Regards, Ivan
Posted on 04/23/2003 5:37:55 PM PDT by MadIvan
SAS troops and British army intelligence officers patrolling the streets of Baghdad are leading the effort to track down wanted members of Saddam’s regime and their secret arms stashes.
In recent days, SAS soldiers have been spotted in the Iraqi capital, travelling around the city in their specially adapted Land Rovers or in joint foot patrols with US forces.
Army intelligence officers, some of whom are fluent Arabic speakers, also take part in the patrols, gleaning as much information as possible from the Arab street.
Behind the scenes, they are at the forefront of efforts to locate top leaders of the former Iraqi regime - including Saddam Hussein himself.
The Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, confirmed yesterday that it was his "best judgement" that Saddam was still inside Iraq.
"As each day goes by, as we continue to search those places he may be hiding," he told reporters on a visit to southern Iraq, "we have to keep an open mind, but is it still my best judgment."
Outside the capital, British special forces are continuing to play a key role, visiting suspected chemical or biological weapons sites.
The troops have won high praise from regular US forces, who say they are less arrogant than their American counterparts.
"It’s amazing to just watch them operate, the way they blend in the street, the way they look so relaxed but are so alert to everything around them," Staff Sgt Gannon, of the US Army’s 64th Armoured Regiment told a reporter from the New York Post.
Sgt Michael Anslinger, of a US reconnaissance platoon, said he was most impressed by the modesty of the SAS men: "They’re not like our special forces guys - they don’t have that arrogant attitude."
Only a sharp-sighted observer could have picked out the four SAS members of a US patrol moving through the city’s Mansour district yesterday.
Although they were wearing American fatigues to keep a low profile, they were the only soldiers without helmets or body armour.
When the platoon stopped to talk to some friendly locals, it was one of the SAS team who communicated - in Arabic - while he warned the rest of the unit not to stare too longingly at the women smiling at them from upstairs windows.
Australian SAS forces, who model themselves on the British SAS, have also played a key role in tracking down hidden weapons caches.
Last week Australian special forces found more than 50 Soviet-made fighter jets, a chemical-proof bunker and a vast store of anti-aircraft guns and munitions at an Iraqi base west of Baghdad.
The coalition had bombed the base early in the war but the extent of the weapons cache was not revealed until Australian SAS troops and commandos searched the base.
Special forces played a central role in the victory in Iraq, though the details of their operations have barely begun to emerge. In western Iraq allied special forces captured at least three desert airfields and knocked out command and control sites.
US commandos infiltrated Baghdad, working with the CIA and Iraqi spies, while their British counterparts directed air strikes from inside Basra.
On the first day of the war, US navy SEALs seized two oil terminals in the Persian Gulf, ending any threat that Iraq could flood the gulf with oil in an act of environmental sabotage.
In northern Iraq, US Green Berets co-ordinated the defeat of an alleged Islamic terrorist group.
In north-western Iraq, SAS patrols recently captured Saddam Hussein’s half-brother as he tried to flee to Syria.
The six-strong SAS team operating around Mosul found the former Iraqi minister 15 miles from the Syrian border, and arrested him at a coalition checkpoint.
In the months preceding the military campaign, British special forces units had been fighting what amounted to a hidden war.
Then, in the opening hours of Operation Iraqi Freedom on 20March, the SAS worked in close US and Australian counterparts to capture key air bases in western Iraq.
For the next three week SAS patrols pushed westwards, ambushing patrols of Iraqi commandos and raiding suspected Scud missile launch sites in short, violent and very one-sided encounters with Iraqi troops. They inflicted hundreds of casualties for minimal British losses.
During the war a specially formed squadron of RAF Harrier jump jets based in Jordan provided close air support for the SAS patrols deep inside Iraq.
One SAS team near Mosul, however, had a fortunate escape when their covert helicopter "insertion" on 1 April was ambushed by Iraqi troops and a treasure trove of weapons and equipment was lost.
The raid in northern Iraq also highlighted the work of another SAS detachment working with Kurdish rebels to tie down Saddam Hussein’s troops, in much the same way US and British special forces troops helped the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in 2001 by calling down precision air strikes on enemy front-line positions.
British officers say the SAS and special covert teams from the UK’s Intelligence Corps have been given the high-profile task of rapidly responding to leads on any weapons of mass destruction - because any information must be followed up quickly before the trail goes cold. "In this game you have to move fast to exploit any information so the suspects don’t get away or looters don’t get to weapons sites before you", said one officer.
Military sources have described the work of British special forces in the war to date as "amazing". But it may be years before the full story is written.
Regards, Ivan
Question: do the British have one "special forces" the SAS? Or, are there various branches?
It seems like we have very many different groups from CIA, Green Berets, Delta, Rangers, Navy Seals, and whole lot of flavors of SOG forces. I wonder if they get along like CIA, FBI, DEA, ATF and the rest of the alphabet soup?
I like the one group versus the many individual groups, because communication and coordination works a lot better with one group than it does with competing groups.
In my rather limited contact with SAS back in the 1980's when they came to my post and trained with my outfit, it seems that they told me that SAS is divded up into specific areas of concentration. Some of their guys concentrate on airborne and HALO/HAHO ops. Some are the water guys who are more like the SEALs. Some specialize in desert or mountain ops while others are jungle specific.
I also think their PARAs and some elements of the Royal Marines qualify as SpecOPS personnel. THEN there are the Ghurka troops who are in a special category; similar to the French Foreign Legion but far more fearsome. I know one thing...those guys can drink like there is NO tomorrow! A light social drinker for them is a full blown alcoholic for our guys.
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