United States Navy Seal Team and Their Families. Their Helicopter Was Shot Yesterday in Afghanistan

The Tangi Valley, located along the border between Afghanistan's Wardak and Logar provinces some 80 miles southwest of Kabul, is a remote, inaccessible area known for its resistance to foreign invasion. Alexander the Dandy 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 unabridged division of Soviet fighters.

In 2009, U.S. forces from the 10th Mount Segmentation of the U.S. Army established a base in the Tangi Valley area subsequently information technology became clear the Taliban had taken advantage of low coalition presence there to establish a stronghold inside striking altitude of the Afghan capital. As the United States and NATO allies began a drawdown of their troops in the spring of 2011, U.Due south. forces turned over the Tangi Valley outpost to their Afghan counterparts. They continued to run operations in the area, however, using helicopters and special operations forces to combat groups of insurgents in the region.

Under cover of darkness on the night of August half-dozen, 2011, a special ops squad that included a group of U.South. Army Rangers began an set on on a Taliban compound in the village of Jaw-e-Mekh Zareen in the Tangi Valley. The firefight at the house went on for at least 2 hours, and the ground team called in reinforcements. As the Chinook CH-47 transport helicopter (phone call sign: Extortion 17) carrying 30 U.S. troops, seven Afghan commandos, an Afghan civilian interpreter and a U.S. military machine canis familiaris approached, the insurgents fired on the helicopter and it crashed to the footing, killing all aboard.

U.S. Regular army soldiers set up a Humvee to be sling-loaded by 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 2 bomb specialists and 15 operators in the Gold Squadron of DEVGRU, or Team Six, the highly classified unit of measurement that conducted the raid that killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden at his compound in Abbottabad, 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 v other Naval Special Warfare (NSW) personnel, three Air Force forrad air controllers and v Army helicopter crewmembers.

The attack on Baronial 6 was the most devastating mean solar day in SEAL Team Six history, likewise as the unmarried largest loss of life for U.South. forces since the war in Afghanistan began in Oct 2001. More twice every bit many NSW personnel died in the Wardak crash than were killed on June 28, 2005, during Performance Redwings. That mean solar day, eight SEALs and eight members of the members of the 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 footing were also killed, in what would stand as the deadliest day in NSW history since the Normandy landings on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

"No words draw the sorrow nosotros feel in the wake of this tragic loss," General John R. Allen, senior commander of the international military machine coalition in Afghanistan, said after the crash. "All of those killed in this functioning were true heroes who had already given so much in the defense of freedom. Their sacrifice will not be forgotten."

Equally funerals for the fallen sailors and other servicemen took identify throughout the United States, a team of specialists conducted an official investigation to determine the cause of the crash. The resulting study, delivered in October 2011, concluded that a Taliban fighter shot down 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 assault could have been an within job, with Afghan forces tipping the Taliban off near the mission beforehand. Others criticized the planning and execution of the mission, including the decision to fly the helicopter into an surface area where it could be easily shot down and the use of a conventional helicopter rather than ane designed for special operations missions. Family members of some of the SEAL Squad Vi operators killed in the crash, forth with some armed forces personnel, claimed that the U.Due south. regime had turned the members of the elite unit into a target past revealing their role in the bin Laden raid. A congressional oversight committee fifty-fifty 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 state of war has continued for more than two years across that point, marking its 15th anniversary last Oct. Every bit of 2016, some ix,800 U.S. troops remained in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan. The Department of Defense force estimates the full number of U.S. service members killed in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan at two,254. Meanwhile, the civilian cost of the war grows ever higher; 1 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 conflict at some 220,000.

The new season of Half-dozen, continues Wednesdays at ten/9c.

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Source: https://www.history.com/news/the-costliest-day-in-seal-team-six-history