Aussie E
06-14-2004, 01:45 PM
from www.theaustralian.news.com.au
Shaking mountains in search of Osama
Rory Callinan goes hunting for al-Qa'ida with the US 501st Airborne Division in Afghanistan
June 15, 2004
A SALVO of machinegun fire echoes across the moonlit plain, followed by the crump of several explosions and the barking of dogs from a nearby camp of the nomad Cuchi people.
The paratroopers twitch nervously in their sleeping bags at their bivouac in an old Russian observation position high above the Khost in Afghanistan, about 130km southeast of Kabul.
"That sounded close. I'm going to check on it," says platoon leader Sergeant Donald Thomas, who is on radio watch.
About 30 paratroopers from Charlie Company have bedded down for the night amid the jagged rocks and old trenches; their jumping off point for a dawn raid on a suspected al-Qa'ida supporter.
Sergeant Thomas's radio calls cannot shed light on the skirmish and the paratroopers are now on high alert, the green light from their night vision goggles turning them into slit-eyed phantoms scanning the plains below.
Such gunfire is common in this rocky, dusty plain ringed by mountains, a former Taliban and al-Qai'da stronghold lying less than 20km from the porous Pakistan border across which terrorists mount raids into Afghanistan.
Since their deployment in August, the 1200 paratroopers of the 501st have mounted hundreds of operations into the Khost, attempting to track down what they call the "bad hajis".
But, like the flickering shadows that keep the paratroopers on edge at night, the enemy is almost indistinguishable from the innocent locals. The 501st has had a handful of contacts with the militants, who prefer to attack soft targets such as Afghan police and aid workers.
At 3.30am, with just a hint of light in the east, Sergeant Thomas gives the order to roll out. As the humvees rattle down the rocky hillside the dogs at the Cuchi camp wake up the district.
At the highway linking the cities of Khost and Gardez, they rendezvous with another platoon that spent the night camped near the road, and the convoy charges towards its target. Inside, MP3 players crudely spliced into the humvee's speakers send out the muted tones of Nickelback and Metallica, punctuated by the chop of two helicopter gunships flying ahead to search for ambushes.
The target is a wealthy builder named Mullah Zariff, who, according to intelligence provided to Charlie Company commander Captain Jason Condrey, has been offering to build a house for anyone who kills an American soldier.
The convoy snakes up through the mountain road, the drivers blasting their horns to keep local traffic out of the way, towards Zariff's village below the Khost-Gardez Pass.
On the back of our humvee, about fourth from the front, Specialist Brandon Bryant mans the saw -- or heavy machinegun. Leaning into the wind on the open backed vehicle, the bespectacled 21-year-old looks hardly experienced enough to drive let alone go into combat, but he's a veteran of one of the 501st most successful skirmishes of the deployment, when they caught four Taliban ambushing two local government officials.
Pointing out the scene of the skirmish, he says the Taliban started running away across the open ground. "It was crazy. I was in one (humvee) like this. It was open on both sides so when they started firing at us, we were like 'oh ****', and I got down on one knee in the bed of the truck and started firing off.
"Then my buddy has got the saw. And he lays the bipod legs on my shoulder and starts firing off. It was awesome. With so much adrenaline going I never really noticed it. We finally laid them down I jumped of the truck and they started firing again so we started firing back. It was wild."
Despite the early start, traffic is building up on the highway, but most drivers know the drill and pull over. Smiling children run to the sides of the road seeking handfuls of sweets, but some of the older men glare at the passing convoy with their hands on their hips.
After crawling through a chicane of hills and potential ambush sites, the convoy halts below Zariff's compound, protected by solid brick walls and set on high ground with a commanding view of the Khost.
The paratroopers take up positions around the gates, blocking all exits.
Standing at the front gate, Lieutenant Neil "Huck" Finn calls for the company's Afghan interpreter. The "terps" use names such as John or Jeff, and cover their faces with scarves and sunglasses as protection against a $US30,000 ($43,000) al-Qa'ida bounty, $US10,000 more than for a dead American.
Using a loud hailer, the interpreter orders Zariff to come out holding his weapons and ammunition where they can be seen. "Tell him I'm serious. There's no excuses if he doesn't bring it out," says Lieutenant Finn.
A plump man wearing a spotless white shalwar kameez comes out with two boys.
The man is friendly but anxious. One of the boys is sent back inside and returns with two magazines and an AK-47 -- legal in a country where men are allowed to own an assault rifle, a shotgun and a pistol.
The man is kept outside while the paratroopers inside lift up carpets, cushions, probe walls and peer through Pashtu books, which they can not read. Two engineers with a metal detector scan the walls. They get a beep from a 60cm-thick concrete wall.
"Can we tear down walls?" an engineer asks. His boss laughs and shakes his head.
Outside, it transpires the man in the white shalwar kameez is not Mullah Zariff. He is Mohammed Whalid Khan, a builder who apparently spends a lot of time in the United Arab Emirates. His photograph is taken, his passport examined and satellite phone numbers jotted down. Khan says the numbers are for his work in the UAE.
Lieutenant Finn questions him brusquely, but without eliciting anything incriminating. The search inside also finds nothing incriminating save an old mortar bore cleaner, which Khan says is used to clean the chimneys. But much goes unsearched; outside the house huge piles of firewood are ignored, but to search them would take hours.
Lieutenant Finn radios his commander to tell him the only part of the intelligence from Captain Condrey that checked out was that the man who lived in the compound was a builder.
On the way back to camp, the company detours through the city of Khost. The soldiers cause a traffic jam as they slow to a crawl through the streets. Paratroopers get out of their vehicles and walk alongside, some go down an arcade to look at jewellery for their wives and girlfriends.
A huge crowd builds along the sides of the streets as locals come out to watch. Some smile and wave; others stare grimly. One youth on a bicycle approaches Sergeant John Hipilito and says the Taliban are involved in rocket attacks on Americans. Sergeant Hipilito says: "We already know about that. What do you know about it?"
The youth backs off but then Sergeant Hipilito jumps and turns and confronts another youth. He takes him off to the interpreters, saying the youth had demonstrated some suspicious body language and wants to know why.
The youth says he was only trying to signal a friend. Hipilito lets him go and says, "Don't sneak up on Americans, you could get hurt." Badly hurt, echoes another soldier.
On our return to the base, Sergeant Thomas says more investigation will be done on Zariff.
While the company has been out on the raid, a group of soldiers on a short drive from the base to deliver uniforms to local Afghan police has been attacked. An anti-tank mine was detonated less than a metre from their humvee, knocking two soldiers and an interpreter unconscious. Another 30cm to the right and they would all have been killed. The 501st has suffered only seven casualties, none of them deaths, in the 10 months they have been in Afghanistan.
Despite the lack of success in the raid to find Zariff, Captain Condrey believes such missions are a sign "we are winning".
"We may not always catch the guys but the guys are no longer able to come and go," he says.
"We are denying their ability to move around freely. If we look at it that way then we are definitely winning."
But one of the terps has a different perspective on the battle.
"All the Taliban and al-Qa'ida are still around. Most of them are in Pakistan," he said.
"If the Americans go, they will be back tomorrow. Maybe in 10 years with the Americans it will be all right."
Shaking mountains in search of Osama
Rory Callinan goes hunting for al-Qa'ida with the US 501st Airborne Division in Afghanistan
June 15, 2004
A SALVO of machinegun fire echoes across the moonlit plain, followed by the crump of several explosions and the barking of dogs from a nearby camp of the nomad Cuchi people.
The paratroopers twitch nervously in their sleeping bags at their bivouac in an old Russian observation position high above the Khost in Afghanistan, about 130km southeast of Kabul.
"That sounded close. I'm going to check on it," says platoon leader Sergeant Donald Thomas, who is on radio watch.
About 30 paratroopers from Charlie Company have bedded down for the night amid the jagged rocks and old trenches; their jumping off point for a dawn raid on a suspected al-Qa'ida supporter.
Sergeant Thomas's radio calls cannot shed light on the skirmish and the paratroopers are now on high alert, the green light from their night vision goggles turning them into slit-eyed phantoms scanning the plains below.
Such gunfire is common in this rocky, dusty plain ringed by mountains, a former Taliban and al-Qai'da stronghold lying less than 20km from the porous Pakistan border across which terrorists mount raids into Afghanistan.
Since their deployment in August, the 1200 paratroopers of the 501st have mounted hundreds of operations into the Khost, attempting to track down what they call the "bad hajis".
But, like the flickering shadows that keep the paratroopers on edge at night, the enemy is almost indistinguishable from the innocent locals. The 501st has had a handful of contacts with the militants, who prefer to attack soft targets such as Afghan police and aid workers.
At 3.30am, with just a hint of light in the east, Sergeant Thomas gives the order to roll out. As the humvees rattle down the rocky hillside the dogs at the Cuchi camp wake up the district.
At the highway linking the cities of Khost and Gardez, they rendezvous with another platoon that spent the night camped near the road, and the convoy charges towards its target. Inside, MP3 players crudely spliced into the humvee's speakers send out the muted tones of Nickelback and Metallica, punctuated by the chop of two helicopter gunships flying ahead to search for ambushes.
The target is a wealthy builder named Mullah Zariff, who, according to intelligence provided to Charlie Company commander Captain Jason Condrey, has been offering to build a house for anyone who kills an American soldier.
The convoy snakes up through the mountain road, the drivers blasting their horns to keep local traffic out of the way, towards Zariff's village below the Khost-Gardez Pass.
On the back of our humvee, about fourth from the front, Specialist Brandon Bryant mans the saw -- or heavy machinegun. Leaning into the wind on the open backed vehicle, the bespectacled 21-year-old looks hardly experienced enough to drive let alone go into combat, but he's a veteran of one of the 501st most successful skirmishes of the deployment, when they caught four Taliban ambushing two local government officials.
Pointing out the scene of the skirmish, he says the Taliban started running away across the open ground. "It was crazy. I was in one (humvee) like this. It was open on both sides so when they started firing at us, we were like 'oh ****', and I got down on one knee in the bed of the truck and started firing off.
"Then my buddy has got the saw. And he lays the bipod legs on my shoulder and starts firing off. It was awesome. With so much adrenaline going I never really noticed it. We finally laid them down I jumped of the truck and they started firing again so we started firing back. It was wild."
Despite the early start, traffic is building up on the highway, but most drivers know the drill and pull over. Smiling children run to the sides of the road seeking handfuls of sweets, but some of the older men glare at the passing convoy with their hands on their hips.
After crawling through a chicane of hills and potential ambush sites, the convoy halts below Zariff's compound, protected by solid brick walls and set on high ground with a commanding view of the Khost.
The paratroopers take up positions around the gates, blocking all exits.
Standing at the front gate, Lieutenant Neil "Huck" Finn calls for the company's Afghan interpreter. The "terps" use names such as John or Jeff, and cover their faces with scarves and sunglasses as protection against a $US30,000 ($43,000) al-Qa'ida bounty, $US10,000 more than for a dead American.
Using a loud hailer, the interpreter orders Zariff to come out holding his weapons and ammunition where they can be seen. "Tell him I'm serious. There's no excuses if he doesn't bring it out," says Lieutenant Finn.
A plump man wearing a spotless white shalwar kameez comes out with two boys.
The man is friendly but anxious. One of the boys is sent back inside and returns with two magazines and an AK-47 -- legal in a country where men are allowed to own an assault rifle, a shotgun and a pistol.
The man is kept outside while the paratroopers inside lift up carpets, cushions, probe walls and peer through Pashtu books, which they can not read. Two engineers with a metal detector scan the walls. They get a beep from a 60cm-thick concrete wall.
"Can we tear down walls?" an engineer asks. His boss laughs and shakes his head.
Outside, it transpires the man in the white shalwar kameez is not Mullah Zariff. He is Mohammed Whalid Khan, a builder who apparently spends a lot of time in the United Arab Emirates. His photograph is taken, his passport examined and satellite phone numbers jotted down. Khan says the numbers are for his work in the UAE.
Lieutenant Finn questions him brusquely, but without eliciting anything incriminating. The search inside also finds nothing incriminating save an old mortar bore cleaner, which Khan says is used to clean the chimneys. But much goes unsearched; outside the house huge piles of firewood are ignored, but to search them would take hours.
Lieutenant Finn radios his commander to tell him the only part of the intelligence from Captain Condrey that checked out was that the man who lived in the compound was a builder.
On the way back to camp, the company detours through the city of Khost. The soldiers cause a traffic jam as they slow to a crawl through the streets. Paratroopers get out of their vehicles and walk alongside, some go down an arcade to look at jewellery for their wives and girlfriends.
A huge crowd builds along the sides of the streets as locals come out to watch. Some smile and wave; others stare grimly. One youth on a bicycle approaches Sergeant John Hipilito and says the Taliban are involved in rocket attacks on Americans. Sergeant Hipilito says: "We already know about that. What do you know about it?"
The youth backs off but then Sergeant Hipilito jumps and turns and confronts another youth. He takes him off to the interpreters, saying the youth had demonstrated some suspicious body language and wants to know why.
The youth says he was only trying to signal a friend. Hipilito lets him go and says, "Don't sneak up on Americans, you could get hurt." Badly hurt, echoes another soldier.
On our return to the base, Sergeant Thomas says more investigation will be done on Zariff.
While the company has been out on the raid, a group of soldiers on a short drive from the base to deliver uniforms to local Afghan police has been attacked. An anti-tank mine was detonated less than a metre from their humvee, knocking two soldiers and an interpreter unconscious. Another 30cm to the right and they would all have been killed. The 501st has suffered only seven casualties, none of them deaths, in the 10 months they have been in Afghanistan.
Despite the lack of success in the raid to find Zariff, Captain Condrey believes such missions are a sign "we are winning".
"We may not always catch the guys but the guys are no longer able to come and go," he says.
"We are denying their ability to move around freely. If we look at it that way then we are definitely winning."
But one of the terps has a different perspective on the battle.
"All the Taliban and al-Qa'ida are still around. Most of them are in Pakistan," he said.
"If the Americans go, they will be back tomorrow. Maybe in 10 years with the Americans it will be all right."