SAS suppressed evidence of war crimes, senior officer tells inquiry

The elite Special Air Service (SAS) ‘shot toddlers’ and covered up evidence of war crimes, a senior officer has told an inquiry. The investigation into allegations of extrajudicial killing in Afghanistan heard:

It’s not loyalty to your organisation to stand by and to watch it go down the sewer.

One SAS squadron may have murdered up to 54 people in a single tour in 2011. The Unredacted website has a useful briefing on cover-up culture within special forces. Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) have also followed the inquiry closely.

The officer served as assistant chief of staff for operations in special forces headquarters. This brought him into contact with the most senior special forces officers. The evidence has been given in closed sessions, and most of the participants names have been protected. This officer is known as N1466.

He told the inquiry:

We were there in Afghanistan to bring law and order and human security and justice. We failed.

Right now and beyond Afghanistan, we are facing off against despotic autocracies. It seems to me to be obvious we should not sink to their level.

SAS shooting sleeping toddlers?

Special forces were heavily used in the War on Terror. One outcome has been allegations that many such units went off the rails and acted with impunity. The US Navy SEALS and the Australian SAS have both been rocked by repeated scandals. Western-trained and controlled Afghan special forces are also accused of illegal killings.

N1466 told the inquiry he was still “troubled” by the:

unlawful killing of innocent people including children but also the absence of what I considered at the time should have been the response of all officers, including very senior officers in the chain of command, and I struggled to come to terms with what had happened.

The officer continued:

When you look back on it, on those people who died unnecessarily…there were two toddlers shot in their bed next to their parents, you know, all that would not necessarily have come to pass if that had been stopped.

The officer said that extra-judicial killings were “not confined to a small number of soldiers…but was potentially widespread and was apparently known to many within UKSF [special forces]”.

Culture of cover-ups and impunity

The officer said he had not joined special forces to tolerate this kind of behaviour. He said he was fiercely loyal to the units, but insisted war crimes had occurred:

I will be clear. We are talking about war crimes…we are talking about taking detainees and executing them with a pretence, the pretence being that they conducted violence against the, the forces. I’m being very blunt there, but that was what I felt at the time.

Another soldier, named N5461, told the inquiry:

Let’s be clear, EJK [extra judicial killings] happened in Afghanistan, we know that increasingly in court and that’s probably just the tip of the iceberg…[UK special forces] are not immune to it.

It has been reported that SAS troops also used so-called “drop weapons”. This involves placing previously captured weapons on bodies to frame them as terrorists.

Mounting evidence of war crimes

Unredacted’s briefing refers to “mounting evidence of war crimes carried out by SAS units deployed to Afghanistan, as well as the fabricated reporting designed to cover up these crimes”.

It provides a timeline and who’s who of (often very senior) officers:

who had contemporaneous knowledge of what appeared at the time to be systematic unlawful killings, and yet who universally failed to refer matters to the Service Police.

In September, AOAV reported SAS soldiers had been urged not to cooperate with the inquiry. AOAV director Iain Overton wrote that the suggestion government-appointed lawyers “may be instructing their clients to disengage” and that such a suggestion:

transforms this from an uncomfortable process into a corrosive one. It suggests that the state’s left hand is undermining what its right hand has demanded: accountability.

Allegedly special forces chiefs blocked asylum claims for allies because they may have witnessed war crimes. In May, “files, disclosed by the Ministry of Defence in court on Thursday, show the unnamed UKSF officer rejected every application referred to him in the summer of 2023”. There were 1,585 cases.

The inquiry, led by Judge Haddon-Cave, has no legal power. And it’s frames of reference are typically narrow. It is not clear when or what it will report. What does seem clearer by the day is that a culture of impunity and cover-up came to exist in UK and allied special forces in Afghanistan.

Featured image via the Canary