LONDON, 4 April 2003 — British special forces were discovered near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul and forced to withdraw rapidly by helicopter, abandoning their equipment, the Daily Telegraph reported yesterday.

The soldiers, from the SAS or its navy equivalent the SBS, were carrying out operations near Mosul when they were forced to call in helicopters to get them out, the newspaper reported, citing Ministry of Defense sources.

No men were dead or missing, despite Iraqi claims that 10 had been killed in a firefight, it said.

Al-Jazeera television showed locals driving an armored British Land Rover, along with pictures of a quad-bike and various weapons, reporting that the incident had happened Monday.

“There was an extraction operation. A certain amount of equipment was lost, and this has been shown on Al-Jazeera television. We cannot go into further details because special forces were involved,” an MoD spokesman said.

The Telegraph said the SAS and SBS had been working across Iraq for two months at least, playing a part in the capture of airfields in the west of the country.

On Tuesday Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi information minister, described the incident as a major defeat. “It is a complete defeat. Amazingly the Americans have pushed the British to do that. They pushed them ahead as an experiment. It is very tragic for the British,” he said.

Meanwhile, Kurdish fighters, backed by small groups of US soldiers, battled Iraqi troops during an advance along a road leading to Mosul yesterday.

During a fierce firefight lasting about an hour, US aircraft also pounded Iraqi positions, witnesses said.

The Kurdish ‘peshmerga’ fighters said Iraqi forces then pulled back about 5 km toward Mosul.

Fighting broke out earlier when the Kurdish forces were some 40 km on the road east of Mosul. One Reuters correspondent said he was about seven km into what was Iraqi government-held territory until Wednesday night. Late in the afternoon fighting resumed, with peshmerga fighters and some US special forces coming under mortar fire.

F-16 fighter jets attacked the Iraqi troop positions and a sequence of flashes and huge columns of smoke could be seen rising from the Iraqi lines.