Combat Camera (11 page)

“It’s like a concrete city,” he moaned. “I’m sick of it.”

He made concrete sound like a bad thing, but to me it meant security, electricity and decent showers. Outside the base’s accommodation block we were met by the admin sergeant, who led me to my own individual room: it had proper walls, a high ceiling with a fan and a television set. Next to the single bed was a tall window with a view across the rooftops of Kabul. It was dark now, and the lights of the city stretched out all the way to the foot of the mountains.

I met up with Russ and Ali a short time later in the base’s coffee shop. They were sitting at the bar, chatting to a colour sergeant who looked like a leathery, middle-aged version of Robbie Williams. He was based down the road at Camp Julian, training ANA officers.

“It’s not the ANA doing it,” he said. “It’s Taliban that have infiltrated.”

He was referring to the recent surge in green-on-blue attacks. To my mind, he was stating the bleeding obvious, but I wasn’t
about to say that to his face.
*
I knew there were Special Forces based at Julian – we’d been told we couldn’t film there for that very reason – and I knew that some of them were involved in ANA training. With no insignia on his uniform, it was clear he wasn’t your average soldier.

“The ANA commander on our base can usually spot any dodgy recruits,” he said, “but it’s getting harder. More and more recruits are coming through. I’ve got a bunch of ex-Mujahidin starting on Saturday.”

“They must be getting on a bit,” I said.

“Most of them are over fifty, but they’re pretty good,” he said. “And they’re less likely to explode.”

Suicide bombers tended to be young men, if not children. Grizzled war veterans over the age of fifty might snap and grab a machine gun and kill everybody in the room, but they were less inclined to go down the more painstaking route of martyrdom. The ex-Mujahidin were old-school warriors: if they had a grievance with you, they would fight you, but generally try to stay alive at the same time.

As it happened, Mujahidin Victory Day was due to be marked the following week. It commemorated the Mujahidin’s overthrow of the communist government in 1992, three years after the withdrawal of Soviet troops. As a public holiday, occasioning various parades and civic events, it was naturally a focal point for the insurgents,
who always tried to mark the day with some sort of atrocity. A number of possible attacks had already been identified, and the threat level had risen accordingly.

We were told as much the following morning, during the brief for our journey to Camp Alamo. One of the civilian repairmen was going there to fix some running machines in the gym. It was still a lame story, nothing had changed, and I had no idea where it was going. I wasn’t miserable, though. The sun was shining, and the temperature was a balmy 22°C. Breakfast had been fantastic – I’d poured a ridiculous amount of golden syrup on my pancakes and wallowed in the sugary taste of Western civilization. Life was good.

Russ and Ali squeezed into the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser with the repairman, who was understandably bemused as to why his assignment merited the attention of a Combat Camera Team. I sat up front with the driver and we all set off for Alamo, hitting the chaotic streets of Kabul in bulletproof comfort.

The traffic in the city centre may have been a lawless free-for-all, but it was nothing compared to the mayhem outside Alamo. The scene at the front gate was like something out of
Wacky Races
, with all manner of jeeps, trucks and lorries jockeying for position, everyone trying to get in and out of the base at the same time. The front gate itself, right on the Jalalabad Road, consisted of a pathetic wooden barrier, held up by a rather worried-looking Afghan soldier. Nobody wanted to sit in traffic outside any military base in Afghanistan, but this road in particular was notorious. All of the ISAF bases along a five-mile stretch out of the city centre bore the brunt of a gruelling Taliban schedule, the insurgents targeting the front gates with varying degrees of success. Camp Phoenix, a little farther down the road, had been on the receiving end of the latest attack just two weeks earlier. Their hefty fortifications put Alamo
to shame, and the sentries, American soldiers from
I
st Squadron 134th Cavalry Regiment, had been able to stand their ground. Two suicide bombers had charged the front gate and blown themselves up, while insurgents on the road had peppered the sentry posts with machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades. Two Americans were injured, but not seriously. Some damage was caused to the gate, but it was soon repaired.

With no suicidal insurgents to greet us, we managed to get through the gate at Alamo unharmed. It was a joint base, shared between the Afghans and the US, with the ANA occupying the outer section. We drove past hundreds of ANA soldiers on our way in: some marching down the main drag, others leaning over the concrete balconies of their three-storey barrack blocks, elbows resting on damp laundry, and others just sitting on the grass verges in the sunshine.

The American section of Alamo was like a base within a base. Their entrance was a good deal more secure, with Hesco fortifications and a number of unsmiling guards. We parked outside and walked through a steel turnstile into a gravelled area that led to a series of two-storey concrete offices, behind which sat the gymnasium. It was a wooden, single-storey building which the Americans shared with a small contingent of British troops. We followed the repairman inside, into a room filled with weightlifting equipment. Two men in tight, sweat-soaked T-shirts were working on their bulging arms, but the rest of the kit was unused.

“I hope it gets busier,” said Ali.

“The cardiovascular machines are right through here,” said the repairman.

We followed him into a smaller adjoining room. It was crowded with running machines, but not much else. A tubby middle-aged woman in a hijab and a pink tracksuit was walking at the slowest
speed possible on one of them. She looked like she was about to keel over.

“I need to sort out the belt on this one,” said the repairman. He started to dismantle one of the machines.

“Do you want me to film this, boss?” said Russ.

“You might as well,” I said. “Try to get the Afghan woman in the background.”

“She’s not Afghan, boss.”

“How do you know?”

“She’s got a Jordanian flag on her tracksuit.”

I looked closer at the exhausted woman. She did indeed have a small Jordanian flag on her chest.

“This is ridiculous,” said Ali. “I can’t believe we’re even doing this.”

“Well, we’re here now. Let’s just shoot what we can.”

We loitered in the cardiovascular section for a few more minutes, getting some token shots and footage, then moved back into the weights room.

“Go fairly tight on those guys,” I said to Russ, nodding towards the two iron-pumpers. “We don’t want this place to look half empty.”

“They’re not Brits,” he said. “They’re Americans. I heard them talking.”

“Film them anyway.”

The whole thing was farcical, but you had to give the lemon a bit of a squeeze before you threw it away. Faulkner hadn’t promised the material to any media outlets: he’d only made a vague reference to some fitness magazines. There were always other stories to find – we’d just have to sniff around. I’d already arranged to film with the Afghan Air Force in two days’ time, so our trip wasn’t going to be entirely wasted.

Back at Souter, we did find something else to cover. All the British troops on the base, members of the Joint Support Unit, were holding an Easter service. About seventy of them had formed up on the main concourse running through the middle of the base, while the padre gave a reading and led them through a number of hymns.

Ali took the pictures and I wrote up the press release. She emailed all the material to a number of news agencies back in London, in the hope that some of the shots would make the papers the following day. It was a nice little Easter story, reminding the folks back home that the boys were still out here, bringing a sense of order and decency to this chaotic country (there were no Afghans in any of the shots – which was hardly surprising – but you couldn’t have everything). The British papers were always looking for material to fill out their pages over the bank holiday, so it had a good chance of getting picked up.

One of the British papers – the
Daily Star
– did indeed pick up one of Ali’s pictures. Unfortunately, it ran the image alongside a story about an April Fool’s gag in
Soldier
magazine that had backfired:

Hundreds of troops fell for a hoax to convince them “sexist” ranks such as “guardsman” were to be ditched. Angry soldiers flooded Internet forums when their official magazine said they would be given new gender-neutral titles. The article claimed a guardsman would be called a “protector”, “sentinel” or “escort” and craftsmen would be known as “artificers” or “tradespersons”. It blamed EU equality laws. But the April Fool worked too well and many squaddies fell for it, complaining on blogs and message boards.
*

I knew nothing about this story – it was fluff, really – but it was parked right alongside Ali’s picture of the soldiers at Souter, singing on Easter Sunday. There was a separate caption beneath the image to that effect, but the whole thing fell under the main headline “Armed Farces”.

Ali was disappointed, understandably, but there wasn’t a lot we could do about it. Once our material was distributed, dropped into the laps of tabloid editors and TV producers, it was out of our hands. We just had to hope that they would use it responsibly, and within its original context. If they decided to go “off message” and come up with a banner headline like that, then we were powerless to stop them. There were no issues relating to operational security, so no one was going to die. It was just a messaging failure. We could moan about it for a while, but then we’d just have to accept it and get on with the next job.

* * *

On the Easter Monday we returned to the airport to film the Afghan helicopter pilots. They were members of the Air Interdiction Unit, supporting the ANP on counter-narcotics operations. More than thirty of the pilots and air crew had previously undergone training with the RAF at Boscombe Down. This gave us an angle for the British media, but we were also planning to push the story towards the Afghan media itself, targeting outlets like Kabul’s Tolo TV.

The Air Interdiction Unit was based in a series of newly built offices and hangars to the north of the airport’s main terminal. Known as North KAIA, it was home to the headquarters of the rapidly expanding Afghan Air Force, which at the time consisted of forty-four helicopters (mostly Russian-made Mi-17s) and thirteen fixed-wing aircraft (mostly C-27A Spartan transports, replacing
their old Antonovs) in serviceable condition. The compound was officially opened in May 2009, following a construction process that cost seventy-seven million dollars, making it the single largest wartime construction project in NATO’s history. Thirteen million dollars alone were spent on security upgrades aimed at thwarting bomb attacks on the gates. The opening saw more than two hundred ISAF personnel move into the compound, where they enjoyed a relatively high standard of living, working alongside their Afghan colleagues.

We met a group of US and Afghan pilots on the nearby flight line. They took us out in their Mi-17s to a range in the mountains, giving the door gunners a chance to blast away at some targets. The prospect of a two-hour flight on a creaky old Russian helicopter didn’t exactly fill me with joy, but at least there was plenty of room inside. I stretched out my legs near the back of our shuddering airframe while Russ and Ali hovered around the cockpit and the two door gunners. The Stakhanovite groan of the engines meant interviews were out of the question, so I put on my ear defenders and tried to make myself as comfortable as possible.

Back on the ground I interviewed one of the Afghan pilots. He’d trained at Boscombe Down, and said he liked England and missed the fish and chips. Like a lot of the Afghan pilots, his English was good, and we didn’t need an interpreter. Many of them had completed an intensive language course at the compound’s so-called “Thunder Lab”, a highly regarded English immersion programme that prepared Afghan officers for pilot training. That was a story in itself, and I’d already made arrangements to come back and film there when the next course started.

We made the short trip back to Souter in the evening. The plan was to edit the material the following day, then fly back to Bastion
on Wednesday. We were keen to get out of Kabul before Mujahidin Victory Day on Thursday. The raised threat levels meant a risk of flights being cancelled, and we didn’t want to get stuck.

On Wednesday morning I was killing time with Ali on the main terrace at Souter, chatting and drinking coffee in the sunshine, when the sirens at the airport went off. Our flight wasn’t due to leave until the evening, but it didn’t sound good. I went over to the Ops Room to find out more. The sirens were loud and continuous, rising and falling like something out of a Second World War air raid.

The reports from the airport were sketchy at first, and it took a few hours for a detailed picture to emerge. An Afghan pilot had walked into a meeting at North KAIA carrying two firearms, following an argument moments earlier. He’d shot dead eight US servicemen, most of them air-force officers, and a US contractor. Five Afghan troops were also injured. According to later reports, the gunman also suffered a serious injury himself. He left the room and was later found dead in a different part of the building.

“After the shooting started, we saw a number of Afghan army officers and soldiers running out of the building,” said Colonel Bahader, a spokesman for the Afghan Air Force. He told reporters that one Afghan was shot – in the wrist – but the rest had suffered broken bones and cuts. “Some were even throwing themselves out of the windows to get away.”

In the days that followed, the identity of the gunman was revealed as Ahmad Gul, a forty-eight-year-old pilot with decades of military experience, having been trained during the Soviet Union’s occupation. His brother, Mohammed Hassan Sahibi, gave an interview to Tolo TV, claiming that Gul had been struggling with financial problems.