8/30/2023 0 Comments Sas britishIt was only in February 2019, in response to a Freedom of Information request about Sergeant Tonroe’s death, that the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) admitted that soldiers from UKSF were embedded with anti-Daesh forces in Syria later that year a book by 22 SAS veteran Chris Ryan revealed they had carried out an aggressive mobile campaign, recalling the original SAS’ operations in the Western Desert in World War Two, as they contested northern Iraq’s deserts with the terrorists two years before. This was also rather paradoxical, given that not only were US, French and other NATO SF deployed in Syria but this was acknowledged in official NATO reports. From 2016 media reports indicated UKSF deployment also, although as usual the British government was cagey about this: for instance, when Sergeant Matt Tonroe became the first British soldier killed in action in Syria in March 2018, the official press release had him as from 3rd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment, his parent unit, even though a US Army Special Forces Operator, Master Sergeant Jonathan Dunbar, was killed by the same improvised explosive device, Tonroe’s funeral took place at the Regimental Headquarters of 22 SAS at Hereford and most of the British media reported him engaged in a ‘covert’ operation to capture or kill a senior member of Daesh. The UK has been the USA’s active partner in this campaign: since 2015 up to fourteen Royal Air Force (RAF) fast jets and six Reaper Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) have been striking at Daesh targets in Iraq and Syria and an admitted 86 British Army personnel have trained anti-Daesh forces in Syria. Under Obama, US strategy in the global war on terror shifted conspicuously away from the hallmark of the George W Bush administration, ‘regime change’ in terrorist-friendly countries, to a global counter-terrorist campaign utilising JSOC assets combined with drones, manned aircraft and local proxies to hit jihadi networks in Yemen, Syria, parts of Africa and, of course, Pakistan, the most famous strike being the killing of Osama bin Laden himself in April 2011. This originated with US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld’s Al Qaeda Network Execute Order of 2004, which authorised JSOC strikes against high value targets (HVTs) in twenty named countries, and escalated following the election of Barack Obama in 2008. The past two decades have seen UKSF cooperate with US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in building what one UKSF officer of the author’s acquaintance has called ‘the greatest counterterrorist organisation in history’, executing a global campaign of capture or kill strikes against al Qaeda and Daesh. United Kingdom Special Forces (UKSF) is a tri-service command in the British armed forces which right now appears on the point of a major shift in direction.
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