Night of fear and fire as US soldiers strike

IT WAS the first night of Ramadan and Abdullah was fast asleep on the soft desert sand by his fuel tanker when he was woken by a cold gun barrel poking into his neck.

“Bandits,” he thought with a flash of fear as a pair of knees pinned his chest to the ground.

Blinded by panic, he tried to struggle away before the gun could be fired. But to his surprise, his assailant turned him over roughly and tied his hands behind his back before hauling him off behind a nearby sand dune.

Then, in the moonlight, he caught his first proper glimpse of the attackers. Six American soldiers, all kneeling on the ground, each holding another terrified driver.

Abdullah recognised his friend and co-driver, Habibullah, struggling as a soldier in body armour and nightvision goggles handcuffed him with plastic restraints.

“Their glasses were green and glittering,” Abdullah said, “and they kept talking on the radio.”

The men who descended on the sleeping tanker drivers were members of US special forces, sent into enemy territory to identify targets for aerial attack. A convoy of tankers carrying fuel through Talebancontrolled territory proved to be a prime target.

One of the soldiers began questioning the drivers in what they described as “very bad Persian”.

“He asked: ‘Who are you?’ ” Abdullah recounted. “We said we are drivers. These are our trucks. We are taking fuel from Iran.

“But they said: ‘No, these trucks belong to terrorists and you are providing help to terrorists.’ ” The soldiers then marched them up another sand dune, away from the tankers and began talking into their radios. “They told us: ‘Don’t try to run. We’re going to hit your tankers.’ ”

Minutes later, they heard the sound of helicopter blades cutting through the sky. “We started to panic,” Habibullah recalled. “We couldn’t understand what was going on.”

The helicopters let loose a barrage of rockets on the tankers, which erupted in a huge fireball, lighting up the night sky. One of the soldiers ran forward and let rip a round of automatic machine-gun fire, peppering the side of the tanker.

A week later, the acrid smell of burning fuel still hung in the air over the mangled remains of the tankers in the middle of the desert plain near Tungi village, ten miles from the Pakistani border. Blackened barrels that had once held petrol and paraffin lay scattered around a charred lorry. Bullet-holes perforated the side of one of the tankers.

Near by were the plastic hand restraints that the soldiers had cut from the drivers’ wrists before letting them go free. Abdullah pointed out tyre tracks made by the soldiers’ Humvees and footprints apparently made by rubber-soled boots. The tankers’ owner, a Pakistani businessman, shook his head in disgust as he surveyed the wreckage.

“This is cruel and excessive,” Aktar Mohammed said. “It’s farmers and ordinary people who buy our oil, not the Taleban. In the name of Osama and the Taleban, they are just penalising the common people.”

More than a dozen other oil tankers had been attacked by American special forces in the province in the past two weeks, he said. In most cases the drivers were ambushed and removed just like Abdullah, Habibullah and their workmates. But while their lives were spared, their livelihoods were not. Without the money to replace the tankers, the drivers are out of work. “How will they feed their families now?” Mr Mohammed asked. “What is the point of this?” The Pentagon says the point is to deprive the Taleban of the fuel it needs to fight a war. With most of the Taleban’s military targets now reportedly obliterated, the Americans have turned their attention to cutting off its supply lines.

Earlier this week, the Pentagon showed video footage of a similar operation in which a US warplane obliterated a tanker on the western approach road to Kandahar.

The drivers’ accounts and the evidence on the ground provide a rare first-hand account of special forces operations inside southern Afghanistan, suggesting that units are now active in a large swath of Taleban territory all the way up to the Pakistani border.

As a result, Afghan tanker drivers are adapting to the new realities of war. Before setting off on their journey from the Iranian border, many try to camouflage their garishly painted trucks with branches and tumbleweed found in the desert. Once they would drive all night to make the cross-country journey along the bone-jarring roads in under three days; now, as darkness falls, they draw up to the side of the road and switch their headlights off before bedding down for the night to avoid drawing attention to themselves.

Abdullah is grateful to have escaped with his life, but he gives no credit to the Americans’ efforts to avoid civilian casualties by removing the drivers from the convoy. He believes that a higher force intervened that night, the first of the Muslim holy month, to save him and his friends from the enemy.

“It’s because of the grace of Allah,” he said, “that we are alive today.”

The evildoers that did not get away

November 23, 2001
Special forces get free rein
By Rowan Scarborough THE WASHINGTON TIMES

     U.S. commandos inside Afghanistan have been given historic autonomy to plan and execute attacks when needed, resulting in "hundreds" of deaths of enemy soldiers, military officials say.

     One official described the special-operations forces' (SOF) rules of engagement as an "unrestricted hunting license" for Taliban militia and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist army now in disarray.

     Special-operations troops the past two weeks have conducted their first sustained ground combat in Afghanistan. Sources say small teams of Delta Force soldiers, and other commando units, have ambushed the enemy and killed them in small batches.

     "From the reports I've seen, they have killed in the hundreds," a senior administration official said. "There have been no deaths on our side."

     This official, and others, said in interviews they credit the success to a premium placed on special-operations training the past 20 years. They also praise the freedom granted the units by Gen. Tommy Franks.

     Gen. Franks, who as head of U.S. Central Command is directing the war in Afghanistan, is part of the "conventional" Army, and thus suspect in the eyes of hardened covert warriors. But some in the community are applauding the general's willingness to give SOF their loosest rein since the Vietnam War. Then, Army Green Berets infiltrated enemy territory and attacked at will.

     Commandos are working in small teams at night in southern Afghanistan, attacking Taliban and al Qaeda soldiers around their stronghold of Kandahar. U.S. commandos can conduct reconnaissance, identify the enemy and plan missions to attack without getting approval from Central Command, officials said.

     "You've got to give these guys freedom to plan direct action because the intelligence is so fragile," an administration official said. "In conventional warfare, you can rely on older intelligence of enemy positions because the enemy is not as mobile. In direct action, they're going after people. They have to do their own intelligence and act on it right away. You have to give these guys some slack."

     In some cases, soldiers have used sniper fire, taking advantage of stealth and superior night-sight equipment. In other encounters, soldiers used Barret 50-caliber weapons, a heavy sniper rifle that can take out an armored vehicle, or a person, at 1,500 yards.

     The administration official said now that hundreds of SOF soldiers are behind enemy lines they must act quickly or lose their prey. "It's only when you operate in country that information becomes minutes old," the official said.

     Personnel in the special-operations community say Afghanistan has provided a playing field for SOF specialists to ply two classic trades at once: unconventional warfare and direct action.

     In unconventional warfare, Army Special Forces, or Green Berets, have worked with the Northern Alliance and other opposition groups. The U.S. soldiers, trained in indigenous customs and language, give tactical advice, supply arms and bond with commanders who will one day run the country.

     In "direct action" carried out by Delta Force and other SOF units, commandos find targets for fighter jets to strike, blow up some targets themselves and conduct hit-and-run raids.

     "They're not leaving a footprint," said the administration official. "When these guys do sleep, they sleep on the ground. They don't have a fixed base camp."

     Delta Force is under the control of U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), located at Pope Air Force Base, which borders Fort Bragg, N.C., home to Army Special Operations Command. JSOC not only oversees the super-secret Delta anti-terrorism unit, but also the Navy's Seal Team Six. "There are elements of JSOC we don't talk about," an Army officer said.

     Under the command of Army Maj. Gen. Del Dailey, JSOC units train in total secrecy. Few outside the units know who they are or what they do. Gen. Dailey, an ex-member of the 800-strong Delta unit, personally briefed President Bush on their missions in Afghanistan before the war began.

     Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld visited Pope and Fort Bragg this week to fire up troops on whose shoulders much of the war's fate now rests. Backed by air power, they must not only kill terrorists, but also help catch, or kill, the two primary al Qaeda leaders: bin Laden and his top aide Ayman al Zawahiri.

     While at Fort Bragg, Mr. Rumsfeld credited SOF with turning the war in Afghanistan in the United States' favor.

     In the first weeks after the air campaign began Oct. 7, opposition forces made little headway. But once U.S. warriors entered the country in significant numbers and began finding crucial command and troop targets, the Taliban began its retreat.

     "The air war enabled the ground war to succeed," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "And it turned when we had Special Forces down there to help with the targeting. And God bless them for doing it."

Your nose picker friends should be happy they are alive Mert.

I like your additions!

By the way, isn't it interesting that the New York Times cannot understand this?

Reading this article made me proud of our guys! I am sure the clymers there at the Old Gray Lady thought that we would feel sorry for the truck drivers and think poorly of our men.

Look at what our soldiers have done...identified a risk, located it without detection, removed the drivers so they wouldn't be injured, destroyed the trucks, and disappeared into the night. About the only thing they didn't do was leave a note saying "Greetings from the United States of America. You are with us, or you are with the terrorists!"

I am so proud I could cry. And the clueless Times, with its tin ear for the heartbeat of America, writes an article that allows these shifty drivers to portray themselves as the victims.

The paper should be ashamed!!

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