![]() Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was demanding answers. According to the news, the SF troops were doing nothing. However, the news reports coming out had painted a very different picture of what was happening. The Special Forces men advising Dostum and his NA had been in two pitched battles at Bishqab and Cobaki, riding into battle on horseback and American air power had turned the tide of each in favor of the lighter armed and numerically inferior SF/NA coalition. Abdul Rashid Dostum had his eyes set on Mazar-e-Sharif, because that city, close to the border of Uzbekistan controlled the road to Kabul. The Northern Alliance (NA) troops didn’t have many vehicles, many of them were riding horses and when ODA-595 met with the regional commander, they quickly were issued a horse and rode for eight hours to his mountain headquarters. ![]() These men though small in number and very lightly armed would soon be changing history. Another SF A-Team, ODA-555 landed hundreds of miles south and was also linking up with other Northern Alliance fighters. ![]() The men were ODA-595 from the 5th SFG along with two Air Force Combat Controllers. In the early morning hours of Oct.19, 2001, an MH-47E Chinook landed in Darya Suf Valley in Afghanistan and 14 heavily laden men alit and gathered their equipment and extra gear and were met by Northern Alliance fighters along with four US CIA men assigned to assist the guerrillas. Infiltration: Just weeks after 9/11, the US would begin the process of taking the Taliban to task for allowing al-Qaeda to use their territory. And in doing so the Green Berets of the 5th Special Forces Group (5th SFG) had conducted the first horseback mounted attack by US troops in the 21st Century. It was a classic UW (Unconventional Warfare) success story showing what a handful of Green Berets can do working with a dedicated and tough guerrilla force. By the time the Taliban withdrew anywhere between 300-500 had been killed, another 500 captured and about 1000 defected. The Taliban had been in control of the city since 1998 and had fortified the area with a tremendous amount of reinforcement.īut the Northern Alliance teams, with a few Green Beret and Air Force Combat Controller advisors, harnessed the might of the US Air Force and decimated the Taliban or their proxies wherever they massed. US intelligence estimates thought that the city would hold out until nearly mid-2002. The taking of the city was somewhat of a shock for both the coalition troops as well as the Taliban. This documentary is their story and a look at the bourbon they created.The fall of Mazar-e-Sharif on November 9, 2001, was the first major defeat of the Taliban and was taken by the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan (Northern Alliance), along with US Army Special Forces A-Teams and precision Air Force bombardment. The Horse Soldier bottle features an image of a soldier mounted on a horse with glass molded in steel from the World Trade Center to remember those who lost their lives on 9/11. Their flagship product is Horse Soldier Bourbon Whiskey. Mark and Bob along with Scott Neill and other Green Berets got back together and founded the American Freedom Distillery. Mitch Nelson, a character based on Mark Nutsch, and Michael Shannon as Hal Spencer, a character based on Bob Pennington. The members of ODA 595 were also featured in a 2017 documentary called “Legion of Brothers” and then came the Jerry Bruckheimer–produced film, “12 Strong” that was released in 2018. Their story is the subject of the book, “Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan” that was published in 2010. One of those teams, Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) 595, had to rely on horses instead of trucks and tanks to accomplish their mission. Just days after the 9/11 attacks, several teams of Green Berets were inserted into Afghanistan to liberate the region from the Taliban in a mission known as Task Force Dagger.
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