How I escaped certain death when Islamic terrorists stormed my hotel... and why my rescuers haven't got the credit they deserve

It was 7am when Terry Kemp went to the front steps of his hotel for a cigarette.

The State Department contractor had just finished an early breakfast, and was taking in the calm morning sun in Bamako, the capital of Mali.

While commuters headed to work and the bustling west African city prepared for the day, he opened the door to a shuttle bus for a ride to the U.S. Embassy, which was just down the road from the Radisson Blu.

Then two men who had been sitting on suitcases across the road stood up and looked ready to approach him.

As an Air Force veteran of the first Gulf War, Terry constantly monitored his surroundings and was always on alert when on a job in a foreign country.

There hadn’t been much cause for concern during his five weeks in Mali, but he knew it only took seconds for situations to change.

The two men opened their luggage, took out AK47s, started running towards the 190-room hotel and opened fire screaming: ‘Allahu Akbar.’

Terry’s training kicked in, and he ran back up the steps towards the hotel’s lobby to find cover from the hail of bullets. The terrorists chasing him shot a guard and shattered the glass entrance.

The attackers mowed down everyone in their path as they charged a target where they knew they could kill as many Westerners as possible. Entering the hotel, they slit a white guest’s throat.

The Islamic militants linked to Al-Qaeda had launched an attack on the popular downtown spot where diplomats, tourists, airline crews and workers from dozens of countries were staying - including Americans.

It was November 20, 2015. Over the next few hours, Terry fought for his life as the gunmen stormed the hotel, took hostages and left piles of bodies in the kitchen and through the corridors.

By the end of the day, the terrorists had killed 23 people including an American aid worker.

No one was spared. They even gunned down a pregnant woman. One man was let go because he recited the Shahada - an oath to Islam - as he begged the attackers not to kill him.

Terry somehow survived, and still remembers the events of eight years ago in horrifying detail. For him, it’s as if it happened yesterday.

In an interview with DailyMail.com - the first since the immediate aftermath of the attack - he recalls how he managed to avoid almost certain death.

He also vividly remembers the Americans who rescued him and likely saved hundreds more lives in a country where the U.S. didn’t have troops on the ground.

But their stories have been virtually forgotten.

Their rapid and coordinated response meant the Mali rampage has been subsumed by the spectrum of terrorist attacks around the globe that have ended in multiple fatalities.

A week earlier, Islamic militants had killed 130 people in coordinated attacks across Paris.

A week later a married couple, both violent extremists, gunned down 14 people in a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.

If it weren’t for the Americans’ bravery in Mali, their split-second thinking and the diplomatic security response, the results could have been far more catastrophic.

Terry’s story is just one of incredible survival over hours of extreme fear and pandemonium.

As Terry ran and tried to find cover after the first shots rang out, he fell down. The embassy facilities manager beside him thought he had been shot dead, so carried on without him.

Terry got back up while the terrorists kept firing. He frantically tried to find a stairwell as he felt another burst of gunfire in his direction.

Grenades started going off, smoke started to surround him and bullets whizzed by, sprayed in all directions.

He sprinted through the bar and up a staircase to the restaurant where he had just eaten breakfast and hid under a buffet table covered in a white cloth, with the attackers chasing.

Somehow they didn’t see him go to his hiding place and, despite the carnage, he managed to stay calm.

He took out a phone given to him weeks earlier by the diplomatic security team and called the emergency number for Post 1 - the Marine Security Guard on duty at the U.S. Embassy down the street.

The embassy’s Diplomatic Security (DS) team had ensured the phones were pre-programmed with emergency numbers in the event of any emergency - whether it was a car accident or a mass murder.

All they had to do was press a key to get help.

‘I told them shots had been fired at the Radisson Blu, and gave them my name,’ said Terry.

The DS team had already been warned an attack was unfolding by a security contractor at the hotel, and Terry’s call gave them more information.

It was confirmation there were trapped Americans in the firing line, and every second that passed put them at greater risk.

In the three years after the 2012 Benghazi attacks, embassy personnel had been formulating plans to better respond to rapidly-unfolding situations near diplomatic outposts.

For the team in Bamako, the next terrorist attack wasn’t a matter of if, but when.

Extremism was on the rise in the north of the country and a masked gunman had stormed the city’s La Terrasse nightclub a few months earlier.

The suspect, believed to have links to Al Qaeda, shot and killed a French national, a Belgian security official and three Malians.

On the morning of November, 20, 2105, Mike Diamond was standing next to his bed in his underwear and wearing a t-shirt of his favorite band when his cell phone rang.

That day, he was the U.S. Embassy’s Regional Security Officer (RSO) in Bamako, because his boss was on a flight on the way to his leave in Portugal.

He was told terrorists had stormed the Radisson Blu, a place he knew was full of guests linked to the embassy.

Immediately, Diamond got to the scene, just 400 meters from his house.

Once there, he contacted the necessary parties—most notably his teammate and the other ARSO, Ryan Pack.

He also got in touch with his military colleagues and told them Americans were under attack.

He called the leader of the Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) Mario Madera-Rodriguez, who woke up his teammate Jarad Stout.

They grabbed their vests and guns and within five minutes they loaded up their truck and started driving towards the embassy.

They also got in touch with Delta Force operator Kyle Morgan.

Terry, meanwhile, was still under the table.

‘I was sitting on a crate of eggs,' he recalled. 

He then heard the gunmen burst into the room and start spraying the walls with bullets.

The terrorists had just executed a crew of flight attendants, and started flipping tables to find any potential hostages - or victims - hiding beneath.

Terry watched as the terrorists’ black boots walked the floor just a few feet away from his face.

The shell casings ejected from their weapons were hitting him on the back, still burning hot from the muzzle.

He was so close he could have touched one of their hands as they grabbed the underside of the table where he was staying out of sight.

He knew it was only a matter of time before he was dead.

‘I just said a prayer to myself and I knew they were going to get to me sooner or later.’

They never did, and instead the terrorists took each cloth from the tables, piled them in the corner of the room and started setting them on fire.

Incredibly, they left the one that covered Terry’s table alone.

Natural gas hissed from the kitchen stoves as the attackers tried to create an explosion.

As the acrid smoke started to rise, Terry knew he had to change locations. Staying underneath the table in the blaze would have left him helplessly trapped.

Somehow he had managed to avoid the terrorists finding him. Maybe they had moved on to find more guests? He couldn’t be sure.

Even so, he made a tactical decision and crawled across the kitchen and tried to turn on the sprinklers. That didn’t work.

Then he found an office. Inside was a desk with a small space underneath. There was also a woman’s body on the floor.

At six-feet one-inches and 240 pounds, he didn’t think he could fit his massive frame in the tiny hole beneath the desk. But he used his adrenaline to wedge himself inside.

‘The smoke was filling up in the room. I soaked my shirt with half a bottle of water and drank some to stop the smoke from getting in. I didn’t care about disease.’

He took out his phone again and called Post 1 to let them know where he was, and give them all the information they needed as the horror continued to unfold.

Shooting was coming from an elevator behind him and a pile of bodies started to build up in the doorway where the terrorists had caught victims trying to escape.

Mike, Jarad, Mario, and Kyle had scrambled to the hotel and were figuring out a game plan to rescue Terry.

There were other Americans trapped inside, including aid worker and mother Anita Datar and a member of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The group were outside the hotel trying to piece together every bit of information they had. 

What were the terrorists armed with? What did they look like? One question they did know the answer to was what they wanted: To kill as many people as possible.

The situation was complex. They didn’t have a large enough team to simply storm the hotel and they still didn’t know how many gunmen were inside.

There were guests from multiple nations, and responders from those various government agencies and countries were flooding into the area. There was no coordination and the risk of friendly fire was extreme.

The African security forces were waiting for orders from their superiors to go in.

The U.S. didn’t technically have ‘boots on the ground’ in Mali. France, the former colonial power, had a military presence and had been working to stop the infiltration of extremist factions into the nation for years.

If Mike, Jarad, Mario, Ryan and Kyle engaged with the gunmen, it would make headlines around the world.

More immediately, if they were to locate and pull Americans out of their rooms, would they be in more danger in the halls of the hotel than barricaded behind their doors?

The rescuers were in constant contact with the Embassy, trying to instruct both diplomats and private citizens inside to stay sheltered.

They were also trying to figure out where Americans were trapped.

The top brass were concerned about their presence, but they knew any hesitation could lead to further disaster.

Permission to go into the hotel and engage was also a point of contention. But American lives were at risk.

As the rescuers tried to piece together this larger picture, a message from Terry came through from Post 1.

‘Sir, there is an American citizen trapped upstairs in a burning breakfast room. His life is in danger; he is requesting assistance.’

The information was critical, as it meant a quick response was needed to save the Americans inside.

Mike was able to prompt the U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission to give the American responders the green light to enter.

It sparked the start of a day of missions mired in confusion and bloodshed.

The team didn’t know what they were up against, but knew they had to find Terry before either fire or the terrorists took his life.

Terry’s cell phone buzzed again and it was Mike Diamond, telling him he was outside the hotel.

They executed their hasty plan, bolstered by their knowledge of the hotel where they had held the Marine Corps Birthday Ball not long before.

Stacking up on the side of the building, they entered, as wide-eyed local policemen watched them go.

Moving through the ballrooms, they traversed the hotel’s atrium through which Terry had fled minutes before.

Multiple floors and a maze of rooms rose upwards towards the ceiling, connected by an exposed stairwell.

Despite the impressive design, the layout didn’t make sense and the room numbers were inconsistent.

It was a beautiful building and a top destination for those who wanted dinner surrounded by expats or an evening cocktail at the hotel bar.

The Americans had been there many times before and knew the surroundings, but the scene they encountered that day could not have been more different,

The floors where guests had walked casually were now slick with blood and covered in broken glass.

Choking black smoke, the team could barely see in front of them and the odds started stacking against them.

The brand new battery in Jarad’s rifle optic inexplicably went dead, meaning their vision was even more impaired.

But they had to find a way to get to Terry.

A dangerously exposed staircase took them to the next level, where the dining room and kitchen belched black smoke from the fires set by the terrorists.

They tried to set up security, but were exposed from every angle, and team members took turns plunging into the smoke to try and find Terry, but all came out empty handed.

Terry’s cell phone buzzed again and it was Mike, telling him the team was outside the dining room but they couldn’t find him in the smoke.

The fire was getting too big for them to come inside to rescue him, so they had to act fast.

He had squeezed himself into that tiny space under the desk for 90 minutes, so his legs were asleep and he wasn’t able to walk.

The whole time he had been praying the perpetrators wouldn’t come back to find him. While he listened to the constant volley of gunshots, he made his peace.

The Americans were able to move swiftly through the hotel to a spot close to the breakfast room where Terry was hiding.

But when they tried to kick the door down, they were overwhelmed by the fire and ferocious heat.

After several unsuccessful attempts to fight the smoke and get inside, they connected with Terry over the phone.

He decided to take matters into his own hands, so he crawled through the kitchen on his belly, and started to hear voices shouting his name and saying: ‘Come to us.’

He was still on the phone with Mike but too scared to go through the door, in case the attackers were on the other side.

His legs were numb from having crouched for so long and the smoke was growing even more dangerous.

He stumbled towards the sounds and beams from flashlights sneaking in through the cracks in the door.

As he reached the door he pushed his way out, and slid his hands through Ryan’s chest plate.

‘(Terry’s) eyes were bloodshot, and he looked like he had just run a marathon,’ Mario told DailyMail.com

‘Are you hurt?’ Terry heard from the Americans as he tried to regain his bearings.

Terry said no, but the blood was returning to his legs very slowly and he was covered in soot.

They formed a protective circle around him and helped him move back along the route they had used to find him.

To Terry, emerging from the smoke into a different location, it felt like they were taking the wrong stairwell.

‘All the time the shooting is still going on above us and there are bodies everywhere,’ Terry said.

Having no alternative, the Americans moved down the same dangerously exposed stairwell and got him outside, back to where he was enjoying what he thought was a peaceful morning smoke a few hours earlier.

He was gasping for air, his legs still weren’t working and his first request stunned his rescuers: He wanted a cigarette.

Mike and Ryan checked on Terry again and saw that, somehow, he had managed to get out virtually unharmed.

Throughout the torment he hadn't screamed for help or lost his cool.

For an hour and 30 minutes he was surrounded by a blazing inferno and the gun muzzles of evil men who wouldn’t have let him survive if they found him.

‘I was never in a panic. I was calm,’ Terry said.

‘Chaos breeds chaos. If you don't remain calm, nobody can help you.’

He was relaxed, and he knew the men still had work to do.

Jarad asked Terry what he saw inside. How many gunmen were there? What were they armed with? What language were they speaking?

Gunfire and explosions kept ringing out through the hotel as they spoke.

With Terry safe, the team regrouped, piecing together the story of what was happening.

They gathered room numbers and any information they could on the number of Americans still trapped in the burning hotel.

The terrorists’ gunfire could still be heard from the outside, where police officers were dragging guests to safety and troops were preparing to enter.

There were no signs the attack was stopping any time soon.

Ryan found a sharpie and wrote room numbers down on his arms. His impromptu body art would be a memory the Americans - and those they rescued - would never forget.

The others grabbed any scrap of paper they could find and scribbled down the information, and got ready to go back into the burning Radisson Blu.

The team’s concerns about the possibility of a growing fire eclipsed the risks of traversing the hallways.

They had faced the flames and smoke one time, and knew they had gotten lucky.

But the Malian response team was not yet on-site, and they had to do something. Mike and Ryan tried to coordinate with the small leadership cadre on-site, and worked to minimize the risk of blue-on-blue shooting within the hotel.

The rescuers got back into a tactical formation and moved inside for the second time.

Malian security teams were holding the stairwells, and the team climbed past them, planning to find their colleagues and remove them from the top of the hotel going down.

As they moved through the halls, survivors from every walk of life clung onto them. They found those who had been hiding and escorted them to safety.

Their operation had turned from extracting Americans to saving everyone they could find in the terrorists’ firing line.

They regrouped outside the hotel for the second time after escorting more survivors to safety, through the same door they had come through.

Again, they gathered as much intelligence as possible. Who was still left inside?

American Anita Datar was still nowhere to be found, and the rescuers were willing to break the rules to try and find her.

Mario was in constant contact with the MARSOC command in Stuttgart, Germany, which was still pushing back on its involvement in the rescue operation and was uneasy at their presence.

One wrong move and their careers would be on the line. But they were willing to accept the consequences if it meant saving as many people as possible.

They went back into the labyrinth of rooms to track down who was left. They had no idea what was waiting behind each door.

There was no concealment in the hallways, and no place to take cover from an assault.

When they entered the stairwell, the Americans came face to face with the terrorists for the first time.

The gunmen were coming down as the rescuers were going up, and they were all taken by surprise.

Gunfire erupted and grenades followed. Bullets ricochet off the walls in what turned into a gunfight.

Kyle Morgan, in the lead, narrowly escaped being hit and Jarad and Mario jumped in to provide supporting fire and help Kyle out of the precarious position.

It was still only 10am.

Mario, Jarad and Kyle entered the stairwell, while Mike and Ryan held security on a in a separate hall.

Taking on the terrorists was going to require a much bigger team.

Holding the bad guys in place was what they needed to do, because French responders were on the way, thanks to Kyle’s military command.

The American team just had to wait for their arrival, along with their more powerful equipment and firepower.

They were respecting the Malian government’s sovereignty and sparing further loss of American life.

Their efforts then shifted to communication with the French-speaking U.N. security counterpart with a clear message: ‘We have them pinned down; help us keep them there.’

The Malian forces took charge of the stalemate in the stairwell, leaving the team free to carry on knocking on doors to find trapped guests.

Some were hesitant to emerge from their hiding spots, terrified the terrorists were on the other side of the door.

They broke into some rooms to find the bodies of barricaded victims who had made the mistake of opening the door to their captors.

Mike, Jarad, Mario, Ryan and Kyle were exhausted, depleted, and out of water.

They’d taken what they could from the hotel refrigerators, but the day was hot, and their operation had dragged on for hours.

Meanwhile, France had rallied a 50-man Special Operations counterterrorism team from neighboring Burkina Faso.

The French had too much to lose in West Africa, having poured in vast military resources, so they were going to finish the job.

The Americans regrouped outside the hotel for the third time. Again they gathered as much intelligence as possible. Who was still left inside the hotel?

Jarad, Mario and Kyle went back to finish the job. Ryan set up an observation point on the roof of a neighboring building, while Mike was called back to the embassy.

The hotel wasn’t their only point of concern. Children of embassy staff, including Mike’s daughter, had to be collected under armed guard and brought to safety.

Jarad's girlfriend, who was now his wife, was at a nearby school who also had to be protected.

His job was also to report back to his superiors in Washington D.C. and Germany.

‘I had a lot of other s***’ to do,’ he said.

The French ‘Saber’ special operations force has arrived and filed into the hotel with purpose.

Heavily armed and in far greater numbers than the American rescuers, they arrived at the attackers’ location in the stairwell.

After their hours-long rampage, the gunmen's reign of terror was coming to an end. One was shot and killed, his body sprawled out over the stairs.

A second terrorist was killed in a janitor’s closet.

Even though the carnage was over, the toll of the day wasn’t. One American who didn’t make it out was Anita Datar.

The body of the 41-year-old mother and sometime Peace Corps volunteer was found in her room as troops swept the hotel.

She was working as a senior manager at the public health firm Palladium, and her death sparked an outpouring of tributes from some of the most influential figures across the country, including Hillary Clinton.

The team were crushed when they found out she hadn’t made it.

The Embassy had sent Ryan to the morgue with the excruciating task of identifying her body.

Jarad was shown a photo. Then the U.S. The Ambassador delivered the heartbreaking news to her family back in Maryland.

‘That was probably one of the hardest moments of my life,’ Jarad told DailyMail.com.

‘I was absolutely crushed. The adrenaline was coming down, I was tired, everything hurt.

‘I was just so physically and mentally exhausted that I broke down.’

It is likely that Datar died before the Americans made it to the hotel, but they still regret not saving her.

‘I will always sit here and think I should have done better. She deserved better,’ Jarad added.

Terry and the other survivors had been bundled into an armored vehicle and evacuated to the U.S. Embassy.

Survivors from across the world were thrown inside, coughing from smoke inhalation and covered in blood and soot.

During the short but chaotic drive, Terry turned his thoughts to the Americans he knew were inside when the attack began.

He also thought of his wife back home in the U.S., who stood by his side while he went on foreign assignments in places that were considered far from paradise.

Terry had given a CDC worker the keys to his room so she could store her bags before her flight home, and knew she was inside when the gunmen entered.

He called Post 1 to make sure they knew to track her down. She was one of the Americans Mike helped to safety.

She had been trapped on the upper stories of the hotel during the firefight with the responders.

She stayed in a room the whole time and stayed calm, refusing to open her door when the terrorists tried to trick her.

The CDC staffer walked out with Malian authorities after the attack stopped.

Terry’s hideous ordeal was over. He sat in the courtyard of the embassy alone, dehydrated and exhausted, but still smoking a cigarette.

It was 5pm, and the sun he watched rising a few hours earlier was now starting to set.

The rescuers had finally received an ‘All Clear.’

‘I was blessed that I was there. I had an angel on my shoulder,’ Terry said.

But there was one moment from that day, away from the bloodshed, that will always stick in his mind.

It wasn’t being stuck under a tiny desk for 90 minutes, crawling through thick smoke to safety or watching the boots of the terrorists walk by.

It was when a child rode up to him on his bike, bent down, looked at him and said: ‘My daddy says you're a hero.'

The boy was Ryan Pack’s young son. It was only a few hours after his father had saved his life.

Overcome with emotion and knowing he had made it through what would likely be the worst day of his life, Terry said to him: ‘No, your daddy is my hero.'

The rest of Ryan and Mike’s families walked over, and Terry hugged them both and thanked them.

Almost a decade on, Terry still reminisces about the moment he was reunited with the men who helped him get to safety. It’s what drives him today.

Mike says Terry was a ‘bada**’ and his ‘nerves of steel likely saved lives’.

If he hadn’t called Post 1 so quickly, the rescuers may have been slower in their response to the hotel.

‘He was a real hero to himself and to his family that day,’ Mike told DailyMail.com.

‘He’s also the reason we got started doing what we were doing and were able to help as much as we did.

‘He was the catalyst that led to everything happening the way it did.’

Terry still keeps in touch and says he would do anything for them.

He also believes they haven’t gotten enough credit for actions that prevented a far more gruesome massacre.

Terry kept working with the State Department around the world for years after the attack.

A month later he had a close call in Karachi, Pakistan, when men started waving and firing AK47s on the bank across the river from his hotel.

The 63-year-old quit traveling with the U.S. government three years ago. A couple of medical episodes - including a month-long stay in intensive care in Dubai - were enough to tell him his globetrotting days were over.

He now works in air conditioning in Destin, Florida - where he lives with his wife of 42 years, who suffered through all of his foreign scares.

His two sons and four grandchildren live nearby.

‘The good Lord looked out after me for so long. It's time for me to stay home,' he said.