Bomb Hunters: In Afghanistan With Britain's Elite Bomb Disposal Unit (13 page)

On the fifth day of the operation the officer commanding Right Flank, Major Iain Lindsay-German, told Captain Swan they had received intelligence suggesting that there was a Taliban bomb factory in the local bazaar, just 30 metres from the compound. The area was searched with ISTAR, in the form of both fast jets and attack helicopters which scoured the countryside for signs of the Taliban.

Once the all-clear was given, the troops moved out of the compound and began to secure the bazaar, which earlier in the week had been a hive of activity but miraculously had emptied overnight. The Scots Guards also pushed smaller units out to a distance of some 200 metres from the compound to secure fire positions in case the Taliban attacked.

Rob explained, ‘We went out and searched the bazaar: there were about forty shops in total. Some still had bread in them, and groceries. It was a long, arduous process. You can imagine what it was like, moving from one shop to the next, always having to be careful that the place hadn’t been booby-trapped. We had received intelligence suggesting that there might be a bomb factory in the bazaar. You hear that a lot, but there was no real sign of anything suspicious. Then just as we were thinking, the intelligence is shite, we found a shop which had thirty-eight pressure-plate IEDs – and you’re like, “Fucking hell, good job.” The shop also had lots of other bomb-making components. There were batteries and wires. Lots of metal saws for the pressure plates, rolls of wire, pieces of wood had been cut up. There were lots of power packs. All the paraphernalia you would expect to be associated with a bomb factory.

‘I went in there and cleared all of them, looking out for booby-traps at the same time. I made them safe and put them to one side, one after the other. Just as I finished that, the guys were searching a shop on the other side of the bazaar and found about another 20 kg of HME, so there were two separate areas in the bazaar, one with a switching system and pressure plates and the other where they made the high explosives. We were 3 km behind an IED belt at Kalshal Kalay, where they have had lots of finds of IEDs. The feeling was that the bomb-making factory we discovered was where they were making the devices, putting them together and then carrying them forward to where the Grenadier Guards were operating and were putting them in the ground and trying to kill the soldiers, so it was quite good that, although we were there for a week and were under a lot of fire, we took thirty-eight devices out of that area, and destroyed 250 kg of HME and 100 kg of conventional explosive in the form of artillery shells and mines.

‘The Taliban are knocking out IEDs on an industrial scale. We can’t keep up. There must be dozens of factories out there churning hundreds of devices out every day. Most people back home think these things must be sophisticated because they’re killing and injuring lots of soldiers. But they’re not. They’re really basic – there is no quality control, no standard. They are just thrown together, but they are effective and deadly.

‘I’ve seen bomb factories where there are shelves of pressure plates, shelves of detonators, shelves of main charges. It was a case of come and grab what you need and take it away and bury it and go away and do the same again. The Taliban look at areas they want to deny to us – they could be areas of tactical significance or a small community which they want to keep under their control. And so they lay IEDs in belts knowing that we will avoid them or work hard to clear them.

‘The compound we occupied was 20–30 metres from the bazaar and the guy who owned the place where we were based lived 30 metres from a bomb factory. We asked him if there were Taliban in the area and he said no. The OC held a shura for all the elders and they were like, “Yeah, there’s nothing in there. Go in and search it, you won’t find anything.” I think most of them were just frightened. They knew that they could ultimately be killed if the Taliban discovered they had helped us. And that’s the same everywhere you go. I think the majority of the local nationals want to help but they are all too scared to be honest. They’re playing the long game – they know we will leave one day but the Taliban aren’t going anywhere.’

Talking with other officers on previous trips, I have seen the same frustration as Rob is expressing over the actions of the locals. One of the greatest challenges commanders in Helmand face is trying to convince the Afghans that they are better off with ISAF than the Taliban. The insurgents counter this by claiming that ISAF will leave in a few years but the Taliban will remain in Afghanistan for ever. Faced with that situation, who would you back? The Taliban often say that their greatest weapon is time. ‘You have the watches, but we have the time,’ they claim.

As we chat the subject drifts onto the countries from whom the Taliban are receiving support and assistance. Rob smiles as he says, ‘The Taliban’s bomb-making knowledge hasn’t been developed in Afghanistan. It’s far too good for that. The current thinking is that it has come from Pakistan, and possibly Iran. The belief is that the majority of the advances in IED technology are coming from Pakistan. There are lots of intelligent people in Pakistan, who are thinking outside the box, and the Pakistani secret service have helped the Taliban, we know that. There are a lot of bomb-makers in Quetta [in Pakistan] and other Taliban strongholds developing new devices all the time. But they have to come up with a simple blueprint for a bomb which can be made out of easily obtainable material and which is not over-complex. If the material wasn’t a problem, then we would have real problems here. The Pakistani Taliban could easily produce devices similar to those we faced in Iraq, and that would cause us enormous difficulties.’

News reaches me via my media escort that our helicopter flights into FOB Shawqat in Nad-e’Ali in central Helmand are confirmed for tomorrow around midday. The excitement of leaving Camp Bastion and moving closer to the action grips me once again. I am acclimatizing to the war zone. Promises I made to myself and my family about not going on patrol or doing anything dangerous are beginning to evaporate. England, my family and my office in Victoria almost feel like a lifetime away. That’s good in a way, I tell myself with little conviction. Better not to think about my family than to miss them. I suppose that’s how the soldiers cope too.

I am told that our group, which includes the
Sunday Telegraph
photographer Heathcliff O’Malley and Captain John Donaldson, known as JD, the Grenadier Guards’ media officer, will be flying into the FOB in a Sea King. I’m not filled with confidence. These aircraft are ancient, having been in service with the Royal Navy for more than thirty years. They were sent out to Helmand in a belated attempt to boost the number of helicopters available to British troops for operations following numerous claims and allegations that troops were dying unnecessarily because they were being forced to travel by road instead. There is a certain truth in this. Even before the surge in use of IEDs by the Taliban, Afghanistan was one of the most land-mined countries on earth and anyone going overland was risking death or injury. It became clear to me as early as October 2006, when I first visited Helmand, that there were too few helicopters there. Back then one senior commander told me privately that the lack of helicopters in Helmand was one of the greatest obstacles they faced in the war against the Taliban.

I return to the tent and begin to pack and repack my kit, trying to work out what I will need for the next phase of my embed, when I move beyond Camp Bastion and into the action. It’s much warmer both at night and during the day than I had predicted, so the winter fleece can be dumped. During my last visit in November I travelled too lightly and my warm clothing consisted of a down-filled waistcoat and a lightweight fleece. Needless to say, I was absolutely freezing at night – primarily because I was sleeping in a steel ISO container which was effectively a large fridge.

‘Everyone wants to get involved in a firefight when you first come out but when it’s happening every day you start to wonder how long your luck will last.’

Guardsman, 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards

The RAF Merlin is flying ‘nap of the earth’, at low level, over the Helmand desert at an altitude of around 100 ft. The chopper is bobbing and weaving like a prizefighter trying to dodge a punch, twisting one way, then the other. In Helmand the safest journeys are the shortest, including those by helicopter.

I’ve flown out of Camp Bastion in a helicopter on dozens of occasions over the past four years but it remains a nerve-racking experience. RAF helicopters are pretty well protected. Most have at least two machine guns, one fore and one aft, a host of defensive aids, which should be able to handle any surface-to-air (SAM) missiles, and armour plating on the floor and sides of the fuselage. But there is always the risk of the Taliban getting a lucky hit. As I write this in June 2010, they have managed to down a US Black Hawk that was trying to extract a wounded British soldier. As the helicopter came down to land, when it is at its most vulnerable, a hidden Taliban RPG team managed to fire a rocket that hit the tail rotor. Four of the crew were killed in the crash. It will not be the last time that a helicopter is shot down on a routine mission.

The British military have already drawn up contingency plans for a mass-casualty event if and when a British Chinook laden with upwards of forty troops is brought down by enemy fire. It is feared that such a catastrophic event would kill off the diminishing support for the mission among the British public and lead to a full-scale withdrawal of British troops. So far the British have been lucky, whereas both the US and Canadian militaries have lost helicopters, either to enemy fire or to mechanical failure, at the cost of many good men. In war good luck always runs out.

I begin to think once again of Rupert and his last journey and wonder whether I will have the same fate. ‘Once you go beyond the wire there are no longer any guarantees,’ someone once advised me before I embedded with an infantry unit. ‘You share exactly the same risk as everyone else.’ The fear and concerns that gripped me are no longer so intense. I’m becoming acclimatized to the dangers Helmand holds, though I’m not sure whether that is a good or a bad thing. I know the fear will return, but I also know that I will be ready for it.

The landscape below is Old Testament. Rectangular, mud-made compounds baked as hard as concrete after decades, possibly hundreds of years, beneath the sun. The dwellings are purely functional; there is no exterior decoration, no outward sign of wealth or individuality. There are no roads, just tracks worn by years of use. Rectangular emerald fields magically appear on the flat, bleak moon-like surface of the desert. Afghan children wave excitedly, while the adults, mostly men, carry on tilling their fields and planting their crops in exactly the same way as their ancestors would have done centuries earlier. Farmers have been working the land here for decades, turning the barren desert into a fertile oasis. The lush, green fields are the first indicator that we are approaching the Green Zone. What should be a thing of beauty is anything but, for this is Taliban country.

In Helmand I’ve always found the concept of a so-called front line – the Army term is the Forward Line of Enemy Troops, or FLET – something of a misnomer. The reality here is much more fluid, for there are no real fixed lines and, at least as individuals, the Taliban have complete freedom of movement. The insurgents can come and go as they please into the villages, or kalays, which make up most of Helmand. Some have even ventured close to Camp Bastion. In 2008 a suicide car bomber attempted to destroy a two-vehicle Snatch Land Rover convoy on a routine run between Bastion and Camp Shorabak, where the Afghan National Army are trained. A captain in the Royal Irish Regiment who survived the attack told me of the horror he felt at the extraordinary sight of the bomber’s face lying in the middle of the road. He said that he wouldn’t have believed this was possible unless he had seen it for himself. The force of the blast had sliced the bomber’s face from his skull.

The Taliban’s cunning was laid bare in their killing of a British soldier on the ranges close to Bastion a few months before I arrived. As part of the RSOI package, units will often march the 5 km to the ranges, a fact which was noticed by the insurgents. So, in the dead of night, when the ranges are unguarded, they sneaked in and laid an IED in a position where they knew British soldiers would be training. The following day, as members of the Coldstream Guards arrived for a day’s live firing, Lance Corporal James Hill, who had flown into Helmand four days earlier, detonated a pressure-plate IED containing an estimated 5 kg of explosive and was killed instantly, proving once again that nowhere in Helmand is safe.

The Merlin continues to jink and twist through the air in an attempt to foil any group of hidden insurgents tempted to shoot down a NATO chopper. On each flank Army Air Corps Apache attack helicopters – called ‘mosquitos’ by the Taliban – are riding shotgun. The Apache is a fearsome £12-million killing machine. Each bristles with a vast array of weaponry which has been adapted for the war in Helmand. The Apache has a crew of two – the pilot who flies the helicopter and a co-pilot or gunner who controls the weapons systems in battle. The aircraft was originally conceived during the Cold War and came into service with the US armed forces, who have 800 compared with the British Army’s sixty-seven, in the early 1990s. Its primary role was to destroy columns of Soviet tanks should they swarm over the north German plain on their way into western Europe. That threat no longer exists, so here they are in Helmand using their Hellfire anti-tank missiles to obliterate Taliban strongholds.

The Apache also carries a 30 mm automatic cannon with a cyclic fire rate of 620 rounds per minute. It takes just one second to take out a target at a distance of 500 metres. A helmet-mounted display enables the cannon to be ‘slaved’ to the pilot’s eye line for manual firing. The flight helmet’s clip-on arm drops a small screen in front of his right eye – the helmet-mounted display, or HMD. At the centre of the HMD is a cross-hair sight, like a sniper’s. As the pilot’s eye moves, so the cannon swivels to follow his line of sight. All he has to do is to look at the target, select the weapon and range, and pull the trigger on the pistol-grip control column.

In addition the Apache is equipped with weapon pods, each of which can carry nineteen CRV7 rockets. These can be fitted with an armour-piercing warhead or packed with eighty 5-in.-long tungsten darts known as flechettes. So a salvo of just eight of these rockets releases 640 flechettes, saturating an area the size of a football pitch. The existence of these weapons is not overtly advertised by the Ministry of Defence because of the effect they have on a human body. The darts strip human flesh to the bone. Those Taliban fighters who aren’t killed instantly die a long and lingering death, and woe betide any innocent civilians who find themselves caught in the killing zone in the midst of a battle. The pain and suffering human beings are prepared to inflict upon one another in war is truly appalling, yet I’m secretly reassured to know that we have these weapons.

Like many of the trips by helicopter I have made in Helmand, my flight was delayed by twenty-four hours owing to the helicopters being retasked for a more urgent mission. I’ve known people who have been stuck in Camp Bastion for up to a week until a flight became available, so a twenty-four-hour delay is viewed as minor-league stuff. Helicopters are a ‘mission critical’ capability in Helmand, and the British operation has been under-resourced since operations in southern Afghanistan began. The government always maintained that commanders had enough helicopters for the job, and, when asked ‘on the record’, commanders would concur. But ‘off the record’ they would then declare that the numbers of helicopters were pitifully low and that troops were being forced to take unacceptable risks travelling in vehicles which were not sufficiently protected against Taliban attack. But, much to the dismay of the military’s rank and file, not a single serving senior officer was prepared to put his head on the block by stating what everyone knew to be a fact. General Sir Richard Dannatt, when he was Chief of the General Staff, came closest to directly criticizing the government’s failure to equip the military with adequate numbers of helicopters for the mission in Afghanistan. During a visit to Helmand in 2009 he stated publicly that he had visited UK troops located in various outposts by travelling in a US helicopter because no British helicopters were available.

Only now do commanders believe they have the requisite number of helicopters to achieve mission success. The bulk of the troop-carrying capacity is conducted by the half dozen or so RAF Chinooks – the twin-engine workhorse which keeps the Helmand mission alive. They are supported by a clutch of Army Air Corps Lynxes, which at first couldn’t fly in the summer owing to the intense heat but have since been adapted, ageing Royal Navy Sea Kings, and RAF Merlins, the latest addition to the British military rotary fleet. The size of the helicopter force has at least doubled since 2006, when NATO forces first ventured into Helmand. But troop numbers have tripled since then, so there is little if any overall gain.

Just fifteen minutes after leaving Camp Bastion we arrive at FOB Shawqat, the British headquarters in Nad-e’Ali. The Army likes to show off Nad-e’Ali because it is one of the few places in Helmand where the British and NATO strategy is flourishing. The Taliban have been forced from the district centre and the whole area is ringed by police and Army checkpoints. When any British VIPs arrive in Helmand, they are routinely shipped off to Nad-e’Ali. Few ever make it into Sangin or other areas where the Taliban presence is more apparent.

The helicopters touch down in a haze of green smoke on two adjacent landing sites within the base. It is rumoured that Shawqat was built in the ruins of a fort occupied by British troops during the First Afghan War, in 1840. Strange to think that 170 years later the British Army is still fighting over the same ground. The fort’s 40-ft-high walls are made of red-brown clay bricks, probably fashioned by hand for a seventeenth-century Afghan warlord. Some of the huge round turrets are still intact and have been turned into fortified observation posts by the Afghan National Army, who provide security at the base.

FOB Shawqat has hardly changed since I was here in November 2009, but it does have two important additions: working showers and toilets, crucial for morale. At that time only solar showers were available, but because the water is heated by the sun, a warm shower was impossible in the morning as the temperature then hovered around zero. Soldiers in FOBs were under orders to shave every day but the only means of heating the water was with an ancient ‘puffing billy’ water heater. This device, which was probably in service with the British Expeditionary Force when it retreated from France in 1940, heated enough water for about twenty soldiers on a base which contained several hundred. It was first come first served, and everyone else had to wash and shave in water chilled to almost freezing by the bitter Helmand night. I can still conjure up the agonizing cramps which momentarily crippled my hands when washing and shaving in the icy water.

The toilets represented an interesting departure in the task of disposing of human waste. Beyond Camp Bastion, apart from at the base at Lashkar Gah, which is home to the brigade headquarters and an infantry company group, plumbing was absent in all the FOBs. Until November 2009 soldiers defecated in foil bags. One of these was placed over a normal toilet, and when the job was done the bag was sealed and thrown into a fire pit. Simple but effective. Before the arrival of poo bags, soldiers were forced to use cubicles which had an open pit beneath them. The stench in the summer was unbearable, but, even worse, the open nature of the pit meant that disease was rife and many troops were struck down with the dreaded D and V, diarrhoea and vomiting.

Within seconds of our touching down, Lieutenant Colonel Roly Walker, the commanding officer of the Grenadier Guards, appears at the HLS, dressed in full battle rig and clutching his rifle. His eyes are obscured by military-issue wraparound sunglasses, but I still recognize his smiling face. ‘Thought you weren’t going to make it,’ he says, his hand outstretched, before adding, ‘Good to have you back, Sean. Right, there’s no time to waste. You’re coming with me – we’re off on a bit of a convoy up to Chah-e-Anjir. We’ll be staying out overnight, so grab what you need. You’ve got five minutes.’

Chah-e-Anjir, in the north of the Nad-e’Ali district, is home to Inkerman Company. The base is located at the apex of an upturned triangle which is known by the Army as the CAT – the Chah-e-Anjir Triangle. When I last visited Inkerman Company gun battles with the Taliban were almost a daily occurrence and the FLET was less than 100 metres from the base’s forward position. This position was in an area known as Five Tanks, named after five large storage tanks which were part of the mass of machinery left behind by the Americans when they left some fifty years ago.

Roly, a white Kenyan educated at Harrow and Sandhurst, is, at 39, one of the youngest battlegroup commanders in Afghanistan. He is passionately committed to the Afghan mission and is fully signed up to the vision of General Stanley McChrystal, who at that time was the US commander charged by President Barack Obama with breaking the stalemate in Afghanistan, until he was sacked and replaced by General Petraeus in June 2010.

Within minutes of stepping off the Merlin I’m strapped into the back of a Ridgeback armoured vehicle. There are four of us in the rear of the vehicle, each wearing body armour and helmets, so it’s a tight squeeze, but I feel secure. The Mastiff and Ridgeback come from the same class of vehicles and are almost identical, but the Mastiff is larger, with six wheels to the Ridgeback’s four. The Ridgeback is one of the latest British Army vehicles to arrive in Helmand and is packed with state-of-the-art technology. It has an armoured V-shaped hull which should help deflect blasts from mines and IEDs, while bar armour on the sides should protect those inside from RPG attack. It is also equipped with a remotely controlled 7.62-mm chain gun which is mounted on the roof and controlled by the vehicle commander through a pistol-grip control. A camera mounted on the gun gives the commander a crystal-clear 360-degree view on a drop-down computer screen. To engage the enemy he positions the cross-hairs on the target, flicks off the safety catch and presses the red trigger with his forefinger. The commander does not experience any recoil and the gun, which can fire sixty rounds per minute, can kill anything within a range of 1,200 metres. Thermal imagery allows the weapon to be used at night.