9th Paratroopers Assault Regiment "Col Moschin"

On 15 March 1983, at 9:00 pm, a patrol of the 1st San Marco Regiment was ambushed near the Sabra refugee camp in Lebanon, with four marines being wounded, one of them seriously. That same night Brigadier General Franco Angioni, commander of the Italcon mission and former commander of the Colonel Moschin, decided to go out with the raiders to intercept the assailants, who had remained in the area. As Italian forces made contact with the enemy a violent firefight broke out, in which the Lebanese fought with heavy weapons and anti-tank rockets. During the course of the fight, three raiders were wounded, including one who lost a leg, and it was decided to suspend the action. The following day, 16 March, the Italian contingent received a radio message from the commander of the Israeli army:

"Communicate to your commander that we are impressed, because in the Middle East nobody fights at night."[4]

On 18 March, 1st San Marco Regiment soldier 20-year-old Filippo Montesi who had been gravely wounded in the ambush was evacuated to Italy to be operated on at the Celio military hospital. Despite the intervention of the doctors, he died on March 22.

In May 1991, the humanitarian crisis precipitated by Saddam Hussein led to hundreds of thousands of Kurd refugees in northern Iraq. The 9th was deployed to assist the people fleeing Saddam, following his defeat in the 1990–91 Persian Gulf War.

Monday, October 7, 1985, the day of the hijacking of MS Achille Lauro (occurred at 13:15), already late in the evening 60 Col Moschin raiders arrived at the military base of Akrotiri, on the island of Cyprus, made available by the British government , ready to intervene following a plan developed together with the COMSUBIN. The sixty operators should have carried out a "saturation like wildfire" and the rescue of the hostages, while COMSUBIN operators would have carried out the initial raid. The situation evolved differently and the diplomatic line prevailed.

Mafia assassinations of top Italian magistrates in 1992 resulted in the deployment of military forces to Sicily, including the 9th.

On December 13, 1992, following the beginning the Restore Hope operation in Somalia, a C-130 Hercules of the 46th Aerobrigata (Italian Air Force) arrived in Mogadishu with on board a team of raiders from the 9th "Col Moschin" Regiment. The operators occupied the building of the Italian embassy, left abandoned after the outbreak of the civil war in 1991.[5]

On June 5, 1993, at 09:30 a flash of the ANSA press agency Remigio Benni, the only journalist present in Mogadishu, speaks of "dramatic situation, riots and shootings". A unit of Pakistani blue helmets is ambushed by Mohammed Farah Aidid's Somali militia near Radio Mogadishu: 24 soldiers are slaughtered with Kalashnikov and machine guns. The intervention of about 20 raiders, led by Lieutenant Colonel Marco Bertolini, avoided a massacre of even greater proportions. The Italian special forces, fighting hand to hand, brought to safety around 80 Pakistanis from the UN forces.

Four weeks later, on July 2, 1993, the Battle of Check Point Pasta took place. An Italian intervention group, made up of Folgore paratroopers, armored cars and infantry, manages to rescue many Italian soldiers trapped in an ambush organized by Somali militiamen, suffering serious losses: 3 dead and 26 wounded. Among the dead one of the raiders, First Sergeant Stefano Paolicchi, 30 years old, hit on the right side of the spleen, in the only part not protected by the bulletproof vest. For his contribution to the battle he was decorate with the gold medal for military valor (in memory).

In 1994, in Rwanda, the Raiders had the task of evacuating Italian civilians from the African land destroyed by war. The operation, called Operation Ippocampo, ended on November 19 with the recovery of the Italians.

Following the tribal clashes that destroyed the Central African country, the "Col Moschin" returned several times to Rwanda, bringing many compatriots to safety and evacuating many local children. During the operations, Sergeant Major Marco Di Sarra was killed by a severe form of malaria.

The Italian Government to allow the evacuation of its compatriots sent a detachment composed of operators of the "Col Moschin" and from the Comsubin raiders carried by airplanes of the Italian Air Force.[6] Once in Kigali,[7] the capital, the group began its activity in an atmosphere of tragedy moving between bodies left at street corners; it was necessary to recover people several kilometers from the airport and the detachment could not bring transport vehicles with them, the operators decided to requisition civil pick-ups at the airport and, after having dismantled the doors and adapted them to their needs, they reached places where civilian where hiding. Always moving with the weapons ready, the operators managed to evacuate everyone, also facing many resistances by local population.[8]

The 9th was deployed within the IFOR to keep the peace in Bosnia following the Dayton Peace Accords of 1995. They served numerous tours of duty. They were also dispatched several times to Kosovo, following the NATO-Serbian War in 1999.

Additional recent operations include an intervention in Albania, following the near-collapse of the Albanian government in 1997, and an operation in East Timor, following that country's referendum for independence from Indonesia.

In Iraq, Operation Ancient Babylon (Italian contingent of Multinational force 2003 - 2006) includes a section of special forces operatives, from the 9th, the Carabinieri's GIS and the Navy's COMSUBIN, mostly deployed for patrol missions, training local police and Army, and to arrest suspects of terrorism. On April 11, 2004, operators from the unit carried out the rescue of British citizen Gary Teeley, who was being held hostage by an insurgent group in Nasirihya [9]

In September 2007, the Regiment took part, along with the British SBS, in a blitz to free two agents of the Italian security service, the AISE, kidnapped a few days earlier in the province of Farah, in the west of Afghanistan. The Italian raiders provided security coverage, while the final assault was carried out by British soldiers equipped with appropriate all-wheel drive vehicles. The operation had no planning possibilities, as the terrorists suddenly tried to transfer the prisoners and the raiders had to intervene immediately. In the ensuing battle, the two AISE agents were seriously injured, and one of them died a few days later.

30 Col Moschin raiders in 2015 operated with US special forces against ISIS in a new military base created in Taqaddum, between Falluja and Ramadi.[10]

During 2011 military intervention in Libya, at least 40 commandos (maybe more) were sent on the ground to train, coordinate, assist in fighting alongside the rebels and for illuminating targets for NATO aircraft.

In March 2016 it was reported that units have joined other western special forces in Libya to train, coordinate, and assist in fighting against local IS militias.