and Jordan. On 28 March 2003 A Company, 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, reinforced with engineers and USAF combat controllers, was loaded onto a Boeing C-17 transport aircraft and jumped onto H1 Airfield ("Objective Serpent"), the northernmost of the Iraqi airfields. Just ten days after operations began, Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force - West (CJSOTF-W), based upon the 5th Special Forces Group, had captured the western third of Iraq. American Colonel John Mulholland, the task force commander, then quickly moved the headquarters of CJSOTF-W to H1 Airfield and began to consider new targets for his command. The British Special Air Service (SAS) and a squadron of Australian Special Air Service Regiment (SASR) had seized the nearby Iraqi H-2 and H-3 Air Bases on 21 March. By 29 March, an area some 170 miles east of the Jordanian border was blocked off from Iraqi forces, with the captured air bases serving as forward special operations bases. In the first weeks of the war there were reports of heavy fighting involving the SAS, SASR and the U.S. Army Special Forces versus Iraqi Special Republican Guard and Special Security Services around a nuclear development site near Qaim on the Syrian border. This and other similar reports suggest that the one of the key targets of the special forces were suspected Weapon of mass destruction (WMD) production and storage sites. In early 2003, it was reported that the United States was planning to develop H-1 as a permanent base in Iraq. Those plans never materialised and today current aerial imagery shows that the operational structures around the airfield appear to have been demolished and removed. Today the concrete runway and series of taxiways remain exposed and deteriorating to the elements, being reclaimed by the Iraqi desert. References Royal Air Force stations in the Middle East Iraqi Air Force bases