LONDON - Testimony released Monday revealed that a former senior UK Special Forces officer has told a public inquiry he believed British troops committed "war crimes" in Afghanistan, describing suspected executions of detainees by a Special Air Service (SAS) unit as an "open secret" that top commanders failed to report to military police.
Giving evidence under the cipher N1466, the former Assistant Chief of Staff for Operations at UK Special Forces headquarters said that as early as 2011 he believed there was a "strong potential of criminal behaviour" by an SAS sub-unit, yet the chain of command chose internal reviews over criminal investigation.
"I will be clear, we are talking about war crimes," he told the Independent Inquiry relating to Afghanistan, which on Monday released redacted transcripts of his previously closed-door sessions.
N1466 said his alarm was triggered in February 2011 as he studied official reports from night raids in southern Afghanistan conducted by a sub-unit referred to as UKSF1.
Across multiple operations, he said, the number of Afghans recorded as "enemies killed in action" routinely outstripped the number of weapons recovered on target. Reports described detainees being shot after supposedly trying, again and again, to pick up guns or grenades after capture, scenarios the officer said he found implausible.
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On one raid, nine men were killed and only three weapons reported. Years later, BBC investigators visiting the same compound found bullet marks clustered low on the walls of the room where the men died, consistent with people being shot while on or close to the ground, rather than during the intense firefight described by the SAS. Families insisted the dead were civilians with no weapons in the house.
Alongside the paperwork, N1466 said he had been told of SAS soldiers bragging on a training course that they killed "fighting aged males" during operations, regardless of whether they posed a threat.
N1466 said he was "deeply troubled by what I strongly suspected was the unlawful killing of innocent people, including children."
In early April 2011, N1466 instructed staff officers to conduct a desk-based review of UKSF1 after-action reports. He said the results confirmed a pattern he had already suspected -- high numbers of fatalities, few recovered weapons, and detainees being taken back into buildings and later reported dead.
He wrote to the Director Special Forces warning that the matter "merited deeper investigation" and could require action "to put a stop to criminal behaviour," and later briefed him in person.
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According to the summary, the director responded by ordering a review of tactics, techniques and procedures, to be handled entirely within the special forces chain of command rather than by the Royal Military Police (RMP). N1466 told the inquiry he believed there was a "clear intent" by the director to close ranks and "pretty much suppress" the issue, adding that the resulting review concentrated on drills and on the supposed behaviour of Afghan men rather than on whether detainees in UK custody had been unlawfully killed.
He criticized what he described as a failure to report concerns both up and down the chain, saying several levels of command should have recognized the warning signs.
N1466 did not approach the RMP until January 2015. He told the inquiry he initially believed internal action had addressed the problem, but when he returned to UK Special Forces in 2014 he concluded that similar patterns had persisted "at least into 2013" across several rotations, something he called "quite shocking".
The Independent Inquiry relating to Afghanistan, established after media reporting on suspicious SAS raids, is examining whether unlawful killings occurred between 2010 and 2013, whether they were properly investigated and whether they were concealed by the chain of command.
