Inside the compound the atmosphere between the British and their supposed allies was rapidly curdling. Rex’s suspicions of the ANP had hardened to the point where he had accused them of communicating with the Taliban. As the din grew louder, the police started ‘behaving extremely suspiciously and fingering their weapons’. Rex took the precaution of removing the police chief’s radio and ‘politely’ putting him under guard.
It was only after two and a half hours that the battle faded out. An American A-10 arrived to drop a 500lb bomb and shoot up the Taliban lines to the north. As the shooting died away Rex toured the sangars. He was astonished and delighted to find that no one had been hurt or killed. He wrote later, ‘we lost some of our nine lives that night, and had the Taliban been more accurate with their RPGs we would have been in for a very close fight’.
The Taliban were extraordinarily bad shots and seemed to believe that weight of fire was more important than where they aimed their weapons. But there was no doubt that the defenders had been extremely lucky. They had done their best to build up the sangars and to site the guns to give the best protection, but there were still blind spots which the attackers recognised and exploited. The Taliban controlled the town. Rex reckoned it would have taken a battalion to wrest it from them, and with his tiny force of forty men there was no question of aggressive patrolling. The insurgents could attack when they wanted. The garrison was particularly vulnerable during a helicopter resupply. Half the platoon were needed to secure the landing site, leaving the district centre dangerously undermanned.
The defenders had the great advantage of air power. Most of the engagements ended with the drone of an approaching aircraft and the seismic thump of a huge bomb. The defenders took great pains to avoid collateral damage and to comply with the rules of engagement. The air controller, Charlie Aggrey, risked his life to get into a position where he could eyeball the intended target and make sure there were no civilians present. There was only one minor civilian casualty during the Gurkhas’ time in Sangin. The victim was shot by the ANP.
Despite the mad courage they showed in returning to the school building after it had been struck by a 500-pounder, the Taliban feared their enemy in the air. They had sentries scanning the skies round the clock for approaching jets or helicopters. But it still took an average of forty minutes between a request going in and an aircraft appearing.
Initially resupply was fairly regular. There was a flat stretch of desert about a thousand yards to the south-west of the base, in the lee of ANP Hill, where the helicopters could get in. It was overseen by the hilltop post but still liable to attack. Early on in the Gurkhas’ deployment, a mortar landed close to a Chinook during a resupply, causing it to break off the mission and return to Bastion with its cargo, including badly needed engineering supplies to build up the defences. Later, as the service became more erratic, stores had to be delivered by ‘jingly-truck’, which was always a risky venture. One was destroyed by a mine. Another was a week late arriving. Supplies of food, water and ammunition never reached critical levels, although at one point the Gurkhas had used up all but 20 per cent of their ammunition before they were resupplied.
As for the morale of the defenders, there were no signs that the Gurkhas were wilting. They were fighting not just to hold their position but for the reputation of a regiment that was as dear to them as were their families.
One attack started with the Taliban advancing up the road from the south. Rifleman Nabin Rai was one of the youngest soldiers in the compound. He had been in the army for less than a year. He was part of the quick reaction force, standing by in the compound, when the shooting began. Rex ordered him to reinforce the sangar where the fire was coming in. ‘In order to get there he had to climb up two fairly lengthy ladders that were attracting a lot of fire,’ Rex said. Nabin then took over the .50-cal that was adjacent to the sangar. Because of its size, it couldn’t fit inside, so he didn’t have the same protection as he would have had inside the sangar. Bullets were hitting the sandbags in front of him. One round hit the barrel of the .50-cal and ricocheted off, grazing his cheek. Nabin kept shooting until the weight of fire forced him to duck into the sangar. His face was smothered with blood. The sangar commander ordered him back down the ladder for medical attention. Nabin decided to stay where he was. Frustrated at being unable to return fire, he dodged outside again and started to shoot into the swirling smoke, dust, debris and flame with a Minimi light machine gun. Crouched down behind the sandbags it was impossible to see the attackers, so he got to his feet and carried on shooting until a bullet hit his helmet, knocking him on his back. He sat up, smoked a cigarette while he recovered his senses, then crawled back to the wall and resumed firing. ‘It was only three and a half hours later that I could get him out of the sangar during a lull,’ said Rex. ‘And even then he was very reluctant to leave his team.’
The Gurkhas needed all their reserves of fortitude to deal with the daily routine. Life in the compound, and in the pounding heat on top of ANP Hill, drained stamina and grated nerves. Rifleman Yam Roka Pun wrote a poem about it.
This is the place where rocks melt into sand
And the bitch heat blows it into your face
For minutes visibility is zero
For days you eat dust
And for months dust will eat you.
There was a further heavy attack on 16 July. The assault was launched from several points around the compound and one RPG struck Rex’s post on the ops room roof. A bullet hit Rifleman Barren Limbu in the left thigh. The defenders radioed for help and thirty-three minutes later one of the British Apaches arrived and hit the Taliban with 30mm cannon fire, very close to the Gurkha positions. The attackers managed to reach an abandoned clinic only 20 yards from the southern wall of the base and opened fire on the sangars from there. The Apache swooped in to shoot up the position, hovering 60 feet over the compound and showering empty shell cases on to the heads of the Gurkhas below. One of the rounds went astray, narrowly missing the 11 Platoon commander, Lieutenant Angus Mathers. The defenders then hurled grenades into the clinic from the compound walls, and the Taliban firing stopped. Later still a helicopter came under fire from an anti-aircraft gun sited in a building 100 yards from the district centre. It sent a Hellfire missile into the position, silencing the gun.
That evening, Rex received welcome reinforcements. 12 Platoon flew in with a small-fire support group from ‘A’ Company of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, who had just arrived from Cyprus. The Fusiliers were equipped with two mortar barrels and two GPMGs. Dan sent them up to ANP Hill, where the mortars could provide a significant addition to his firepower.
The Taliban continued their determined attacks until the evening of 22 July, when there were simultaneous assaults on both ANP Hill and the district centre. They were repulsed by a bombing and gun run by an A-10. After that the insurgents changed their tactics. Even the Taliban had limits to how many casualties they could take before they became disheartened.
Towards the end of the period of heavy fighting, Rex had tried to get the Taliban commanders to see sense and back off. He sent a message via an interpreter: ‘I said to them, “Look, you have two paths here.” I suggested that we’d been quite lenient so far and I was going to take the gloves off next time. Actually, we were being hammered.’
On another occasion he used the fact that Taliban routinely tried to eavesdrop on radio traffic to trick the insurgents into identifying themselves. One night, a convoy of pick-up trucks appeared on the edge of town with their headlights blazing. ‘It was extraordinary,’ said Dan Rex. ‘Like the M25.’ It seemed obvious that they were Taliban, but the rules of engagement did not allow an attack without a positive identification. Afghan police were manning the observation post on ANP Hill. Rex got them to ask over their net whether anyone had seen the lights of the Taliban vehicles. The headlights were promptly switched off. The Fusiliers then targeted the convoy with their 81mm mortars.
Throughout this time the Taliba
n continued to harass the base and ANP Hill with mortar and sniper fire. The mortar bombs were haphazardly aimed and caused no casualties. After 13 July, however, the aim of the Taliban improved markedly and carefully bracketed rounds started landing in the compound. The suspicion was that an outside team was now operating the barrel. On 19 July, three rounds landed inside the district centre. Later 12 Platoon, sitting up on ANP Hill, spotted the mortar position and strafed it thoroughly. There was no more trouble from mortars during the rest of the Gurkhas’ stay.
The Taliban snipers were professionals. Their positions were well concealed and set back deep inside buildings behind walls that had holes cut in them to allow good arcs of fire as well as offering protection. The snipers used high-velocity Dragunov rifles. They moved around from position to position, keeping the garrison in a permanent state of anxiety. To minimise risk, Rex ordered a stop to all unnecessary movement in daylight. One day Corporal Jack Cook, the OC’s signaller, decided to repair the field telephone used as the secure line from the sangars to the ops room. He was immediately hit in the back by a sniper round, and had to be casevacced out.
The Gurkhas responded to the sniper threat by bringing in their own marksman. Corporal Imbahadur Gurung played a long, lethal game of hide-and-seek with his counterparts. He would lie up for hours in an elevated position inside the compound, watching the known sniper points and waiting for one of his opposite numbers to appear. He succeeded in killing three of his opponents, but gunmen kept returning to the positions and were not deterred by regular blasts of machine-gun fire. In the end the firing points were destroyed by air strikes.
Close air support was fundamental to the Gurkhas’ defence. They knew that they could usually rely on attack helicopters to come to their rescue when a situation began to slide into precariousness. That did not mean that their requests were answered without question. Rex once received intelligence that a senior Taliban commander had established his headquarters in a building to the northeast of the compound and requested a pre-emptive air strike. The request went all the way back to Permanent Joint Headquarters (PJHQ), the highest level of command, at Northwood before being rejected. No reason was given.
‘D’ Company left Now Zad on 30 July, to be replaced by the Fusiliers. Stuart Tootal mounted a 3 Para battle group operation to carry out the relief. The Gurkhas were thankful to go. In their time there they had fired more than 30,000 rifle rounds, 17,000 machine-gun bullets and had thrown twenty-one hand grenades. They had also called in numerous air strikes. As a result, they had killed about a hundred Taliban, while suffering only three low-level injuries themselves. This was a stark imbalance. The Taliban had thrown all the violence they could muster at their enemy, showing extraordinary courage and determination. The attacks eventually tailed off but never quite stopped. Throughout August, the Fusiliers would have to contend with intermittent mortar and small-arms attacks. The big fights had achieved nothing except the destruction of large areas of the town and the flight of much of the population. The Taliban had nothing to show for their efforts and sacrifices. The Gurkhas could commend themselves on their fortitude. The fighting they had been through was as vicious as anything seen in the district centres and they had stood firm. But whether their efforts had done anything to advance the original aims of the mission was another matter.
14
Hesco
In Sangin, the Taliban had mounted a different sort of siege. With ‘B’ Company’s arrival on 3 July, the district centre started to look like a proper fortress. The ever-mounting piles of sandbags and the tangle of razor wire were unlikely to be breached by direct assault. For the next two months, the insurgents would test the defences night and day. But it was less in the hope of overpowering the occupants than in sapping their willingness to stay.
Giles Timms’s men spent their first days making constant improvements to the fortifications. On 7 July, they filled sandbags and humped them around the compound, building up a ‘super-sangar’ on a building on the eastern side of the base. While they were on the roof, an RPG whizzed overhead from the direction of the bazaar. They fired back but the attackers had disappeared. Further ‘shoot and scoots’ continued throughout the afternoon. One RPG hit the building that 4 Platoon used as a dormitory, but fortunately the men were all on the roof at the time. As the Paras changed stag duty at 7 p.m. they were shot at from the orchard to the south of the base. They called in an artillery strike from FOB Robinson and shells crashed into the ground 100 yards from the compound.
The Taliban had been using the built-up area to the east to fire on the district centre. One building, which lay on the far side of the orchard, was a particular favourite. That evening, 7 July, Timms decided that enough was enough. He called in an air strike and shortly afterwards an A-10 appeared carrying a JDAM-equipped 500lb bomb. Joint Direct Attack Munition was a bolt-on guidance system which transformed an old-fashioned gravity bomb into a ‘smart bomb’. The desired coordinates were fed into the on-board computer and, once dropped, the bomb directed itself to the target. It was accurate and inexpensive. Each kit cost £10,000, which put it in the bargain basement of the high-tech munitions supermarket.
Harvey Pynn, the regimental ‘doc’, sat huddled in helmet and body armour with the rest of the garrison to watch the show. The bomb landed ‘with a flash and a bang covering our compound with dust’. He noted that ‘it was great to witness such destruction close at hand, but it’s not exactly what we’re here for’. The ruins became a point of reference in the geography of the Sangin battlefield – the ‘JDAM building’.
This was a drastic measure. In other respects, though, Timms favoured a less forceful approach. His inclination was to reduce the volume of fire pumped out from the base. This had the doubly beneficial effect of limiting damage to the town and the risk of causing civilian casualties, as well as preserving ammunition stocks and reducing the necessity for dangerous helicopter resupplies.
He also wanted to avoid, where he could, the physical and psychological wear and tear on his men that came with the static business of manning a fort. During the (by now routine) Taliban night attacks, everyone was ordered to stand to. Timms tended to stand them back down again soon after the shooting subsided, rather than keeping everyone on high alert for long periods. This consideration was very welcome. The constant nag of anxiety was debilitating, as was the heat. It was stifling in the airless rooms of the compound. Some men preferred to kip outside, reckoning that the possibility of a slight breeze outweighed the constant attentions of the mosquitoes and the occasional alarm caused by a 107mm rocket or an RPG hurtling overhead.
The Taliban had not repeated their success of 1 July and the Chinese rockets they fired resumed their customary inaccuracy. There was more confidence now that, thanks to the improved defences, if the insurgents got lucky again the results would not be as devastating. They certainly seemed determined to keep trying. Giles Timms thought they were ‘on a bit of a high’ after the rocket strike.
‘It was pretty full on,’ he said. ‘We were in contact four or five times a day. Some days there were only a couple. Some days it would be six. The Taliban were obviously pretty buoyed up by their success.’ He suspected the ANP in the base of passing the news of the deaths of Hashmi, Thorpe and their interpreter to their supposed enemies.
But on a couple of occasions the Taliban crept up close under cover of darkness. One night they got within 15 yards of the compound wall and had to be driven off with hand grenades. The defenders placed claymore mines in front of their positions. These were banana-shaped, flat metal boxes that sprayed shrapnel over a wide arc when detonated by a command wire. On the night of 6 July, as many as ten Taliban fighters were killed by claymores after they were spotted creeping up to the compound walls.
Mostly, however, the Taliban now chose to attack at a distance of several hundred yards, from the cover of the urban fringe or the cultivated land to the south. The Paras responded with. 50-cals, GPMGs, mortar and sniper fire, the occasional
artillery barrage from 7 RHA’s guns at FOB Robinson or an air strike when the Taliban were particularly threatening. Some of the firefights lasted just a few minutes. Some could go on for forty minutes.
The snipers operated in two-man teams from the roof of the FSG tower. Craig Mountford, the thirty-six-year-old sergeant who had been frustrated at not having seen what he regarded as real operational duty, was getting his full share of action in ‘lawless Helmand province’. He commanded a platoon of about twenty men, which was split into three sections of six when R & R was taken into account. Each section was made up of three sniper pairs. Within each pair, one sniper would man the gun, the other the binoculars, telescope or night sights.
The snipers’ job was little understood outside the army. The primary role was, in Mountford’s words, ‘to take out key enemy personnel like commanders, radio operators, mortar crews, anything that is going to pose a threat to friendly forces’. But the teams spent most of their time working as observers, as ‘an extra set of eyes for the commander’. They scoped out the ground, passing on information about suspicious movements. They were also trained to call in mortar and artillery fire if needed.
The British Army sniper rifle fires a 8.59mm round. This is considerably larger and heavier than the 5.56mm bullet that comes out of the standard SA-80 infantry rifle. It is equipped with powerful Schmidt and Bender sights and is clinically accurate up to 1,000 yards. Because of the tight rules of engagement, the snipers had to exercise great care before engaging targets. They were allowed to fire warning shots when they saw what looked like suspicious behaviour. After a while, the snipers worked on the principle that any movement on the edge of town after dark was suspicious. By now most of the ordinary folk of Sangin had left and the night belonged to the insurgents.
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