Murder in Uniform: Britain’s Special Forces and Their Killings in Afghanistan

There is a rot at the heart of Britain’s military mythology. For years, politicians and generals have draped the Special Air Service (SAS) and its kindred regiments in the teflon cloaks of honour, sacrifice and secrecy. But myths have a habit of unravelling and this one is fast doing so. And what has emerged, as revealed by a years-long BBC Panorama investigation and parallel work by my charity Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), is not the heroic professionalism of elite warriors. It’s something far darker.

It’s the body of a child, handcuffed and shot in the head.

It’s the tally kept of kills by men who seem to have relished bloodshed.

It’s the planted weapons, the falsified reports, the footage never watched, the servers wiped clean.

It is, bluntly, murder. And done in our names.

For those of us who have spent years documenting the civilian costs of the war on Terror, these most recent allegations – in Panorama’s exceptional film ‘Special Forces: I saw war crimes’ – confirm what many long suspected. That Britain’s Special Forces almost certainly conducted a campaign of extrajudicial killings in Afghanistan with impunity. And that a military judicial system built to restrain them catastrophically failed. Worse, it may have even have helped cover their tracks.

This is not the misconduct of a few “bad apples”. This is not battlefield confusion. The testimonies aired by Panorama – drawn from interview with more than 30 former soldiers, intelligence officers, and insiders – reveals systematic wrongdoing. Operations where “everyone knew what was going on”, attacks where detainees were executed, raid where children were murdered, and missions where those acts were recorded, not for accountability, but seemingly as trophies.

The most shocking revelation may not be the killings themselves. It is just how many people knew. Knew, and stayed silent. Or worse – knew and enabled.

Commanding officers. Legal advisors. Ministers. Even, allegedly, a former Prime Minister.

They were warned. And yet they did nothing.

Instead, what emerges is a choreography of concealment.

Legal manoeuvring to block inquiries, manipulation of official language to stay within the “rules of engagement”, refusals to hand over evidence, and the deeply troubling revelation that Special Forces were granted a secret veto over the UK asylum claims of Afghan soldiers – men who had witnessed these killings first-hand.

This veto, in particular, reveals a moral depravity at odds with Britain’s self-image as a nation of law and order. As a nation that ‘exported’ democracy to Afghanistan.

The suggestion that some of the “Triples” – Afghan special forces who fought and bled alongside British troops – were left behind to be tortured or killed by the Taliban, not because they were a security risk, but because they were witnesses, should be a wound in the national psyche. It should haunt every official who signed those rejections. It should haunt the Ministry of Defence.

These are not mere allegations of misconduct. These are detailed allegations of war crimes. That phrase has weight and with it carries a legal threshold. The killing of wounded detainees; the execution of unarmed men; the murder of children. These acts are not combat. They are crimes.

And yet, the British state’s response has been to close ranks. Operation Northmoor, the Royal Military Police’s investigation into 52 suspicious killings, was shuttered without key film evidence reviewed. Eyewitnesses were intimidated or ignored. The MOD’s own lawyers misled the courts. Senior figures, including former heads of the Army and UK Special Forces, refused to comment.

Instead, the Ministry has insisted that it is “cooperating fully” with the independent Afghanistan Inquiry. That may be true in letter. But in spirit? The spirit of that cooperation looks a lot like obstruction. And still, the killings went on.

From 2006 to beyond 2013, British Special Forces reportedly turned war into a numbers game, where human lives were reduced to metrics, and the “success” of a mission was measured in bodies. In 2010 alone, one SAS squadron averaged 2.7 kills per raid.

There is a quiet violence, too, in the way the MOD dismisses Afghan testimony – as if Afghan lives are lesser lives, Afghan grief a lesser grief. This, too, is part of the problem. For war crimes do not exist in a vacuum; they thrive in cultures of impunity, racism, and disdain for the rules that supposedly bind us.

And so, we should add our voices to the calls for justice – not just for the dead, but for the living who remember them. For the families who still wait for truth. For the Afghans denied safe haven. For the British soldiers who stayed silent for too long, and who now seek to atone.

Let there be no illusions: what Panorama and AOAV have, over the years, helped uncover is not just a scandal. It is a reckoning. And if the British state fails to confront it, it will not only dishonour the dead, it will dishonour itself.