The British Army’s Special Air Service (SAS) is a special forces division. David Stirling established it as a regiment in 1941, and a corps was reconstituted from it in 1950. The squad specialises in a variety of tasks, such as hostage rescue, direct action, counterterrorism, and covert reconnaissance. Due to the secrecy and sensitivity of the SAS’s missions, a lot of information regarding the organisation is highly classified, and neither the British government nor the Ministry of Defence comment on the SAS.
Operation Telic
As part of Operation Telic, the British SAS were involved in the 2003 invasion of Iraq from the start. Between the beginning of the invasion on 19 March 2003 and the departure of the final British forces on 22 May 2011, all military activities carried out by the United Kingdom in Iraq were carried out under the codename Operation Telic (Op TELIC). Most of the mission was completed on April 30, 2009. However, 150 troops, mostly from the Royal Navy, stayed in Iraq as part of the Iraqi Training and Advisory Mission until May 22, 2011. At the start of the invasion, 46,000 soldiers were sent in, and the war’s overall price tag in 2010 was £9.24 billion.
It was one of the biggest British military deployments since World War II. Only the Gulf War Operation Granby deployment in 1991 and the Suez Crisis Operation Musketeer deployment in 1956 came close to matching this size. It was a lot bigger than the 1982 Operation Corporate in the Falklands War, which sent out about 30,000 troops, and the Korean War, which sent out less than 20,000.
Geoff Hoon, Secretary of State for Defence, made three separate Commons statements indicating that additional British forces were deploying to the area (considerable numbers of RAF personnel were already stationed in Kuwait, Turkey, and other locations in the region on Operations Northern Watch and Southern Watch). The Royal Marines and naval troops’ deployment was announced on January 7. The deployment of the land forces was announced on January 20 and the air forces on February 6. They were prepared in time for the start of hostilities on March 19. Things moved along far more quickly than during the Gulf War, with the slowest deploying elements taking only 10 weeks to get from base to combat readiness in the theatre.
Opeartion Hathor
Post invasion of Iraq, the British kept a variety of units in Iraq for all the different missions that were still being carried out. As a result, they kept a detachment of the SAS to conduct operations such as Operation Hathor. Essentially, this was a handful of personnel and limited equipment. The SAS were to protect MI6 officers and conduct surveillance and reconnaissance for the British Battle Group.
The Incident
On September 19, 2005, two British Special Air Service (SAS) soldiers acting undercover opened fire on a group of Iraqi Police officers after being halted at a roadblock while wearing traditional Arab clothing and headdresses. At least one of the two wounded Iraqi police officers died. The two troops were escorted to the Al Jameat police station after being taken into custody.
The two SAS members were a part of Operation Hathor, whose goal was to monitor an Iraqi Police officer who oversaw a team that was thought to have ties to corruption and brutality in the city. When Iraqi cops attempted to remove the operators from their car at the roadblock, the British forces opened fire, killing two of the policemen. Tensions between the Iraqi Police and the British forces were already high. The SAS guys took off, but when they realised they couldn’t outrun the Iraqi Police, they opted to pull over and negotiate their way out of it. They were beaten and detained by Iraqi police, and the local media released their captivity photos to the world.
The Response
News of the capture obviously spread quickly and stunned members of the SAS and British military in general. Everyone knew that the men needed to be rescued as quickly as possible or they were going to be executed. Unfortunately, the SAS simply did not have enough men to go into a rescue operation alone so twenty soldiers of A Squadron 22nd SAS Regiment and a platoon of Special Forces Support Group paratroopers flew from Baghdad to Basra in response. However, the political response resulted in the entire operation being shut down by command headquarters in England. The SAS leadership in Iraq had to make a decision, obey command and risk possibly losing two of the members in a brutal fashion or risk being court-martial and go for their men. They obviously opted to risk it all and ignored the command to stand down.
They gather whatever equipment they had and prepared to go in without the blessing of headquarters. A predator drone and Lynx helicopter provided the UK JOC with a live feed on the prison while other SAS operators located their two comrades at the Al Jameat police station, retreated, and called in Hathor’s QRF in Basra. Individuals from The 1st Battalion While an SAS raid was planned, the Staffordshire Regiment set up a perimeter outside the police station.
The prisoners, whose names had not been made public but whose images had been extensively disseminated, were being kept in a jail that was surrounded by British tanks and infantry. The Warrior armoured vehicles were attacked by a crowd that started throwing rocks and gasoline bombs at them, at least one of which caught fire. In addition to the two demonstrators’ deaths, three British soldiers were hurt. Two officers from 12 Brigade HQ were held hostage while delivering an ultimatum letter to the prison, and the SAS soldiers were loaded into the trunk of a car and driven to a safe house in Basra.
The British believed that the two SAS captives would be executed by Iraqi Hezbollah after they were relocated to a residence close to the jail, as evidenced by footage from the Lynx helicopter. As a result, the rescue strategy was changed to have a small portion of A Squadron attack the prison using regular army men and vehicles while the primary SAS ground force attacked the home. Around 9 o’clock at dusk, the British Army broke into the house and prison where the SAS soldiers were being held. The two detainees were discovered in a locked room after the SAS raid on the residence encountered no opposition.
Mohammed al-Waili, the governor of the province of Basra, claimed that the British had carried out the raid with “more than ten tanks supported by helicopters.” Warrior IFVs and Challenger tanks led the attack on the jail, tearing down the walls and demolishing automobiles and fragile structures. According to eyewitness accounts, 150 convicts were able to escape the prison as a result of the assault.
At first, the Ministry of Defence denied that they had stormed the facility. In later remarks, it claimed that the police force had been compromised by illegal militia groups and that the soldiers would have most certainly been slain. No one was punished for the incident.
