Luke Griffin, Facebook Page Photo.
Man, for a first post coming back home, this one is a tough one to write about. My heart goes out to the friends and family of those that were killed, and this is a difficult time for the G4S family. This is the second attack on G4S folks (March of this year) and this kind of thing can definitely impact the morale of folks on the ground and especially during the holidays.
With that said, I wanted to write about this and give folks a chance to correct the record or add to the story. There is no AAR on this incident and everything I have on it is from open source or from folks on Facebook that have brought forth information. So with any of this stuff I have posted, please feel free to comment below to correct the record.
My other intent is for other security folks to use this for research and learn from it. The value of incidents like this is that other folks that are performing similar type duties elsewhere in the world, can learn from what happened in incidents like this.
The attack happened November 27, 2018 at 0630 PM. This is from Tolo. For timing and cause, the Taliban said it was in retaliation for an air strike that killed some civilians. It was also timed right after a conference in Geneva where President Ghani spoke of appointing a team to seek a peace deal which would take five years to implement. There have been numerous attacks recently, and in my view, they are a sign that the Taliban wants leverage in the ongoing peace talks.
The coalition have also dropped a record number of ordinance throughout the country in an effort to help Afghan forces stop the Taliban. The Taliban have definitely taken more territory in 2018 and hold a pretty good chunk of Afghanistan.
The method of attack was pretty simple. The suicide bomber drove a water tanker packed with explosives to the gate, outside of the G4S compound in Pul-e-Charkhil, in Kabul’s Police District 9 area. They also call this the Anjuman base and it has other stuff nearby like the Green Village. Once the bomb was detonated and the front gate guards manning the entry control point were taken out, an assault force stormed the compound. The blast was big, and TOLO showed the damage in this video.
This assault force was apparently armed with ‘small arms and rockets‘, so I assume AK’s and RPG’s. No word if they had explosive vests and I have no better information than that.
They fought their way in, sent everyone running to bunkers, and were met by the responding quick reaction force. So all together, there were five attackers- one suicide truck driver that died in the blast, and four assaulters that entered the compound by foot.
For time frame, this attack lasted 10 hours from when the assault started. So this was an all night affair, and a pretty extensive clearing operation. One security guard told TOLO news that one of the attackers was alive until early Thursday morning. According to the local Afghan police chief in charge of the district there, this is the break down of casualties.
Col. Bismillah Taban, the police of chief of the district where the attack happened, said six Afghans and a British citizen were killed in the attack, and 27 others — 11 Nepalese, 11 Afghans, and 5 British — were wounded. Most of the casualties came from the initial blast, he said.
Col. Taban said the last of the four attackers were killed nearly 10 hours after the assault begun, just before dawn.
“The police were moving slow because there was a hostage situation inside, where the staff of the firm were stuck in bunkers,” he said. “We rescued 330 people from inside.”
G4S made a statement about the incident and listed casualty figures on their Facebook page. Feel free to go there to show your condolences or seek answers to any questions. They said five of their employees were killed, and 32 were injured.
One of the individuals that was killed in the counter attack was 33 year old Luke Griffin. He was a British citizen from the Rainhill, Merseyside area, and had worked for the company for 8 years. He had done time in Iraq and Afghanistan as a contractor and in the military. Luke had served in the 16th Regiment Royal Artillery in Afghanistan when he was in the military. Apparently he was with one of the PSD teams that G4S runs in Afghanistan, and responded to this incident as part of a quick reaction force. He is a father of one child, a son, and husband of Helen Morris.
Colleagues of Luke mentioned that there are many people alive today because of his actions. If anyone else would like to further fill in the details of what happened to Luke, or of the efforts of his quick reaction force, please fill free to contact me or write below in the comments section. This will be on Facebook as well. The other folks that were killed were his fellow Afghans, and I would like to hear about their actions as well. My intent is to make sure their story is heard and it is correct. Here is a quote from the Sun.
A suicide car bomber detonated a huge device at the gate of the Anjuman base near the city’s airport before heavily armed fighters swarmed inside.
But they were pushed back in brave defensive action spearheaded by British security teams.
Luke – a veteran infantryman who saw action in the Iraq and Afghan campaigns – is understood to have been cut down after grabbing his weapon and dashing into the firefight.
Five other British G4S staff were wounded in the battle – including one with blast injuries to his face and another with shrapnel wounds to his arm and hand.
Dad-of-one Luke, from Rainhill, Merseyside but originally from Tunbridge Wells, Kent, was a member of one of the four G4S “quick reaction teams” securing the sprawling base.
My other thought here was the loss of Nepalese and Afghans. The Nepalese lost a quite a few folks in a 2016 attack, and the Afghans as a whole have lost many at the service of private companies in this war. Their sacrifice, like any contractor in this war, must not be forgotten.
In the company statement, numerous groups came to help out with security and medical support. No mention of specific groups, other than police were involved with clearing operations. I have to think that the surviving security forces were involved with clearing operations, as well as partner NATO nations. Possibly special operations folks, that type of thing. There were apparently 230 to 330 hostages on the compound that required rescuing, according to various reports. They hid in safe rooms and/or bunkers, and probably stood by while the police and adjacent forces cleared. Like the security guard mentioned at TOLO, there was one last guy that was killed in the morning, so that means he could have been killing and wounding folks all through the night.
No word on aviation support, but I have to imagine something showed up to help out. If anyone has anything to add for that, please feel free to comment.
As for commentary, incidents like this highlight the difficulty of securing a compound near a main road. Typically you want stand off distance between your ECP and any kind of access. You want folks to be able to survive a blast like this, so that at least they can counter a ground assault. In this case, the entire ECP defense team was probably wiped out or wounded and the assaulters made entry. Which brings up the the next point–quick reaction forces.
These days, if you cannot move the compound to someplace where you have stand off distance, then focus needs to be on really building up the blast walls/defenses and ensuring the quick reaction force is actually a ‘quick’ reaction force. Can it react within seconds and minutes of an incident? Often times, jihadists and assaulters that the Taliban use, are armed with small arms and explosive vests. They are literally fighting their way into pockets of human concentration and quickly. Think Dining Facilities, bunkers, class rooms, etc. Anything that will give them a high concentration of humans, so that they could shoot them or detonate their vest and kill them. So it is imperative to have a means of stopping such a force before they reach these zones.
Drilling and training both the security force and those that you are protecting is essential. From what it looks like, folks ran to bunkers and designated safe zones. The goal is to get them into places that will give them cover and allow them to survive an assault like this until the clearing forces can do their job. But time is everything, and with these types of attacks, the assaulters have the advantage. They could kick off their attack with a big boom like this, and everyone is dazed and there is chaos everywhere–which assaulters will take advantage of. Or the attack is kicked off from the inside– like the typical green on blue attacks. It could be both, and the goal is violence of action to create the maximum amount of shock to the nervous systems of their targets and to inflict the most amount of damage and death. So response via a quick reaction team is critical to these types of deals and preparing the occupants and facility is equally critical.
Medical is another area to focus on. As police and security are trying to clear, it might be impossible for medical folks to get into a specific area to treat injured. So ensuring security/clients have some kind of medical training to handle injuries until forces get to them is very important. Tourniquet training, and other basics is advisable. We are talking about blast wounds and gunshot wounds.
Communications can be crap during a deal like this. Most basic coms that companies use, shut down when overloaded with a ton of traffic. Repeaters cannot handle everyone trying to talk on the same net, or folks overwhelm the channels. So a simple thing like a communications plan, that includes primary and secondary and tertiary means of communication needs to be worked out so that it can account for this type of scenario. I am sure folks were using WhatsApp or cellphones or whatever they had, in order to communicate during the incident. No word on what coms were like for this deal, but it is definitely something that is a factor.
Clearing operations is very dangerous and very difficult. Does G4S train their guys for that? I don’t know, nor will I speculate. The thing to be aware of is that one bullet can go through multiple pods or trailers that you see on sites like this. Whatever safe room or bunker you designate, you need to keep this in mind and make sure it is actually protective. That and coordinating with the responding and adjacent forces can be a nightmare. Training and drills are key to making sure everyone is aware of what is involved with this stuff. I do not know if anyone was harmed during the actual clearing operations. Remember, they didn’t get the last attacker until the following morning, and so that is a long night of slow and detailed clearing of the compound. Clearing forces get tired, or spooked, and the possibility of shooting an innocent person is there.
Finally, it is often incidents like this that really show the strengths and weaknesses of whatever plan the company had. I would highly recommend that G4S do an extensive after action report on what happened, and conclude with some lessons learned. That document could then be used in future training, and an effort should be made to bring in any of the survivors of the incident to talk to the class about it. It is much more impactful to have those that were there explain the who, what, where, when and why of the whole thing. It has value because it could save lives in future incidents. Unfortunately, most companies do not do this and they do not share that information with the outside world if they do. More than likely because of possible liability reasons or lack of leadership pushing the issue and making it a priority.
As a security contractor and student of my profession, I always like to promote the idea that we should all take the time to learn from these types of incidents. Read the available after action reviews, wikis, open source reports, blogs, forums, etc. to get a better picture of what happened. Know your enemy, and know yourself as they say. Reach out to those that were there and ask them about it if you can. It is amazing what little details come up in conversation that were not mentioned in reports. I also study video footage, because most jihadists love to post their work. Most importantly, apply Kaizen or continuous improvement to your defense. Todays enemies are constantly evolving and seeking new ways of attack. We need to be constantly staying one step ahead of them and operating within their decision making cycle to win that fight. –Matt
Edit: 12/22/2018 Tim Lynch of Free Range International fame is now writing over at a website called The Freq Media and his series is called the Afghanistan Weekly. He wrote an in-depth post about this attack and the history of security work in Kabul. Check it out here.