MIRACLE ESCAPE OF THE RORKE’S DRIFT PARAS

Cut off. Surrounded. Outnumbered. Just 88 British soldiers resigned to defeat after fighting off 500 Taliban for 56 days. Then, against all the odds, a...

OUTGUNNED, outmanoeuvred, hopelessly outnumbered and besieged in the Afghan desert, a small band of British soldiers chose to save a final bullet for themselves rather than fall into Taliban hands.

For nearly two months, the 88 men of Easy Company – a mix of Paratroopers and the Royal Irish – had faced the overwhelming force and firepower of up to 500 Taliban determined to over-run the remote Helmand outpost of Musa Qala.

And their near miraculous survival has been described as a latter day Rorke’s Drift, evocative of the 1879 siege in which 140 British soldiers held off a Zulu force of 3,000, later immortalised in the blockbuster film starring Michael Caine.

For 56 days in the autumn of 2006, the men at Musa Qala faced constant fire from fixed machine gun posts and mortars. Hungry and frequently at the point of exhaustion, they were forced to somehow fend off 360-degree attacks from the Taliban, with little protection beyond a series of low mud walls.

They used up a quarter of all the British Army’s Afghan ammunition for that entire year.

Yet today their heroism remains little known, not least because the Ministry of Defence has never permitted the full story of what happened there ten years ago this month to be told.

It has taken a Channel 4 documentary team to piece together fragments of testimony from survivors who have now left the Army, to reveal in devastating detail how close the 88 officers and men came to being massacred.

They lost three men and saw 12 badly wounded before a ragged ceasefire was brokered by tribal elders, allowing them to evacuate their Helmand hell-hole. As with Rorke’s Drift, the final, devastating assault somehow never came.

Their ordeal began almost immediately when, on August 23, Easy Company was dropped by Chinook to replace a mainly Danish Nato contingent struggling to bring stability and security to the remote region. It was a terrible start.

The Taliban watched in satisfaction as the Danes took with them more than 40 armoured vehicles, eight heavy machine guns and a 12-strong medical team with armoured ambulances.

Their British replacements had just two heavy machine guns, one doctor, two medics and a quad bike. When Taliban spies reported the huge reduction in armour and weaponry, the terror leaders scented an easy victory.

To make matters worse, the village was often too dangerous for helicopter support, and reinforcements – although it is still not entirely clear why – simply never came.

Troop Staff Sergeant Ian Wornham listened with his Afghan translator to the enemy’s radio communications. He recalled: ‘They were talking about drinking tea in our headquarters by sunrise – which meant they were going to kill anyone in their way.’

Or worse. There was, after all, the prospect of being taken alive, with beheadings later broadcast on YouTube.

Sniper Jared Cleary said: ‘It came to a point I actually thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown. I swore I was going to get hit by a mortar bomb. I remember standing there, my legs shaking uncontrollably. If you got caught, you’d probably end up on YouTube having your head cut off. Everybody knew that the possibility of getting captured and executed was very real.’

Initially, Taliban tactics resembled scenes from Rorke’s Drift as they tried to over-run the compound in a series of full frontal attacks. They came so close to breaking in that they were able to lob grenades over the walls of the compound.

Wornham, a veteran with 20 years’ experience, said: ‘I’d never encountered fighting like that. It was very intense and it wasn’t just from one direction. They were attacking from all sides – all the time.’

Sergeant Freddie Kruyer of 3 Para continued: ‘You’re returning fire but for every one that you’re knocking down, you’re thinking how many more are going to keep coming up?

‘You’re not dealing with a conventional enemy. So I thought, well I’ve got the bullet with my name on it that I’m going to fire at myself if it comes to it.’

To be blunt, their chances seemed slim. ‘We were totally alone. It would have been very easy to lose the entire compound with us in it,’ said commanding officer, Paratroop Major Adam Jowett.

Part of the reason for that was the parlous state of Easy Company’s defences. They were based in a lowwalled compound that Jowett says was ‘not a defensive position in any sense at all’.

The former Grenadier Guard who’d switched to the Paras and saw service in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, says: ‘I’d worked in compounds in the Middle East, in Africa and for the UN and I had a concept of what

We weren’t going to be beheaded on YouTube