British special forces soldiers used extreme methods against militants in Afghanistan, including covering a man with a pillow before shooting him with a pistol, as well as killing unarmed people, according to testimony released Wednesday by an inquiry into the actions of British troops during the war there.
“During these operations it was said that ‘all fighting-age males are killed’ on target regardless of the threat they posed, this included those not holding weapons,” one officer said in a conversation with a fellow soldier in March 2011 that he confirmed in testimony given during a closed-door hearing.
Britain’s Ministry of Defense announced in 2022 that it would institute the inquiry to investigate allegations of war crimes by British armed forces in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013. In 2023, it confirmed that the allegations related to special forces troops.
The hundreds of pages of evidence released Wednesday, which includes email exchanges, letters and witness statements by senior officers and rank-and-file soldiers, painted a disturbing portrait of an elite fighting force with a culture of impunity, which placed body counts above all other benchmarks.
One member of a British unit said that the troops appeared to be “beyond reproach” during the long years of combat in Afghanistan, which amounted to “a golden pass allowing them to get away with murder.”
Like all of the witnesses, that soldier’s identity was not revealed. Many of the statements and other documents were heavily redacted to suppress names, units and the location of operations.
But even with those details withheld, there were revealing descriptions of junior officers raising concerns with their superiors about tactics used during nighttime raids on militants.
In an email exchange from February 2011, a soldier told a senior officer of a raid in which a lone Afghan fighter, ordered to go back inside a building, returned with a weapon, even though he was heavily outnumbered. The soldier questioned whether the SAS units were ordering Afghans to fetch their weapons, “thereby setting the conditions for their execution?”
“A good point,” his superior replied. “There appears to be a casual disregard for life, COIN principles and credible reporting.”
COIN refers to the counterinsurgency doctrine used by American, British and other NATO troops during much of the war in Afghanistan. Among other concerns, the wanton killing of Afghan fighters and civilians was viewed as destroying trust between foreign troops and the civilian population.
In another exchange, the same senior officer described how the SAS seemed to be reverting to “the good ole tactics.”
When he raised a question in an email about whether SAS units were manufacturing scenarios that allowed them to kill Afghan combatants, another officer replied, “these Afghans are so stupid they deserve to die.” The first officer said he viewed the reply as “a glib comment on his part reflecting the fact that the way it is described that the Afghans were killed doesn’t add up.”
The Ministry of Defense said it was “appropriate that we await the outcome” of the inquiry “before commenting further.”
Allegations of war crimes by British troops in Afghanistan are not new. They have been highlighted in media reports, most notably by the BBC investigative program Panorama. American special operations troops have also been accused of repeated cases of misconduct in Afghanistan, including killing civilians in raids and then trying to cover it up.
The conduct of Britain’s elite troops flared into a political dispute last fall when the Conservative Party was choosing a new leader. Robert Jenrick, one of the candidates, claimed without evidence that they “are killing rather than capturing terrorists” and said that was because a European human rights court would otherwise force Britain to release them.
Mr. Jenrick came under sharp criticism from two other candidates, Tom Tugendhat and James Cleverly, both former soldiers. Mr. Tugendhat said his comments showed a “fundamental misunderstanding of military operations and the law of unarmed conflict.”
Some of these disclosures came to light because of a fierce rivalry between the SAS, or Special Air Services, the special forces unit of the British Army, and the SBS, or Special Boat Service, its counterpart in the Royal Navy. SAS troops arrived in Afghanistan in 2009, many fresh from the war in Iraq, and took over the mission of hunting Taliban militants from the SBS. Many of the concerns about their methods were raised by SBS soldiers and their commanders.
Several witnesses expressed frustration that there was a culture of covering up misdeeds by falsifying operations reports. In the case of the Afghan man whose head was covered by a pillow, “It was implied that photos would be taken of the deceased alongside weapons that the ‘fighting age male’ may not have had in their position when they were killed,” one soldier recounted to the inquiry.
Another soldier said in a February 2011 email that when people raised concerns, they were met with the response, “‘What doesn’t everyone get about how important these ops are?’ The guys appear to be beyond reproach,” he wrote. “Astonishing.”
Some warned that British forces were vulnerable to the same embarrassment as their American allies, who were tarred in 2010 by the leaking of military logs documenting six years of the Afghanistan war by WikiLeaks, the antisecrecy group established by Julian Assange.
“If we don’t believe this,” an officer said in an email, “then no one else will and when the next WikiLeaks occurs then we will be dragged down with them.”
