Who are the Special Forces?
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 11 August 2016
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When the BBC obtained exclusive pictures of Special Air Service soldiers fighting Islamic State militants in Syria, the Ministry of Defence refused to comment.
British Special Forces are now on the ground in Libya as well - although nobody ever voted in favour sending them, and there has never been a debate in Parliament about it.
In fact, it's a long-standing cross-party tradition that the government doesn't comment on the operations of the Special Air Service, the Special Boat Service, and other Special Forces units.
In this edition of The Briefing Room, David Aaronovitch calls on expert researchers and former military offers to trace the development and current activities of Britain's Special Forces.
Who are they and how many of them are there? Why, when we talk about military operations, do Special Forces not count as "boots on the ground"? And why are their activities so secret?
CONTRIBUTORS:
Mark Urban, Newsnight's defence and diplomatic correspondent
Robin Horsfall, former SAS member
Anthony King, Professor of War Studies, University of Warwick
Emily Knowles, Project Manager of the Remote Control Project, Oxford Research Group
Dr Jon Moran, Reader in Security, University of Leicester
Lt Col Stephen Grenier, author and former US Special Forces officer
PRODUCER: Mike Wendling.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Mike. I'm one of the producers here at the briefing room. And recently, the BBC |
| 0:05.4 | obtained some exclusive pictures of British special forces on the ground in Syria. That's |
| 0:11.2 | despite the fact that officially there are not supposed to be any British troops on the ground |
| 0:16.1 | in Syria at all. So why are they there? Where else are they? And why can they operate without a |
| 0:22.0 | parliamentary debate or a vote? These are some of the questions that intrigued us here at the |
| 0:27.0 | briefing room and we set out to answer them. Here's David Aronovich. |
| 0:32.4 | Hello. Earlier this year, Sarah Elizabeth Williams, a reporter working for the Times in Jordan, made a discovery. |
| 0:41.0 | The story goes back to January 2016, the beginning of this year, in an area called Rukban, |
| 0:47.1 | which is in the far, far eastern stretch of the Jordan-Syria border, where you had a pile up of |
| 0:52.2 | more than 10,000 Syrian refugees. |
| 0:55.0 | Now there's an old Jordanian military base out there and the press were given access to some of the refugees but not in this one area. |
| 1:06.0 | And I thought that was a little bit odd. A month later, the new Syrian army deployed into southern Syria. |
| 1:13.6 | A month after that, the US Department of Defense referred to having used these |
| 1:17.6 | high Mars rocket systems, these very powerful rockets, from the Jordanian base. |
| 1:22.6 | So that told me, okay, it's not just the Jordanians up there who are doing some pretty significant things. |
| 1:30.6 | I then spoke with insiders and slowly put together a picture that indeed, not just American, |
| 1:37.8 | but British special forces were active up there and going over the border into Syria. |
| 1:42.6 | This week, the BBC obtained exclusive pictures |
| 1:45.6 | showing British Special Forces operating in Syria. |
| 1:49.0 | They were shown carrying sniper rifles, |
| 1:51.2 | heavy machine guns and anti-tank missiles. |
| 1:54.4 | So today, who are the special forces? |
... |
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