BBC News has revealed “disturbing evidence” of British Special Air Service (SAS) war crimes in Afghanistan and subsequent attempts to cover them up. Journalists believe SAS fighters have killed unarmed teenagers.
The journalists obtained the information from a cache of internal emails from the headquarters of the UK Special Forces (UKSF), the military department that oversees the SAS. The emails contained details of previously classified raids in which civilians were killed.
The BBC later had an anonymous source who gave hundreds of military reports to journalists. They contained no details of the locations of the raids but “potentially important clues as to what happened during each raid”.
After gathering information, journalists travelled to Afghanistan and spoke to relatives of the alleged victims of the British soldiers.
Haji Habibullah, a 70-year-old Afghan man, said his sons, aged 16 and 20, had been killed during one of the raids.
In the early hours of February 7, 2011, Habibullah’s sons, Samiullah and Nisar Ahmad, were sleeping in a one-room guesthouse. Seven other people who had come to their village for a funeral were staying with them. At that time, four helicopters with SAS fighters landed nearby and soon all nine people in the guest house were killed.
According to the official SAS report on the incident, the military believed that the house was linked to a militant leader. The SAS claimed that they were resisted and found three AK-47 rifles during the raid.
However, Habibullah claimed that all the dead were unarmed civilians not affiliated with the militants.
The journalists inspected the building where Habibullah’s sons were killed. They found that all but one of the bullet holes were less than 75 centimetres from the floor.
A UKSF weapons expert told the BBC that the shots were fired from above – meaning the men were shot as they lay or sat against the wall.
Investigating another 2011 raid in which eight people were killed, journalists met 43-year-old Mohammad Daoud. Two of his brothers, aged 15 and 25, were victims of the raid. Daoud claims that no one in his family had weapons or links to militants.
BBC journalists had already investigated an SAS raid in 2019 in which a 12-year-old and a 14-year-old boy were killed in an Afghan guesthouse.
A source who served with the SAS in Afghanistan told the BBC that the unofficial “policy” of the squad was to kill everyone they encountered during the raids, whether they were armed or not.
According to BBC News, in some cases the military may have planted weapons on dead bodies to give the impression that defenseless people were armed.
A defense ministry spokesman told the publication that British troops had “served bravely and professionally in Afghanistan” and had always held themselves to “the highest standards”.
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