Libyan dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, dressed in brown Bedouin-style robes, was ranting on the TV screen in our hotel about a man he said was “British special forces, working for NATO and helping the revolution”. It was April 2011, and Libya was split by a bloody civil war with rebels fighting to topple the man who had ruled the North African nation with an iron fist since the 1960s. “$100,000 on his head!” shrieked Gaddafi as he ripped up the photograph of the alleged rebel sympathiser and tossed it over his head.

The man in the photo was me, and I’d just had a bounty put on my head by a ruthless madman who was intent on crushing the revolution by every violent means possible. “I’m a Welshman, not British”, I thought, “and I’m worth more than that”.

I was watching Gaddafi put a price on my head in the Uzu Hotel in Benghazi, a city that was a revolutionary stronghold in the rebel-held east of Libya. Rebel, or fighter, in Libya is Thuwar, and unbeknownst to Colonel Gaddafi, he had just given me the nickname that has stuck with me to this day. “We can get $100,000 for you, Thuwar,” laughed the revolutionaries, sharing the lobby of the hotel where I was staying as security and safety advisor for Al-Jazeera journalists covering the war.

Read more:'New Gaddafi' fears as Libya on the brink of civil war

Close protection contracts were my bread and butter in Libya, and after nine years in the 1st The Queen’s Dragoon Guards regiment, seeing the things I had seen in Bosnia, Kosovo, and the second Gulf War, I knew a thing or two about how to defend myself and others. The reason Colonel Gaddafi was ranting and waving a picture of me was that just 24 hours earlier, we had been almost blown to smithereens in the desert, and it had all been caught on camera.

We were filming at the port in Benghazi. I was with the senior correspondent Abdul Adim, a cameraman from Lebanon called Issam, and our driver Hamid. We were heading for the front line again near Brega when I noticed something strange on the horizon, a convoy of black SUVs coming straight for us at speed. I moved the group off the road to some “dead ground” as soldiers call it, which is an area sheltered from any direct fire should it happen.

Once the black SUVs had roared to a halt, General Abdul Fatah Younis, the head of the rebel forces at the time and who had defected from Gaddafi’s regime, emerged from the car. Our cameraman and correspondent got set up ready for the interview, and I sat there with my driver, Hamid, in our van. Hamid said the general was from the same tribe as him, the Obeidi tribe, and asked me if he could go and say hello, even though the drivers were meant to stay in the vehicle. I agreed. He left his AK-47 in the footwell next to me.

At that moment, I heard a voice in my head telling me to get out. I grabbed the AK-47, took two steps from the van and an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) came in from the front, went straight through the seat I had been sitting in and detonated at the rear of the vehicle. I didn’t have time to drop to the ground.

Mortar shells started raining down, and small arms fire erupted in what was clearly a government ambush of the rebels. Everyone was dashing for their vehicles. Running forward, I grabbed the correspondent, and we ran about 600 metres from the van before I pushed him down into the sand.

Hamid was injured by shrapnel, and I ran back and dragged him to safety next to the correspondent. When I looked up again there was Issam the cameraman still filming, but behind him I saw a head pop up behind a small hump in the sand. It was one of the attackers firing at us, so I cocked my weapon and sent him a few messages.

Source: Daily Express :: World Feed