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Christina Drummond

Sergeant Jon Hollingsworth, 3rd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment


Remembering the Fallen: on this day in 2006, Sergeant Jon Hollingsworth, 3rd Battalion Parachute Regiment, was killed in Iraq. He had previously served in Northern Ireland and had been awarded the Queen’s Gallantry Medal. In 2006 he deployed with D Squadron, 22nd SAS Regiment, and was assigned to 'Hathor' detachment, a British special forces detachment that carried out operations against Iraqi insurgents in Basra. A few weeks earlier he had been shot in the neck during a raid, sent home for treatment but returned to Iraq within days, refusing to take time off to recover. He was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross for his actions, reportedly for single-handedly killing six insurgents during the raid. On the night of his death Hathor detachment was on a mission to strike a block of insurgent occupied flats in a hostile area of Basra. Sergeant Hollingsworth was in overall charge of the mission but was shot early on in the raid and died soon afterwards. He was the first member of the British Special Forces to be killed in action since Operation Abalone in 2003. Jon, from Rotherham, was 35 years old and married with two sons.

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