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Ross Gets Pinned Down By Taliban AK-47 & RPG Gunfire

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Ross Kemp hits the dirt as Taliban rounds crack past his head in Helmand’s Green Zone.

The footage now circulating under the “Ross Kemp Extreme World” banner didn’t come from some recent embed — it’s a clip pulled from Kemp’s landmark 2008 Sky One series “Ross Kemp in Afghanistan,” shot in 2007 while he was attached to 1st Battalion, The Royal Anglian Regiment. On only his second day out with the unit, Kemp and a small camera crew joined B Company on a deliberately aggressive patrol meant to draw the Taliban out near Sangin. It worked, and almost got them killed.

• The clip originates from 2007 filming with 1st Battalion, The Royal Anglian Regiment for “Ross Kemp in Afghanistan” (2008) — not a 2021 Afghan National Army patrol.
• The ambush hit near Sangin’s agricultural “Green Zone” as B Company pushed toward Jucaylay village, with five to seven RPG rockets passing roughly a metre over Kemp’s position.
• Kemp and his crew were pinned flat for three to four minutes before crawling forward to cover under British suppressive counterfire.

The Patrol Toward Jucaylay

B Company’s plan that day was to provoke a reaction — an offensive combat patrol through the irrigated farmland along the Helmand River designed to locate and pressure Taliban fighters dug into the terrain near Jucaylay village. Kemp, filming for what would become one of the defining British war documentaries of the decade, moved with the soldiers as they crossed past a compound and into open ground. That transition was the trap. Taliban insurgents concealed in irrigation ditches had let the patrol get exposed before they opened up.

Pinned in the Open

The ambush came in daylight, with AK-47 fire and RPGs converging on the exposed clearing where Kemp and his small production team had ended up. Rifle rounds hit the dirt inches from Kemp’s head — one round passed directly between his shoulder and neck — while between five and seven RPG rockets streaked past roughly a metre overhead. It’s the kind of exposure that soldiers training in cover and concealment drill obsessively to avoid, and Kemp’s crew simply had none available in that moment.

Kemp later admitted he genuinely believed he’d wet himself during the barrage — though he added afterward it might just as easily have been a ruptured water pouch.

Crawling Out Under Covering Fire

For three to four minutes, Kemp and the crew lay flat in the dirt while the Royal Anglians answered with sustained counterfire, buying just enough of a lull for the group to start moving. Crawling forward, staying low, and inching toward the nearest cover, they eventually got clear of the killing ground and out of the ambush’s arc — the exact kind of extraction under fire that has made British soldiers’ reputation for composure under pressure well known among viewers who’ve followed how elite units operate when a patrol goes loud.

The sequence went on to become one of the most replayed pieces of British frontline journalism from the Helmand campaign, precisely because there was no distance between Kemp and the danger — no long lens, no safe perimeter, just a presenter flat on his stomach in a Green Zone ditch while rounds impacted the ground around him. It’s a two-minute clip, but it’s the two minutes that defined what “Ross Kemp in Afghanistan” was actually willing to show.