A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (7 page)

His company, 'D' Coy, was never supposed to be in a real fight. When they began to deploy in April 2006 they were told to expect nothing more arduous than guard duty at Camp Bastion. Within weeks, however, the humdrum mission they had prepared for had turned into the regiment's fiercest action since Borneo in 1965. Military control of Helmand passed from the Americans to the British with the formal launch of Herrick 4 on 1 May. Two weeks later came the fateful decision to occupy the district centres in the north. It was clear to everyone that the 650-strong battle group wasn't nearly large enough to hold down an area that was roughly the size of Wales. The Paras could do it for a while, no doubt, but what would happen when they needed to be relieved? It was an open secret at Bastion that a request for additional troops had been made, but these had yet to arrive, and they would need time to acclimatize and prepare when they did. In the meantime the only reinforcements available were the battle group's supporting units, such as the Gurkhas.

Sure enough, on 2 June a platoon commanded by Lieutenant Paul Hollingshead, a twenty-four-year-old from Merseyside, was ordered forward to help relieve the Para garrison at Now Zad. Two days later, Hollingshead's men took part in Herrick 4's first 'deliberate op', Operation Mutay, an assault on a Taliban arms cache in the woods just to the east of the town. The Paras who dropped on to the target by Chinook met far fiercer resistance than expected. No arms cache was found, no senior enemy commander was captured, and the entire force was obliged to fight all the way back to the safety of the garrison compound. The British had severely underestimated the guerrilla skills, strength and determination of their enemy, and it was a miracle that none of them was killed.

Now Zad lay on a dusty plain between two mountain ranges at the southern end of the Hindu Kush. Its heart was the bazaar, a single tarmac road lined with metal-shuttered shops off which countless narrow alleyways led into a maze of low mud-brick houses and the occasional high-walled compound. The town was the economic centre for a sprawling district of some 150 villages, although it was often hard in rural Afghanistan to know quite how many people called the place home. In 2002, the year of the last UN survey, there were an estimated 50,000 people in the district, with perhaps 7,000 in Now Zad itself, although even the UN treated these figures with caution. A traditionally itinerant people had been forced to move about even more than usual by years of war.

The community was solidly Pashtun and characteristically close-knit. Civic power was wielded, as was customary, by a
shura
, a council of elders drawn from the tribes that dominated the district: the Alokozais, Barakzais, Noorzais, Alizais and Sahagzais. In the weeks to come, the Gurkhas were to learn a great deal about the complex local politics of this place. Here as elsewhere, the traditional power structures were being challenged by the mullahs of the Taliban. The district had been one of their regime's noted strongholds when it was in power in the 1990s, and now they were back. Before the summer was out, the Gurkhas would have an intimate knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of the mullahs, too – their fighting capabilities, their ideological convictions, the loyalties of their troops.

Now Zad means 'New Born' in Persian – a name worthy of the pioneers of the American Wild West, although its inhabitants had little cause for such optimism now. The community had been neglected for years by central government. There was one secondary school, with nineteen untrained teachers and 1,200 pupils, all of them male. There was one hospital, with only twelve beds, and one private health clinic. Malaria and typhoid were common, and the hospital was always short of medicine.

Worst of all was that, from 2000, Helmand had been devastated by drought, the effects of which were compounded by the disrepair of the province's fifty-year-old irrigation system. Around Now Zad, it was estimated, the area of cultivable land had shrunk from over 200,000 acres to 12,000 in only three years. Some 80 per cent of the district's residents were farmers, which naturally intensified the drought's socio-economic impact. Water shortage was the nub of Helmand's troubles, and ultimately the Taliban's best recruiting sergeant. It created strife between rival tribes as they competed for diminishing resources. It exacerbated poverty, and resentment against the politicians in Kabul who did nothing to alleviate it. And it motivated farmers to maximize profits on farms of diminishing size and faltering efficiency by growing valuable poppies instead of the wheat, maize, okra, onions, turnips, pomegranates, almonds, apples, apricots and tomatoes for which the region was once famous.

In 2006, according to the UN, Afghanistan produced 92 per cent of the world's opium; Helmand, where poppy production rose by 169 per cent between 2005 and 2006, was responsible for almost half of it. About 380,000 Helmandis, a third of the province's population, are now dependent on poppies for a living. The province is on the way to becoming the world's biggest drugs supplier, cultivating more drugs than entire countries such as Burma, Morocco and even Colombia. Now Zad was a major cog in the new narco-economy, with all the crime, corruption and human misery that the drug trade brought in its wake.

The British were garrisoned in the town's police headquarters at the southern end of the main bazaar – a square, mud-walled compound, 100 by 120 metres. An office building stood at its centre, with a mosque, a prison and some limited accommodation space ranged around it. There were storerooms and offices in each of the corners whose roofs, now heavily fortified, doubled as sangars. There was a fifth sangar above the main entrance gate to the east, and a sixth in the centre of the wall to the west. The Operations Room was set up in the central office building. During contacts the roof of this building, sandbagged and shaded by camouflage netting, served as a tactical command post, and became known as the Control Tower.

As a static defence position the compound had two distinct disadvantages. The first was that it was part of a town. The civilian buildings surrounding it, even the ones across the street from the compound walls, offered any number of fire points for determined attackers. The second was a 150-metre hill, just 700 metres to the south-west, which overlooked the compound and was obviously a crucial piece of ground. The Gurkha platoon, twenty-seven strong, manned the corner sangars and the Control Tower, with just enough left over to form a small reserve – the Quick Reaction Force, or QRF – to plug any gaps in an emergency. But there weren't enough of them to occupy the hill as well; the Gurkhas had no choice but to let the local ANP, the Afghan National Police, do that. The hill was topped by and named after an old shrine, although now, in order not to offend local sensibilities, it was renamed 'ANP Hill'.

Since Operation Mutay a month earlier, a peculiar calm had returned to the town. By day the bazaar and the weekly market remained busy with people and traffic, but it was different at night, when with increasing frequency shots were fired at the compound. There were short bursts of rifle and machine-gun fire, occasional RPGs, well-aimed sniper rounds. It was just enough to keep the garrison on edge – although that was not the purpose of the attacks. 'With hindsight, it's obvious that they were testing us out,' said Rex. 'They were examining our arcs of fire, our fire-times, our close air support response times. It was quite professionally done.'

The Gurkhas' assailants were seldom seen, even through night vision goggles, while in the daytime they were free to blend in with the populace. In such circumstances, and especially after the close call of Operation Mutay, patrolling into the town in any regular way was out of the question for a garrison so small. 'The Gurkhas are very good at public interface,' Rex told me ruefully. 'They are naturally friendly, and being non-Europeans they are often more easily accepted than we are. They understand the tribal nature of Pashtun society because they come from a tribal society themselves. Many of them speak Urdu, which is widely understood in southern Afghanistan. But in the event, all we got to interface with was bullets.'

Confined to barracks, the platoon spent long hot days manning sangars once again, staring out at a town that seemed studiously to ignore their presence. When not on sentry duty they mostly slept – something that was hard to do now at night. Sometimes they played chess or poker in the shade, or filmed themselves on their digital cameras. A goat was brought in and slaughtered for the curry pot with a kukri, the famous long curved knife that all Gurkhas carry. According to tradition, the goat's head must be severed with a single chop of the blade; anything more is considered inauspicious. There were mixed groans and laughter when the rifleman nominated for the task muffed it.

Dan Rex arrived at the head of a relief platoon for Hollingshead's tired men on 2 July, by which time the mood in the town was deteriorating fast. Shops had begun to close. Entire families were observed driving out of town, packed into battered Toyotas with all their household possessions on the roof. The trickle of departures soon became a flood. It wasn't difficult to read the meaning of the exodus, and it was confirmed by anyone whom the Gurkhas asked: the Taliban, ever-present in the outlying districts of the town, had now infiltrated the centre and were taking control.

'The defining moment was when the Taliban took over the town bakery,' said Rex. 'That was when we knew for sure that we had lost control. Until then the ANP in our compound had bought their bread from there, but that was impossible now. It was a shrewd move psychologically.' Just as ominous was the sabotage of a nearby water-pumping station. The sudden, surprising silencing of the decrepit generators driving the pumps was, the Gurkhas realized, the point of the attack: it allowed the enemy to listen for British helicopters approaching from the south.

The night-time attacks subtly increased in tempo. Watchmen on ANP Hill reported streams of vehicles, sometimes as many as twenty at a time, inching towards the town from both the north and the south-east. Rex went up the hill to see for himself more than once. 'There were times when it was like the M25 down there,' he recalled. 'We knew it was the enemy because no innocent farmer would be moving about like that at night, and most ordinary citizens had already left. The vehicles were all around us, and we were pretty sure that they were preparing an attack, but we couldn't be sure, so we couldn't respond under the Rules of Engagement.'

Finally, one morning in the first week of July, the central bazaar failed to open at all. The normally bustling stretch of tarmac was deserted. Now Zad had become a ghost town.

On 11 July, in a last bid to prevent the inevitable, Rex invited the town's elders to a
shura
. It was far from certain that the elders would agree to come, but in the end about twenty-five of them did so. A spectacular collection of mostly grey-bearded old men shuffled through the compound gates and into the main building's dedicated guest room – a feature of every public building in Afghanistan. They sat on cushions in a rough circle in the usual way, and were served the standard
shura
fare of nuts, dried mulberries and tea. The stratagem was not without risk. Rex had no idea who these people really were or where their true loyalties lay. At a similar
shura
in Kandahar province earlier in the year a Canadian officer had been attacked and seriously injured by the son of an elder who had smuggled in a machete under his clothes. However, it would not do to address the elders while armed or wearing body armour. Rex detailed a couple of his men to keep a close eye on proceedings from the rear, with others posted outside the window with their weapons made ready, and trusted to luck.

The text of his address was no different from the one British officers were disseminating all over Helmand that summer. 'I wanted to look them in the eye. I told them that we had no desire to harm them or their town, but that if we were attacked we would respond with force. I explained that we were there at the invitation of their government – that we were there to provide security, to help. I said that development money was available. I asked them what they wanted.'

The most remarkable feature of the meeting was what was not discussed: the Taliban. 'It was the real elephant in the room. They just refused to talk about it. I don't think the T-word was mentioned even once.'

Most of those attending remained silent throughout the hour-long meeting. Some of them just stared at the foreigner in their midst with an intensity bordering on hostility – 'eyeballing', Rex later called it. He had the strong impression that they were sizing him up. The ANP later confirmed that two of the so-called elders were actually Taliban commanders, for whom the
shura
was an unmissable opportunity to inspect the Gurkhas' defences from the inside.

That they were able to do so without the genuine elders objecting said a great deal about their power and influence in the town. The elders were either intimidated by or colluding with the Taliban, but by this point it made little difference. As a peacemaking exercise, the
shura
was almost pointless. Rex knew he was only going through the motions, and that matters had probably already gone too far for a showdown to be avoided. 'About the only thing of any substance that came out of it was a request that the NDS wear uniform when on duty in the town,' Rex said.

This seemed fair enough. The plainclothes men of the National Directorate of Security, a handful of whom had been assigned to the Now Zad mission, were tough, savvy operators who answered to the Minister of Interior in Kabul. Rex took the request as an encouraging sign that at least some of the elders recognized the need for law and order, and were prepared to recognize Kabul's authority. Uniformed men would naturally be more easily identifiable to the suspicious townspeople, and so were more likely to be trusted. An armed NDS patrol was already scheduled for that night. This time, at Rex's insistence, they left the compound in regulation blue.

The request, however, was almost certainly a trick. It was true that uniforms made the NDS men recognizable to the townspeople, but they also marked them out for the Taliban. The six-man patrol headed north up the main bazaar and had covered no more than 150 metres when they were attacked. Whether it was an ambush, or whether they had simply bumped into a Taliban unit infiltrating the town from the other direction, it was impossible to say. Caught in a hail of machine-gun and small-arms fire, one of the NDS men was immediately wounded. The Gurkhas in the sangar overlooking the bazaar stood to, and observed through their night vision goggles as the NDS men rushed back towards them, dragging their injured comrade between them. 'The weight of fire that was going down, it was completely amazing that they made it,' recalled Lieutenant Angus Mathers, Rex's second-in-command. This was the trigger for an attack on the compound that lasted all night. It had evidently been many days in the preparation, and it signalled a sharp change in the Taliban's tactics. It was 12 July, and the battle for Now Zad district centre had begun.