Just two months ago, its streets were deemed too dangerous for an American to journey through. To reach the crash site, one must wind slowly through the ancient, narrow streets of the villages of Logar to reach the Tangi Valley in Wardak. Photo by Jake Simkin for Coffee or Die Magazine. Near the site of the Extortion 17 crash stands a memorial to Taliban fighters killed in the August 2011 battle during which Extortion 17 was shot down. To try to find the truth and to understand how the landscape has changed, I arranged to visit the Tangi Valley and the small village where Extortion 17 went down. Tahir had escaped the raid, and the SEAL assault force immediately flew to the target area to aid in the hunt for “squirters” - the term US forces used for enemy fighters who escaped an initial strike. ![]() The helicopter was rushing to the nearby scene of a raid executed earlier by Army Rangers seeking a so-called high-value target, a Taliban leader named Qari Tahir in the country’s Wardak province, just southwest of Kabul and adjacent to Logar. Also on board were three Air Force special operators from the 24th Special Tactics Squadron, several specially trained Navy sailors attached to the SEAL team, an Army flight crew of two pilots, and three crew members. The US dead included 17 Navy SEALs, most from the elite SEAL Team 6, the same unit (though not the same men) that had killed Usama Bin Laden just three months before. Those 38 casualties included 30 American troops and eight Afghans, plus a military working dog. With one RPG, the Taliban shot an Army CH-47D Chinook from the sky, killing all 38 on board. Extortion 17 was among the Taliban’s greatest single moments of battlefield triumph in the 20-year war with US forces, and one with which a young Taliban official might be tempted to associate himself. He says he wasn’t the one who fired the rocket-propelled grenade it was a “friend of his” hiding out with him. Muhajer never flinches as he tells his story, but he also never looks my way, as I am a woman. “Losing friends was a bad memory, but good because our friends shot down American helicopter.” “It was a good and bad memory of my life,” he says. ![]() He says one of those battles - or at least moments of combat - was the 2011 shootdown of Extortion 17, the deadliest single moment of the 20-year war for the American military.Īkif Muhajer, who believes he is 32, says he was part of the Taliban team that shot down Extortion 17 in August 2011. LOGAR PROVINCE, Afghanistan - In a stuffy office covered with white-and-black Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan flags and full of Taliban foot soldiers sipping cold tea, Akif Muhajer sits poised and composed, every bit the administrator he now is as the newly appointed director of information and culture in the Taliban-controlled Logar province.īut from behind his desk, he speaks casually about his many years waging war in the mountains, his weapons, and the battles he saw.
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