UK military leaders covered up special forces’ war crimes in Afghanistan: Ex-officer

TEHRAN (Iran News) The revelation came on Monday after the Afghanistan Inquiry released summaries of closed hearings, in which, members of special forces have given evidence about alleged war crimes committed by their colleagues.

The document, citing the senior officer, codenamed N1466 said there was a “deliberate policy” among some members of the British special forces unit in Afghanistan to kill civilians even when they did not pose a threat.

He reportedly had warned the UKSF director in a note dated 2011, about the policy, sharing concerns from the unit’s commanding officer, but the SAS chief and others tried to suppress information about the potential war crimes by the unit, dubbed UKSF1.

N1466 alleged that “The director … made a conscious decision that he is going to suppress this, cover this up and do a little fake exercise to make it look like he’s done something.”

The whistleblower further said that told the inquiry that he had been approached by some of his men who recounted separate conversations with members of UKSF1 but the chain of command failed to stop extrajudicial shootings, including of children, allowing them to continue such killings until 2013.

The cover-up allegations are among the most severe to be raised at an ongoing inquiry that was launched in 2023 under Lord Justice Haddon-Cave.

“We could have stopped it in February 2011. Those people who died unnecessarily from that point onwards, there were two toddlers shot in their bed next to their parents … all that would not necessarily have come to pass if that had been stopped,” stated the whistleblower, seemingly referring to the night-time killing in Nimruz province back in 2012.

After leaving the unit for a period, N1466 returned in 2014 to find evidence. “It was apparent when he came back to UK special forces in 2014 that it had not stopped at all. In fact, it had carried on at least into 2013. He found that quite shocking,” according to a summary of his evidence.

He said the killings by some of the unit members were a “stain” on the reputation of the special forces and sacrifice of others.

“We didn’t join UKSF for this sort of behaviors – toddlers to get shot in their beds or random killing. It’s not special, it’s not elite, it’s not what we stand for and most of us, I don’t believe, would either wish to condone it or to cover it up,” he told the inquiry.