by Al Venter
Retaliatory fire with a man-portable FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missile, aimed at attacking Taliban positions in the mountains—the rocket can be clearly seen after leaving the tube. Photo Captain Ryker Sentgeorge
An aerial view of the ancient Afghan city of Qalat, said to be used as a headquarters base by Alexander the Great when he campaigned in this region almost 2,400 years ago. Photo Neall Ellis.
A pair of Russian-built Mi-8s in the process of being prepared for the day’s flight operations. Photo: Neall Ellis
Captain Ryker Sentgeorge with one of his Afghan soldier alongside an armoured vehicle that had taken a battering when his base came under Taliban mortar attack. Photo: Captain Ryker Sentgeorge
A pair of German Air Force helicopters—part of the Coalition effort in Afghanistan— leave the security of their base for the interior. Photo: Neall Ellis
One of the ‘Shooters’ attached to Nellis’ wing waits to board prior to take-off from Kabul. Photo: Neall Ellis
Dawn breaks over a relatively rare unpolluted Kabul. Photo: Neall Ellis
A graphic shot of the Afghan desert creeping inexorably towards settlements in the mountainous interior. It is in the valleys that most the action takes place— and where the poppies are grown. Photo: Neall Ellis
Nellis' Mi-8 helicopter parked on the LZ at Torkham PRT in the extreme south-east of the country. This Coatlion 'Frontline Base' is only a short hop from the city Peshawar in Pakistan from where the Taliban get most of their weapons and supplies and consequently comes under regular rebel attack. 'Shooters' are in attendance should there be problems. Photo: Neall Ellis
American military choppers in an active role at one of the larger Coalition bases. Photo: Neall Ellis
A group of private military personnel (Shooters) head towards Nellis’ helicopter prior to departure from Kabul. Photo: Neall Ellis
The reason why Neall Ellis and colleagues fly chopper support missions in Afghanistan: an American military vehicle totally destroyed by a Taliban Improvised Explosive Device (IED) on the road to the Koregal Valley. Without air support from private security companies like Nellis' Balmoral—the aviators of all nationalities fly hundreds of missions a day to the remotest corners of the country—this war would quickly come to a halt because of lack of supplies. (Photo: Captain Ryker Sentgeorge)
flew combat in Iraq, he spent time there with the mercenary group formed by former Executive Out comes and 32 Battalion operative Mauritz le Roux who eventually created one of the largest private military companies in the region with several thousand employees under his control, many of them South African. The original idea was that Le Roux's company would acquire helicopters which would fall under Nellis' command. That did eventually take place, but by then this free booter aviator had moved on. This selection of photos shows a variety of Baghdadi scenes including the house where he and his colleagues stayed, chaotic and polluted road traffic, and wreckage from the 2003 US invasion. Photos: Neall Ellis
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE WAR GOES ON … AND ON …
Diamonds made the world go round in Sierra Leone, said Nellis when speaking about the lure of the precious stones in many African countries, ‘and many of my detractors, people who deprecated my actions, insisted that I was only there to make my fortune’. He continued:
To these people, it mattered little whether the rebels were cutting the hands and feet off children, or roasting their enemies alive and eating them. Instead, they concentrated their efforts on trying to dislodge this ‘foreign mercenary’ who was making a living by flying helicopter gunships in the war. That I was killing these barbarians was of no consequence to this pretty vocal bunch.
Unfortunately, while being involved in this internecine struggle, I’d become a media figure. One of the reasons for this was that the word had gone out that I was working hand-in-glove with the British to try to bring hostilities to a close. A number of my Freetown ‘enemies’ worked for NGOs and many of them actually sympathised, and sometimes clandestinely associated, with the brutal murderers in the RUF. These people sought a means of terminating what they termed, my ‘dreadful mercenary actions’.
They were an odd bunch, Nellis admitted. He would say that if you met them at a party in Hounslow or Clapham, they’d be like anybody else. However, he reckoned that they could be lethal.
I was tipped off at one stage, beforehand fortunately, that they even considered pouring cups of sugar into the fuel tank of my helicopter so that the Hind’s engines would seize while we were out on ops. It never happened, of course, because they’d have had to get into Cockerill Barracks first. However, I know that had they been able to, they would have done so.
Then somebody put the word out that Nellis wasn’t actually a military man at all, but a diamond smuggler. ‘You can’t win with some of these people’, he flatly declared.
I was actually investigated several times by a United Nations Special Investigative Committee. They wouldn’t be overly specific about what they were investigating but, soon enough, the diamond issue would surface. The first time was towards the end of 1999 when our entire crew was accused of smuggling diamonds. I was fingered as the principal culprit, although nobody was able to produce any evidence because there wasn’t any. I was as broke then as I am today, which wouldn’t have been the case had I been dealing in the stuff.
One of the ‘Golden Rules’ laid out by Nellis and Juba early on was that nobody on the team would get involved with either gold or diamonds. If they did, he said, even legally, they would be dismissed. It was what was termed a ‘zero tolerance’ issue. The same restrictions applied to drugs.
There was very good reason for us taking what some might have regarded as an uncompromising stance. We all knew that the Nigerians were smuggling diamonds. Not only that, they were doing so on an enormous scale … you couldn’t miss it because the same people who sidled up and offered us parcels of diamonds, would later be seen doing deals with the Nigerian soldiers. Worse, they weren’t even discreet about it.
Some Nigerians tried to load suspicious cargoes onto the choppers. A number of times Fred stopped them loading bags of what they said was ‘gravel’ onto both ‘Bokkie’ and the Hind. A Nigerian officer would arrive at a pick-up point in the interior with what he would say was rice—ten or 12 large bags of it. However, a closer examination would show that the bags were all filled with diamondiferous gravel.
We had some serious confrontations with these people. They told us that they had been deprived of their rights by our lack of cooperation and we left it to Fred to read them their so-called ‘rights’. More than once we were threatened that the matter wouldn’t be laid to rest.
So be it! We had Foday Sankoh’s jungle bunnies on one side and the Nigerian Army on the other, but we won in the end, which just about says it all.
It was interesting, he commented, that none of the people working for NGOs, or even the diplomats at local embassies, would ever confront members of the helicopter crew face-to-face. However, they would later hear accusations of smuggling and, as Nellis commented, it rankled.
These people didn’t have the balls to accost either me or any of the members of the crew directly. Once or twice I had to stop Fred from flattering the nose of some particularly obnoxious little shit who believed he could voice off and that we wouldn’t dare react.
In any war, repeated success in the field invariably leads to charges of human rights abuses, particularly where innocent civilians are involved. As well as being denounced as a diamond smuggler, Neall Ellis was also routinely accused of using his Mi-24 helicopter gunship indiscriminately, especially when he targeted RUF vehicles parked in or near villages or marketplaces. As he declared to one critic, ‘this was a regular ploy, used in the same way that the rebels would paint big red crosses on the roofs of buildings they used for military headquarters or operations centres’.
It was also pointed out that there was no International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) activity in the field either i
n Sierra Leone or Liberia, although that organisation was very well represented in the capitals of both countries. The truth was that the situation was just too dangerous in the jungle, where the fighting was at its most intense, for any kind of effective aid work. Anyway, the average pubescent rebel had no respect for the ICRC, the media, or the UN, for that matter. Most of these youngsters, high on liquor and drugs for 18 hours of the day, wouldn’t have known the difference between a UN official and the postman anyway.
One of the more dedicated people to emerge in West Africa during this time was a young woman by the name of Corinne Dufka. Formerly a journalist, she had covered the war in the Balkans and was so badly wounded by a land mine in Bosnia that she had almost died. Corinne had been living in West Africa for many years, mostly in Dakar.
Nellis’ Mi-24 coming into land at Cockerill Barracks. Author’s photo
As the regional representative of Human Rights Watch, it was her job to check on all reports that emerged as a result of the war, and she was particularly scathing about some of the Liberian and Nigerian excesses. While organisations like Human Rights Watch are usually circumspect about their comments, Corinne Dufka was not afraid to call a spade a spade. Nellis comments about her:
I would return from a mission and if I spotted something unusual … [I would] get on the phone and tell her immediately, particularly once the RUF moved into its destructive second phase and started destroying villages and killing their inhabitants. You really couldn’t miss it from the air because there would invariably be bodies strewn about all over the place.
Corinne was one of those rare individuals who would listen carefully to everything that emerged. Then she’d record the detail in her files and later, when a village was reported destroyed or possibly torched (the rebels would quite often claim I’d shot the place up), she’d refer back. A sharp lady, she always made up her own mind about these things and wasn’t shy to ask questions that could make you squirm if you weren’t being direct.
It didn’t take Ms Dufka long to accept that Neall Ellis, for all his other faults, was meticulous about the way he waged his war. By his own admission, he never targeted a village unless he had prior information that the rebels were using the place to their own advantage or he saw evidence of unauthorised military activity. If he did unexpectedly come upon a group of men in the field, he would first check them out carefully for the kind of uniforms they wore and whether they carried weapons. Nellis recalls:
Most of the time, the rebels would hear the Hind approach and they would quickly scoot into the jungle … then, I knew I was onto something. One incident happened when we were returning from a sortie north of Makeni, the biggest town in the central region. I happened to fly over an RUF stronghold … I’d do so quite regularly just to wind them up. This didn’t exactly go down well with the local UN command because they claimed I was antagonising the bastards, and of course they were spot on. That’s what this was all about.
It was also one of the reasons why the UN was so fucking useless in Sierra Leone. They were terrified of the rebels and would back down every time they encountered them in the interior. More than once the RUF would surround groups of UN soldiers and demand that they hand over their firearms, which they would do without argument.1
I didn’t listen to the UN, in fact nobody did. So I went about my business and the next time I flew over Makeni, I spotted four brand new vehicles parked next to the market, two with 12.7mm heavy machine guns mounted on the back. The other two were crowded with RUF troops and they had a 14.5mm gun there as well. We subsequently understood from a capture that they had originally come from Liberia and had either just returned from a raid or were in the process of going out on one. The bottom line here was that I caught them totally by surprise.
Of course, with all that firepower, they immediately opened up on us and the game was on, good and proper. They had suddenly presented us with some of their moveable assets, which were just too valuable to ignore. I wasted no time, and in my first pass I let rip with a clutch of rockets. This completely destroyed two of the trucks and, from what I gathered afterwards, killed quite a few of their occupants.
A few days later, a complaint was lodged by the rebel command through their unofficial representative in Freetown. It was claimed that I had bombed a market and killed dozens of unarmed civilians. Fortunately, I had detailed the attack in a dispatch to Corinne after I got back to the office and I had told her exactly what had taken place. She called me back some days later and repeated the same story, but obviously from the rebel perspective. Then a special court was convened in Freetown and I was told by UN officials that my name had been put forward for human rights abuses.
Nothing came of it in the end because Ms Dufka was called to testify and she obviously mentioned Nellis’ earlier report. Another independent source had said she had seen the vehicles that the gunship had destroyed, together with the heavy weapons. ‘I still keep in e-mail contact with Corinne. She is an all-round lovely person’, says Nellis.
Much of this adverse publicity, some of it clearly linked to enemy misinformation that could be tied to people with rebel connections, came at a time when the Kamajors were at their best as a counter-insurgency force.
Officially termed Civil Defence Forces, these resilient fighters gave as good as they got, and then some, according to Nellis. It helped, of course, that they were extremely professional when it came to handling firearms, which was one of the reasons why the Nigerians included them within the ranks of ECOMOG. ‘Though why Kholbe and his people subsequently subverted all Kamajor efforts remains a mystery’, comments Nellis cynically. He believes that it was all part of the ongoing West African imbroglio that included Nigerian efforts to prolong the war, remain in Sierra Leone as long as possible and get a grip on the diamond industry.
The single biggest issue that faced the Kamajors, a Mende tribal people from the south and the east of the country, was that they were not militarily trained. For that reason, regular troops tended to look down on them and consider them the African version of country bumpkins. At the same time, although they were largely illiterate, they consistently outfought and outperformed both Fodah Sankoh’s rebel forces and the RSLAF.
Another rumour that did the rounds, which was also fallacious, was that the Kamajors were ill-disciplined. They obviously had some bad apples, as do most military units, commented Nellis, but he recalls working with them during the second invasion of Freetown by Foday Sankoh’s irregulars. While ‘Bokkie’ was still in use, he’d drop small groups of Kamajors and Nigerian soldiers, usually with his partner Hassan in the lead, and they would deploy against fairly substantial groups of RUF rebels who sometimes outnumbered them by 20 to one.
‘It was rare that our guys came up short. The Kamajors weren’t only good fighters, they were utterly fearless and they didn’t take an awful lot of casualties either’, said Nellis. They also took no prisoners, he told me much later. Nellis put the Kamajors way up there with the Gurkhas when it came to rating their efficiency in battle.
Earlier in the war the term ‘Sobels’—soldiers by day, rebels by night—had been coined. Many critics of Kamajor prowess maintained that these tribal fighters were among the worst offenders, a claim Nellis dismissed out of hand.
‘Sure,’ says Nellis, ‘there was the occasional Kamajor among the very irregular “Sobels”, but almost all of these renegades were government troops on the plunder … I saw them myself, and there was no question about who were the apprentice turncoats’, he declared. He added that when Chief Hinga Norman—the Kamajor spokesman, protector and mentor— unexpectedly died in a Dakar hospital after surgery (the family maintains, with some justification, that he was poisoned) there was nobody powerful enough in Sierra Leone to take up their case. ‘That was when the Kamajors were quite openly accused of “pillaging, terrorizing and killing”.’ They were also accused of recruiting youngsters under the age of 15, in contravention of the Geneva Convention. The truth is that the majority
of the rebel forces were under age and almost nobody was brought to book on that issue after the fighting had ended.
Many stories about the Kamajors emerged during the war, some based on fact, others apocryphal. Shortly after the Makeni incident, Nellis and his crew were tasked to go to Moyamba to uplift as many of the Kamajor bush fighters as possible and fly them to Freetown. The rebels were marching towards Freetown and the intention was to deploy the tough and aggres sive Kamajors in the defence of the approaches to the city. Nellis recounts:
We’d earlier lost our one rear door and I had the other removed as well. The result was that we were flying with the back of the aircraft wide open, which was not a good idea. We would have no control over people who might have been trying to get on board in a chaotic situation. Also, we were aware that EO had lost one of their helicopters due to ill-disciplined soldiers running away from battle. When we finally did land at Moyamba, however, we had the Kamajors storming us for a different reason. They were all eager to go into battle against the rebels and we had been sent by their jungle gods to take them there.’
Ellis said that it felt as if an entire company of Kamajors had squeezed on board. Worse, not one of them would get off although the crew begged, pleaded and even tried bribery. In fact, they did a count afterwards and found that there were 91 of them in the helicopter. As these men were considered by one and all as a bunch of mean bastards if they believed that you were opposed to them, the crew were in something of a Catch-22 situation.