Afghan president voiced concern over civilians killed by SAS troops, inquiry told | British army
Concerns over the number of Afghan civilians killed by British special forces early last decade prompted the country’s then-president to lodge a “strong” complaint with NATO commanders fighting the Taliban.
Newly released evidence from the public inquiry into the deaths of up to 80 people during the SAS deployment also showed that Afghan joint military forces were no longer willing to work with the British as of spring 2011.
The statements appear in edited and summarized evidence from a special forces staff officer known only as N1788, who was responsible for reviewing tactics used in operations that led to repeated killings of civilians.
According to N1788’s summary of two days of evidence, first given in the autumn of 2024, “President Hamid Karzai was very ‘strong’ in addressing the issue of British detention operations “with NATO’s chain of command.”
Around the same time, the summary of evidence said: “Everyone was aware that some Afghan joint units were reluctant to continue operations with the British special forces subunit known only as SU1.”
This has become a “major issue for campaigns” across NATO-led forces operating in Afghanistan and comes at the same time that US president Barack Obama is increasing the number of US troops in Afghanistan to deal with the growing Taliban insurgency. “This was a known problem and a significant incident,” the summary of evidence said.
In April 2011 the staff officer was asked to review a repeated procedure by the SAS in which Afghan men were asked to return to a family compound that had been the subject of a special forces raid, often at night.
Many times it was said that Afghan men produced weapons and were immediately killed. N1788 told the inquiry there were concerns that the procedure had become an “inefficient practice”. Sometimes fewer weapons were discovered than the number of Afghans killed.
Asked by inquiry chairman Charles Haddon-Cave to explain what the statement meant, N1788 said there were concerns that a tactic designed to reduce the threat to British forces and civilians was having the opposite effect.
Separating Afghan adult males during raids “directly increased kinetic bias” [ie military] “This was undermining the very purpose it was designed to de-escalate,” N1788 added.
The testimony of a second soldier, N2252, who was chief of staff of the United Kingdom’s special forces directorate in 2010 and 2011, stated that there was a high degree of pressure on delivery due to the killing of many British soldiers in 2010.
“As I told you, we wanted to do things right. We all went to a lot of funerals in 2009/2010, over 100 people were killed in 2010. We didn’t want that to happen again,” N2252 said. But he said the tactic of separating Afghan men during raids had led to “unintended consequences”.
Concerns about the SAS’s deadly behavior in Afghanistan’s Helmand province have since circulated, leading to the launch of the public inquiry in December 2022. The inquiry began the following October with a series of public hearings covering the UK’s special forces deployments between 2010 and 2013, but progress since then has been slow.
The hearings, which involved former members of the special forces, with the exception of former MP Johnny Mercer, were largely held in private without press or public access, and the evidence was subsequently summarized and edited to comply with official requests to maintain secrecy regarding the day-to-day activities of the SAS.
The inquest also heard allegations in evidence from Richard Hermer KC, who later became chief prosecutor, that two Afghan adults were shot dead while they slept with children next to them.
Another British soldier told his superiors at the time that he believed the SAS had a policy in Afghanistan of “target killing all men whether they posed a threat or not”; this was a practice colloquially described as “split packing”.
