UK Special Forces Whistleblowers: SAS Had ‘Golden Pass’ To Murder Unarmed Afghans

Veterans of British special forces operations in Afghanistan have shared with a public inquiry their concerns that noncombatants — including juveniles under 16 — were regularly murdered in raids targeting Taliban fighters. One senior officer said the elite soldiers had a “golden pass allowing them to get away with murder.” 

Launched by the Ministry of Defence in December 2022, the Independent Inquiry Relating to Afghanistan was sparked by a BBC documentary that concluded that members of one elite Special Air Service (SAS) unit killed 54 people under questionable circumstances in just six months, with a great many slain after surrendering to detention. 

The soldiers giving testimony to the inquiry did not assert they witnessed murderous killings themselves. However, defense ministry documents show that several special forces officers in 2011 had declared their concerns that the SAS seemed to be routinely executing Afghans, with one writing that the SAS and murder were “regular bedfellows.”  

One of the soldiers testifying to the inquiry, who’s identified in inquiry documents as N1799, repeated accounts given him by an SAS member with whom he was training, saying: 

“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. It was also indicated that ‘fighting age males’ were being executed on target, inside compounds, using a variety of methods after they had been restrained. In one case it was mentioned a pillow was put over the head of an individual before being killed with a pistol…I suppose what shocked me most wasn’t the execution of potential members of the Taliban, which was of course wrong and illegal, but it was more the age and the methods and, you know, the details of things like pillows.” 

When asked if the victims were as young as 16, the solider said, “Or younger. 100%.” Other testimony related to accounts of SAS soldiers fabricating conditions that would be used as a pretext to kill detainees. In particular, SAS operators were said to carry weapons that would be dropped next to detainees, so it could be claimed they were shot in self-defense. “It was also suggested that the [dropped weapon] act was known as a ‘Mr Wolf’ — supposedly a reference to the fictional fixer Winston Wolfe from the film Pulp Fiction,” Sky News explains. 

#Australian soldiers film themselves murdering a young, unarmed #Afghan man. pic.twitter.com/y5d5XfOuh2

— tim anderson (@timand2037) March 18, 2020

Stirring memories of the “body counts” of America’s war in Vietnam, senior officers of the Royal Navy’s elite Special Boat Service (SBS) said they worried in 2011 that SAS units that had arrived in Afghanistan after serving in Iraq were focusing on racking up kills, according to BBC’s review of inquiry documents just released to the public.   

At the time, the senior SBS officers shared their suspicions that the SAS units were submitting dishonest accounts of their actions during so-called “deliberate detention operations” — the middle-of-the-night raids targeting suspected Taliban insurgents. One of the officers warned that they themselves could eventually find themselves under scrutiny, telling a senior colleague, “If we don’t believe this, then no one else will and when the next WikiLeaks occurs then we will be dragged down with them.”

One of the officers told the inquiry that the UK’s top special forces commander in Afghanistan seemingly felt the soldiers under his command were beyond questioning, and said the lack of accountability and discipline was “astonishing.” 

The SAS’s apparent murderous conduct sparked intense animosity within the Afghan special forces, that boiled over in a February 2011 meeting, to the point of a weapon being drawn on a UK officer. In an email released as part of inquiry, an SBS officer recounted at the time, “I’ve never had such a hostile meeting before – genuine shouting, arm waving and with me staring down a 9mm barrel at one stage – all pretty unpleasant.”

Here’s a July 2022 BBC report that draws on the full “Panorama” documentary that inspired the British inquiry — which is still underway. Is there a similar US investigation in our future?