Task Force Black by Mark Urban

Author:Mark Urban
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780748120024
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2010-02-17T19:00:00+00:00

9

OPERATION LARCHWOOD 4

The scene about the MSS Fernandez landing site that April night in 2006 was one that had already become thoroughly familiar. RAF Pumas had come in from BIAP and their crews were making final checks. ‘The guys on standby knew they could be quite relaxed during the daylight,’ recalls one crewman assigned to the Task Force Knight helicopter flight. ‘They would have an hour or two’s warning. But then that might go down to a thirty-minute standby, then a cockpit standby and finally a rotors turning standby.’

In the murk beside the choppers, men formed up nearby, fresh from their quick battle orders. These were usually given in the briefing room of the SAS house, where the marble floors and gilded white sofas reminded the blades of its previous inhabitants. Sergeant-Major Mulberry was there, a couple of the troop commanders, two guys with snipers’ rifles. It was after 1 a.m. as each man checked his kit: night-vision equipment, radio, magazines for their primary weapon, usually an assault rifle, and a pistol. The blades had formerly worn their handgun or secondary weapon low-slung in leg holsters, but by this time the fashion was for fixing a quick-release holster to the front of the body armour, just beneath the neck. In addition to the standard kit, there would be small personal add-ons. Some men, usually the sergeant-major among them, carried cyalumes, chemical lights that could be used to mark a landing zone or an entry point. One or two men carried shotguns or explosive charges for blowing in doors. Many sported knives too, although the SAS never quite adopted Delta’s taste for fearsome fighting daggers.

That night’s serial, as the name Operation LARCHWOOD 4 suggests, was a development based upon raids over the previous days. The two B squadrons – SAS and Delta – had been hitting AQI targets in the ‘Baghdad belts’ – a term used by the Coalition for communities surrounding the capital. There had already been several firefights. On 8 April a raid near the same town they were heading for on this night had killed five insurgents, who the intelligence people claimed were foreign fighters. On 13 April, another two. With each raid, JSOC’s intelligence picture of a group of al-Qaeda cells around the capital had evolved.

Yusufiyah, twenty-five kilometres to the south-west of Baghdad, was seething with tension at the time. Fallujah is about twenty kilometres off to the west, Abu Ghraib between the two places. To the east of Yusufiyah is Mahmudiyah and south-east is Latifiyah – the three ‘iyahs’ marking the points of an area of intense insurgent activity known since late 2003 as the Triangle of Death. By 2006 the violence was going in several different directions. It was an extremely dangerous area for Coalition forces but the presence of many Shia villages had also led to numerous sectarian murders.

During the spring of 2006, there was a series of sweeps by US troops through the area. They had rounded up the usual trophies of Kalashnikovs,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.