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IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN COMFORTING TO THINK THAT the high ground was the enemy soldiers' only advantage. It might have been convenient to think of them as desperate, as having climbed to the peak in the dark of night, alerted by the clatter of attack helos and the crash of bombs initiating Operation Anaconda. But the enemy who had taken up this established position overlooking the valley, and who were there to stay, were Chechens, and they were superb mountain fighters.
The Chechens had come from afar—a thousand miles to the north and west of Takur Ghar—in many ways besides. Four months earlier, they had fled Jalalabad in northern Afghanistan for the mountain redoubts and caves at Tora Bora, near the Pakistani border. Surviving a relentless American aerial bombardment, about 1,600 young, zealous, and well-trained foreign terrorists, among them these Chechens, had slipped the noose to fight another day. In their desire to face the Americans in a fight, the Chechens had tried to stop Arab al-Qaeda fighters from fleeing Tora Bora and heading across the Pakistani border. And while most of the al-Qaeda at Tora Bora had done just that, an inspection of the Tora Bora caves by the U.S. Special Forces 5th Group after the bombings had harvested intelligence indicating that as many as 1,000 Arab Afghans, Chechens, Pakistanis, and Uzbeks had moved overland on foot and mule, by bicycle and cart, a hundred miles south to an ancient valley in Paktia province called Shah-i-Kot, the “Place of the King.” They had not traveled to hide from American and coalition forces; they could have sought refuge on the tribal territories' side of the Pakistani border if that was their motive. They had come to the Shah-i-Kot for a showdown with the Americans in a place of their own choosing.
With a unique geography that was as suited for military defense as any medieval European keep, the Shah-i-Kot consisted of steep ridgelines overlooking a turbulent and hostile high-altitude terrain along a north-south axis that measured no more than 9 miles by 9 miles. As a battle space, it compared in size to the Civil War battlefield at Chancellorsville. The Shah-i-Kot was the Afghans' Masada, their final defensive place, and it had served them for more than two thousand years—against the forces of Alexander the Great in 327 BC, against British colonial troops in the 1840s, and against the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, when they annihilated 250 Russian soldiers in a day, making the Shah-i-Kot the Russians' most costly field of battle since World War II.
Defenders of the Shah-i-Kot had never tasted defeat. Over the course of 165 years, they had developed and improved their fortifications, digging myriad caves and reinforcing them with concrete, stocking them with weapons, food, and other supplies. Some caves even contained libraries and kitchens. Precisely placed mirrors conveyed sunlight to the deepest interiors. They coordinated these positions with interlocking weapons firing lanes, having long ago calibrated and sighted their Russian- and Chinese-made 82 mm mortars, 57 mm recoilless rifles, RPGs, and machine guns. The overlooks offered the defenders an advantage of ambush and surprise. Historically, invading ground troops had marched into the valley and did not march out. Defenders swept down from the steep walls of the eastern mountains; on the western side, they fought from fortifications on sheer heights along the Whale. The valley trapped invaders in a perfect killing zone. And if bullets did not kill their enemies, they fell to altitude sickness and hypothermia at 8,500 feet above sea level on the valley floor.
The Chechens on Takur Ghar had already fled a secessionist war in their own country that had ground to a stalemate the year before, the latest spasm of a conflict with the Russians that dated from the late eighteenth century. With the Sufi-influenced Sunni Chechens fighting the “infidel” Russians, mujahideen from Arab countries had supported their jihad. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda had supplied the funds. Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, Chechen mujahideen fighters had migrated to assist the Afghans against their common enemy. And when the Russians retreated from Afghanistan, the Chechens, with no home to return to, had stayed on, believing in a larger jihad to convert the world. Bin Laden found these veteran fighters easy recruits. He paid them well and gave them a renewed purpose. They had settled in al-Qaeda training camps like Zhawar Kili al-Badr, where bin Laden officially had declared war on America in 1998.
In receipt of intelligence about al-Qaeda moving into the Shah-i-Kot from Tora Bora, CENTCOM ordered the commanders in Afghanistan to get out of their garrisons and find enemy to kill. The 101st Airborne and the 10th Mountain divisions were sitting in the Afghan city of Kandahar and farther north in the country of Uzbekistan, doing nothing. With a desire to get in the fight, the 10th Mountain Division's CO, General Hagenbeck, agreed to lead Afghan forces in the first large offensive operation with conventional forces in the war.
As the plan took shape, elements of the Afghan National Army under General Zia Lodin would form a hammer to pound Taliban and al-Qaeda forces against the anvil of the 10th Mountain and the 101st Airborne divisions. Under the heat of pursuit, enemy forces would run right into the muzzles of waiting American guns. The enemy's decision to flee was essential to the strategy's success. Taliban and al-Qaeda had always run in the past when confronted with a choice between fight and flight. There was no reason to believe they would behave differently this time.
The American planners, of course, hoped to use the element of surprise, but they conceded that before Operation Anaconda even began. Overflights of intelligence-gathering aircraft had warned al-Qaeda and the Taliban of the Americans' interest, if not their intent. They had taken up fortified positions on the flanks of the eastern mountains and the western flank of the Whale, and they spread out, waiting for the Americans to arrive.
The Chechen al-Qaeda fighters linked up on the peak of Takur Ghar with Taliban fighters from Afghanistan's Pushtun and Dari ethnic groups, who knew the terrain from long use and had already manned the bunkers on the peak, overseeing weapons hidden in bulging caches—grenades, RPGs, and ammo for machine guns and mortars. The Chechens, once they reached the summit, worked a command and control network from under a tattered green tarp stretched between a fir tree and a rock outcropping. They used reliable radios, no more complicated than over-the-counter RadioShack walkie-talkies, to coordinate a 360-degree defensive perimeter. They were ready for whatever came up at them, or came down on them from the skies, with a commitment to stay, a ferocity fueled by anger, and a battle experience that American forces had not faced since Vietnam.