A History of the World Since 9/11

by Dominic Streatfeild

  Abdul Malik and his family were well aware of the importance of the region, and their town in particular, for the Taliban. Some of them had met Mullah Omar.

  ‘I knew him when he was very young. He was a bit younger than me,’ says Malik’s uncle Anwar. ‘I grew up with him.’ Anwar had shared a room with Omar for four years during the Soviet occupation. His opinion of the future Taliban leader was not high. ‘Not that educated. Illiterate. Among his friends he wasn’t even in the top ten.’

  In a couple of areas, however, Omar excelled. He was certainly brave in combat. And he was a fantastic marksman. When Anwar and his friends challenged him, Omar would demonstrate his aim by shooting single cigarettes off a wall at the edge of town.

  ‘We would put up a cigarette. He would always hit it first time.’

  For a while, the two men were quite close. According to legend, Mullah Omar was wounded in the face by a piece of shrapnel during a Soviet airstrike and extracted his own eye on the battlefield with a bayonet. This, says Anwar, is hokum. He was indeed partially blinded, but was then taken to Pakistan, where the eye was surgically removed.

  ‘I went into hospital to see him,’ says Anwar. ‘He told me, “I’ve lost my eye!” He was really worried about losing his eye.’

  Anwar reassured the future Taliban leader. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told him. ‘Thank God that you are alive.’

  But Omar wasn’t having any of it. ‘Right!’ he told his friend sarcastically. ‘This injury has destroyed my youth.’

  Later, it was a great surprise to Anwar that Omar had achieved such prominence. Of all the young men growing up in Deh Rawood at the time, nobody would have predicted he would achieve high office.

  After the Taliban swept the country, the two men met again. Anwar sought Omar’s assistance in freeing a friend of his who had been wrongly imprisoned for a petty crime. Omar issued Anwar with a letter instructing the authorities to release their prisoner. When the guards refused, Anwar returned and told him what had happened. Together, the two men marched to the prison, where they located the man, ordered his release and castigated the official responsible. After the incident, Omar had offered Anwar a job in his administration.

  ‘Come,’ Omar said. ‘Come and join the Taliban movement.’

  Anwar refused. It was the last time they would meet.

  The exact nature of the intelligence that reached US officials in the summer of 2002 regarding the Taliban presence in Deh Rawood has never been revealed. It probably never will be. What is clear is that sometime in the spring of that year rumours began circulating that Mullah Omar had returned to Oruzgan and, specifically, to Deh Rawood.

  In May, the New York Times reported from Deh Rawood that Mullah Omar had been sighted. Either he was in the village or in the vicinity. If these rumours were true, he was almost certainly receiving assistance from family and friends there.

  ‘They will be helping them in the villages,’ General Amanullah, the Afghan military commander for northern Oruzgan, assured the Times. ‘They are of the same tribe or family . . . of course they will be helping them.’

  Special Forces from Norway, Germany, Australia and Canada were positioned in the mountains around town to watch the area and report any suspicious activity. It wasn’t long before they did. Whenever helicopters approached the area to drop off men or supplies they were shot at. SPECTRE gunships covering the operations reported fire from artillery weapons, including 23 mm machine guns and a 12.7 mm Soviet antiaircraft gun known as a DShK. The gunfire appeared to confirm the rumours: this region of Oruzgan housed a High-Value Target (HVT). Signals intelligence – phone and radio intercepts – as well as human sources indicated that the HVT might be one of three Taliban leaders: Mullah Osmani, Mullah Barader or Mullah Omar himself. Possibly even all three. Something, it seemed, was going on in Deh Rawood.

  US Special Forces drafted a Concept of Operations (CONOP) plan to sweep the valley, passing through Deh Rawood, clearing the area of Taliban and arresting any HVTs they might find. Four Special Forces teams would infiltrate the area by helicopter. Because it was known the Taliban had intelligence sources in the region, the teams were to split up around the village, taking up blocking positions to cut off possible escape routes to the north, on the roads leading to Helmand Province. SPECTRE would cover the operation from the air in case things went wrong.

  Things did go wrong. On the flight in, the Special Forces’ MH-47 helicopter was engaged from the ground, causing the pilots to change their landing zone. They then tried to put the helicopter down in an area strewn with boulders. While landing, the MH-47’s undercarriage caught on the rocks and was irretrievably damaged, along with the helicopter’s hydraulics system, which ruptured. Aircrew aborted the mission and returned to base, topping up the hydraulic system by hand all the way.

  One Special Forces team did make it to the Deh Rawood area, where they established their blocking position, only to discover they were now alone. They were forced to spend two days hiding from the villagers before they could be exfiltrated.

  ‘The mission they hoped would net a thousand al-Qaeda and Taliban forces netted nothing,’ wrote one of the Special Forces operatives involved. ‘Not a damn thing.’ There was one good piece of news: apparently the team on the ground had picked up a cellphone. It was rumoured to be Mullah Omar’s.

  Planning immediately started on another raid. This one was going to be bigger. Teams from the 3rd and 19th Special Forces groups were to go in, along with British Royal Marines and members of the US 101st Airborne Division. Deh Rawood would be surrounded, sealed off and swept. This ‘large combined arms mission’ was given a name: Operation Full Throttle. According to one Special Forces soldier involved, senior planners were convinced that the town ‘was hiding hordes of bad guys’.

  On 27 June 2002, just two days before Operation Full Throttle was to be launched, the plan changed. The Royal Marines and the 101st Airborne weren’t coming. US Special Forces, Navy SEAL teams and a handful of CIA officers were going in alone. And most of them weren’t going in by helicopter any more. They were going to drive from Kandahar. Thirty vehicles would traverse 150 kilometres of rough Afghan terrain at night to surprise the Taliban in Deh Rawood. Special Forces were unimpressed by the new plan.

  All the guys knew that, with such a scheme, any fuck-up was going to have very real consequences,’ observed one participant. And there was a very real chance for a fuck-up.’

  * * *

  While Special Forces were contemplating the wisdom of Operation Full Throttle, Abdul Malik’s family was planning, too. Malik’s father had finalized negotiations regarding his daughter-in-law’s dowry on 27 June, the same day US forces learned of the change of plan regarding the assault on Deh Rawood. The following day the men in Malik’s family would pick up the dastmal and there would be a private family gathering. Then, on the night of the 30th, there would be a party.

  As in the case of his engagement, Abdul Malik would have nothing to do with any of this. The bride and groom were not invited to their own engagement party. Partly this was to ensure they didn’t meet, but there was another motive.

  ‘The groom never stays at home, because he is ashamed,’ explains his brother, Khaliq. ‘Also, so that all his cousins can make jokes about him when he’s not there.’

  According to Afghan custom, a wedding party would be strictly segregated. A few male relatives were to attend – twenty in all – but their roles were menial: they prepare the food. Other than when serving the meal, they were to be kept apart from the women.

  The Malik house was separated into guest and family areas, and the men set about procuring enough meat, rice and cooking pots to prepare the banquet. Deh Rawood was without electricity, so they scoured the village for lights, borrowing four propane gas burners to position around the house. They also borrowed a neighbour’s tractor. Its headlights could be used to illuminate the garden. Abdul Malik was sent off to spend the night at his uncle’s house, well out of the way of the women. His
bride-to-be Tela Gul was left at her parents’ home.

  Throughout the day of 28 June 2002, children from the Malik household were dispatched on errands around the village. Their mission was to visit all the family’s friends and relatives and invite them to the party on the 30th.

  * * *

  The issue of the invitation list to the wedding party remains one of the unsolved mysteries regarding what happened next. For those who were involved, it is the unsolved mystery. Because there was one potential guest whose presence at the Malik household on the night of 30 June would have been of very great interest to the US military.

  When Malik’s mother had told him that his future bride belonged to a ‘famous family’, she wasn’t exaggerating. Tela Gul’s father Mohammed Sarwar Akhond, the mullah at the mosque in Chagasyan, had a brother considerably more important than he was. The brother – Tela Gul’s uncle – was Mullah Barader, second in command of the Taliban, and generally regarded by the United States at the time as the means of communication between potential Taliban supporters in Oruzgan and Mullah Omar himself.

  At the time of the engagement, all kinds of rumours were circulating about Barader. Like the other Taliban leaders, he had fled Kandahar in December 2001, presumably for Pakistan. Now it seemed he was back. In June, he was spotted in Oruzgan’s neighbouring province, Helmand. Gossip picked up by local journalists suggested he was hiding somewhere in the vicinity of Deh Rawood and that he was coming into town at night, on a motorbike, to speak to locals and plan for an insurgency against the Americans. The US military appears to have got wind of these trips: in the spring of 2002, Special Forces launched three raids in the area, two of them specifically targetting Barader’s house.

  Abdul Malik’s family is adamant that, although they knew Mullah Barader prior to the US invasion of Afghanistan, and knew that he was Tel Gul’s uncle, no one had heard from him since he had fled to Pakistan in the winter of 2001. Certainly he was not invited to the party. Neither he nor his boss – Uncle Anwar’s former roommate – Mullah Omar was due to attend the celebration.

  It seems entirely possible, however, that others in town – those less well acquainted with the family or possibly with ulterior motives – might have passed a rumour to American forces: Mullah Barader’s niece was getting married. There was to be a party. Mullah Barader might show up. Mullah Omar might show up.

  Here was an opportunity.

  Operation Full Throttle began on 29 June, when around thirty personnel carriers containing the SEALs, the Green Berets and a clutch of CIA officers departed from Kandahar. The teams drove all night, then stopped for the day to rest and prepare for the raid itself on 30 June. As the sun went down, they checked their weapons, donned their night-vision gear and headed off in the direction of Deh Rawood – and, they hoped, the biggest Taliban seizure of the war so far.

  Again, things went wrong. Operation Full Throttle called for four twelve-man Operational Detachments Alpha (ODAs) and a team of SEALs to surround Deh Rawood. Another ODA was to be flown in by helicopter to block possible escape routes. A nearby B-Team would coordinate the mission. The idea was to sneak up on the village (‘in complete secrecy’, according to one officer present), then pass through as quickly as possible, snatching up the HVTs. But, according to another participant, the ‘stealth’ element of the raid was compromised before the operation began. Thirty vehicles driving through the desert created a cloud of dust visible for miles around.

  As the convoy approached Deh Rawood, it was forced along a mountainside, a downhill slope leading into the Helmand River valley. At the end of the slope on the right was an Afghan National Army checkpoint, manned by armed guards. Since the objective of the exercise was stealth, it now became crucial to disarm the guards. More important, however, was to remove their means of communication, so they could not alert potential insurgents in the valley below.

  The convoy stopped 200 metres short of the guard house and the troops debated how best to go about this. For a brief period, they wondered whether they should kill the Afghans. Then they decided it might be better just to talk to them. A handful of US troops entered the checkpoint. They explained who they were, what they were doing, and demanded the guards’ weapons, radios and cellphones. At this point it became clear something was very wrong.

  ‘We knew you were coming,’ one of the Afghan guards told them. ‘We were briefed about you.’

  He had been told not only that US troops were coming, but how many vehicles there would be. He had already rounded up his men’s communications gear and handed it over to Jan Mohammed, the Province Governor.

  ‘Now,’ he told the soldiers, ‘would you like to sit down and have some tea with us?’

  Abdul Malik’s engagement party got underway at sunset. More than 200 women showed up with their children. As they entered the house, they passed by the dastmal basket and dropped in small-denomination Afghan currency notes, gifts for the groom’s family. Then they got on with the serious business of congratulating the women of the household on the successful engagement, and speculating how many children Abdul Malik and Tela Gul might have.

  Outside in the pomegranate orchard, the men cooked the rice and meat, lit the gas burners and started the tractor to provide the lighting for the evening. The children, allowed to stay up late for the party, ran around the garden, then climbed up on to the single-storey house’s roof to watch the grown-ups below.

  After the meal was served, most of the men who had cooked it went home, but Abdul Malik’s uncles and brothers stayed on, drinking tea in the garden. One of them then rigged up a tape recorder, cleared a space in front of the house and trained the tractor lights on to it to provide a makeshift dance floor. Someone found a tape of the Atan, a traditional Afghan dance, and put it on. Many of the women moved outside and watched the boys dancing. The kids on the roof of the house laughed.

  * * *

  Having realized the secrecy of Operation Full Throttle had been compromised, the Special Forces left the guard house and headed down into the valley towards Deh Rawood. Almost immediately they came under fire. They shot back, then split up to assume their various positions around the village.

  Again, things did not go to plan. According to one team involved, the US Navy SEAL contingent got lost and ended up heading in the wrong direction. After putting them right, the Green Berets checked in with their air cover: two B-52s, a handful of US Air Force fighter jets and two SPECTRE gunships that were circling overhead.

  One Green Beret team then discovered that the site they had been given as a potential point to cross the Helmand river was actually impassable. As they wondered what to do next, they were radioed by one of the AC-130s. It warned them that the Navy SEALS, still apparently lost, had seen them, assumed they were Taliban fighters and had requested the gunship to take them out. Fortunately, the SPECTRE crew had been watching the entire process from above and recognized that it was being asked to open fire on friendly forces.

  Operation Full Throttle had not got off to a good start. It was about to get a great deal worse.

  Abdul Malik’s brother Khaliq didn’t hear the planes. He was sitting outside under the pomegranate trees in the garden, drinking tea with his cousins. The meal was over and the party well underway.

  ‘It was a great party. The tape recorder was on. Boys were dancing to the music’

  Mohammed Sharif, the groom’s father, didn’t hear the planes either. The noise level of the party was too high. He was at the door between the two sections of the house to ensure that no men entered the women’s area.

  A neighbour, Saheb Jan Agha, who was sleeping on his roof fifty metres away, did hear the planes. Over the sound of the music wafting from the Malik household came the drone of jets, followed by the noise of propellers. At first it didn’t worry him: for days now there had been aerial activity over Deh Rawood. Then, around 11 p.m., the tone changed abruptly.

  ‘Right in the middle, I heard this loud sound,’ he recalls. ‘Suddenly they started.�
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  Khaliq had just finished his tea when the first missile struck the house. The blast broke both his hands and stripped the flesh from his legs. In an instant he looked up to see that many of his relatives were dead. The children on the roof started screaming and the garden filled with smoke. He just had time to count the corpses around him – seven in all – before the second projectile hit. He was knocked unconscious. Inside the house, his father, guarding the door between the two sections of the party, managed to shout that someone should contact the authorities before he, too, was hit. He was killed instantly.

  Partygoers attempted to flee. Laik, a local farmer, had been drinking tea outside with two friends when the attack began. One of them was killed in front of him, so he and the other ran through the courtyard towards the wheat fields. Then his other friend was also hit. Laik was one of the first to realize what was going on.

  ‘The Americans were bombing the house. We could not believe it. We were running everywhere to hide.’

  On the roof Malik’s grandmother Sardara, who had been playing with the children, desperately tried to get them away, dropping the infants to the ground. She then jumped down to help them to safety, but found herself unable to see: the fire from the sky, and the dust from the ground, had created an impenetrable cloud.

  For some reason the children had a better view. Fifteen-year-old Nassema later reported what she had seen: ‘A piece of iron sliced the woman’s neck in front of me. In a split second, her head was not on her body’

  Eight-year-old Kako witnessed the same incident. She heard a sudden explosion, then looked up: ‘I saw the pool in the courtyard filled with blood. There were bodies all around. I saw a woman without a head.’

  Most survivors describe two attacks, the first on the women’s section of the party, the second on the men’s. The first explosions were almost certainly blasts from the AC-130’s 105 mm canon. Perhaps there were more. Saheb Jan Agha recalls ‘continuous fire’.