The plan was simple: with overwhelming force, the British soldiers would arrive in Babaji – one of the most dangerous insurgent strongholds in southern Afghanistan – and scare away the local Taliban without a fight, leaving a permanent military presence in the area for the first time, winning over local people and persuading them to stand up to their Taliban masters.
But Operation Panchai Palang (Panther’s Claw) – the biggest air assault mounted by British troops since 2001, involving hundreds of soldiers being dropped from Chinooks – did not go quite according to plan. //
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The aim was to claim a lawless part of Afghanistan’s troublesome south for the distant and disliked government far away in Kabul. They would seize the area, put up fortifications to limit movement and impose some order and authority.
But, despite the strict secrecy that cloaked the operation, the local people seemed to have got wind of it and – scared by the prospect of intense fighting – voted with their feet.
The day before the soldiers began their operation, drones monitoring the area showed people evacuating their homes, leaving Babaji in the hands of militants.
During the first three days of their two-week stay in the area, which will end when troops from the Welsh Guards relieve them, the men of the Black Watch battalion endured persistent attacks of small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. With the enemy hiding at a distance, in bushes and abandoned compounds, most soldiers never saw their foes. Only the snipers and the men monitoring the live video feeds from circling drones got sight of their quarry.
"They are so well camouflaged you can’t see anything," said Rob Colquoun, a section leader, in charge of a team of snipers who killed 18 Afghans in one afternoon.
Insurgents had also laid a number of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in advance of the troops’ arrival, often marked rather obviously by piles of rocks as a warning to local people. As a result, patrols were forced to move at the pace of a soldier waving a metal detector back and forth. Some protection was afforded by the vehicles used to scoot around the battlefield, including Vikings – sauna-like metal boxes on caterpillar tracks whose fetid interiors made the heat of high noon in Helmand feel like a refreshing breeze.
"There is nothing worse for soldiers’ morale than suffering casualties without being able to inflict them on the enemy," said Major Al Steele, the commander of B Company.
The night before the Black Watch set off, the troops watched a gut-wrenchingly moving photographic tribute to a young private killed on 12 June, killed by an IED that was placed in a position the insurgents guessed a soldier would rush into when under fire.
The slideshow, projected on to a huge screen on the wall in the battalion’s Camp Gordon headquarters, featured pictures of Robert McLaren in the field, and of the repatriation of his union flag-draped coffin back to Scotland.
With those images seared on their brains, the men, weighed down with weapons, ammunition and the rations that would sustain them for the coming 24 hours, wolfed down a meal of greasy hamburger and chips before clambering aboard the Chinooks that would take them for the seven-minute hop to Babaji. Served up amid the dust of the Afghan desert, it was the last cooked meal most of the soldiers would have for 11 days.
With the normal seats stowed away, the Jocks – as the men are known – arranged themselves on the floors of the helicopters, legs tucked around the man in front of them and the bulky rifles, rocket launchers, radios and other kit.
As the powerful engines gathered speed, the eerie green cabin lights were cut – leaving them in darkness, save for the occasional flash of anti-missile flares detonated from the side of the helicopters – and the Chinooks headed away from Bastion, the vast British base in Helmand, for the heart of green zone, the irrigated farmland that is home to swaths of poppy fields and large numbers of Taliban insurgents.
July 3, 2009
