BBC investigation finds suspicious killings of civilians in Afghanistan by UK SAS soldiers

A new programme to be released by the BBC on Tuesday night will conclude that 54 people were suspiciously killed by the British army special forces group, the Special Air Service (SAS), over two years in 2010 and 2011.

Based on official British files, the BBC said there was a pattern of “strikingly similar reports” of SAS operations known as kill or capture missions, in which night attacks on villages were made by the soldiers. The investigation highlighted the manner in which these men were killed after producing weapons once they had captured. This practice was not noted by other military units, and bullet marks left behind in the raided buildings could show tthese men were killed while on the floor.

“You can see why we were concerned,” a military police investigator told the BBC. “Bullet marks on the walls so low to the ground appeared to undermine the special forces’ version of events.”

“Too many people were being killed on night raids and the explanations didn’t make sense,” a senior officer said. “Once somebody is detained, they shouldn’t end up dead. For it to happen over and over again was causing alarm at HQ. It was clear at the time that something was wrong.”

Internal emails described the squadrons “latest massacre”. One email said it had to have been 10th time in the last two weeks” the squadron had sent a detainee back into a building “and he reappeared with an AK”.

What did the British army know of these killings?

After a number of suspicious deaths while fighters were being held, an investigation named Operation Northmoor was opened into around 600 events. However, the investigation was disrupted by the army from its inception in 2014. Operation Northmoor was wound down in 2017 and closed in 2019. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has said that no evidence of criminality was found.

Another special review was conducted into the soldiers, but it reflected the official line of those under investigation and was signed off by the commanding officer of the SAS unit responsible for the suspicious killings.

After the release of the information by the BBC, the MoD said it believed Panorama had jumped to “unjustified conclusions from allegations that have already been fully investigated”.

A war of cruelty

This evidence would seem to follow a pattern of war crimes committed by the US-led forces in Afghanistan. As recently as August 2021, US forces killed 10 civilians in an airstrike during the manic evacuation from Kabul. No one was prosecuted for the attack in what the US Defense Department described as a “tragedy.”

A report in 2016 from the International Criminal Court (ICC) said there was “reasonable basis” to believe that the US army and CIA were torturing prisoners in Afghanistan. The ICC does not have jurisdiction over the US as it is one of six nations worldwide that are not signiatories, along with other nations with poor human rights records such as: Russia, Israel, Libya, China, and Qatar.

There is evidence that many of the nations involved in the 2003 invasion committed war crimes. In 2020, 13 Australian soldiers were sacked for the murder of 39 civilians and prisoners during the conflict. In the Brereton report, it was found that troops had a “warrior culture” in which newly deployed troops were told to shoot prisoners to “blood” themselves into combat.