- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 410
(according to this article from the Sunday Times, there was a Canadian contribution to the SAS/Para rescue mission):
How the hi-tech army fell back on law of the jungle and won
Marie Colvin and James Clark
THE first Chinook C-47 flew low over the jungle as the African sun started to rise. There was just enough light for the pilot to see where he was going - but not enough for his helicopter to be seen - as he swooped towards Rokel Creek in the heavily wooded Occra Hills of Sierra Leone.
His target was a camp sprawling over both banks of the muddy creek, where six British soldiers had been held in sweltering heat for more than two weeks by heavily armed members of the rebel militia that called itself the West Side Boys.
On board the Chinook and four other helicopters that followed were more than 120 paratroopers and members of the Special Air Service (SAS) trained in hostage rescue. Their mission: to recover the six members of the 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment and, if possible, to capture Foday Kallay, the rebels‘ 24-year-old leader.
Operation Barras, co-ordinated from Permanent Joint Headquarters, the army‘s nerve centre almost 2,700 miles away in Northwood, northwest London, had received the green light from Tony Blair four days earlier. Within 20 minutes of the first landing last Sunday, the British hostages were being flown to safety, their 16-day ordeal over. Within hours, at least 25 of the West Side Boys had been killed and Kallay was on his way to jail.
For the military planners it was a textbook operation, worthy of study for years to come and marred only by the death of Brad Tinnion, a 26-year-old member of the SAS snatch squad, who was shot as he jumped from his helicopter.
"You cannot resolve a situation like this with a laser-guided bomb from 30,000ft," said Brigadier Andrew Stewart, who monitored the operation from Northwood. "As a purely military operation, it knocks the lifting of the Iranian embassy siege into a cocked hat."
Few of the hostages would have dared envisage such an outcome during the dark days after they fell into the West Side Boys‘ hands on August 25. At one point, they were subjected to a mock execution at a place known as the dead zone, because so many of the West Side Boys‘ enemies had been shot there.
Eleven members of the Royal Irish - five of whom were subsequently released - had been returning to their Benguema base after visiting a Jordanian peacekeeping battalion in Masiaka, east of Freetown, when Major Alan Marshall, their commander, turned sharp right off the main road, down a narrow red dirt road that led for seven miles to the West Side Boys‘ camp at Magbeni.
Marshall thought there were only a few rebels there. He was wrong. His men were overwhelmed, he was beaten and all were taken across the creek in dugouts with outboard motors to Gberi Bana, Kallay‘s headquarters on the north bank.
There they were stripped of their uniforms and searched. Kallay personally stuffed possessions ranging from watches to spare clothes into a bag, putting their rings on his fingers and admiring the glitter of the gold. He later put on a spare British uniform as he swaggered around the camp, and used one of the three British Land Rovers to check on his followers.
Kallay visited his captives every day, repeatedly demanding to know why they had driven to his camp. "Explain your mission or I will shoot you," he would say.
Several days after their capture, Kallay hyped himself up with cocaine and decided he had had enough. The six soldiers were taken to the dead zone and placed in front of wooden poles that had been hammered into the ground about a yard apart.
Their hands were secured behind the poles with cuffs twisted out of twine. The bodyguards lined up, stony-faced, pointing their weapons at the captives, awaiting the order to shoot.
As the rest of the Britons fell silent, Marshall tried to reason with the rebel leader, who, maddened by cocaine, was shouting: "I will kill you! I will kill you!"
"Even when he was tied to the stake, the major continued to speak to Kallay," said the rebel leader‘s chief bodyguard, who styled himself Corporal Blood. "He was very cool. He told Kallay, ‘We just came to see you, to tell you to forget fighting. We did not come with any bad intentions. If you kill us, it will not be for any reason.‘ "
Then, after half an hour of threats, Kallay relented and ordered the men to be returned to their hut in the main camp. He gave no reason.
Unbeknown to the rebels or their captives, Kallay‘s increasingly erratic behaviour was being monitored by a handful of SAS men who spent a week in the jungle before the rescue.
While the British Army continued to negotiate with Kallay in the hope of a peaceful resolution, the SAS‘s task was to supply intelligence that would facilitate any eventual rescue mission.
Working in pairs, they lay in shallow trenches, just below eye-line, dressed in "ghillie suits" - a type of overall to which they attach twigs, leaves and branches picked up from local vegetation as camouflage. Eating carefully packed rations, and urinating into bottles, they used night-vision, thermal and infrared scopes to provide commanders in Northwood with information so detailed that a replica of the West Side Boys‘ camp was built for training purposes.
The mango swamps along the creek in which they were hidden are heavily wooded. Anyone concealed there would have faced water snakes in the river and the danger of being given away by curious monkeys.
On September 6, "H hour" was set for 6.16am local time on Sunday - 7.16am in London. Three of the giant Chinook C-47s and two smaller Lynx craft took part in a two-pronged assault. One group of Paras was assigned to destroy the positions held by the rebels at Magbeni, on the south bank of the creek. This was intended to give the helicopter heading for Gberi Bana camp, on the north bank, the chance to land without taking fire from two sides.
Captain Danny Matthews, aide-de-camp to the commander, Major Matthew Lowe, was apprehensive as his Chinook came into land. At 22, Matthews had already had one tour of duty in Sierra Leone and been a platoon commander in Kosovo. This time, the risks were far greater.
"We knew the West Side Boys had lots of equipment, mortars, rifles, machineguns and heavy machineguns," he said. "There is obviously no set format and obviously that plays on your mind - not being able to predict your enemy‘s intentions or reactions."
The West Side Boys had little more than a minute from the moment they heard the clatter of the helicopters to prepare to defend themselves.
From their camouflaged positions, as close as 180ft from the camp, the SAS men could see the rebels take up their firing positions. They sent a snap radio message back to Northwood warning that the landing would be made under fire. The first target was the hut in which the hostages were being held. As the Chinook touched down in the centre of the village, it came under fire from West Side Boys shooting from a captured Land Rover.
The helicopter responded with machinegun fire. The SAS men in the jungle opened up, causing panic among the rebels by firing from behind positions they had thought were safe.
The West Side Boys retaliated with British-made general purpose machineguns and Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles. Heavy fire also came from Magbeni, where the rebels had heavy-calibre machineguns and a double-barrelled anti-aircraft gun. But they were no match for the British.
"We never experienced anything like this," said Blood. "We saw the soldiers coming down to the ground. I fired my RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] two times, but both times the helicopter balanced [swerved] and I missed."
As the battle raged, SAS men came sprinting towards the hut where their colleagues had reported the hostages to be, firing bursts from their 5.56mm Canadian assault rifles and hurling grenades. "It was all about speed," said one British-based special forces officer. "They had to be in and out very quickly."
The assault was brutal: the government claimed last week that 25 of the West Side Boys were killed. One source close to the operation said the death toll would prove higher. "If you followed every blood trail into the jungle you might well be able to quadruple that figure."
Inside the hut, the SAS found Marshall, his men and a Sierra Leonean liaison officer who had been captured with them.
On the south bank, meanwhile, a Chinook loaded with Paras had landed in front of a swamp, leaving Matthews and his fellow soldiers to wade up to their midriffs for at least 10 minutes, each man weighed down by as much as 60lb of kit. They then had to hack their way through 150ft of jungle.
The platoon successfully took its first objective - a crumbling one storey-building - but came under heavy fire as it approached a second. A mortar bomb exploded in front of the men, injuring seven, who might have been killed had it not sunk so deep into soft ground. The wounded included Lowe, who went down with shrapnel wounds to his legs. "The OC [Lowe] called me up and told me I was to take over command of the company," Matthews said.
As another Chinook braved enemy fire to pick up the wounded, Matthews sent his three platoons in different directions to secure the area and retrieve the British vehicles. A Lynx helicopter touched down at speed to the north to collect the hostages.
It was an audacious piece of flying, but Tinnion, a new recruit to the SAS, was shot from behind shortly after getting out of the helicopter.
The bullet passed through his body and out through his shoulder. Under heavy fire, his colleagues treated him as well as they could. He died shortly after reaching medics aboard Royal Fleet Auxiliary Ship Sir Percivale, off the coast near Freetown.
The mood in headquarters in Northwood changed dramatically: "Within 20 minutes of the go, we knew all the hostages were safe and away from the scene, but within a minute of that we knew Tinnion had been hit and looked unlikely to survive," said Stewart.
The carnage the SAS left behind them was considerable. "There were many corpses and wounded people lying on the ground moaning," said Unisa Sesay, 16, one of the West Side Boys‘ child soldiers, who reached the base just after the British had left.
"One commander was standing and his friend was trying to remove a fragment from his shoulder. The rest of the people were on the ground."
Another soldier, who gave his name as Cyrus and his age as 17, said they had been told the wounded would be shot and thrown into the river because there were no medical supplies. Both boys said they saw too many corpses, and were too shocked, to count. The dead included a 14-year-old boy soldier and one Sierra Leonean hostage who panicked and ran into the firefight.
General Sir Charles Guthrie, the chief of the defence staff, had been booked three months earlier to be interviewed that morning on BBC1‘s Breakfast with Frost. At about 9.20am, Major Tom Thornycroft whispered to Guthrie in the wings of the studio confirmation that all the hostages were safe. Guthrie then broke the first news to the nation that an operation was under way in West Africa.
The prime minister, who had spent the weekend at Chequers approving the last details of the plan, had already received a call from Guthrie informing him of the success. Blair returned to London and made a statement to television cameras in Downing Street.
Kallay, meanwhile, had been captured at his hut and flown by British helicopter to JordBat2 (second Jordanian Battalion) on the Freetown-Masiaka highway. He was hustled into the base, his hands secured behind his back with white plastic cuffs, his oversized Calvin Klein T-shirt flapping almost down to his knees.
He was stripped naked and searched. Then British soldiers threw him to the ground and exploded in anger. A large black boot was placed on his back and another on his legs, pinning Kally to the ground, face down. He peered around, not responding to shouts from soldiers who had spotted the rings Kallay stole from the British hostages.
One soldier with a heavy Irish accent shouted, "You f****** f*****, stealing f****** soldiers‘ rings" as his colleague, one by one, twisted and pulled until all the rings were back in British hands. Kallay grimaced in pain, but did not let out a single cry.
The operation terrified the West Side Boys. More than 50 have surrendered since the raid. But defectors revealed that a hard core had regrouped at a base inland from Gberi Bani.
In London, jubilation was tinged with sorrow at the death of Tinnion, who had served with distinction in 29 Commando Royal Artillery. The army believes he was almost certainly killed by a round, believed to be of 7.62mm calibre, from a self-loading rifle (SLR) of the type provided by Britain to pro-government forces in Sierra Leone. The West Side Boys‘ militia supported the Freetown government until a few months ago.
On Friday, as Marshall faced the prospect of disciplinary action after taking the blame for his men‘s capture, Tinnion‘s parents and girlfriend were at his graveside after he was buried with full military honours at his regiment‘s base in Hereford.
Anna Homsi, his girlfriend, who is seven months pregnant, described him as "the man of my dreams". She added: "We are obviously deeply shocked and devastated by Brad‘s death, but enormously proud he died doing the job he loved."
Under army rules, neither Homsi nor the unborn child would be eligible for Tinnion‘s pension or other money. However, the Ministry of Defence is preparing to make an exception.One SAS officer said: "Because of the level of danger the lads face, the wives need to know somehow that there is security for the family there if it all goes wrong. It‘s in the regiment‘s interests as well as the blokes‘ and their families‘."
- 30 -
How the hi-tech army fell back on law of the jungle and won
Marie Colvin and James Clark
THE first Chinook C-47 flew low over the jungle as the African sun started to rise. There was just enough light for the pilot to see where he was going - but not enough for his helicopter to be seen - as he swooped towards Rokel Creek in the heavily wooded Occra Hills of Sierra Leone.
His target was a camp sprawling over both banks of the muddy creek, where six British soldiers had been held in sweltering heat for more than two weeks by heavily armed members of the rebel militia that called itself the West Side Boys.
On board the Chinook and four other helicopters that followed were more than 120 paratroopers and members of the Special Air Service (SAS) trained in hostage rescue. Their mission: to recover the six members of the 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment and, if possible, to capture Foday Kallay, the rebels‘ 24-year-old leader.
Operation Barras, co-ordinated from Permanent Joint Headquarters, the army‘s nerve centre almost 2,700 miles away in Northwood, northwest London, had received the green light from Tony Blair four days earlier. Within 20 minutes of the first landing last Sunday, the British hostages were being flown to safety, their 16-day ordeal over. Within hours, at least 25 of the West Side Boys had been killed and Kallay was on his way to jail.
For the military planners it was a textbook operation, worthy of study for years to come and marred only by the death of Brad Tinnion, a 26-year-old member of the SAS snatch squad, who was shot as he jumped from his helicopter.
"You cannot resolve a situation like this with a laser-guided bomb from 30,000ft," said Brigadier Andrew Stewart, who monitored the operation from Northwood. "As a purely military operation, it knocks the lifting of the Iranian embassy siege into a cocked hat."
Few of the hostages would have dared envisage such an outcome during the dark days after they fell into the West Side Boys‘ hands on August 25. At one point, they were subjected to a mock execution at a place known as the dead zone, because so many of the West Side Boys‘ enemies had been shot there.
Eleven members of the Royal Irish - five of whom were subsequently released - had been returning to their Benguema base after visiting a Jordanian peacekeeping battalion in Masiaka, east of Freetown, when Major Alan Marshall, their commander, turned sharp right off the main road, down a narrow red dirt road that led for seven miles to the West Side Boys‘ camp at Magbeni.
Marshall thought there were only a few rebels there. He was wrong. His men were overwhelmed, he was beaten and all were taken across the creek in dugouts with outboard motors to Gberi Bana, Kallay‘s headquarters on the north bank.
There they were stripped of their uniforms and searched. Kallay personally stuffed possessions ranging from watches to spare clothes into a bag, putting their rings on his fingers and admiring the glitter of the gold. He later put on a spare British uniform as he swaggered around the camp, and used one of the three British Land Rovers to check on his followers.
Kallay visited his captives every day, repeatedly demanding to know why they had driven to his camp. "Explain your mission or I will shoot you," he would say.
Several days after their capture, Kallay hyped himself up with cocaine and decided he had had enough. The six soldiers were taken to the dead zone and placed in front of wooden poles that had been hammered into the ground about a yard apart.
Their hands were secured behind the poles with cuffs twisted out of twine. The bodyguards lined up, stony-faced, pointing their weapons at the captives, awaiting the order to shoot.
As the rest of the Britons fell silent, Marshall tried to reason with the rebel leader, who, maddened by cocaine, was shouting: "I will kill you! I will kill you!"
"Even when he was tied to the stake, the major continued to speak to Kallay," said the rebel leader‘s chief bodyguard, who styled himself Corporal Blood. "He was very cool. He told Kallay, ‘We just came to see you, to tell you to forget fighting. We did not come with any bad intentions. If you kill us, it will not be for any reason.‘ "
Then, after half an hour of threats, Kallay relented and ordered the men to be returned to their hut in the main camp. He gave no reason.
Unbeknown to the rebels or their captives, Kallay‘s increasingly erratic behaviour was being monitored by a handful of SAS men who spent a week in the jungle before the rescue.
While the British Army continued to negotiate with Kallay in the hope of a peaceful resolution, the SAS‘s task was to supply intelligence that would facilitate any eventual rescue mission.
Working in pairs, they lay in shallow trenches, just below eye-line, dressed in "ghillie suits" - a type of overall to which they attach twigs, leaves and branches picked up from local vegetation as camouflage. Eating carefully packed rations, and urinating into bottles, they used night-vision, thermal and infrared scopes to provide commanders in Northwood with information so detailed that a replica of the West Side Boys‘ camp was built for training purposes.
The mango swamps along the creek in which they were hidden are heavily wooded. Anyone concealed there would have faced water snakes in the river and the danger of being given away by curious monkeys.
On September 6, "H hour" was set for 6.16am local time on Sunday - 7.16am in London. Three of the giant Chinook C-47s and two smaller Lynx craft took part in a two-pronged assault. One group of Paras was assigned to destroy the positions held by the rebels at Magbeni, on the south bank of the creek. This was intended to give the helicopter heading for Gberi Bana camp, on the north bank, the chance to land without taking fire from two sides.
Captain Danny Matthews, aide-de-camp to the commander, Major Matthew Lowe, was apprehensive as his Chinook came into land. At 22, Matthews had already had one tour of duty in Sierra Leone and been a platoon commander in Kosovo. This time, the risks were far greater.
"We knew the West Side Boys had lots of equipment, mortars, rifles, machineguns and heavy machineguns," he said. "There is obviously no set format and obviously that plays on your mind - not being able to predict your enemy‘s intentions or reactions."
The West Side Boys had little more than a minute from the moment they heard the clatter of the helicopters to prepare to defend themselves.
From their camouflaged positions, as close as 180ft from the camp, the SAS men could see the rebels take up their firing positions. They sent a snap radio message back to Northwood warning that the landing would be made under fire. The first target was the hut in which the hostages were being held. As the Chinook touched down in the centre of the village, it came under fire from West Side Boys shooting from a captured Land Rover.
The helicopter responded with machinegun fire. The SAS men in the jungle opened up, causing panic among the rebels by firing from behind positions they had thought were safe.
The West Side Boys retaliated with British-made general purpose machineguns and Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles. Heavy fire also came from Magbeni, where the rebels had heavy-calibre machineguns and a double-barrelled anti-aircraft gun. But they were no match for the British.
"We never experienced anything like this," said Blood. "We saw the soldiers coming down to the ground. I fired my RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] two times, but both times the helicopter balanced [swerved] and I missed."
As the battle raged, SAS men came sprinting towards the hut where their colleagues had reported the hostages to be, firing bursts from their 5.56mm Canadian assault rifles and hurling grenades. "It was all about speed," said one British-based special forces officer. "They had to be in and out very quickly."
The assault was brutal: the government claimed last week that 25 of the West Side Boys were killed. One source close to the operation said the death toll would prove higher. "If you followed every blood trail into the jungle you might well be able to quadruple that figure."
Inside the hut, the SAS found Marshall, his men and a Sierra Leonean liaison officer who had been captured with them.
On the south bank, meanwhile, a Chinook loaded with Paras had landed in front of a swamp, leaving Matthews and his fellow soldiers to wade up to their midriffs for at least 10 minutes, each man weighed down by as much as 60lb of kit. They then had to hack their way through 150ft of jungle.
The platoon successfully took its first objective - a crumbling one storey-building - but came under heavy fire as it approached a second. A mortar bomb exploded in front of the men, injuring seven, who might have been killed had it not sunk so deep into soft ground. The wounded included Lowe, who went down with shrapnel wounds to his legs. "The OC [Lowe] called me up and told me I was to take over command of the company," Matthews said.
As another Chinook braved enemy fire to pick up the wounded, Matthews sent his three platoons in different directions to secure the area and retrieve the British vehicles. A Lynx helicopter touched down at speed to the north to collect the hostages.
It was an audacious piece of flying, but Tinnion, a new recruit to the SAS, was shot from behind shortly after getting out of the helicopter.
The bullet passed through his body and out through his shoulder. Under heavy fire, his colleagues treated him as well as they could. He died shortly after reaching medics aboard Royal Fleet Auxiliary Ship Sir Percivale, off the coast near Freetown.
The mood in headquarters in Northwood changed dramatically: "Within 20 minutes of the go, we knew all the hostages were safe and away from the scene, but within a minute of that we knew Tinnion had been hit and looked unlikely to survive," said Stewart.
The carnage the SAS left behind them was considerable. "There were many corpses and wounded people lying on the ground moaning," said Unisa Sesay, 16, one of the West Side Boys‘ child soldiers, who reached the base just after the British had left.
"One commander was standing and his friend was trying to remove a fragment from his shoulder. The rest of the people were on the ground."
Another soldier, who gave his name as Cyrus and his age as 17, said they had been told the wounded would be shot and thrown into the river because there were no medical supplies. Both boys said they saw too many corpses, and were too shocked, to count. The dead included a 14-year-old boy soldier and one Sierra Leonean hostage who panicked and ran into the firefight.
General Sir Charles Guthrie, the chief of the defence staff, had been booked three months earlier to be interviewed that morning on BBC1‘s Breakfast with Frost. At about 9.20am, Major Tom Thornycroft whispered to Guthrie in the wings of the studio confirmation that all the hostages were safe. Guthrie then broke the first news to the nation that an operation was under way in West Africa.
The prime minister, who had spent the weekend at Chequers approving the last details of the plan, had already received a call from Guthrie informing him of the success. Blair returned to London and made a statement to television cameras in Downing Street.
Kallay, meanwhile, had been captured at his hut and flown by British helicopter to JordBat2 (second Jordanian Battalion) on the Freetown-Masiaka highway. He was hustled into the base, his hands secured behind his back with white plastic cuffs, his oversized Calvin Klein T-shirt flapping almost down to his knees.
He was stripped naked and searched. Then British soldiers threw him to the ground and exploded in anger. A large black boot was placed on his back and another on his legs, pinning Kally to the ground, face down. He peered around, not responding to shouts from soldiers who had spotted the rings Kallay stole from the British hostages.
One soldier with a heavy Irish accent shouted, "You f****** f*****, stealing f****** soldiers‘ rings" as his colleague, one by one, twisted and pulled until all the rings were back in British hands. Kallay grimaced in pain, but did not let out a single cry.
The operation terrified the West Side Boys. More than 50 have surrendered since the raid. But defectors revealed that a hard core had regrouped at a base inland from Gberi Bani.
In London, jubilation was tinged with sorrow at the death of Tinnion, who had served with distinction in 29 Commando Royal Artillery. The army believes he was almost certainly killed by a round, believed to be of 7.62mm calibre, from a self-loading rifle (SLR) of the type provided by Britain to pro-government forces in Sierra Leone. The West Side Boys‘ militia supported the Freetown government until a few months ago.
On Friday, as Marshall faced the prospect of disciplinary action after taking the blame for his men‘s capture, Tinnion‘s parents and girlfriend were at his graveside after he was buried with full military honours at his regiment‘s base in Hereford.
Anna Homsi, his girlfriend, who is seven months pregnant, described him as "the man of my dreams". She added: "We are obviously deeply shocked and devastated by Brad‘s death, but enormously proud he died doing the job he loved."
Under army rules, neither Homsi nor the unborn child would be eligible for Tinnion‘s pension or other money. However, the Ministry of Defence is preparing to make an exception.One SAS officer said: "Because of the level of danger the lads face, the wives need to know somehow that there is security for the family there if it all goes wrong. It‘s in the regiment‘s interests as well as the blokes‘ and their families‘."
- 30 -
