Warrior Elite by Nigel Cawthorne

Author:Nigel Cawthorne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ulysses Press
Published: 2011-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

BATTLE OF TORA BORA

IN DECEMBER 2001, DELTA FORCE were given the job of taking the Tora Bora cave complex where Osama bin Laden was thought to be hiding. Central Command in Florida again asked the British SAS and SBS to assist. The Australian and New Zealand SAS would also be involved in the operation, with the German KSK guarding the flanks. The KSK—Kommando Spezialkräfte, or Special Forces Command—is a unit in the German army formed in 1996 to take over antiterrorist operations from GSG-9. It saw action in Bosnia and Herzegonia, the Kosovo War and Afganistan.

Tora Bora lay in the Tangai Mountains that separate Afghanistan from Pakistan. It is a lawless region, home to bandits and smugglers. The narrow roads there were cut into the sides of the mountains and are dangerous for sure-footed pack animals and impassable for four-wheeled vehicles. The cave complex at Tora Bora had been used by the mujahadeen as a base during their war with the Soviets. Just 50 kilometers west of the Khyber Pass and 10 kilometers from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, the labyrinthine underground fortress has been compared to the complex built by Hitler under Berlin. According to US intelligence, there were underground ammunition dumps, command and control rooms furnished with the best communications equipment bin Laden’s millions could buy, sleeping quarters, dining facilities, and everything else an army needed to survive.

As Taliban resistance collapsed throughout the rest of Afghanistan, intelligence came in that al-Qaeda and the Taliban’s foreign fighters planned to make their last stand at Tora Bora. It had been bin Laden’s headquarters during the jihad against the Soviets, and it was where he had started al-Qaeda with his mentor, the radical cleric Sheikh Abdullah Azzam. It was Azzam who had invited bin Laden to come to Afghanistan from his home in Saudi Arabia in 1979, though the two man had fallen out when bin Laden set up his own force of foreign fighters in 1988. Azzam was killed by a car bomb soon after. Bin Laden’s foreign fighters became al-Qaeda, which means “the base.” The base was Tora Bora.

Despite the might of the Red Army, the Soviets had never managed to dislodge the mujahadeen from Tora Bora. The US Army feared it would do little better. Taking the fortress would involve heavy casualties. Since the Vietnam War, the American public was particularly sensitive about body bags being returned home, so no US politician was likely to sanction a full-scale onslaught. If bin Laden were in Tora Bora, he could continue to thumb his nose at the West indefinitely. However, while US firepower might not succeed against Tora Bora, Special Forces might just be able to take it. And as their activities are largely covert, if they failed it would not be catastrophic—in public-relations terms at least.

As they moved into the area of Tora Bora, the anti-Taliban Afghan forces recruited by the Green Berets took the ridgeline and a small village called Milawa where caves used by al-Qaeda for storing weapons were discovered.

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