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| Iraq | ||
| British blunder may have let al-Qaida kingpin Zarqawi go free | ||
| 2010-10-24 | ||
| British troops came close to capturing al-Qaida's top commander and the occupation forces' most wanted target in Iraq – but the operation collapsed after the only surveillance helicopter ordered to monitor him ran out of fuel and had to return to base, secret military intelligence logs suggest. The astonishing blunder in March 2005 allowed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi – a Jordanian associate of Osama bin Laden with a $25m reward on his head – an extra 15 months to expand al-Qaida's operations throughout Iraq, bringing the country close to civil war. His fundamentalist Sunni supporters were behind some of the worst atrocities aimed at Iraq's Shia majority population as well as countless attacks on US and Iraqi government forces.
His narrow escape from British troops and a unit of British special forces emerges from the secret military intelligence logs examined by the Guardian. They report that on 17 March 2005 the G3 cell of army intelligence at British brigade headquarters in Basra heard that Zarqawi was travelling south on route 6 from Amarah to Basra. They informed Danish forces at 2.15pm. The Danes played a junior role in the coalition under overall British command in south-eastern Iraq. Half an hour later, the report says, a Lynx helicopter spotted a suspicious car that had stopped 7.5 miles (12km) south of al-Qurna and about 60 miles north of Basra. Al-Qurna is a dusty flyblown Mesopotamian town that is claimed, inappropriately in view of its present condition, as the site of the biblical Garden of Eden. US forces in Iraq invariably sent helicopters in pairs. The report says the helicopter maintained "top cover" for 15minutes but then had to return to the UK-run Shaiba logistics base to refuel. "As a result the area of interest was unobserved for between 20 and 30 min," the report adds. By then British troops from Corunna company of 1st Battalion the Duke of Wellington's Regiment had rushed in and set up an inner and outer cordon around the area. British special forces and an American "arresting officer" were brought in. Having lost their helicopter cover the forces were reduced to random searching. A Shia mosque was raided but Iraqi civilians were the only people in it. A second building was searched but also only contained civilians. The report ends with: "At 22.14 the search was concluded." Unlike many other reports in the logs, this one makes no comment on the source of the intelligence and its reliability. The British may have doubted it since Amara is in an overwhelmingly Shia area and perhaps an unlikely place for Zarqawi to be. Perhaps they suspected the Americans were inflating his importance. Regardless, the British did take the report seriously enough to send dozens of troops to capture the suspect.
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| Posted by:Steve White |
| #2 Someone called Gordon Brown was responsible for cutting the budgets for helicopters whilst the British army was fighting in 2 wars. |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2010-10-24 16:21 |
| #1 Blunder; harsh, maybe too harsh. RTB for fuel happens. Fuel consumption happens. Not everything works perfectly in war. (Duh.) This sounds like it was written by lawyers, armchair admirals, and REMFs. |
| Posted by: Whiskey Mike 2010-10-24 00:52 |