Concerns about the number of Afghan civilians being killed by British special forces in the early part of the last decade prompted the country\u2019s then president to make a \u201cmuscular\u201d complaint to Nato commanders fighting the Taliban.<\/p>\n
Newly released evidence from a public inquiry into the deaths of up to 80 people during an SAS deployment also showed that Afghan partner military forces were no longer willing to work alongside the British by the spring of 2011.<\/p>\n
The statements are contained in redacted and summarised evidence of a special forces staff officer, known only as N1788, who had been responsible for reviewing tactics used in operations that led to civilians repeatedly being killed.<\/p>\n
\u201cPresident Hamid Karzai was very \u2018muscular\u2019 in addressing the issue\u201d of British detention operations \u201cwith Nato\u2019s chain of command\u201d, according to the summary of N1788\u2019s two days of evidence, first given in the autumn of 2024.<\/p>\n
Around the same time, the evidence summary said, \u201ceveryone was aware that some of the Afghan partner units were being reluctant to go on operations\u201d with the British special forces sub-unit, known only as SU1.<\/p>\n
This became \u201ca major issue for campaigns\u201d across the Nato-led forces operating in Afghanistan<\/a> and emerged at the same time as the US president Barack Obama had increased the number of US troops in Afghanistan to try to deal with a growing Taliban insurgency. \u201cIt was a known issue and a big deal,\u201d the summary of the evidence said.<\/p>\n In April 2011, the staff officer had been asked to review a recurring procedure in which Afghan males were asked by the SAS to come back inside a family compound that had been the subject of a special forces raid, typically at night-time.<\/p>\n On several occasions, the Afghan men were said to have produced weapons and were promptly killed. N1788 told the inquiry that there were concerns that the procedure had become an \u201cinefficient practice\u201d. Sometimes there were fewer weapons discovered than there were Afghans killed.<\/p>\n Asked by the chair of the inquiry, Charles Haddon-Cave, to explain what that phrase meant, N1788 said there were concerns that a tactic that had been designed to reduce the threat to British forces and civilians had become counterproductive.<\/p>\n Separating off Afghan adult males during raids had \u201cdirectly increased the propensity of kinetic [ie military] activity\u201d, N1788 said. It was \u201cundermining the very reason it was designed for \u2026 which was to de-escalate\u201d, he added.<\/p>\n Evidence from a second soldier, N2252, who was chief of staff to the director of the UK\u2019s special forces in 2010 and 2011, said there had been a high degree of pressure to deliver because many British soldiers had been killed in 2010.<\/p>\n \u201cAs I\u2019ve said to you, we wanted to do things right. We\u2019d all been to lots of funerals in 2009\/2010, 100-plus people killed in 2010. We didn\u2019t want that to happen again,\u201d N2252 said. But he said that the tactic of separating off Afghan males during raids had led to \u201cunintended consequences\u201d.<\/p>\n Concerns about the lethal conduct of the SAS in Helmand province in Afghanistan have been circulating since, leading to the setting up of the public inquiry in December 2022. It began with a handful of public hearings the following October<\/a>, covering UK special forces deployments between 2010 and 2013, though since then progress has been slow.<\/p>\n Hearings involving former members of the special forces, with the exception of former MP Johnny Mercer, have largely been held in private without press or public present and evidence is then summarised and redacted to comply with official requests to maintain secrecy around the day-to-day activities of the SAS.<\/p>\n The inquiry has also heard allegations that two Afghan adults were shot dead while sleeping<\/a> with children next to them, in evidence presented by Richard Hermer KC, who has since become attorney general.<\/p>\n Another British soldier told his superiors at the time that he believed the SAS had a policy in Afghanistan to \u201ckill all males on target whether they posed a threat or not\u201d \u2013 a practice colloquially described as \u201cflat packing\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Concerns about the number of Afghan civilians being killed by British special forces in the early part of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":609736,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-609735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=609735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609735\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/609736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=609735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=609735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=609735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}