UK Troops Faced Tough Mission
By CLARENCE ROY-MACAULAY
Associated Press Writer
FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (AP) — While helicopters provided covering fire, Cpl. Simon Dawes led the first British paratroopers on a mission to free seven hostages held by a maverick Sierra Leone army gang.
Dawes, 29, was seeing combat for the first time. ``This is the first firefight I have
been in where rounds were coming my way. It was a scary experience.''
Capt. Liam Cradden, 30, waded 1,500 feet under enemy fire Sunday through a creek
with his troops on the way to freeing the six British soldiers and a Sierra Leonean
soldier.
``There were an awful lot of young guys in the unit,'' Cradden said. ``They all performed with excellent professionalism and every member of the company did his duty as he was asked to.''
Cradden said the 150 British paratroopers, mostly all in their 20s, had been planning the operation for 10 days and that it took six hours to extract the hostages, who had been held since Aug. 25.
One British paratrooper was killed and between 12 and 14 others were wounded in the mission, British military officials said.
Twenty-six members of the West Side Boys faction were killed, and at least 18 others, including the faction leader, were captured.
Dawes, a father of three, told reporters: ``It was scary. But once we got into the fighting the training took over.''
``The company is a very young company and none of us had experienced a two-way range, as we call it, with rounds coming our way.''
Cradden, the second-in-command, recalled how the regiment moved in on Rokel Creek in the Occra Hills, 45 miles east of Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown.
``Our part in the operation was to ensure the West Side Boys' heavy guns on the south side (of the creek) could not interfere with operations on the north side and endanger the safety of the hostages,'' Cradden said.
``The assault lasted for about two hours until the area was secured.''
The six British soldiers freed in the raid and five others released Aug. 30 by their captors were being debriefed Monday aboard the British warship Sir Percivale in Freetown's harbor, Lt. Cmdr. Tony Cramp told reporters.
It has never been explained how the soldiers were captured by the West Side Boys, a well-armed but ill-disciplined group
that has, at times, fought alongside both the government of President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah and the main rebel group, the
Revolutionary United Front.
Cramp insisted the hostage-taking would not deter the British soldiers from their mission of training better Sierra Leonean soldiers to fight the rebels. The rebel group is responsible for the deaths and intentional mutilation of tens of thousands of civilians since 1991.
The rescue was carried out after the captors had threatened repeatedly to kill the hostages.
At the United Nations, British Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock said the raid showed that ``this kind of thuggery, of rejection of law and order in Sierra Leone will not be tolerated by the international community.''
Greenstock spoke outside the Security Council, where ambassadors were working on a resolution to strengthen the U.N. peacekeeping force in the West African nation to as many as 20,500. A vote could come later this week.
