Operation BLUE RIDGE

“6 long years, 6 meaningful years, 6 dangerous years.”

From 2007 to 2013, a total of 492 Singapore soldiers were dispatched to Afghanistan for humanitarian and reconstruction efforts there.

Stretching over a period of two thousand two hundred and sixty-three days, it was the Singapore Armed Forces’ longest and most challenging overseas mission.

One might wonder why Singapore would choose to send soldiers more than 5,000 kilometers away into harm’s way. The answer lies in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Singapore’s Internal Security Department (ISD) began investigations into Jemaah Islamiah (JI), a militant Islamist terrorist organization. It was discovered that some members of the JI had links to Al Qaeda and had received training in Afghanistan. The cell in Singapore even conducted survey of a subway station in 1997, where American troops and their families used to take shuttle rides. A video tape of the reconnaissance was later found in Kabul, Afghanistan by U.S. troops. Singapore was also the target of terrorist attacks.

It was the recognition that terrorism was a global threat that a decision was made in 2007 for the deployment of Singapore troops to Afghanistan. Former Defense Minister Mr Teo Chee Hean said: “Our purpose in Afghanistan is to support the international efforts there, to try and bring stability to Afghanistan so that Afghanistan will not be a location from which terrorism is exported to other parts of the world including to our region and to Singapore.”

The mission was named Operation BLUE RIDGE because blue represent peace and the mission was to support peace in Afghanistan. The first mission was at Bamiyan, which was located along the ridge called the Hindu Kush.

A site survey in 2006 concluded that the New Zealand Defense Force in Bamiyan was in need of assistance. The local governor told the team that her people needed dental treatment. Thus the first deployment to Afghanistan was a five-men dental team. Over the years, the mission was expanded to include a construction engineering team, a weapon-locating radar team, a UAV-team, medical teams and image analysis teams.

The weapon-location radar team in Oruzgan was so effective, they did not miss a single rocket fired at them during their 15-month deployment, that they were asked to stay another six months after the end of their deployment.

The imagery analysis teams also left deep impressions with the Australian defense force during their stay. Their reports were so detailed that an Australian team was sent from Kandahar to learn from the Singapore team. The job of an imagery analysis is to take the images captured by UAVs and determine the pattern of life behind those images. Each and every team member also had to be on standby 24 hours a day and be ready to be activated at anytime. Initially, the team relied on images captured by Singapore’s Searcher UAV, subsequent teams base their analyses using data from Australia’s Shadow UAVs.

And in order for Singaporeans to better understand the challenging mission in Afghanistan, an exhibition will be put together. It will travel to four locations across the island to let Singaporean know what made the mission a success.