Did the SAS participate in the Iraq war?
History of the Special Air Service
In mid-January 2006, Operation Paradoxical was replaced by Operation Traction: the SAS update/integration into JSOC, they deployed TGHG (Task Group Headquarters Group): this included senior officers and other senior members of 22 SAS - to JSOCs base at Balad. This was the first deployment of TGHG to Iraq since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the upgrade now meant that the SAS were "joined at the hip" with JSOC and it gave the SAS a pivatol role against Sunni militant groups, particularly AQI In March 2006, members of B squadron SAS were involved in the release of peace activists Norman Kember, James Loney and Harmeet Singh Sooden. The three men had been held hostage in Iraq for 118 days during the Christian Peacemaker hostage crisis. in April 2006 B squadron, launched Operation Larchwood 4 which was an intelligence coup which led to the death of AQI's leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In November 2006, Sergeant Jon Hollingsworth was killed in Basra whilst assaulting a house containing a senior al-Qaeda member; he was decorated for his service in this unit. On 20 March 2007 G squadron raided a house in Basra and captured Qais Khazali; a senior Shia militant and an Iranian proxy, his brother and Ali Mussa Daqduq, without casualties. The raid turned out to be most significant raid conducted by British forces in Iraq, gaining valuable intelligence on Iranian involvement in the Shia insurgency. During the Spring and summer of 2007, the SAS suffered several men seriously wounded as it extended its operations into Sadr City. From 2007 to early 2008, A squadron achieved "extraordinary" success impact in destroying al-Qaeda's VIBED network in Iraq, ultimately saving lives. In early 2008, B squadron carried out the regiments first HAHO parachute assault in Iraq. In May 2008, the SAS replaced their Humvee's for new Bushmaster armoured vehicles. On 30 May 2009, Operation Crichton; the UKSF deployment to Iraq ended, over the course of the war, 6 SAS soldiers were killed and a further 30 injured.
Chris Ryan
Ryan made SAS history with the "longest escape and evasion by an SAS trooper or any other soldier", covering more than SAS trooper Jack Sillito had in the Sahara Desert in 1942. Ryan completed a tab from an observation point on the Iraqi MSR between Baghdad and North-Western Iraq to the Syrian Border.