The Sunday Times' Christina Lamb, embedded with an elite company of the 3rd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment in Afghanistan, gives a hair-raising account of an ambush last week by the Taliban. This is war reporting at its bravest, and finest.
“HAVE you ever used a pistol?” yelled Sergeant-Major Mick Bolton amid the Kalashnikov fire and bursts from a machinegun as we ran across a baked-mud field and dived for cover. “If it comes down to it, everyone’s going to have to fight.”
Round after round fizzed past our ears, sending up clouds of dust. My heart was thudding crazily against my flak jacket, my breath coming in short, rasping pants.
The whoosh of a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) close enough to lift the hairs on the back of my neck was followed by an orange blaze of flame as it landed nearby.
I hurled myself into an irrigation ditch and crouched amid the tall reeds, the soil just above me flying up as bullets landed all around. Then firing started coming from behind too. The Taliban had us from three sides.
Lamb, an old Afghan hand (does one say that these days?) truly thought she was done for, as did the troops she was with.
I have been in some hairy situations, not least in Afghanistan, a country that I love, where at the age of 22 I was trapped in trenches by Russian tanks with a group of mujaheddin. But this was the first time in my life that I thought I would not survive.
Worse, I looked at the taut faces around me — and could see the soldiers thought that too.
I thought about all the things left undone in my life, words left unsaid or unwritten, but most of all, my little boy’s big blue eyes and curly hair, and I just wanted it to stop.
FOR the next two hours we were under relentless fire from AK47s, RPGs, mortars and a Dushka, a Russian-made heavy machine gun.
Justin — separated in a trench with a group led by Major Blair — was under attack from all sides, but witnessed the turning of the battle.
“We were ordered out of the ditch and, under heavy covering fire, scrambled up the sides. Breaking towards the river we came under fire again. This time there was a massive burst of fire from the FSG on the ridge directed at the Taliban.”
The Paras had managed to regroup impressively. The men of the FSG beat off their own ambushers, drove their vehicles to the south where they were more secure and then moved back north along the ridge to our aid — with devastating effect.
But it's not just the Taliban that's the enemy.
Everyone was stunned at how quickly the Taliban had organised themselves and how co-ordinated they had been. From the time we had walked into the village to the start of the ambush was less than an hour and they had been undeterred by our array of hardware.
“That’s as bold as it comes,” said Captain McKenzie, shaking his head in awe. He added: “The Taliban are quite ingenious but they’ve probably got 25 dead blokes and we’ve got none and that speaks volumes.”
Private Deerans said: “We don’t tend to think the Taliban can fight as well as us, but they’re fighting for something they really believe in and they have the advantage of local terrain. They’re world-class at getting rounds down but fortunately their shooting was crap.
“Still, it was close enough for me. They had the advantage from the beginning and I don’t know how none of us got shot.”
Some of the men realised they had forgotten to wear their wedding rings that day. “I have my fiancée’s ring on a string and it’s the first time I’ve gone on an operation without it,” said Sergeant-Major Bolton.
I looked at my own bare finger, remembering how while checking in for my flight at Heathrow 20 days earlier I had realised the two rings I always wear were in an oyster shell by the side of my bed.
The big question was whether the villagers were in on the ambush. It seemed clear to me that they had directed us straight into it, and there must have been locals fighting for them to organise so quickly.
Five years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan remains untamed, unchanged and unpacified.
It may be just too late. Disillusion with the government of President Hamid Karzai has never been so high. The Taliban have reorganised, possibly with the help of both the Pakistani military intelligence and Al-Qaeda, to use the sophisticated tactics I experienced first hand in Zumbelay.
No longer are they just a few dozen ragtag fighters here and there. Now groups often include hundreds of heavily armed men equipped with motorbikes, cars, horses and radios.
All over the south they have set up shadow administrations and kill any Afghan who is even indirectly associated with the government, such as teachers. Approximately 1,500 Afghan security guards and civilians were killed by the Taliban last year and some 900 already this year.
The Taliban are also winning the propaganda game. Within a few hours of our returning to Camp Price, the Afghan Islamic Press in Peshawar had put out a statement claiming the Taliban had killed seven British soldiers in Zumbelay.
Far from losing any men, the brave paras from C company had killed about 20 Taliban. Yet the Ministry of Defence put out nothing. If Justin and I had not been there, you would probably never have read about it.
Ask yourself how much you have heard about what is going on with Operation Mountain Thrust from a Canadian perspective. Ask yourself what Canada's ''mission'' there is, and whether it's the right one -- both for Afghanistan and Canada. Then ask yourself why this debate isn't (still) raging in the media.
H/t to Scott Disher.
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