Extracts from the Times newspaper….
September 11 2000 HOSTAGE RESCUE
“SAS emerged from swamp to launch deadly attack
BY MICHAEL EVANS, DEFENCE EDITOR
Rescue drama: Operation Barras
Some of Britain’s elite soldiers suffered casualties in the process and the repercussions of the decision by The Royal Irish Regiment patrol on August 24 to veer off the main highway into the jungle territory of the renegade West Side Boys will have an impact not just on the careers of the officers involved but also on the Government’s strategy in Sierra Leone.
The drama began at 6.16am, after two weeks of intensive planning and training. A total of 272 Service personnel were involved, including 100 men of D Squadron 22 SAS, a unit from the Royal Marines’ Special Boat Service and 110 soldiers from the 1st Battalion The Parachute Regiment.
Surprise was essential. The rescuers feared that the sound of helicopters could well prompt the rebels to kill their captives and landing at first light ensured that the West Side Boys were at their least alert.
The rescue force also faced the daunting prospect of moving swiftly across 300 yards of flat but hostile jungle and mangrove swamp from the helicopter landing sites to their eventual objectives. And the West Side Boys were no pushover.
The size of the rescue force was an indication of the resistance that was expected from the well-armed West Side Boys, but those involved in the planning underestimated the firepower that was to greet the paratroopers and SAS.
Operation Barras was a two-pronged attack, with a company from 1 Para abseiling from Chinook helicopters on to a landing site close to the West Side Boys’ jungle hideout. Their task was to take the village of Magbeni, one of two locations controlled by the renegade militia, which are divided by Rockel Creek. On the other side, 100 yards from the water, was the village of Gberi Bana, where the six soldiers from The Royal Irish Regiment were being held hostage.
As the Paras burst into Magbeni firing their SA80 rifles and machineguns, on the other side of the creek D Squadron SAS, which had spent the previous two weeks watching the militia camp from camouflaged observation points, took the West Side Boys by surprise with a salvo of shots and stun grenades.
The hostage-takers in Gberi Bana were attacked from both north and south for, as the SAS arrived from the north, armed frogmen of the SBS crossed the creek underwater and opened fire as they emerged in the semi-darkness.
Although the six British hostages were grabbed unharmed from their captors, military sources said it took about two hours from the launch of the rescue operation to when the men from The Royal Irish Regiment landed safely on board the Royal Fleet Auxiliary vessel, Sir Percivale, moored off Freetown.
Two Lynx helicopters performed the “hostage extraction” task, once the captives had been freed by the SAS.
The British troops were confronted by a different sort of enemy from that they had been trained to fight. The West Side Boys included young women who opened fire along with their male colleagues. The fighting continued for another two or three hours because one of the other tasks of Operation Barras was to recover the three Land Rovers, one of them armed with a 50mm Browning heavy machinegun, which had been taken by the West Side Boys when they seized the 11 British soldiers.
The ferocity of the gunfight between the British troops and the West Side Boys became clear when the final casualty toll was released.
By the end of the fighting, according to Ministry of Defence sources in London, at least 25 West Side Boys lay dead, among them three women. Eighteen more, including another three women and the Boys’ 25-year-old leader, the self-styled “Brigadier” Foday Kally, had been taken prisoner and handed over to a company of Jordanian troops, who had earlier secured the road into Magbeni village. The prisoners were later handed over to the Sierra Leone police.
On the British side, one soldier died, another was seriously injured, although his life is not in danger, and 11 more were wounded.
Once it was decided that the hostage crisis would be solved only by force, the greatest challenge faced by the Ministry of Defence was to make the necessary preparations without giving the game away.
Journalists were called in to the MoD ten days ago and were told that certain units were being put on standby for Sierra Leone but were asked not to divulge this information nor to speculate on a possible rescue operation by special forces.
The plan worked. While 145 soldiers from 1 Para, already experienced Sierra Leonean hands from their previous deployment to the West African state in May, had their notice to move reduced, newspapers and broadcasters continued to focus their reports on the negotiations between Lieutenant-Colonel Simon Fordham, the commanding officer of The Royal Irish Regiment, and “Brigadier” Kally. Five of the soldiers were released in exchange for a satellite phone.
Handing over the phone was a vital element of the planned rescue mission. Not only did it help to pinpoint the whereabouts of the kidnappers, using sophisticated interception equipment, but it also enabled the British military to contact the hostages before the rescue was mounted to give them a coded message that an operation was about to be launched. Apart from the Paras, the MoD also sent a message “in a sealed envelope” to the captain of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary vessel Argus which had left British waters bound for an exercise off Turkey.
The captain was ordered to head straight for Sierra Leone. Two Lynx helicopters were also taken by a C130 Hercules transport aircraft to Dakar in Senegal and then on to Lungi, the Sierra Leonean airport near Freetown. The two Lynxes and the three RAF Chinooks already in the country were then deployed to the small airfield at Hastings, about 30 miles from Freetown.”
Sounds like something out of a Tom Clancy novel to me. I would love to know more details of the operation – just picture it, SBS frogmen rising out of the water firing their MP5s while SAS troopers hurl their stun grenades from the bushes where they have been covertly watching the camp for the past weeks before emerging from the jungle while from above over hundred paratroopers abseil down from the hovering chinooks.
I fear the true story of the operation won’t come out for many years as these stories never do but i’m sure it would make intresting reading. Anyone else got any details.?.?.?
Regs
Brit
(P.S I don’t mean to glorify fighting here as im sure some of you will lambast me for doing but you gotta remember who the bad guys were here)
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September 11, 2000 at 4:02 pm