BIDEN'S WITHDRAWAL LEFT BRITISH SQAD TO DIE

How Biden almost got British SAS squad KILLED: President's disastrous withdrawal left elite soldiers stranded hundreds of miles from safety... until a dramatic desert rescue in the dead of night saved them from Taliban

 

Daily Mail 

August 22, 2021

A team of Special Air Service soldiers who were surrounded by Taliban hordes in Kandahar have been rescued in a dramatic desert operation.

Around 20 elite SAS troops were left stranded in the province hundreds of miles from friendly forces when the militants took over.

As enemy fighters closed in they sent an SOS request to Special Forces bosses back in Britain calling for immediate extraction.

But they could not use Kandahar airfield – once home to 26,000 international troops at the height of the military campaign – because it had already been overrun by Taliban. So the SAS soldiers fought their way to a secret desert location where they went into hiding. The coordinates of the location were then relayed back to Special Forces headquarters in a series of coded messages.

Meanwhile, RAF chiefs planning the evacuation of British nationals and entitled Afghans from Kabul airport, had to find a transport aircraft capable of landing and taking off again in the desert.

On Wednesday night online flight trackers picked up a UK Hercules transport aircraft flying over the Gulf, until it turned off its Identification Friend or Foe sensors. This ensured flight radars could not follow its route towards the area of desert scrub which SAS troops had identified as a possible landing strip.

The aircraft, from the RAF’s Special Forces wing, made a dramatic landing in the dead of night with the crew wearing digital night-vision goggles.

A source said: ‘It was a very hush, hush mission. Kandahar had fallen to the Taliban on Friday and the guys were down there for five days after that. The enemy were rampant and killing a lot of Afghan Special Forces whom the SAS had been working with. So it was a very urgent mission.

‘Credit to the Hercules crew from 47 Squadron for landing the aircraft at night on rough terrain and getting her airborne again with the guys and their equipment aboard. It was textbook.’

The aircraft reappeared on Thursday morning on flight trackers as it approached an international military base in Dubai.

Frustratingly for SAS chiefs the C-130J which rescued their troops is due to be retired as part of the latest reorganisation of the RAF.

The Hercules is the RAF’s major tactical transport aircraft and in its current versions, has been the backbone of UK operational mobility since it was brought into service in 1999. Praised as ‘highly flexible’ by the RAF, it has the ability to airdrop a variety of both stores and paratroopers, while landing and taking off from natural surfaces, such as a desert strip.

To conduct these missions, Hercules crews are highly skilled in low-level flying and trained to perform in both day and night.

The plan to rescue the stranded SAS troops was put together by the Joint Special Forces Aviation Wing. The aircraft and crew came from the RAF’s 47 Squadron. It comes as Taliban fighters were on the move last night to take over a key Afghanistan province currently outside of their control.