KABUL, Afghanistan — Late last Friday night, special forces troops from the Nato-led coalition launched an operation to capture a Taliban leader in an inaccessible valley southwest of Kabul.
A few hours later 38 troops 30 of them Americans lay dead in a transport helicopter destroyed in the worst single incident suffered by foreign forces in 10 years of war in Afghanistan.
Little, if any, information was available soon after the crash, mainly because “a cone of silence had been ordered from the top,” one senior military official said.- Reuters has been able to reconstruct a clearer picture of the circumstances of the crash after interviews with officials from the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan and the US military. Unless identified, all spoke on condition of anonymity because investigations are still being carried out.
Coalition officials have effectively ruled out that the helicopter was brought down by anything more sophisticated than an RPG launcher. That dispels fears the Taliban had suddenly acquired more sophisticated weapons such as the Stinger missiles used to such devastating effect by Mujahedin fighters against Soviet aircraft during the occupation of the 1980s.
ISAF says insurgents had been using RPGs during the initial engagement and that the helicopter had been fired on, but still refers to the incident as a crash.
“While it has not been determined if enemy fire was the sole reason for the helicopter crash, it did take fire from several insurgent locations on its approach,” ISAF said.
While it is not unusual for rocket-propelled grenades normally an anti-tank weapon to hit helicopters, it is extremely rare for them to actually bring one down.
RPGs have an effective range of about 300m, although officials in Kabul say the shot that downed the Chinook would have to have been fired well within 100m of its target.- “The shot could have come from a low angle, or even from above the helicopter,” one military official said.
- What is not known for sure now is whether the helicopter caught fire or exploded, or whether it fell from any considerable height. Officials acknowledge that the destruction was devastating, something supported by the fact it took about four days to gather all of the wreckage and remains.
- “Whether it was a fire or if it exploded, it was catastrophic. It’s a bloody big target and a slow moving target.” another military official said.
As soon as the helicopter crashed, the SOC ground troops rushed to the secure the scene. It now appears Mohibullah and his remaining fighters then escaped.- Mohibullah and the unidentified man who fired the shot at the helicopter attempted to flee the country, ISAF said, most likely to Pakistan, but were tracked to a wooded area in a nearby district. Both were killed by an air strike on Tuesday, ISAF said.
Questions have been asked in the United States why the second unit which consisted of 25 members of the Navy’s Seal Team 6 was travelling in a US Army CH-47 instead of a more sophisticated MH-47 more commonly used by Special Forces.
Part of that explanation might lie in the fact it was not the primary unit used in the raid and was only on standby.
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