The husband of the first British woman soldier to be killed in Afghanistan paid tribute yesterday to her bravery and devotion to her job.

Corporal Sarah Bryant, 26, was killed alongside three members of the Special Air Services during a secret operation in Helmand Provide in southern Afghanistan on Tuesday.

Her husband, Carl, a fellow corporal in the Intelligence Corps, said: “Although I am devastated beyond words at the death of my beautiful wife, Sarah, I am so incredibly proud of her.

“She was an awesome soldier who died doing the job that she loved. My wife knew the risks. She was there because she wanted to be, and she wouldn’t have had it any other way.”

Her parents also spoke of their loss, and her mother told how Corporal Bryant had insisted on doing the same job as her male colleagues. Maureen Feely, 55, said that her daughter loved life in the Army. “She gave it everything and she paid the ultimate price for that, but I’m so, so proud of what she’s done and what she achieved.”

The soldier’s death has highlighted the increasing use of women on the front line in the “asymmetric battle-fields” of Afghanistan and Iraq. Commanding officers said that soldiers were now routinely selected for operations regardless of their sex.

Mrs Feely said that her daughter, a member of 15 (United Kingdom) Psychological Operations Group based in Chicksands, Bedfordshire, saw herself as a soldier, equal to male troops. “She would never have shied away – just because she was a woman – from doing that job,” she said.

Photographs released by Corporal Bryant’s family yesterday show her from her childhood to her wedding day – the young girl on the beach during a family holiday, grinning with her father at Christmas and with the horse that she loved riding through the Cumbria countryside.

She attended primary school in Cotehill, near Carlisle, and then Cal-dew School, in Dalston, Cumbria. As a child she wanted to be a vet but when an Army careers officer visited her school she set her heart on the Forces.

After completing her A levels she joined the Intelligence Corps, aged 18. She was marked out for a potential commission but insisted on going through the ranks.

During her training she met and fell in love with Carl Bryant and they were married at Wetheral Parish Church in 2005. Both were posted to Iraq at the same time for two tours, but on different operations.

They had spent just six months of married life together when, in March, Corporal Bryant was posted separately from her husband to Afghanistan with the 152 Delta Psychological Operations Effects Team.

Her linguistic skills as a speaker of the local Pashtu language were employed in monitoring Taleban communications by telephone and over the airwaves. As a woman she was also given the task of searching and interrogating female prisoners.

On Tuesday morning she was told that she had been recommended for promotion to sergeant, as had her husband.

Hours later she accompanied members of 23rd Special Air Service and the Afghan National Police in an operation east of the British Army headquarters at Lashkar Gah. One of the group’s lightly armoured Snatch Land Rovers hit a mine, killing Corporal Bryant and three members of the SAS. Another soldier was seriously injured.

Yesterday one MP described the Snatch Land Rover as a “death trap for so many men and women” as the Government faced calls to replace it with a more heavily plated vehicle.

Patrick Mercer, a Tory MP and former colonel, said that the Snatch had been designed to transport troops in Northern Ireland and was entirely unsuitable for Afghanistan. “The reason they are there is because that’s all the military, or the Army in particular, have got,” he said.

However, Bob Ainsworth, the Armed Forces Minister, insisted that other vehicles, such as the more heavily armoured Mastiff, “would not have been suitable for the task they were doing in the area in which they were required to work”.

He added: “We delude ourselves if we suggest that there is anything we can send people out to patrol in that is capable of withstanding all the hazards that they face.”

Corporal Bryant’s father, Des Feely, the retired manager of Brampton Conservative Club, said at his home in Cotehill: “Nothing much seems to have changed since the days of Churchill’s famous speech – never have so many owed so much to so few. We truly have lost the angel of the North.”

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