I was a soldier in Afghanistan – I saw an old lady crushed to death and extremist fighters with UK accents
SOLDIER Adam Croucher has endured everything the Taliban has thrown at him over his distinguished two-decade career in the Paras.
They have shot at him, fired rockets at him, killed ten of his friends and maimed countless others on the battleground of Afghanistan.
And now, speaking publicly for the first time, the 40-year-old Company Sergeant Major reveals how he came face to face with a Taliban fighter — and his enemy spoke perfect English with a northern accent.
The extraordinary exchange took place when Adam, a senior project manager for 2Para, was deployed to Afghanistan for a third time, in 2021, on rescue mission Operation Pitting.
In the biggest evacuation since the end of World War Two, just over 1,000 of Britain’s military saved 15,000 civilians from almost certain death in just two weeks, after the country fell under Taliban control.
It was as the Brits prepared to leave the war-torn country that Adam was approached by one of the Taliban at a Kabul checkpoint he had been manning.
He recalls: “In that area there were about two or three of them. They were doing what we were doing.
“There were a few of them going to every area where we were. They had been watching us for days.
“One of them approached me and asked me what we were doing and I replied, ‘Well, we’re leaving, and this now belongs to you. Are you happy with the situation here?’
Surreal experience
“And he said, ‘Yeah, mate, I’m happy’. It took me aback that he had an English accent.
“He wasn’t from Afghanistan.
“He’d obviously had a UK upbringing because he had a northern accent.
“It sounded like he was from Leeds or Bradford.
“It did take me aback.
“It was the most surreal experience in the world — after three previous tours of Afghanistan where we were solely fighting the Taliban, to have a conversation with someone about handing over a checkpoint so they would now have control.
“We looked at each other and there was that mutual hate but the understanding that this has to happen for us to leave their country.”
He adds: “They tried to blow me up, they fired rockets at me.
“Whether it was that individual or not, it sums up what they were like.”
Adam spoke up ahead of landmark new Channel 4 series Evacuation, which features never-before-heard testimony from the British servicemen and women who faced one of the most complex and intense military operations as the Taliban closed in.
In the three-part series, Adam candidly admits he questioned whether he wanted to “punch” the Taliban terrorist.
And he told The Sun: “That comes with the mutual hate.
“The amount of thoughts that run through your mind in a split second . . . the amount of friends I’d lost, the amount of situations I’ve been in with them.
“But also the fact I knew I had to act professionally in that moment.
“You had to act in a manner where it wasn’t going to cause more dramas than had already happened.
“They were obviously no more than 50 to 100 metres away at some points (on previous tours) because they were always mixed in with us.
“However, that was the closest I’d got to them.
“And that was it — that was the end of the Afghanistan campaign, something that had consumed my whole adult life.
“If I could cast the clocks back, never in a million years would I have thought that would happen.”
Adam had been in Starbucks with his wife Ali, 35, a corporal with the Adjutant General’s Corps, and their sons Oliver, 15, and six-year-old Max when he got the order to fly out to Afghanistan after the US decided to evacuate its troops from the country.
But the rescue mission was almost thwarted the day after the Taliban took control of the capital, Kabul, on August 15 when terrified civilians flooded the city’s airport, desperate to escape the hellhole.
Adam says: “There must have been 50,000 to 60,000 people in front of a line of 50 to 60 lads.
“We were just holding them back as best we could.
“I have been involved with the Afghan people for quite a while and that was pure desperation.
“I saw people clinging on to the undercarriage of an aircraft as it took off.”
The Paras’ heroic efforts in clearing the runway allowed 800 more British troops to arrive to start the process of flying out the thousands of civilians with links to the UK.
The non-combative operation was like no other tour of Afghanistan and Adam says: “It was the least kinetic tour I’ve ever been on but it was, without doubt, the most emotionally draining.
“People wouldn’t comprehend the things we were seeing — an old lady being crushed to death against a wall, my lads handing over dead babies, saying, ‘Sir, I think this one’s dead as well’.
“I have never seen that on my operational tours.”
Adam was in charge of 120 servicemen and women, and for the vast majority it was their first operation.
He says: “They were fresh out of training, dealing with these sorts of things on a daily basis.”
Many were emotionally affected by what they saw, and he recalls on more than one occasion young troops pulling people with babies and children out of the crowd, even when the family didn’t have the correct paperwork, to say they could come to the UK.
He says: “Who is not going to think, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to get that baby out of there’?”
Even so, Adam had to order his soldiers to send them back, or they would have been overrun.
But the documentary does also feature a young Afghan family who Adam did manage to save from the jaws of hell.
Burhan Vesal, a former interpreter for the British Forces, his wife Narcis and their young son Sepehr feared for their lives when the Taliban swept to power and they were evacuated in the final days of the mass airlift.
Adam says: “I saved him. I pulled the family out of the crowd.
“His family could not be more grateful and I thought, ‘Oh my god, what have you been through?’
“I remember pulling out a cigarette and offering it to him and his wife.
“He said, ‘Sorry, I don’t smoke’. His wife looked at me in disgust and said, ‘I’m a doctor and smoking is bad for you’. She then snatched the cigarette and stamped it out on the ground.”
He adds with a laugh: “And I looked back at the crowd and what I’d just pulled them from.”
The Vesal family now live in Aberdeen after a member of the public, Helga Macfarlane, heard about them and offered them the flat she owns — and Adam hopes one day to be reunited with them.
Suicide bomber
He says: “I would love to meet them again.”
Amid the chaos in Kabul there were reports that people were kidnapping babies in a bid to jump the queue in their desperation to get out of Afghanistan.
RAF Police Squadron Leader Di Bird’s job was to oversee who got on the flights out of the country.
In the documentary she tells how civilians would try to hide injuries because they were so desperate to fly, including one man who had a hole in his head.
She says: “We had been talking for a while, showing me all these bits of paper, and I said to him, ‘You haven’t shown me enough’.
“And he unravelled his bandage and there was this hole in his head and he just said, ‘Is that enough?’”
On August 26 Adam narrowly avoided death when a suicide bomber struck at the airport, killing 13 US soldiers and 170 civilians, including two Brits.
A soldier in the film recalls how bodies were “littered everywhere”. He added: “It was like people had been put in a blender.”
At the time Adam had been at the city’s Baron Hotel, where evacuees were being processed.
Yet just half an hour earlier he had been standing in the blast spot when British troops were told to move out after receiving intelligence that an Islamic State suicide bomber might strike. Adam, who joined the Paras in 2001, the year of the 9/11 attack in New York, says his experience of the Taliban was a world away from that of his soldiers on Operation Pitting.
He says: “They were just lads dressed in black to them. They knew they were the Taliban but they didn’t have any connection to them, whereas me, my Platoon Sergeant, we’d obviously fought them on previous tours so we had a different connection.”
Adam, who is now with 3Para after being promoted to Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant overseeing logistics for 1,200 personnel, says the Taliban were “ruthless” with the Afghan people.
He says: “If they saw them giving us water or anything, they would torture them.”
And he adds: “The Taliban had something we could not do — we couldn’t dominate. Every time we’d secure a village, we had to extract.”
He lost ten friends in Afghanistan, including Lance Corporal James Bateman, 29, killed in a Taliban ambush in 2008. He says: “That hit me hard. He was someone very close to me and I wasn’t going to see him again.”
Adam says out of the soldiers who joined him in 2002 on his first tour of Afghanistan, Operation Fingal, only three are still serving — due to deaths, injuries and others choosing to leave the military.
He says: “I’m proud of the fact I was in Afghanistan first and in there last.
“But I didn’t want to be on that plane flying back because we wanted to save everyone.
“I would have had no refusals if I had turned around and said, ‘We are going back to save 15,000 more’.
“Not one would have given it a second thought.”
- Evacuation starts on July 2 at 9pm on Channel 4, airing over three consecutive nights, and is available to stream as a box set on channel4.com.
THE LIVING HELL THAT STILL HAUNTS OUR FORCES
By Jerome Starkey, Defence Editor, The Sun
IT is hard to watch soldiers sob as they dredge up memories of the Kabul airlift. But it is even harder to turn away.
If there is one thing I take away from Channel 4’s must-see series Evacuation it is that it is OK to cry. I did.
We lost. We fled. We abandoned countless friends and allies. Evacuation doesn’t dwell on how or why that happened.
It tells the stories of brave men and women who carried out the biggest military airlift since World War Two.
I was in Kabul as Operation Pitting unfolded, but I was outside the airport. In Evacuation I got to see the story of inside the wire – the courage and professionalism of soldiers, medics, aviators and police who put themselves in danger to get 15,000 people out.
We can be proud of the teenage soldiers who were forced to make life-or-death decisions over who was saved and who was not.
We can be proud of the veterans who worked with the Taliban – their sworn enemies on previous tours – because the Taliban could control the crowds and we could not.
We can be proud of the troops who ran into danger moments after a suicide blast killed 13 US Marines and 170 civilians.
And we can be proud of the young female medics who delivered a baby amid the carnage of the airport hospital.
But there is no triumphalism. We cannot be proud of desperate Afghans dropping to their deaths from the undercarriage of a C-17 military transport plane.
Or the deadly crushes outside Kabul airport, or desperate mothers passing babies over razor wire to soldiers.
The documentary glosses over epic failures to predict or prepare for what happened.
But it reminds us of the mighty toll those failures took on our Armed Forces, who are haunted by the things they saw and did in service of their country.
One soldier said: “We weren’t shooting at people but it was harder, physically and mentally.”
Another, 2 Para Private Fahim, says: “We shut the gate in their face. That bothers me a bit.”