‘We won’t forget the British soldiers, how they killed and lied’

The SAS post-mission reports into the Helmand night raids read like the draft notes to the opening scene of a Hollywood war film. There was certainly no shortage of drama as the raid on a complex of Afghan compounds in the village of Khanano unfolded in the early hours of March 12, 2011. Nor is there any doubt that among the scurrying figures the British pursued that night were members of the Taliban.
First, drones flew over the target area, where the SAS sought to kill or capture the Taliban commander Ismatullah, codenamed Objective 9. One redacted report describes “air assets” firing into the fields to repel two groups of men seen running from the compounds as a Chinook helicopter landed to the southwest of the village carrying the SAS. They then cleared several buildings in sequence, a process in which the SAS were, according to their own accounts, regularly challenged and once fired at by armed men. By the time the mission concluded just before dawn, eight Taliban, including Ismatullah, were reported dead and six weapons had been recovered.
But were all of the dead men really armed Taliban?
The Afghans’ recollections of the raid are very different, and lack similar claims of efficacy and glory. Detailed accounts from those who survived that night, and who spoke to The Times in Khanano last week, allege that what followed the SAS arrival was needless carnage in which unarmed men, including one with mental disabilities, were corralled and shot over a four-hour period — some after being detained. They also allege that a prisoner was later electrocuted during interrogation.
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“My wife and I were shouting to the foreign soldiers not to kill our son as they led him away,” said Haji Sadiqullah, now 68 years old, whose adult son, Naqibullah, was detained by the British shortly after the SAS landed in the village. “My wife was begging them not to shoot our son, who was mentally disabled.”
Haji Sadiqullah claims that the next time he saw his son, just a few hours later, it was nearly dawn. The foreign soldiers had gone. Naqibullah lay dead in a room, shot multiple times at close range. Haji Sadiqullah insists that his son’s hands were still tied behind his back with plastic cuffs.
“I cut the bonds free from my son’s hands with my own knife,” he claimed.
Though 13 years have passed since the night the SAS landed in the small village, north of the main British base in Sangin, the community’s memories of the war and its violence still burn bright. Nor are they alone in recollecting the killings. The night raid at Khanano is one of many operations undertaken by the SAS in Helmand between 2010 and 2013 that are the subject of investigation by an independent inquiry, chaired by Lord Justice Sir Charles Haddon-Cave, into allegations of unlawful killings.
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The inquiry has heard accusations of the regiment routinely shooting unarmed Afghan adult males they suspected of Taliban membership, then placing “drop” weapons beside the bodies to falsely legitimise the scene.
Richard Hermer KC, who was appointed attorney-general last week by Keir Starmer, referred directly to the killings at Khanano in his opening statement to the independent inquiry last year when he was at speaking on behalf of the Afghan families, represented by Leigh Day solicitors.
The killings of more than 80 Afghans have come under the inquiry’s scrutiny since it was launched last year. It is not just the reputation of the SAS at stake. If further evidence emerges supporting allegations of a high-level cover-up of unlawful killings by senior officers then the ramifications could extend not just to serving and former generals but also to members of the former Conservative government.
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Hermer’s appointment as attorney-general will doubtless cause unease within the military establishment. As a well-known human rights lawyer with a reputation for doggedness, during his earlier involvement with the inquiry he called for the investigation and prosecution of any individual found to be implicated in the murder of Afghan civilians. He called too for that accountability to ‘involve not only the soldiers on the ground but also those who were responsible for their management and oversight.’
Asadullah was the first man to die during the Khanano raid, according to evidence presented to the inquiry. A 43-year-old member of the Alokozai tribe, his name appears to have been on a list held by the British soldiers. When the troops surrounded his compound and called for his family to step outside, they told Asadullah to remain behind, then they took him to a room and shot him, his brother said.
“Once the foreign soldiers called our wives and children out through the gate to where the foreigners waited, the soldiers called me to step out of the yard to join them,” said Asadullah’s brother Azizullah, now 35. Both brothers were known only by their first names, which is common in Afghanistan.
“I was standing right beside Asadullah at the time,” he told The Times. “The foreign soldiers were really close. Some stood right in front of us. Others were on the wall and roof looking down on us. They had a translator with them. They told Asadullah to wait behind, and told only me to come out. They knew his name. ‘Not you, Asadullah,’ they said. ‘You wait there’.”
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Azizullah claims that he complied with the instructions and walked out of the yard, and that as soon as he was out of the gate he was restrained with plastic cuffs and hooded. Then he heard the sound of shooting behind him as his brother was killed. The SAS later claimed that Asadullah had reached for a hidden weapon.
The soldiers said that the next man they killed in the same compound minutes later was also found with a weapon; and that after that, in a nearby compound, they killed another man who, though already detained, had grabbed a hidden AK47; and that as soon as he was killed a fourth Afghan man, who had already been arrested, grabbed the same fallen weapon and was killed too.
Four others were then killed in another compound. Ismatullah, the Taliban commander who was the target of the raid, was the last to die, according to Afghan witnesses, after he ran from one compound, was shot in the leg, was bandaged by a local woman, and was then killed after being discovered by the SAS hidden under a blanket.
“It is true, Ismatullah was a Taliban commander,” recalled Azizullah. “But he was not armed when the foreign soldiers killed him, and the other men killed that night were not Taliban. Did seven have to die just so the British could get the one they wanted?”
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The SAS report said that five weapons were recovered from eight bodies. In documents submitted to the Haddon-Cave inquiry, a similar pattern of unease was expressed by SAS officers after the raid as in earlier missions in which soldiers claimed that detainees grabbed weapons. “Back to the good ole tactics,” said one officer with the code alias N2107.
The Ministry of Defence has not commented on allegations against the SAS while the Haddon-Cave inquiry is ongoing, but a ministry representative said: “This is a fully independent inquiry which has the full support of the MoD, and we encourage anyone with relevant information to come forward.”
The rules of war in Sangin were always strained by the brutality of the violence there. More British soldiers were killed by the Taliban in Sangin district and its namesake town than anywhere else in Afghanistan, and as fighting there peaked between 2009 and 2010 British soldiers blown up by IEDs or shot in gun battles weekly. The Taliban suffered correspondingly.
“It was a bitter fight between us,” acknowledged Haji Abdullah Qaniy, 56, speaking last week in Sangin, where he is now one of the most senior Taliban commanders.
Haji Qaniy fought the British throughout their time in the district and said that of the original 80 men in his group of fighters in 2006, only eight were still alive by the time the last foreign troops left the town in 2014.
“The British were softer than the Americans, but neither group put flowers in our hands, nor did we give them anything but bullets and IEDs in return,” he said. “We fought against the foreign soldiers fiercely as we wanted none of them in Afghanistan — not previously, not now and not in the future — and we sacrificed a lot to achieve that.”
The Taliban commander, whose own eight-year-old daughter was killed by an airstrike during the fight against foreign troops in Sangin, was specific in how he differentiated between the impact of armed Taliban fighters being killed in action by the British and the impact of unarmed men being shot dead in their homes during night raids.
“The night raids worked to our advantage. Every time the British killed unarmed people in their compounds the young, the old, man, woman, child — all were moved to stand against the foreigners,” he said. “Night raids and air strikes are what angered people most about the foreigners. When they killed our fighters, we understood it. When they killed innocents, it drove everyone to rage.”
Despite the investment in money and lives — the bloody expenditure of the British era in Sangin — scant evidence remains of Britain’s four-year military endeavour in the district’s sweeping sands. The main base there, FOB Jackson, has been stripped and dismantled by the locals; the walls are gone, the fortifications bulldozed, the watchtowers toppled and sold for scrap.
Orchards grow where soldiers once defended sandbagged bunkers. Even the heavy wire mesh encasing Hesco blast barriers has been taken away, put to use by Afghan shopkeepers in the bazaars to cage their goods. Only the pool of a tributary running through the ruined base, where once British and Afghan soldiers swam to wash away the dust and tension of patrols, remains, the tumbling current rushing ever onward through the ghostly memories of soldiers past.
Indeed, if an Ozymandias lay today in Sangin, then he would not be the ruined statue Percy Bysshe Shelley described but instead the two bridges placed by coalition military engineers across the Helmand river from which children now dive; or a cracked, half-destroyed sentry’s sangar beside the dust of FOB Jackson.
The sun-blasted land may have all but subsumed the physical legacy of the British soldiers once based in Helmand but the bitter memory of night raids still lingers.
Azizullah’s ordeal in Khanano did not end with the shooting of his brother. Before dawn, he said, he was one of nine Afghan males flown out of the village aboard the Chinook as prisoners, hooded and bound, to an undisclosed detention facility, probably in Kandahar, run by foreign soldiers.
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There, he claims, he was held in a windowless cell and deprived of sleep, with white noise and mechanical sounds broadcast into his cell. He says he was repeatedly interrogated over a 25-day period and accused of Taliban membership. Twice, Azizullah claimed that he was placed by foreign interrogators into a small wet-walled box and subjected to electric shocks.
“Each time, it happened during interrogation,” he alleged. “They became angry and said I lied. They hooded me, and men dragged me to a small, damp cell and turned on an electric current until I passed out. Later they would say ‘lie again, and you’ll return to the shock room’.”
On day 25, he was flown to Camp Bastion, held overnight and released without explanation, he said.
“You ask how we remember the British here and I have told you,” he said in Khanano last week. “Though they are long gone, driven from here by our sacrifices, we cannot forget them for the graves they left us, the killings, the recall of how they entered our homes at night, and killed and lied. They left us with a grief and anger which vexes us still. Whatever happens in a London court, it will not take those feelings away.”