Sniper killed a Taliban from eight thousand feet away

War History Online has an article about a very long shot:

Craig Harrison, a member of the elite British Household Cavalry unit, holds the record for achieving the longest kill shot ever recorded in the history of warfare. Harrison is an icon of the British Army whose 2,707-yard shot saved the lives of fellow soldiers while on convoy protection duty in Afghanistan in November of 2009.
He was behind the convoy when he spotted a Taliban two-man machine gun crew that had started shooting at the vanguard. An ambush was upon them, and a well planned one at that. The insurgents were armed with a Soviet PKM machine gun, more than capable of piercing through vehicles. The gun started to bark. It was all up to Harrison and his L115A3 Long Range Rifle to save the day:

The convoy consisted of several Jackal vehicles, under heavy fire. Harrison’s Jackal was more than a kilometer behind, so he jumped off and stationed himself in a nearby building from which he could snipe without being noticed. Harrison took his driver with him, to serve as a spotter, even though the soldier wasn’t exactly trained for such operations. Professional training wouldn’t affect the outcome too much, for what Harrison had in mind had never been done before. In his case, it was rocket science.
Just to make it clear, the Taliban were about two and half kilometer away from Harrison’s location. That distance is about fifteen hundred feet more of the maximum range of his weapon, so the odds of hitting anything smaller than a tank weren’t in his favor. Nevertheless, he decided to take the shot, calculating wind speed and all other factors that could influence the trajectory of the bullet (besides the fact that the enemy was well out of range).
He was forced to aim at a spot about four hundred feet above his targets, that weren’t exactly static throughout the battle. Even though the weather conditions were appropriate, this calculation was necessary if the shot was to be done right. The difference of four hundred feet is an equivalent of a forty-story building. That was how much Harrison needed to calculate to find a spot to fire, well above the heads of his targets.
He devised the account in a record time, counting the gravity and muzzle velocity loss, while under the pressure of losing his own life, or the lives of his men.
The first shot was perfect. The Taliban machine gunner was shot in the abdomen. The second, consecutive shot, achieved with minimal adjustment, was fatal for the other crewman. To make sure that nobody used that PKM again, Harrison shot it, rendering it to pieces with a single bullet.
It took approximately three seconds for each bullet to reach its target, which illustrates the distance from which the shot was taken and what exactly means to break the world record in such a category.  In an interview for The Daily Mail, Harrison recalled that he had to wait around six seconds to acknowledge if the shot was successful.
One could only imagine the mixture of surprise and terror that the rest of the Taliban squad felt at that moment, realizing that their machine gun support was shot dead by a sniper at such a distance. The ambush was successfully repelled and the convoy reached safety.
His tour of duty in 2009 includes around twenty more confirmed kills. He was wounded several times during his service in Afghanistan, receiving a flesh wound on his head and having both of his arms broken on one occasion, when his vehicle ran into a landmine.
These injuries never influenced his actions, as it is recorded that, each time he was wounded, he was contributing to the fight as well as he could. He never backed down and demonstrated extreme bravery in the face of battle.
CoH Craig Harrison broke the record established by an equally brilliant Canadian sniper, Rob Furlong, in 2002, which was 2,430 meters. Before Furlong, the record was held by an another Canadian, Arron Perry, who had set his record of 2,310 meters only a few days prior to Furlong’s shot. Nevertheless, Perry broke the record that was held for over thirty years by a Vietnam War veteran, Carlos Hathcock:

Harrison’s record is yet to be broken. Even though Harrison is considered a war hero and an excellent example of the British armed forces, he appeared in media showing his disappointment in the Army and talking about his post-traumatic stress disorder. The Ministry of Defense paid Harrison a hundred thousand pounds for revealing his identity to the media against his will, thus putting him at the risk of being kidnapped by al-Qaeda, who had more than enough reasons to put a bounty on his head. He was placed on permanent sick leave and discharged in 2014. After his discharge, he stated:

“I joined when I was sixteen and, since all of this has happened I felt abandoned, absolutely abandoned by my regiment. I spent 22 years loyal to that regiment, putting my life on the line doing tours, and they just hung me out to dry. My trust in people, the armed forces, it’s gone.” 

Harrison served from 1991 to 2014. Military service this long left permanent scars on his psyche. In an interview conducted by the BBC, Harrison stated that he constantly sees the faces of those he killed, a common disorder for snipers.
Harrison wrote a book about his war experience, titled The Longest Kill, where he stated, among other things, that he was driven to the brink of suicide by his PTSD disorder.

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