By Jon Swain
Additional reporting: Christina Lamb in Washington, Jerome Starkey in Kabul and Tim Ripley
ONE minute there was total silence in the darkness. Then, faint at first, swelling louder, came the unmistakable thwack of rotorblades as the helicopters approached their target.
The room in northern Afghanistan where the two hostages were held reverberated with the noise. The Taliban guarding them realised they were coming under attack. They rose from mattresses on the floor, grabbed their weapons and ran out to do battle.
Hovering a few feet above the ground, the American Chinook helicopters dropped off an elite team of British special forces made up of the SAS, paratroopers and some trusted Afghan troops. They fanned out and the night exploded with gunfire.
The target of the raid was a mud-walled farmhouse compound near Kunduz in northern Afghanistan where the Taliban were holding their hostages prisoner.
Four days earlier Stephen Farrell, a British journalist working for The New York Times, and Sultan Munadi, his Afghan assistant, had been captured by the Taliban while reporting on a Nato airstrike that had killed many civilians.
When the assault began there was chaos and terror. “We absolutely expected [the kidnappers] to cut us down as they ran,” recalled Farrell. “We were crouching targets in a long, narrow room devoid of anything but walls and matting. We were no longer of any use to them.”
He described how, as the Taliban picked up their weapons and ran from the room, the last fighter paused and considered the hostages. Farrell and Munadi crouched behind a camera case full of metal equipment in the hope that it would afford them some protection from the guard’s AK-47. They tensed for the shots that would end their lives. They never came.
Farrell and Munadi decided to run for it. At one point Farrell lost his balance and Munadi put out his hand to steady him. They reached the corner of a low wall and Munadi stepped out.
“He raised his hands and shouted, ‘journalist, journalist’, even as he stepped out,” said Farrell. “I could not see around him to discover who he was trying to reassure: the troops or the Taliban. There was a burst of gunfire and he went down immediately.”
Farrell dropped into a ditch. When he heard British voices, he came out and gave himself up. Minutes later he was on a helicopter.
He knew Munadi was dead but it was only on the flight home that he realised a member of the rescue party, Corporal John Harrison, a 29-year-old British paratrooper, had also been killed. “His blood-soaked helmet was in front of me throughout the flight,” wrote Farrell. “I thanked everyone who was still alive to thank. It wasn’t, and never will be, enough.”
Amid the relief there is recrimination. Was the operation necessary when negotiations were under way to free the hostages — and was Farrell partly to blame for being kidnapped in the first place? (Read more)
