Shots cracked over barricades in the dark, and the night filled with sounds of men shouting and running. The defenders of a small outpost in the town of Sangin slammed mortars into firing tubes, sending up flares that cast a ghostly light over the confused scene.
The smoky phosphorescence revealed British and Afghan soldiers watching nervously over the walls, toward an empty graveyard that Taliban fighters had used as cover to sneak up on a guard post. It was only a probing attack, intended to gauge the strength of the government forces now desperately holding a town on the front lines of this year's fight against the insurgents.
But the attack seemed to fray the nerves of the British troops, who had narrowly escaped an ambush a few hours earlier. As the flares winked out and darkness returned, a soldier walked up to a journalist and tried to give him a handgun.
The offer was declined, but the soldier insisted: “You might need it,” he said, holding out the weapon, its black polish gleaming under his headlamp. “We don't know what will happen tonight.”
The valley of discord
With support from Canadian artillery, U.S. and British troops took control of this half-ruined town and its strategic valley in northern Helmand province in early April. Starting last week, the Taliban launched a major drive to take it back.
The insurgents' new offensive brought them to the doorstep of Captain James Shaw, of the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards. He commands one of several British teams working with Afghan forces in Sangin, sleeping alongside the local troops in a crumbling mud building near the town's market.
Capt. Shaw committed what he later acknowledged was a potentially fatal mistake on a hot afternoon last week. Acting on a tip from an old woman, he allowed his men to search for a rumoured cache of Taliban weapons in a village about five kilometres north of town.
The bumpy route leading north from Sangin had been cleared of insurgents many times, and fighting earlier in the week was concentrated much further north, in the river valleys leading to Kajaki and Musa Qala. The battles swept southward as the days passed, however, and Capt. Shaw hoped he could find the weapons dump quickly and retreat back into town.
Unlike the Canadians who roar through Afghanistan in heavily protected troop carriers, the British rely on light jeeps, whose improvised armour often makes them look jerry-built. That afternoon, Capt. Shaw had only three of these vehicles and a few Afghan pickup trucks.
The patrol rolled past bombed buildings on the outskirts of Sangin, past shuttered stores and a mosque with a missing wall. The vehicles accelerated as they broke into the open countryside, churning a haze of dust over the farmland that sloped away to the left. Children hauled bundles of dry poppy stalks through the fallow fields.
A craggy hill rose to the right of the road. A few minutes outside of town, the hill seemed to explode in a shower of grey smoke streaked with beige dirt. Several more rocket-propelled grenades screamed toward the convoy from a line of trees in the distance, accompanied by the clatter of automatic weapons.
“Contact left!” shouted Lance Sergeant Matt Robinson, standing up in his jeep and raking the trees with bullets. “In that tree line over there! Five hundred metres, four hundred metres! Tree line!”
The young soldier squinted through his scope and banged more rounds downrange, then swore heartily as another British vehicle slammed into his, throwing him off balance.
In the first moments of the ambush, the British were jamming their vehicles into reverse and pulling back. For them, it was standard procedure: Get out of the Taliban's sights and return fire.
The Afghans did the opposite, bailing out of their vulnerable pickup trucks and charging forward. They took shelter in a ditch and looked back at the retreating British with undisguised scorn. Two Afghan soldiers had been wounded, and many others had barely avoided injury when an anti-tank mortar slammed into the tailgate of their truck. It was a dud; the explosion only shattered the rear window. The mortar's tail fin remained stuck in the vehicle, which sat empty in the road as the Taliban continued to sweep the area with gunfire.
