Pakistani F-16 "Engaged" One Of The MH-47G Chinooks Three Times During Bin Laden Raid

[Valin]

The War Zone

These details come from a new interview that also says the Obama Administration tried at least twice to capture Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.

Joseph Trevithick

March 17, 2020

The flight lead during the raid that led to the death of Osama Bin Laden, who was piloting one of the MH-47G Chinooks employed in that operation, says that a Pakistani F-16 Viper fighter jet "engaged" his helicopter three separate times as he flew toward Afghanistan during the exfiltration phase of the mission. The now-retired U.S. Army officer also says he was involved personally in two attempts during the Obama Administration to capture Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in Iraq. The Trump Administration decided to kill Soleimani, who had been head of Iran's Quds Force, in a drone strike in Baghdad in January.

Retired U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer 5 Douglas Englen offered these and other previously unreported details about operations from throughout his career with the elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, also known as the Night Stalkers, in an exclusive interview with journalist and documentarian Alex Quade for Military Times, which is worth reading in its entirety. He only decided to share his personal memories after prompting from former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Leon Panetta and retired U.S. Navy Admiral William McRaven, both of whom were heavily involved in the planning execution of the raid on Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan in 2011, according to Quade. 

"I’m telling it to you," Englen told Military Times. "There’s never been an accurate air piece conveyed on what happened that night."

(Snip)

Beyond these and other interesting details about the Bin Laden Raid, Englen also says that he directly took part in two attempts to capture Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in Iraq, once in 2013 and again in 2016. These are significant revelations given the ongoing debate around the Trump Administration's controversial decision to kill Solemani outside Baghdad International Airport in January and its legal justification for doing so. For years, Solemani ran Iran's Quds Force, which conducts various covert overseas operations overseas and provides different levels of support to various proxy forces throughout the Middle East and beyond.

Now-retired U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal has said that he declined an opportunity to kill the Iranian officer in Iraq in 2007. McChrystal was head of JSOC at the time. The following year, President George W. Bush reportedly shot down a joint proposal from the CIA and Israel's Mossad to assassinate Soleimani in Syria.

That President Barack Obama was willing to try to capture Solemani is certainly an interesting addition to the discussion and it's not clear what the justification would have been for doing so. In 2011, the Obama Administration had sanctioned the Iranian officer over a Quds Force plot to kill the Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States in Washington, D.C.

"It wasn’t ‘capture or kill,’ so if we couldn’t guarantee a capture, then we couldn’t take it to the next level," Englen said in his interview with Military Times. "But we were minutes behind him and his vehicles in Iraq, and we could’ve gotten him. But our rules of engagement was, 'capture only.'"

As already noted, the first to Englen's interview with Military Times is well worth reading in full. Englen was involved in some of the earliest U.S. military operations in Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, including the mission to save Hamid Karzai, who later became president of the country, from getting captured by the Taliban. He also took part in the opening phases of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

(Snip)

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H/T Rantberg