https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj3j5gxgz0do

"Former members of UK Special Forces have broken years of silence to give BBC Panorama eyewitness accounts of alleged war crimes committed by colleagues in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Giving their accounts publicly for the first time, the veterans described seeing members of the SAS murder unarmed people in their sleep and execute handcuffed detainees, including children.

"They handcuffed a young boy and shot him," recalled one veteran who served with the SAS in Afghanistan. "He was clearly a child, not even close to fighting age."

Killing of detainees "became routine", the veteran said. "They'd search someone, handcuff them, then shoot them", before cutting off the plastic handcuffs used to restrain people and "planting a pistol" by the body, he said.

…

Knowledge of the alleged crimes was not confined to small teams or individual squadrons, according to the testimony. Within the UK Special Forces command structure, "everyone knew" what was happening, said one veteran.

…

"There was a fake grenade they'd take with them onto target, it couldn't detonate," said a former SAS operator. Another veteran said operators would carry AK-47 rifles which had a folding stock because they were easier to fit into their rucksacks and "easier to bring onto a target and plant by a body".

Officers would then help to falsify post-operational reports in order to avoid scrutiny for the actions of assault teams on the ground, according to the testimony.

…

"If it looked like a shooting could represent a breach of the rules of conflict, you'd get a phone call from the legal adviser or one of the staff officers in HQ. They'd pick you up on it and help you to clarify the language. 'Do you remember someone making a sudden move?' 'Oh yeah, I do now.' That sort of thing. It was built into the way we operated."

The reports were "a fiction", another UKSF veteran said.

An intelligence officer who worked with the SBS described reports which said they had been caught in a firefight, while the photos showed bodies with "multiple clean headshots".

…

The Afghan president was "so consistent with his complaints about night raids, civilian casualties and detentions that there was no senior Western diplomat or military leader who would have missed the fact that this was a major irritant for him," said Gen Douglas Lute, a former US ambassador to Nato.

…"

by snuggl3ninja

9 comments

  2. >*Panorama can also reveal for the first time that then Prime Minister David Cameron was repeatedly warned during his tenure that UK Special Forces were killing civilians in Afghanistan.”*

    >*”According to the SAS veteran, the problem started long before the regiment moved across to Afghanistan and “senior commanders were aware of that”.*

    >*”The testimony, as well as new video evidence obtained by the BBC from SAS operations in Iraq in 2006, also supports previous reporting by Panorama that SAS squadrons kept count of their kills to compete with one another.*

    >*Sources told the BBC that some members of the SAS kept their own individual counts, and that one operator personally killed dozens of people on one six-month tour of Afghanistan.*

    >*”It seemed like he was trying to get a kill on every operation, every night someone got killed,” a former colleague said. The operator was “notorious in the squadron, he genuinely seemed like a psychopath,” the former colleague added.*

    >*In one incident that sources say became infamous inside the SAS, the operator allegedly slit the throat of an injured Afghan man after telling an officer not to shoot the man again. It was “because he wanted to go and finish the wounded guy off with his knife,” another former colleague said. “He wanted to, you know, blood his knife.”*

    Such heroes. Murdering innocent civilians, executing children with their hands bound. Good to know that’s where your tax money goes. Good to know that’s what we’re a part of; that the British Government and PM are not only well aware that this is going on but happy to spend billions on it.

  3. Atleast if they had done it to the wee shits on the Glider, I might have given them the benefit of the doubt

  4. Sure the local savages needed to be civilised…. /s

  5. British army acting like deranged murderers? Well I never, preposterous.

  6. So I imagine there will be calls for the UK to be excluded from Eurovision, the Olympics etc? Right?

  8. no armed antagonists , create them.

    from a well used and very familiar playbook, on any given sunday.

  9. If one tenth of this is true and I have no reason to suspect it isn’t then the SAS and the SBS should be disbanded.

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