and fell forwards. He had been shot in his right arm by one of the ANP guards, who had panicked after being woken up by the sound of the convoy. Newell picked himself up and carried on into the base. His arm was completely numb. The single bullet had shattered bone and destroyed nerve tissue. It was the end of the war for Newell. He was casevacced back to Bastion then on to Britain for treatment.
The following night the Taliban stayed away. While the Danes were bedding in, the political situation in Musa Qaleh was soured by an accident of war which depleted drastically what goodwill remained among the local people towards the
ir self-declared saviours.
One afternoon during an air raid on a Taliban position, a bomb was mistakenly dropped on the mosque adjoining the district centre. The building was empty, but the blunder created fury among the town elders. The normally genial demeanour of Coco the police chief vanished. It took all the diplomatic skills of Major Lars Ulslev, the Danish officer who had now taken over command of the base, to convince him that the mosque was not the intended target. Eventually Coco was persuaded, and set about explaining to both his men and the remnants of the population that the bombing was an accident and that the soldiers would repair the damage.
The Danish OC requested a shura to apologise directly to the town elders and promised that Coalition money would fund the rebuilding. They asked him whether those who were left should leave town and let the Taliban and the Coalition force slug it out. Ulslev replied that they should stay. However many chose to ignore the advice and over the next weeks the remaining population of Musa Qaleh slipped away, leaving it eerie and empty, save for the Taliban.
By the end of July the town and its surrounds were, in Wight-Boycott’s opinion, the Taliban’s ‘centre of gravity in the region’. For this reason it was all the more important not to abandon the base. He suggested to Ed Butler that a battle group operation should be launched into the area to close down the insurgents’ main supply routes either side of the town. Inevitably, this would suck in Taliban forces from outside, who could then be destroyed on ground of the Coalition forces’ choosing. He also emphasised that this ‘kinetic’ operation should be balanced by a peaceful initiative – rebuilding the bomb-blasted mosque.
The deadly danger the Taliban posed to any battle group movement in the area was demonstrated on 1 August when a patrol of D Squadron HCR was ambushed in a village near Musa Qaleh as it attempted to relieve some of the Taliban pressure on the town. It was commanded by Captain Alex Eida, who was serving with 7 RHA. He was travelling in a Spartan light reconnaissance armoured personnel carrier when it was blown up by a roadside bomb. The vehicle was then hit by RPGs and heavy machine guns. Eida was killed, along with Second Lieutenant Ralph Johnson and Lance Corporal Ross Nicholls of the HCR.
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