Afghan soldiers contacted the Taliban and offered to kill Australian special forces operators they were supposed to be supporting during a battle where war hero Ben Roberts-Smith won his Victoria Cross.
The betrayal occurred while 35 Special Air Service Regiment (SASR) E Troop soldiers, assisted by half a dozen Afghans, were outnumbered three-to-one by Taliban fighters in the village of Tizak in June 2010, according to new book The Last Battle by journalist Aaron Patrick.
In an adaptation from the book published in The Australian, Patrick revealed that three SAS sources confirmed the actions of the Afghan soldiers, who were policemen from the local regional security force.
“E troop was required to take Afghan soldiers on missions. After one was badly wounded, the rest had sheltered behind a stone wall and refused to move. Worse still, they contacted the Taliban in Tizak over their radios and began trying to negotiate a deal,” he wrote.
“If they swapped sides, would they be allowed to leave? The policemen offered to kill their SASR team leader, his interpreter and as many other Australians as they could.
“They would wait until several of the Australians had been injured or killed before executing the plan. The radio communications were overheard by an interpreter, an Afghan ex-Marine with US citizenship who immediately told the SASR soldier responsible for managing the Afghan troops.”
While the Afghan soldiers were plotting their betrayal, Roberts-Smith patrol decided to attack Taliban machinegun positions despite being pinned down by heavy fire, ultimately gaining the upper hand and killing 22 enemy combatants, and the SASR cleared the village after seven hours of intense fighting.
A photo taken after that battle shows Roberts-Smith, who famously wore a crusader patch on his uniform, and five other SASR operators posing behind the bodies of dead Taliban fighters.
Robert-Smith was later awarded the Victoria Cross, Australia’s highest military honour, only to be accused of war crimes by left-wing journalists from corporate media giant Nine Entertainment. They were aided by Liberal MP Andrew Hastie, who gave evidence against his former SASR comrade during a defamation trial.
Former corporal Roberts-Smith, who is the country’s most decorated soldier and has never been charged with any criminal offences, lost his lawsuit against Fairfax Media and journalists Nick McKenzie, Chris Masters and David Wroe after the Federal Court found allegations against him were “substantially true”. He then lost an appeal, and had an application to appeal again to the High Court rejected.
The Last Battle details the five-day Battle of Shah Wali Kot, which included the Tizak engagement and a largely unknown operation by the Australian Army’s 2nd Commando Regiment that resulted in the deaths of about 100 insurgents while just one Australian soldier was wounded.
Patrick writes in the book that the military commanders were unprepared for the Tizak battle and grossly underestimated the number of Taliban fighters the SASR would face, calling it “the regiment’s biggest intelligence failure” in history, The Daily Telegraph reported.
Header image: Left, Ben Roberts-Smith and another soldier after the Tizak battle (supplied). Right, Roberts-Smith in Afghanistan (Defence).
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