Faulty intelligence meant the eight-man patrol was dropped in the middle of 3,000 Iraqi troops. The Bravo Two Zero patrol was one of several SAS teams sent deep into Iraq on 22 January 1991 to target Scud missile launchers.
Mark Lucas, McNab's agent, said: 'The great British public set a great deal more store by accounts by men who were there than by the evidence of highly unreliable Iraqis with extraordinarily clear memories.'
McNab's allies say the figure came from US military intelligence. Asher says that, despite accounts of a series of bloody firefights with Iraqi troops, the SAS troopers did not come up against substantial numbers of soldiers and claims that 250 Iraqi soldiers were killed are false. One point of argument is how many men the patrol killed. Ryan, who was decorated for his role in the mission, said Asher had been naive and had handed the Iraqis a 'propaganda victory'.įriends of McNab, who is in America working on the film of his second book, said that he had found Asher's allegations 'infuriating'.
I am not proud of having killed - it still gives me nightmares - but I am proud of having. All I will say now is that I know I killed a number of Iraqi soldiers. He went on: 'If he wants to come and meet me face to face, alone somewhere, we can sort this out in the way that SAS men do. Last week Ryan, who is working as a bodyguard, expressed 'contempt and disgust' for 'what Asher had said about '. 'I'd have been very happy to find that they were all true, but rigorous investigation showed they were not,' Asher said at his home in Morocco. Others - including SAS members in the Gulf at the time - have joined Asher to accuse McNab and others of 'embellishing' their stories. Michael Asher, a former Territorial SAS man and desert explorer, claimed that interviews with eyewitnesses in Iraq had shown that the stories recounted by men such as Andy McNab, who led the Bravo Two Zero patrol, or Chris Ryan, the only one of its members to reach safety in Syria after the patrol was 'compromised', were flawed.Īsher, in a film broadcast last week on Channel 4, accused the pair of vastly exaggerating the number of Iraqis they killed and 'embellishing' their accounts. This weekend troopers on the famed patrol launched a counter-attack on another SAS member who questioned their accounts.
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