A NEW 1,200-strong British special forces unit is to be rushed into service to deal with threats in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The job of the Joint Special Forces Support Group, designed as Britain’s equivalent of the US army’s elite Ranger force, will be to provide heavyweight back-up and covering fire to snatch operations, hostage rescues or intelligence-gathering missions by the SAS and SBS.

The unit was not due to be ready for deployment for another three years, but senior commanders have ordered it to form early because special forces have been overstretched by almost continuous service in Afghanistan and Iraq for more than three years.

Senior defence sources disclosed last week that the 1st Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, which will provide about half the group’s troops, has been told to be ready to deploy 145 men by mid-November. A further two companies will need to be ready by the middle of next year to provide a force that will be on call to back up special forces operations anywhere in the world.

Britain’s director of special forces, who commands all SAS and SBS operations, has been using SAS reservists to make up for a shortfall in numbers.

Unlike other British units, special forces operate across the whole of Iraq and Afghanistan. The SAS’s main operations have included hunting Osama Bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains of eastern Afghanistan. In Iraq it helped search for Saddam Hussein and, during the 2003 war, British special forces stormed the H3 airfield near the Syrian border.

The SBS was widely praised for its role in securing Iraq’s oilfields. There have been concerns, however, that some operations have been so big that special forces had to work in larger units than their preferred small, covert groups because they lacked the support troops available to American units.

The new group was announced last year by General Sir Mike Jackson, chief of the general staff, who said it would be comparable to the American Rangers who support “special mission” units such as Delta Force. The revamp of special forces also includes the creation of a new intelligence unit, the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, which was set up earlier this year and is based at Hereford alongside the SAS.

Men from 1 Para are used to working alongside the SAS — they carried out mopping-up duties during Operation Barras when the SAS and SBS rescued British soldiers kidnapped by the West Side Boys militia in Sierra Leone in 2000.

The creation of the new unit reignited the often bitter rivalry between paras and commandos amid claims that Jackson, colonel commandant of the Parachute Regiment, hijacked the concept to save his own regiment from the cuts affecting other parts of the army.

The force will also have commandos — including specialists from 539 Assault Squadron who run a fleet of raiding craft — and members of the RAF Regiment. The group will be backed up by a special forces flight from 9 Regiment Army Air Corps equipped with up to four Apache attack helicopters as well as specialist medics and engineers.

The Royal Marines 40 Commando and 45 Commando worked with the SBS and SAS in some of the most important operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The group is expected to be based at an old RAF airfield in Wales.

The paras, now serving in Northern Ireland, will have only a short time to acquire all the skills needed, including boat-handling, helicopter abseil drills and special forces procedures for desert and jungle operations.

A senior Parachute Regiment officer said the new role was ideally suited to his men. “Many of our officers have soldiers who have served alongside the SAS and so we have a hard core of trained personnel who we can use to develop our skills,” he said.

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