Sam Kiley

‘We’ve been spreading the Marmite too thin’

Our forces in Helmand have been trying to do too much with too few troops, and without their basic purpose being stated, says Sam Kiley. Now, at last, the army has ordered a rethink

Lance corporal Jay Bateman and Jeff Doherty slumped to the ground. They were killed instantly in the first swarm of bullets from an enemy ambush. Their comrades dragged their bodies along irrigation ditches and across burning fields under intense fire. Rocket-propelled grenades skidded and cartwheeled through the poppy stubble, exploded and showered them in dirt and shrapnel.

The only helicopter available to evacuate the bodies was called away to pick up a another soldier wounded in a battle up the Musa Qala wadi. So the dead were pushed clear of the fighting in wheelbarrows; until a sniper team commandeered a saloon car to carry them back to Forward Operating Base Gibraltar. The rest of the company ran alongside, passing farmers and men sitting in the shade of shops selling dust-covered biscuits and wrinkling tomatoes — all giving the paratroopers the ‘stink eye’.

Bateman and Doherty had been caught by the Taleban in a textbook ambush as C Company of 2 Para patrolled back to FOB Gibraltar after a shura and a ‘key leader engagement’ with prominent locals. Taleban ‘dickers’ (spies) had tracked their every movement and laid the trap.

Gibraltar was about five miles south of the 2 Para battle group headquarters in Sangin, one of a daisy-chain of British forts along the Helmand river valley. Three more paratroopers would die there in the summer of 2008, less than a mile from its ramparts. The Royal Marines who took over, and later the Rifles, would lose more men over the next year.

Finally, in the summer, Gibraltar was closed. The British had killed plenty of Taleban but they had been unable, because there weren’t enough of them, to take and hold any new ground. They had, however, brought violence and death to the Afghans they were trying to win over and ‘protect’ from the Taleban.

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