Seal Team and Their Families. Their Helicopter Was Shot Yesterday in Afghanistan
The Tangi Valley, located forth the border between Transitional islamic state of afghanistan's Wardak and Logar provinces some 80 miles southwest of Kabul, is a remote, inaccessible expanse known for its resistance to foreign invasion. Alexander the Great suffered heavy troop losses there during his entrada in Afghanistan in the fourth century B.C. In the 1980s, mujahideen fighters in Wardak and Logar provinces devastated an entire sectionalisation of Soviet fighters.
In 2009, U.Due south. forces from the 10th Mountain Division of the U.Due south. Regular army established a base in the Tangi Valley surface area after it became clear the Taliban had taken advantage of depression coalition presence there to establish a stronghold within striking altitude of the Afghan uppercase. As the United States and NATO allies began a drawdown of their troops in the spring of 2011, U.Southward. forces turned over the Tangi Valley outpost to their Afghan counterparts. They connected to run operations in the area, nonetheless, using helicopters and special operations forces to combat groups of insurgents in the region.
Under embrace of darkness on the nighttime of August half-dozen, 2011, a special ops team that included a group of U.S. Ground forces Rangers began an set on on a Taliban compound in the hamlet of Jaw-e-Mekh Zareen in the Tangi Valley. The firefight at the house went on for at to the lowest degree two hours, and the footing team called in reinforcements. As the Chinook CH-47 transport helicopter (phone call sign: Extortion 17) carrying 30 U.Southward. troops, vii Afghan commandos, an Afghan civilian interpreter and a U.S. military dog approached, the insurgents fired on the helicopter and it crashed to the ground, killing all aboard.
U.S. Army soldiers fix a Humvee to be sling-loaded past a CH-47 Chinook helicopter in Bagram, Afghanistan, on July 24, 2004. (Credit: Public Domain)
Of the 30 Americans killed, 22 were Navy personnel, and 17 were SEALs. These included two bomb specialists and 15 operators in the Golden Squadron of DEVGRU, or Squad Six, the highly classified unit that conducted the raid that killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden at his chemical compound in Abbottabad, Islamic republic of pakistan the previous May. None of the operators killed in the Afghan helicopter crash had been involved in that mission, officials said. In addition to the SEALs, the others killed in the Chinook crash included five other Naval Special Warfare (NSW) personnel, three Air Forcefulness forward air controllers and five Army helicopter crewmembers.
The attack on August 6 was the near devastating twenty-four hour period in SEAL Team Six history, equally well every bit the unmarried largest loss of life for U.S. forces since the state of war in Afghanistan began in October 2001. More than twice as many NSW personnel died in the Wardak crash than were killed on June 28, 2005, during Operation Redwings. That day, 8 SEALs and eight members of the members of the Regular army's 160th Special Forces Operations Regiment (SOAR) were killed when insurgents shot downwardly their Chinook helicopter in Kunar province, near Asadabad. Three SEALs involved in a firefight on the ground were also killed, in what would stand as the deadliest mean solar day in NSW history since the Normandy landings on D-Day, June 6, 1944.
"No words draw the sorrow we feel in the wake of this tragic loss," General John R. Allen, senior commander of the international military coalition in Afghanistan, said after the crash. "All of those killed in this operation were true heroes who had already given and so much in the defense of freedom. Their cede volition not be forgotten."
As funerals for the fallen sailors and other servicemen took place throughout the United States, a squad of specialists conducted an official investigation to decide the cause of the crash. The resulting written report, delivered in October 2011, ended that a Taliban fighter shot downwards the Chinook with a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) as the helicopter neared its landing zone, and that "all operational decisions, linked to the incident, were deemed tactically sound."
Some later questioned the official narrative of the Extortion 17 crash, fifty-fifty suggesting the attack could have been an inside chore, with Afghan forces tipping the Taliban off about the mission beforehand. Others criticized the planning and execution of the mission, including the decision to fly the helicopter into an expanse where it could be easily shot down and the use of a conventional helicopter rather than one designed for special operations missions. Family members of some of the SEAL Team Six operators killed in the crash, along with some military personnel, claimed that the U.S. government had turned the members of the elite unit into a target by revealing their office in the bin Laden raid. A congressional oversight committee even held a controversial hearing into the events surrounding the crash in early 2014.
Though the U.S.-led coalition formally ended its combat mission in Afghanistan in December 2014, the war has connected for more two years beyond that point, mark its 15th ceremony last October. As of 2016, some 9,800 U.S. troops remained in Afghanistan. The Department of Defense estimates the full number of U.Southward. service members killed in Afghanistan at 2,254. Meanwhile, the noncombatant toll of the war grows e'er higher; one estimate, by the organization International Physicians for the Prevention of War, put the total number of Afghans killed in the first 12 years of the disharmonize at some 220,000.
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Source: https://www.history.com/news/the-costliest-day-in-seal-team-six-history
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