In 1982, during the insurgent war in Afghanistan, the Soviet Army carried out a well-planned attack on a target in southern Afghanistan, in their largest airborne operation up to that time, and destroyed it. There was just one problem—it was the wrong target.
By 1982, the USSR had been at war with Muslim resistance fighters in Afghanistan for over two years, and the conflict seemed no closer to ending. The Russians controlled the cities, but the entire countryside belonged to the mujahideen, who were waging a successful guerrilla war against the invaders.
In March 1982, the Russians decided to strike a blow at the mujahideen by taking out their supply base at the village of Robat Jaali, in southern Afghanistan just a few miles from the borders with Iran and Pakistan, an area known to the Russian pilots as “The Bermuda Triangle”. According to Soviet military intelligence, this was a training base with around 60 rebel troops and large supplies of weapons and ammunition. The operation to strike the base was planned in Moscow, and to eliminate any chance of advance warning to the mujahideen, the Soviet military staff did not inform either the Afghan Army or Afghan intelligence services—both of which were riddled with rebel informants. The operation was commanded by General Anatoly Tabunshchikov, who would be following the strike force in an Antonov command plane to do a photo evaluation of the raid, while the troops would be led on the ground by Colonel Vladimir Aprelkin.
The plan was complex, because the distance to the rebel stronghold was too far for the Red Army’s helicopters to make it without refueling. So, it was decided that, on April 4, a force of 600 Soviet troops, including Spetsnaz special forces, would gather at a rendezvous point about 30 miles away from Robat Jaali, where they would be refueled. The next morning, the mujahideen camp would be hit by a dozen Sukhoi Su-17 fighter-bombers, which would destroy the rebel defenses. The force of 60 Mil Mi-8 transport helicopters (including two heavily-armed Mi-8TV assault versions) would immediately follow, and the camp would be quickly overrun and captured, and the rebel supplies destroyed. Six hours later, after the Mi-8s had been refueled again by their accompanying Mi-6 tanker helicopters, the victorious Soviets would fly home in their choppers.
It didn’t work out that way.
As the helicopters departed their base for the refueling point, a sandstorm closed in, forcing them to break up into a number of smaller groups. Each of these had to make their own way to the rendezvous, and it was already getting dark before the last of them arrived. They spent much of the night refueling.
At dawn the next day, the helicopter force took off and headed for the rebel base, with Colonel Aprelkin as a passenger in the lead chopper. At the specified time, meanwhile, two Su-17s dropped parachute flares to mark the target location, and the rest of the air strike quickly attacked their objectives.
And then the trouble began. Some of the flares were apparently released too high, and a strong desert wind blew them several miles away–where they ended up on the other side of the Iranian border. (In Tabunshchikov’s version of the story, the flares had been specially dropped to mark the border so the Soviet aircraft would not cross it.)
When the helicopter force arrived, the crew of the lead chopper, combat veterans who had been here before, realized that the flares were in the wrong place and were not marking the target, but the commander, Colonel Aprelkin, who had not been there before, disagreed and decided that they had not yet reached the target. He ordered the pilot to continue on towards the flares—and the rest of the helicopter group followed.
After a short time, the lead chopper came upon a paved road, with a civilian bus driving along it. There was no such road on the Soviet maps of the area, and once again the crew tried to convince the Colonel that they were in the wrong place, but now the Colonel saw a small group of buildings in the distance and, convinced that it was their target of Robat Jaali, issued a direct order to attack.
In the Soviet Army, disobeying a direct order from a superior officer in a war zone would likely get you shot, so the lead helicopter landed, and everybody else followed. Over the next twenty minutes, the Soviet assault troopers swarmed out of their transport copters and overran the compound—which had only two defenders.
To their shock, the Russians found that they had captured, not an Afghan rebel base, but an ordinary civilian asphalt factory, which happened to be closed on that day. At the same time, arriving in the air over Robat Jaali to do damage assessment, General Tabunshchikov immediately saw the situation and frantically screamed into the radio, telling Colonel Aprelkin that he and his troops had crossed the Iranian border and had landed near the town of Harmak. Tabunshchikov ordered the entire Soviet force to get back in their helicopters and evacuate immediately, then radioed back to his superiors, “Our troops are on foreign territory!”
He was too late. As he was talking, two F-4 Phantom II fighters from the Iranian Air Force screamed by overhead, then began circling. After they opened fire on the mass of Russian Mi-8s on the ground, they were followed by two more Iranian fighter jets. Meanwhile, the Soviet MiG-23s which had been assigned to give air cover to the strike force had been given orders by the General not to fire on the Iranians, and they kept their distance. “It was bad enough that we had attacked the Iranian town,” Tabunshchikov recalled years later, “and there was no need to escalate the problem by shooting down Iranian airplanes over Iran.” The Iranian F-4s managed to destroy or damage a number of the Mi-8s.
By this time, a group of Iranian Army tanks was approaching, and the Soviets held their fire as the Iranians pulled into the burning compound. Under the barrels of the tanks, the Russians hastily scrambled aboard their helicopters and departed the scene. Some of the troops no longer had a helicopter to depart in, and they were forced to walk the three hours back to the Afghan border.
But their day wasn’t over yet.
Despite the debacle they had just been through, the Soviet officers decided that they would all regroup near the Robat Jaali camp and continue their mission. And so, at around 2:30 in the afternoon, the Su-17s carried out another airstrike on the mujahideen camp, the Soviets swept in—and captured a mostly-empty group of buildings. The rebels had, not surprisingly, heard about the botched raid nearby and decided to be elsewhere. The Russians, meanwhile, now found that, with their unexpected detour into Iran, their helicopters were once again low on fuel, and they called for a number of Mi-6 tankers to bring more gas. One of them was ambushed and shot down by the mujahideen on the way, and one of the Mi-8s then crashed on the way home. It was a long day for the Russians. Remarkably, in all of the fighting and crashing, the only people who were killed were the two Iranian police guards at the asphalt plant.
The chastised raiders had not even yet returned to their bases before the Iranian government had filed a flurry of outraged diplomatic protests with the Soviets. Officials in Moscow apologized profusely, issued a formal statement accepting responsibility for the mistake, and wrote a lot of checks to compensate everybody. The official Soviet inquiry put the blame on Colonel Aprelkin for his inaccurate navigating and his unwarranted attack. He was reprimanded, but remained as a commander in Afghanistan.
The Soviets continued their losing war in Afghanistan until 1988, when they admitted defeat and began withdrawing their troops.
Hidden History 