| Here is the history piece. All the rest is gun pr0n, which many of you will appreciate properly, so go read about it at the link, dear Reader. |
[AmericanHandgunner] May 5, 1980 was a Monday. Six days prior, half a dozen terrorists representing the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan
| … founded in 1979 as a splinter group of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Ahvaz (PFLA, part of the movement for Arab liberation of the Ahwaz/Ahvaz region of Iran. This lot were apparently Baathists, others among them are Arab Sunni-firsters, probably some are communist of one flavour or another… |
had stormed the Iranian embassy at Prince’s Gate in South Kensington, London. Curiously, these six armed men were actually protesting the theocratic regime that had recently seized power in Iran. They were, geopolitically speaking, technically the Good Guys. However, after days of aggressive negotiations that saw the release of five of 26 hostages, tempers grew short. In a fit of anger, the terrorists shot and killed the Iranian cultural attaché, Abbas Lavasani. At that point, the Iron Lady, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, turned operational control of the situation over to the British 22nd Special Air Service.
They called the subsequent symphony of violence Operation Nimrod and it changed everything about modern counterterrorist operations. Where normally, the SAS operates in the shadows, this time, they took down the Iranian embassy in broad daylight before the accumulated television cameras of the world’s press. The building was five stories tall and contained 51 different rooms. Seventeen minutes after the go order, five of the six terrorists were dead, the sixth was in custody, and the entire building was secure. One hostage died during the assault and one SAS man was fairly badly burned. However, the cumulative result was legitimately paradigm-shifting.
In short order, every cop in the world wanted an HK MP-5 submachine gun in the trunk of his squad car and a set of black fatigues hanging in his closet. The otherworldly imagery of the assault burned into the world’s consciousness. The SAS had become the world’s premiere direct-action counterterrorist force. |