F-16 delivers payback to Taliban that downed Chinook

By LUIS MARTINEZ (@LMartinezABC)
Aug. 10, 2011



An F-16 airstrike Monday night killed the Taliban fighters believed to be responsible for shooting down the Chinook helicopter that killed 30 American servicemembers and eight Afghans. Included among the U.S. dead were 22 Navy Seals.

Gen. John Allen, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, said the Taliban fighters were tracked through intelligence gathered in the aftermath of the crash, so that "we did in fact locate them with certainty, and we did strike them with an airstrike," Allen said.

He said the airstrike "does not ease our loss. But we must and we will continue to relentlessly pursue the enemy."

Allen described the airstrike as a continuation of Saturday's original mission that targeted the head of an insurgent network in the Tangi Valley of Wardak province, located southwest of Kabul.

Defense officials said that Army Rangers were engaged in a firefight with insurgents who were protecting a leader who was the target of the raid. When a small group was spotted moving away from the firefight, the Rangers believed their target was about to escape. Defense officials said it is common for senior Taliban leaders to flee the scene of a fight and leave foot soldiers behind to carry on the fight without them. At the time, the firefight had already left six Taliban fighters dead.

That's when the Rangers called on the Immediate Response Force of Seals and Afghan commandos flying overhead to provide reinforcements to cut off the Taliban leader's escape.

It is believed that one of the insurgents fired a rocket-propelled grenade that brought the helicopter down. NATO issued a statement today stated that said "while it has not been determined if enemy fire was the sole reason for the helicopter crash, it did take fire from several insurgent locations on its approach."

A Defense official said an rocket-propelled grenade round was seen targeting the helicopter.

Following the crash, Allen said intelligence leads and tips generated by local residents helped track the insurgents. According to Allen, "learning their location, we were able to deliver ordnance on that position and to kill them as well."

ABC News has learned that a special operations team tracked the men visually for more than 12 hours Monday before it called in the airstrike. Both the RPG triggerman and his leader, Mullah Mohibullah, were spotted getting into a vehicle that took them into a compound located in a wooded area. The two men were then spotted leaving the compound for the wooded area. After it made sure there were no civilians in the area, the team called in the airstrike that killed both men as well as other Taliban associates. he strike occurred at 11:47 p.m. Afghanistan time.

According to a NATO statement, the two insurgents responsible for the shootdown were thought to be fleeing Afghanistan to avoid capture at the time of the airstrike.

Allen said the Chinook shootdown was "a singular incident in a broader conflict in which we are making important strides and considerable progress." Though there will be challenges in securing Afghanistan, Allen expressed confidence that "all across Afghanistan, the insurgents are losing. They're losing territory. They're losing leadership. They're losing weapons and supplies. They're losing public support."

Allen said he had no worries about using Chinook helicopters in the future, given how they have performed in thousands of special operation missions this year.

Broken Bone in Amarillo ...

A B-1B strategic bomber from Dyess Air Force Base near Abilene was forced to land at Amarillo/Rick Husband International airport today due to an in-flight emergency. Sources say the problem was described as being electrical in nature . The big bomber landed without incident.

A repair crew is being dispatched from Dyess. As a result it is expected to remain at least over night.


The B-1B "Lancer" is a common site over Amarillo as they come here often to train practicing touch and go landings - but because they are a strategic bomber and nuclear capable they rarely land anywhere except on secure air force bases.
Video by Steve Douglas

NATO source says Chinook was fired on by hostile forces

CNN:
Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Coalition forces embroiled in a firefight with insurgents in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday had called for assistance, but instead had to race to the crash scene of a downed NATO helicopter carrying their reinforcements, officials said Monday.

Everyone inside the CH-47 Chinook was killed, marking the worst single-day loss of American life since the beginning of the Afghan war, NATO reported.
The inbound helicopter -- loaded with 30 U.S. service members, a civilian interpreter and seven Afghan troops -- crashed after being "reportedly fired on by an insurgent rocket-propelled grenade," the statement said.

Twenty-five of those on board were U.S. special operations forces, including 22 Navy SEALs. Five air crew members were also on board.
Deadliest U.S. day in Afghanistan 'Complex' landscape where troops died 'The unprecedented Afghanistan attack'

U.S. Armed Forces
Two military transport aircraft carrying the remains of the 38 U.S. and Afghan personnel have departed Bagram, Afghanistan, and are headed to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, Pentagon spokesman Col. David Lapan said Monday. The flights are expected to arrive on Tuesday.
"In life they were comrades in arms, and in death they are bound forever in this vital cause. We cherish this selfless sacrifice," Gen. John R. Allen, International Security Assistance Force commander, said in a statement. He pledged to continue the fight in Afghanistan.

"Today, as we pay our respects to these magnificent troops, we recommit ourselves for the future, and for the freedom, peace and stability of Afghanistan," he said.

Because the catastrophic nature of the crash made the remains difficult to identify, all 38 sets are being taken to the United States. The Afghan remains will be returned to their families once identifications can be made.

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Chopper crash in Afghanistan kills dozens ...

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- More than two dozen American troops are believed to have died in a helicopter crash in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday, a U.S. military official told CNN.
Many, if not all, were special operations forces, the official said. If the numbers are confirmed, the incident would be the most deadly for coalition forces in the Afghan war, according to a CNN count of international troop deaths.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai issued a statement saying as many as 31 U.S. special forces and seven Afghans were killed and offered "deep regret" to U.S. President Barack Obama.
The Taliban claimed militants downed the helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade. Mohammad Hazrat Janan, head of the provincial council said Tangi village elders reported that insurgents shot at the craft when it was flying back from an operation.

The incident took place in the eastern province of Wardak, an area rife with insurgent activity. There has been a swell of recent attacks in the country's southern and eastern provinces.
The crash comes just as NATO is drawing down and handing over security control to national forces. Ten thousand U.S. soldiers are scheduled to depart by year's end, while the full drawn-down is expected to take place by the end of 2014.

However, NATO's International Security Assistance Force has not said how the incident occurred. ISAF spokesman Justin Brockhoff confirmed the crash and acknowledged the helicopter had been flying in area where there was reported insurgent activity, but declined to offer additional details.
Officials are being especially tight-lipped because recovery operations at the site are still under way and body identifications and family notifications are just beginning, the U.S. military official said.

The mission to get Osama - great story!

The New Yorker:

Getting Bin Laden
What happened that night in Abbottabad.
by Nicholas Schmidle

Shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from Jalalabad Air Field, in eastern Afghanistan, and embarked on a covert mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. Inside the aircraft were twenty-three Navy SEALs from Team Six, which is officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU. A Pakistani-American translator, whom I will call Ahmed, and a dog named Cairo—a Belgian Malinois—were also aboard.

It was a moonless evening, and the helicopters’ pilots, wearing night-vision goggles, flew without lights over mountains that straddle the border with Pakistan. Radio communications were kept to a minimum, and an eerie calm settled inside the aircraft.
Fifteen minutes later, the helicopters ducked into an alpine valley and slipped, undetected, into Pakistani airspace. For more than sixty years, Pakistan’s military has maintained a state of high alert against its eastern neighbor, India.

Because of this obsession, Pakistan’s “principal air defenses are all pointing east,” Shuja Nawaz, an expert on the Pakistani Army and the author of “Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within,” told me. Senior defense and Administration officials concur with this assessment, but a Pakistani senior military official, whom I reached at his office, in Rawalpindi, disagreed. “No one leaves their borders unattended,” he said. Though he declined to elaborate on the location or orientation of Pakistan’s radars—“It’s not where the radars are or aren’t”—he said that the American infiltration was the result of “technological gaps we have vis-à-vis the U.S.”

The Black Hawks, each of which had two pilots and a crewman from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, or the Night Stalkers, had been modified to mask heat, noise, and movement; the copters’ exteriors had sharp, flat angles and were covered with radar-dampening “skin.”

The SEALs’ destination was a house in the small city of Abbottabad, which is about a hundred and twenty miles across the Pakistan border. Situated north of Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, Abbottabad is in the foothills of the Pir Panjal Range, and is popular in the summertime with families seeking relief from the blistering heat farther south. Founded in 1853 by a British major named James Abbott, the city became the home of a prestigious military academy after the creation of Pakistan, in 1947.

According to information gathered by the Central Intelligence Agency, bin Laden was holed up on the third floor of a house in a one-acre compound just off Kakul Road in Bilal Town, a middle-class neighborhood less than a mile from the entrance to the academy.

If all went according to plan, the SEALs would drop from the helicopters into the compound, overpower bin Laden’s guards, shoot and kill him at close range, and then take the corpse back to Afghanistan.

The helicopters traversed Mohmand, one of Pakistan’s seven tribal areas, skirted the north of Peshawar, and continued due east. The commander of DEVGRU’s Red Squadron, whom I will call James, sat on the floor, squeezed among ten other SEALs, Ahmed, and Cairo. (The names of all the covert operators mentioned in this story have been changed.) James, a broad-chested man in his late thirties, does not have the lithe swimmer’s frame that one might expect of a SEAL—he is built more like a discus thrower.

That night, he wore a shirt and trousers in Desert Digital Camouflage, and carried a silenced Sig Sauer P226 pistol, along with extra ammunition; a CamelBak, for hydration; and gel shots, for endurance. He held a short-barrel, silenced M4 rifle. (Others SEALs had chosen the Heckler & Koch MP7.) A “blowout kit,” for treating field trauma, was tucked into the small of James’s back. Stuffed into one of his pockets was a laminated gridded map of the compound. In another pocket was a booklet with photographs and physical descriptions of the people suspected of being inside. He wore a noise-cancelling headset, which blocked out nearly everything besides his heartbeat.

During the ninety-minute helicopter flight, James and his teammates rehearsed the operation in their heads. Since the autumn of 2001, they had rotated through Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and the Horn of Africa, at a brutal pace. At least three of the SEALs had participated in the sniper operation off the coast of Somalia, in April, 2009, that freed Richard Phillips, the captain of the Maersk Alabama, and left three pirates dead.

In October, 2010, a DEVGRU team attempted to rescue Linda Norgrove, a Scottish aid worker who had been kidnapped in eastern Afghanistan by the Taliban. During a raid of a Taliban hideout, a SEAL tossed a grenade at an insurgent, not realizing that Norgrove was nearby. She died from the blast. The mistake haunted the SEALs who had been involved; three of them were subsequently expelled from DEVGRU.

The Abbottabad raid was not DEVGRU’s maiden venture into Pakistan, either. The team had surreptitiously entered the country on ten to twelve previous occasions, according to a special-operations officer who is deeply familiar with the bin Laden raid. Most of those missions were forays into North and South Waziristan, where many military and intelligence analysts had thought that bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders were hiding. (Only one such operation—the September, 2008, raid of Angoor Ada, a village in South Waziristan—has been widely reported.) Abbottabad was, by far, the farthest that DEVGRU had ventured into Pakistani territory. It also represented the team’s first serious attempt since late 2001 at killing “Crankshaft”—the target name that the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, had given bin Laden. Since escaping that winter during a battle in the Tora Bora region of eastern Afghanistan, bin Laden had defied American efforts to trace him. Indeed, it remains unclear how he ended up living in Abbottabad.

Forty-five minutes after the Black Hawks departed, four MH-47 Chinooks launched from the same runway in Jalalabad. Two of them flew to the border, staying on the Afghan side; the other two proceeded into Pakistan. Deploying four Chinooks was a last-minute decision made after President Barack Obama said he wanted to feel assured that the Americans could “fight their way out of Pakistan.” Twenty-five additional SEALs from DEVGRU, pulled from a squadron stationed in Afghanistan, sat in the Chinooks that remained at the border; this “quick-reaction force” would be called into action only if the mission went seriously wrong.

The third and fourth Chinooks were each outfitted with a pair of M134 Miniguns. They followed the Black Hawks’ initial flight path but landed at a predetermined point on a dry riverbed in a wide, unpopulated valley in northwest Pakistan. The nearest house was half a mile away. On the ground, the copters’ rotors were kept whirring while operatives monitored the surrounding hills for encroaching Pakistani helicopters or fighter jets. One of the Chinooks was carrying fuel bladders, in case the other aircraft needed to refill their tanks.

Meanwhile, the two Black Hawks were quickly approaching Abbottabad from the northwest, hiding behind the mountains on the northernmost edge of the city. Then the pilots banked right and went south along a ridge that marks Abbottabad’s eastern perimeter. When those hills tapered off, the pilots curled right again, toward the city center, and made their final approach.

During the next four minutes, the interior of the Black Hawks rustled alive with the metallic cough of rounds being chambered. Mark, a master chief petty officer and the ranking noncommissioned officer on the operation, crouched on one knee beside the open door of the lead helicopter. He and the eleven other SEALs on “helo one,” who were wearing gloves and had on night-vision goggles, were preparing to fast-rope into bin Laden’s yard.

They waited for the crew chief to give the signal to throw the rope. But, as the pilot passed over the compound, pulled into a high hover, and began lowering the aircraft, he felt the Black Hawk getting away from him. He sensed that they were going to crash.

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