Task Force Black: The Explosive True Story of the SAS and the Secret War in Iraq
Written by Mark Urban
Narrated by Jonathan Keeble
3.5/5
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Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
When Allied forces invaded Iraq in April 2003 their intelligence operations began looking for the WMD, quickly realising no such weapons existed. Instead they become faced with an ever-increasing spiral of extremism and violence.
Combining intelligence with brute force, the SAS went on the attack, night after night targeting Al-Qaeda and other insurgent groups with an intensity never before practiced by the service.
A W. F. Howes audio production.
Mark Urban
Mark Urban is a broadcaster and historian. Priory to working for the BBC he was defence correspondent for the Independent for four years, covering the end of the Cold War and the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. He is the acclaimed author of The Skripal Files, Task Force Black: The explosive true story of the SAS and the secret war in Iraq; Big Boys’ Rules: The SAS and the secret struggle against the IRA and Rifles: Six years with Wellington’s legendary sharpshooters. Mark read international relations at the London School of Economics and served for a short time in the British army.
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Reviews for Task Force Black
16 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Occasionally hard to follow due to plethora of units, affiliations and names, and this being a multi-sided conflict, approaching Hobbes' bellum omnium contra omnes: conventional forces, paras,SAS,SBS, brits, americans, shia, sunni, alquaeda, awakening, Iranians, Iraq itself splintering - so the narrative line can be hard to grasp. The main message seems to be: hard-hitting special ops with good intelligence ( mainly from cosying up to the US element) works, at least as a crude numbers game. So kill more of the "baddies" at a faster rate than they can recruit, i.e."the surge". A flaw in this arithmetic, not pointed out by Urban, is that the recruitment pool is virtually unlimited, and once you ease off, the baddies pretty soon have it their own way. Which is what has happened since the book was written. Depressing reading.In the early stages they spent much resources hitting on the Baathist leaders, who themselves said "why are you bothering with me? We're a busted flush around here". The coalition really didn't have a clue of the hornet's nest they were poking their boots into in Iraq. Alquaeda are strongly present though i would guess they weren't there in Saddam's day. A special case of self-fulfilling prophecy. Most of the themes and threads of 2006-8 are still the same, with the addition of Syrian fallout. Urban makes little explicit judgment on the whole, though seems to favour military effectiveness, as in Surge strategy. Any soldier reading this might thrill to the action sequences, but must despair at the pointlessness, especially in view of subsequent developments.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A good general history of special forces in Iraq by a author that is very pro-war. A little too close to the matter at hand, to be unbiased, but interesting politics and also interesting to find out the nature of behind the scenes operations