The engineers set the forty-second fuses and retired. In UK exercises the safety distance for a ten-stick mousehole charge is 1,000 yards. Hugo Farmer was about three yards from this one, crouched in a trench. He shouted to his men to cover their ears. Then came the explosion. ‘I wasn’t in danger from flying debris or anything but I hadn’t counted on how strong the shock wave was,’ he said. ‘It knocked the air out of my lungs and I felt dizzy, light-headed, and for a brief moment I saw stars.’
On recovering Farmer jumped out of the ditch, threw a grenade into the compound and ordered the first pair of men through the door. There was still some sporadic fire coming towards them, but the compound itself was empty. They moved through, methodically checking the outbuildings scattered around the courtyard. To the south, Andy Mallet and 2 Platoon were doing the same thing.
Apart from the odd incoming round the initial Taliban resistance had died away. The air over the target area was now buzzing with A-10s, Apaches and the Spectre gunship, which blasted any sign of insurgent activity. The two Chinooks carrying ‘C’ Company had stood off for what seemed to its OC, Paul Blair, like a long ten minutes before putting down. By the time they landed the firing had subsided. They moved through ‘A’ Company and on to their objectives. When they entered their first target compound they found a small group of civilians. If Taliban fighters had been there before, they had now gone. Blair decided that ‘rather than us charging in’ he would send forward a section of anti-tank troops attached to the company ‘to try and find out what was going on and try to reassure them that we were not there to rape and pillage’.
By now the Paras had been joined by the Canadian company in their armoured vehicles. The senior Taliban commander they were there to capture was reported to be hiding in one of the remaining compounds. Supported by the Canadian LAVs, Blair and his men moved to check it out. In one compound they found a vehicle loaded with two 107mm ‘Chinese rockets’ of the type that had killed three men at Sangin two weeks earlier. They also found half a dozen RPGs. These were put in a pile to await destruction by the engineers. The vehicle with the rockets was blown up from the air by an Apache. It took three shots before a Hellfire missile finally connected.
In some of the compound buildings Blair found twenty beds crammed into a space meant for only six. ‘A lot of people had moved in there pretty quickly,’ he said. Whether they were farm workers getting out of the way of the insurgents or the insurgents themselves was not clear. But he reckoned from ‘the look and the feel of the area it was clear that a Taliban presence had been there’. If so, they were no longer around. There was no sign of the ‘high-value target’ that had prompted the exercise.
By mid-afternoon there was nothing left to be done. It had been a long day. As they pulled back to the south to await the helicopters Farmer saw a big explosion south of their position. ‘It turned out that even though we hadn’t found much at the target location, the action had flushed out a number of enemy leaders who had gathered in a building three kilometres south of Sangin. The Canadians levelled this with two missiles.’ If Augustus had been an anticlimax it had at least ‘achieved this side effect … even though what we were looking for wasn’t there, it had the effect of highlighting them in another location’.
The 3 Para battle group had certainly done what was asked of it. American gratitude for their efforts was slow in coming, however. Eight days after Augustus General Freakley arrived in Lashkar Gah for a meeting with the Canadian commander, David Fraser, Charlie Knaggs and Stuart Tootal. Daoud and his security chiefs were also present, and it was the governor who started the proceedings. He said he was worried that the Taliban were gaining the upper hand and that the feeble grip the government had on Helmand was in danger of being prised loose. Freakley then turned to the others and asked them what they were going to do to answer Daoud’s concerns. In the opinion of one who was present the American gave an ‘emotive and bombastic’ performance. He made it clear that, in his view, the British were not doing enough. In fact, given their superior numbers and weight of equipment, they were doing less than any of the other Coalition partners in the province.
Tootal rose to the challenge. He replied that by answering the governor’s demands the British had gone far beyond the task they were originally given and had dangerously stretched their resources. It was still possible to do more, but only if compensating reductions were made on their existing responsibilities in the platoon houses. By that, he meant pulling out of Now Zad.
13
Eating Dust
While the commanders were meeting in Kandahar, the defenders of the Now Zad platoon house were enduring yet another day of attacks. The district centre, 40 long miles to the north of Bastion, had become the hottest spot in Helmand. The town was empty except for the fighters, and Now Zad was an eerie arena, where a sinister silence alternated with the eruption of gunfire and the earthshaking detonation of bombs. Inside the compound, 200 yards square, twenty-five Gurkhas pitted themselves against scores, sometimes hundreds, of Taliban, who attacked with relentless determination. In the week leading up to the commanders’ conference, Now Zad had been attacked thirty-five times. On 16 July, an average day, the fighting opened at breakfast time with sniper shots which continued throughout the morning. In between, the Taliban fired mortar bombs into the base. In the afternoon they sneaked into a clinic 20 yards from the southern wall and opened up from there. Shortly afterwards, they launched a volley of RPG fire at Sangar Three, on the south-east corner of the compound, before signing off with a last firefight as dusk descended.
Now Zad had become a classic example of the unintended consequences of the platoon house strategy. It had been the first outpost the Paras had reinforced in answer to the pleas of Governor Daoud. When ‘B’ Company arrived there on 22 May, it seemed that his concern that ‘the black flag of Mullah Omar’ would shortly be fluttering over the district centre was exaggerated.
Now the threat was serious. Whether that was due to the arrival of the British troops or would have happened anyway was a question that would never be answered. But the fact was that, while the deployment may have asserted the government’s authority in the area, it also presented a challenge that the Taliban appeared unable to resist. Afterwards this would be presented as a positive development. The platoon houses were candles on which the insurgents seemed fatally eager to burn their wings. That was not how it struck the beleaguered force at Now Zad. The defenders of the compound felt vulnerable and isolated. Worst of all, they were stuck, fixed, unable to manoeuvre. The situation favoured the attackers. By the beginning of July the Taliban had the run of the town and were able to strike when they liked. Their objectives were limited and seemed achievable. By killing one Coalition soldier they could claim a minor propaganda victory. By killing thirty or forty aboard one of the helicopters that had to fly in to sustain the garrison – always a real possibility – they could significantly undermine Britain’s willingness to sustain the platoon house strategy. Looking at it coolly, the Gurkhas concluded that, given the choice, they would rather be in the attackers’ boots than their own.
The Para deployment in Now Zad had been brief. Giles Timms and his men moved out after a few days and a platoon of the Gurkhas’ ‘D’ Company moved in. The local Taliban had been hit hard during Operation Mutay at the beginning of June, and the town stayed quiet for the rest of the month. But as the month wore on the Gurkhas began to notice some ominous changes. Initially, life flowed along, placid and unmenacing. The local people took little notice of the newcomers. A few were openly hostile. Most were indifferent. The pick-up trucks, loaded with crops and goods, came and went to the weekly open-air bazaar, which stretched along the town’s main north–south road. But as the weeks passed, there were fewer and fewer people on the streets. The bazaar closed down. Then, on 28 June, the Taliban fired a mortar at the ANP post on the top of the hill south of the compound, causing no injury but marking the start of hostilities.
‘ANP Hill’, as it
became known, was a key point for attackers and defenders alike. It looked out over the base and the town, giving anyone who held it a strong tactical advantage. It also dominated the patch of desert to the south-west of the district centre, where the helicopters came in.
The district centre was on the western edge of town, about a thousand yards from the hill. Inside the walls were a main building, a prison, a mosque and some offices and storerooms that could be used for accommodation. There were heavily sandbagged sangars at each corner, with one each on the main gate and the back wall. The ops room was in the main building in the centre of the compound. Each time the shooting started the OC and his team moved up from the ops room to a position on the roof known as the Control Tower to follow events more clearly. On 1 July, the Gurkhas’ 10 Platoon were relieved by 11 Platoon. For the next month they would hold the fort, together with twenty ANA soldiers, overseen by an OMLT, and a mixed contingent of policemen.
‘D’ Company was commanded by Major Dan Rex, a quiet, courteous thirty-four-year-old who seemed to have a particularly warm relationship with his men. His father had run away from school when the Second World War began to fight in the Indian Army against the Japanese, before becoming a tea planter in Assam. Rex was born in India and grew up wanting to join the army. He first came across the Gurkhas when he was a cadet at Sandhurst and ‘felt a real affinity for the soldiers’. He had spent his career with the Royal Gurkha Rifles and spoke fluent Nepali, perfected during a year spent building schools in Nepal.
‘D’ Company had been put together at very short notice. The Gurkhas were told only in January that they were Afghanistan-bound. They arrived in April, charged with providing protection for Bastion. The plan soon changed, to the satisfaction of the soldiers. ‘We really wanted to go to the front line, rather than doing the force protection job,’ said Corporal Khailash Khebang Limbu, a twenty-five-year-old who had followed his grandfather and uncle into the British Army. ‘It’s quite boring just standing in a sangar. I wanted to fight with the enemy. All the Gurkhas wanted to fight the enemy.’
By the time 11 Platoon arrived in Now Zad it was clear that their wish stood every chance of being fulfilled. By now the exodus of civilians was in full swing. ‘It was rather a miserable sight seeing people in donkey carts loaded with their belongings, just clearing out,’ said Rex. He had invited the local elders to a shura soon after his arrival. He had worked hard building up a picture of local politics and identifying those who wielded power and influence. The elders came to the compound and listened politely to Rex’s ‘passionate’ speech about peace and reconstruction. He ‘told them what we were there for, and I really made the point that we were not the Russians. I said to them, the last thing I want to do is use aviation against you’. He mentioned some possible QIPs that would benefit the town. Their response, though, seemed to him to be ‘really ambivalent’. The locals knew that the British presence would guarantee trouble with the Taliban. As at Sangin and Musa Qaleh, they had no way of knowing which would be the winning side, and were cautious about deciding which way to jump.
One of the elders’ main concerns was the conduct of the police. There was a mixed force of policemen in the base. A small number were from the National Directorate of Security. They carried out intelligence duties and were from outside Helmand. Rex found them more reliable than the ANP, who were local and therefore intricately involved in the area’s opaque and complicated politics.
The elders wanted guarantees that the soldiers would force the police to wear their uniforms. This seems to have been so they could be more easily held accountable for their misdeeds, and also to identify them to the Taliban. As the British were finding everywhere, the ANP were hated, feared and despised. The Now Zad elders accused the local force of arresting boys on false charges and demanding ransom money for their release. Rex had found a young man in the compound prison when he arrived ‘and released him because there was absolutely no reason why he was there’.
The alliance with the robbing, oppressing ANP did serious damage to British claims to be on the side of the local people. The Taliban, on the other hand, set themselves up as avengers of the ANP’s crimes. One of the Taliban’s first acts while infiltrating Now Zad had been to start a campaign to starve and frighten the ANP out. They intimidated the local bakery into stopping supplies of bread to the base and took potshots at the policemen when they left the compound to patrol. As a result, the ANP had stopped going out and were effectively prisoners inside the district centre.
The ANP’s relationship with the Taliban was complicated, however. Some policemen had taken out an insurance policy by volunteering their services as spies in the British camp, and regularly tipped the insurgents off about the Gurkhas’ movements.
Rex had told the elders that he had no desire to bomb Now Zad. But he was equally clear that if the Taliban attacked, they would be hit hard. There was no problem about getting the message back to them. Two of those present at the shura, he suspected, were Taliban spies who were taking advantage of the invitation to get a good look at the compound from the inside.
The insurgents made thorough preparations before starting their campaign in earnest. It seemed, from the pattern of their attacks, that they had carried out careful reconnaissance and knew the strength of the Gurkha force. They mounted small, probing attacks designed to reveal weaknesses in the compound’s defences. At nightfall the defenders noticed the chink of steel on masonry. The Taliban were burrowing through the walls of the surrounding buildings to set up close-quarter firing positions. They also used underground irrigation channels, which were dry in the summer months, to move men and equipment around.
The first big attack started in the early hours of 12 July and lasted for six hours. It was intended to be a decisive action that would drive the British out of Now Zad. The fighting had begun late the night before when an ANP patrol surprised a Taliban team who were moving stealthily up the main road towards the base. In the firefight one of the policemen was wounded. The main assault was launched just after the Taliban had extracted themselves. Sangars One and Three on the eastern side of the district centre and the Control Tower on the roof of the main building were hit by rifle and heavy machine guns and RPGs. The Gurkhas’ two .50-cals were on top of the main building and next to Sangar Three. Their heavy-calibre bullets were devastatingly effective in suppressing enemy fire, but the Taliban knew the exact locations of their positions. ‘They had red-hot rounds bouncing off them, so to get on the .50-cal was bloody difficult,’ said Rex. The pattern was repeated in subsequent attacks, and by the time the Gurkhas left Now Zad both guns had been hit so many times that their barrels were beyond repair.
For a while, all ‘D’ Company’s men were pinned down and unable to fight back effectively. It was time to call in the aircraft. The Gurkhas had a Joint Tactical Air Controller with them, Sergeant Charlie Aggrey of 7 RHA, who requested help. Soon afterwards, American A-10s came in low, strafing Taliban positions amid some trees to the east and in a former school to the north-east with cannon shells and rockets, before dropping a 500lb bomb on the building.
Despite the pounding and the continued presence of aircraft, the insurgents returned to the school and resumed the attack. Rex was impressed. ‘I thought, you’re brave boys to do that.’ Another 500lb bomb struck the building and the shooting, at last, stopped. The attackers had still not given up. A Predator UAV overhead sent back pictures of two Toyota Corollas, the pick-up trucks used by all Afghan fighters, drawing up close to the school. Yet another bomb was dropped. The defenders watched the vehicles catapult into the air and the attack at last subsided.
Any hopes that the Taliban had exhausted themselves were dispelled the following night. There was a full moon. Corporal Khailash Limbu was on Sangar One, peering into the streets and alleys to the north-east of the base, where most of the shooting had come from the previous night. In the moonlight he glimpsed four men ‘leopard-crawling’ along a pathway about a hundred yards away, steadying them
selves with one hand and holding their weapon in the other. Limbu alerted his men. As they moved forward they opened fire simultaneously, killing three of the approaching attackers and knocking over the fourth.
For a quarter of an hour, quiet descended once more. Then the base shuddered as salvoes of RPG and heavy machine-gun fire hit it from several directions. Corporal Khailash’s sangar was rocked by several RPGs that arrived in quick succession. ‘They wanted to destroy one sangar so they could break in through it,’ he said. ‘When it happened, I thought at first we were all going to die.’ The temptation to fall back was strong but the men in the sangars fought it. ‘We were thinking about our grandfathers, about the old generations,’ said Khailash. He and his men held their ground. It was impossible to see what was happening. At one point he felt sure the Taliban were at the foot of his sangar and jumped forward to throw two grenades over the wall.
For twenty minutes an unbroken stream of Taliban fire cracked and thumped into the compound. Movement was almost impossible. Then, slowly, the Gurkhas began to regain the initiative. For those in the sangars it was a question of summoning up the courage to get into a firing position and shoot back, forcing the attackers to take cover themselves, creating a few seconds’ grace that would allow another soldier to join in, increasing the weight of fire incrementally until they were winning the firefight. The shooting went on and on.
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