British Military Intervention in The Sierra Leone Civil War - Operation Barras

Operation Barras

The Anglians were replaced by a detachment of 1st Battalion, The Royal Irish Regiment (1 RIR) formed around C Company. On 25 August, a patrol from 1 RIR went to visit a militia group known as the West Side Boys (WSB). At the village of Magbeni, where the WSB were based, the Royal Irish were overpowered and taken captive. British officers undertook negotiations with the WSB which led to the release five of the eleven soldiers on 31 August.

On 9 September, the WSB's spokesman stated that the remaining six members of the patrol, who had now been held for over a fortnight, would only be released after a new government was formed in Sierra Leone, which led negotiators to conclude that the increasingly unrealistic demands were stalling tactics rather than a serious attempt to conclude the crisis. At around the same time, observation teams – which had been in place near the West Side Boys' base for four days – reported that they had seen no sign of the captive soldiers in that time. There were also concerns that the West Side Boys may move the hostages, which would make an assault more dangerous. The combination of these factors led COBRA to order an extraction mission.

The mission, codenamed Operation Barras, was undertaken by D Squadron of 22 Regiment, Special Air Service, who assaulted the village of Gberi Bana in order to extract the soldiers, while a battle group formed around A Company, 1st Battalion, The Parachute Regiment assaulted Magbeni, on the opposite side of Rokel Creek. The operation was successful and all the British captives were extracted, along with their SLA liaison and 22 Sierra Leonean civilians, while the WSB were defeated as a military force. Many West Side Boys fled and later surrendered to Jordanian peacekeepers. The Jordanians had received 30 by the end of the day, and 371—including 57 children—had surrendered within a fortnight. Some of those who surrendered went on to volunteer for the new Sierra Leone Army and those who were accepted went into the British-run training programme at Benguema.

Following Operation Barras, two SLA battalions – graduates of the British short-term training programme – swept the area surrounding the West Side Boys' camp to clear it of any remaining gang members.

The risks of Operation Barras were acknowledged by the MoD and by officers involved in the planning and the assault. It was described by an SAS soldier as "not a clinical, black balaclava, Princes Gate type operation. It was a very grubby, green operation with lots of potential for things to go wrong". However, Richard Connaughton observed in Small Wars & Insurgencies that the operation showed the Blair government was not averse to the possibility of casualties where they felt the cause was just, while Dorman suggested that the success or failure of Operation Barras was "inextricably linked" to the fate of the wider British operation in Sierra Leone. He suggested that, had the British forces been defeated, the United Kingdom would have been forced to withdraw all its forces from Sierra Leone. Dorman also suggests that a defeat would have "raised questions" regarding Tony Blair's policy of using armed force for humanitarian intervention.