Around 20 elite SAS troops were left stranded in Kandahar province hundreds of miles from friendly forces when the militants took over.
As enemy fighters closed in they sent an SOS request to Special Forces bosses back in
Britain calling for immediate extraction.
But they could not use Kandahar airfield – once home to 26,000 international troops at
the height of the military campaign – because it had already been overrun by the Taliban.
So the SAS soldiers fought their way to a secret desert location where they went into hiding.
The coordinates of the location were then relayed back to Special Forces headquarters in a series of coded messages.
