Stephen Grey - Operation Snakebite

But for others, those far from the front line, the battle of Musa Qala was long over.

In Kabul, the Afghan Defence Ministry spokesman General Mohammad Zahir Azimi announced Musa Qala was now in the hands of NATO and Afghan forces, who were ‘strengthening their positions and continuing clean-up operations’. President Hamid Karzai said Musa Qala had been entered following reports of brutality there by the Taliban, Al Qaeda and foreign fighters. ‘The successful attack was aided by some local Taliban leaders switching allegiance to the government,’ Karzai said. A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, said militant fighters had left Musa Qala because of a strategic decision to avoid Taliban and civilian casualties.

In Musa Qala no one was quite ready to celebrate, even though the Afghan army had wrapped flowers round their rifle barrels.

Just before nightfall, Breach was told by Jake to go out and secure the perimeter by holing up in a compound on the edge.

‘What if we get attacked,’ he asked. ‘Is there a QRF [Quick Reaction Force]?’

‘No,’ said Jake. ‘We’re going to sleep.’

An American interrupted.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Just get on the net… We’ll reduce the threat.’

The men from Task Force 32 now had a new name: ‘The Reducers’.

It seemed colder than the desert had been that first night in Musa Qala. In the morning there was frost on our bivvy bags. I woke up at one point in the darkness, thinking I could hear gunfire. But it was just Nick Cornish, the Sunday Times photographer, snoring. I drifted back off to the comforting drone of the Spectre gunship overhead.

‘I can’t wake up the rats,’ Benson, the sergeant-major, was shouting at first light.

The commander of the kandak , Colonel Rahimi, had the only armoured vehicle of his unit, a Humvee. He’d installed a bed in it. He wanted to stay there in the warm.

The advance was supposed to start again at 06.30, but no one shifted for another hour. I was with Nuri, the interpreter, who had a radio scanner tuned to the Taliban’s frequencies. When we got going, the radio announced: ‘The infidel are moving.’

We pushed round the back of the market and through a maze of alleyways. It was quiet again but just as tense. There was a herd of cats that crawled round our ankles. More locks were blown off. A message said somewhere ahead a helicopter had been fired on. The UAVs checked the courtyards in front, but no one saw anything. Taliban radio declared: ‘It’s your decision if you want to stay.’

A twenty-year-old man, Bagi, was hanging around with the Afghan soldiers and saying that he had stayed behind to mind the shop. He claimed the Taliban always complained about his beardless face and wanted money from his family. The whole population had left the town about six days before. ‘All the Taliban have gone, and all the people have gone north to Baghran. They’ll be back soon with their sheep and goats.

We went down an alleyway, and Nick Mantell spotted some ANA smoking pot. ‘This is a big operation, lads. Hashish no good. Hashish no good!’ he told them.

Someone said the ANA had found an old man who said he had already seen people ‘with uniforms like yours’ moving through a couple of days before. ‘Fucking SF!’ said Jake, referring to special forces. (Commanders would always later deny there was anyone in the town before us.)

Then we were inching up the final stretch of the main road leading to the district centre, the engineers in the lead with some kind of indestructible truck. But Captain Dan, from the special forces, was worrying again. ‘None of these buildings has been searched. This is not clever,’ he said, pointing out that everyone was walking past shops that could contain a massive bomb.

At 09.30 we came out to the central crossroads. To the right was a mound of rubble. Welcome to the Musa Qala district centre!

Jake and B Company continued to push on. Their job was to secure the northern edge of the town. A ring of security would then be in place so the generals could arrive to celebrate a victory.

A single mortar round that whistled over our heads was the Taliban’s last gasp. Well trained by now, I dived into a ditch. It was full of sewage, and I cut my arm too. Afghan soldiers, who had not flinched, burst out laughing.

I stayed behind in the centre to wait for the flag to be raised. We were all tired now. It was all such an anti-climax. Everyone had wanted one last battle – a few hardened Taliban foreign fighters who could have made a last stand and made all the stress and fears feel like something that would have been worth it , made it feel like a prize that deserved to be captured.

Jake was glad he wasn’t there for the media event. It fell to Matt Adams and C Company to sort things out for the cameras. Spare Afghan flags were on hand in case the ANA forgot theirs. ‘Who has got the Afghan flag?’ someone asked. The British hid their WMIKs and Vectors, but Adams also had to get the American Humvees moved away. He found it all very embarrassing, and the Americans at first were unresponsive. They didn’t want to collapse their perimeter security. Adams told them there were forces now deployed in depth, and they reluctantly complied. It became something of a farce, though, with gun trucks hidden down alleyways.

Then a convoy of Afghan vehicles came sweeping up the main street and the ever-charismatic Brigadier Mohaydin strode out to take charge. Two soldiers took the flag up a tottering bamboo scaffolding on the central monument, and everyone held their breath as they balanced themselves precariously. Mohaydin made a brief speech and then picked up a telephone and phoned President Karzai to tell him the job was done. ‘Three days ago all the terrorists were standing here,’ he told me. ‘I am sure we have defeated the Taliban in Musa Qala now. They haven’t got the authority to come back and fight us.’

The dramatic scene of waving the flag was filmed and broadcast round the world by the Ministry of Defence’s Combat Camera Team. They had been with Adams for the last few days but, soldiers claimed, had been under instructions to send back only pictures of Afghans in the operation.

It was at the flag raising that I first met Brigadier Mackay. He did his formal interviews, and then we wandered down the street and sat in a porchway and he told me what this had all been for. ‘We could have come here any time and trashed the place,’ he said, but then the follow-up – the stabilization and reconstruction – would have been hard. The whole operation to take Musa Qala had been calibrated to minimize the use of ‘kinetic force’.

Though the destroyed district centre buildings lay around us, he said it was the Taliban, not the coalition, which had knocked those down.

Musa Qala had been a ‘running sore’, a base for the Taliban that affected everything in Helmand. When 52 Brigade took over, they had come up with a plan for putting pressure on the Taliban using everything from special force operations to conventional disruption to information operations. Then he had put Chris Bell’s Warriors into the equation. ‘I took a bet where this would lead us,’ he said. The Taliban had reacted to that by putting ‘enormous pressure’ elsewhere – for example with major attacks down in Sangin. ‘We realized what the Taliban were trying to do was draw us back down from Musa Qala so they carry on holding this place. We decided instead that we should increase the pressure on Musa Qala.’ That was when he had deployed Tony Phillips’ BRF. The Afghan government had also hoped that a tribal alliance could come together and overthrow the Taliban peacefully, but that didn’t happen.