NewsTask Force Black hits No 1 spot
Mark Urban's memoir Task Force Black (Little, Brown 2010) has débuted at number one in the Sunday Times non-fiction bestseller list.
When British and American forces invaded Iraq in April 2003, their intelligence operations got to work looking for the WMD their governments had promised us were there. They quickly realised no such weapons existed. Instead they become faced with an ever-increasing spiral of extremism and violence that was almost impossible to understand, let alone contain.
Task Force Black tells the story of what happened next, one of the most dramatic and sustained operations in our recent military history. Up against the wall, under the aegis of the joint forces commanded by Major General McChrystal, our men moved into action using the wide variety of aircraft and weaponry at their disposal. 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, destroying the terrorist threat and saving lives.
‘In this ground-breaking investigation into the SAS war in Iraq between 2003 and 2009, Mark Urban...has put together one of the few truly authentic accounts of the modern SAS outside the world of fiction' The Sunday Times
‘Few reporters succeed in cultivating any sources within the closed world of the British special forces; Urban has found dozens who have spoken with unprecedented candour. The result is gripping and troubling in equal measure and an invaluable addition to the increasingly comprehensive literature on the Iraq war' The Observer