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'Lots of Psychotic Murderers': Ex-Elite UK Troops Break Silence on Iraq, Afghanistan War Crimes
"They handcuffed a young boy and shot him," said one Special Air Service veteran.
May 12, 2025
Dozens of former United Kingdom Special Forces troops or those who served with them have broken their silence to describe alleged war crimes they witnessed—including the execution of children—during the U.S.-led wars on Afghanistan and Iraq.
BBC's "Panorama"—which has repeatedly aired episodes focused on war crimes committed by British soldiers during the so-called War on Terror—on Monday featured testimonies from 30 former U.K. Special Forces (UKSF) members, including Special Air Service (SAS), Special Boat Service (SBS), and supporting troops who served in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"They handcuffed a young boy and shot him," recalled one SAS veteran who fought in Afghanistan. "He was clearly a child, not even close to fighting age."
"It's not justified, killing people in their sleep."
Another veteran who served with the SAS said that killing was "intoxicating" for some soldiers and became "an addictive thing to do," adding that there were "lots of psychotic murderers" among the ranks.
"On some operations, the troop would go into guesthouse-type buildings and kill everyone there," he said. "They'd go in and shoot everyone sleeping there, on entry. It's not justified, killing people in their sleep."
One SBS veteran described executions of wounded people who posed no threat, including one man who was being treated by a medic when "one of our blokes came up to him."
"There was a bang. He'd been shot in the head at point-blank range," the veteran recalled, describing the killing and other like it as "completely unnecessary."
"These are not mercy killings," he said. "It's murder."
Another veteran recounted a fellow SAS commando who kept track of the dozens of Afghans he'd killed during his six-month deployment.
"It seemed like he was trying to get a kill on every operation, every night someone got killed," the former soldier said, adding that his colleague was "notorious in the squadron; he genuinely seemed like a psychopath."
The soldier allegedly slit the throat of an injured Afghan man after telling an officer not to shoot him again, "because he wanted to go and finish the wounded guy off with his knife."
Another veteran said "everyone knew" what was happening and that to avoid scrutiny for executions, British troops would plant "drop weapons" on victims' bodies to make it appear as if they were militants. U.S. troops—who widely engaged in this war crime—called it "dead-checking."
One veteran said that "there was implicit approval for what was happening" from commanders.
"We understood how to write up serious incident reviews so they wouldn't trigger a referral to the military police," he explained. "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."
"Panorama" also confirmed for the first time that former Conservative U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, who was in office from 2010-16, was repeatedly warned that British troops were committing war crimes.
Gen. Douglas Lute, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, told "Panorama" that then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai—who repeatedly condemned American war crimes in his country—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."
In 2020, the International Criminal Court determined that British troops committed war crimes in Iraq but declined to prosecute any alleged perpetrators.
Documented war crimes committed by U.S. troops, mercenaries, and other private contractors in nations including Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Syria during the ongoing War on Terror include but are not limited to murder of civilians and detainees, extraordinary rendition, torture, rape, and jailing and sexual abuse of women and girls held as bargaining chips.
Whistleblowers who exposed these and other illegalities—including WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, former NSA operative Edward Snowden, former Army analyst Chelsea Manning, former CIA intelligence officer John Kiriakou, and others—were almost always the only ones ever punished in connection with the crimes they exposed.
Other coalition troops—including Afghans, Iraqis, Australians, Germans, Poles, and Canadians—have allegedly committed atrocities during the War on Terror, as have Taliban, al-Qaeda, Islamic State, and other militants.
According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, "at least 940,000 people have died due to direct war violence, including civilians, armed forces on all sides, contractors, journalists, and humanitarian workers" in U.S.-led wars since 9/11. This figure includes at least 408,000 civilians.
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Peace Is a Word That the West Has Taken From the Afghans
With no end of war in sight, this past year has been the deadliest year for civilians since the United States first began to bomb Afghanistan in 2001
Jun 11, 2019
It's difficult to explain the nature of the Afghanistan peace talks. There is no single table with the combatants arrayed on either side. Talks are not even taking place in the same city, since there are at least two sets of discussions ongoing. One location for the peace talks is Doha, Qatar, where the Taliban is meeting with the U.S. government. The other location is Moscow, Russia, where the Taliban has been holding meetings with Afghan opposition leaders--including the former president Hamid Karzai. Absent from both meetings is the incumbent President Ashraf Ghani and his government. The Taliban sees them as illegitimate and irrelevant. Everyone--except President Ghani--says that the talks have made "progress." But seasoned diplomats say that this "progress" is far too slow for a war that has now lasted 18 years.
Qatar
Between February and March of this year, U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar met during the fifth round of peace talks. The Taliban says that there can be no peace unless all foreign forces withdraw from the country. On a practical level, the withdrawal of the 15,000 foreign--mostly U.S.--troops will deliver the country to the hands of the Taliban.
Last week, Taliban forces struck the Afghan government's troops across the country. Each spring, since 2002, the Taliban and its allies have left their mountain hideouts to conduct guerrilla and conventional attacks on U.S., NATO and Afghan government forces. The epicenter of these attacks has been in Afghanistan's southeast--Ghazni and Helmand provinces in particular--as well as in the western province of Ghor. Fierce fighting in these areas came alongside suicide attacks in Kabul.
Two changes in U.S. policy suggest that the U.S. government knows that the game is up in Afghanistan. In October 2017, the United States stopped counting casualties for Afghan security forces. This year, the U.S. government has stopped measuring how much territory and how much of the Afghan population is under government control. The last U.S. study showed that the Afghan government controlled territory in which about 63.5 percent of the population lived, while the rest was in Taliban hands or remained contested. All signs show that the balance is shifting, with the Taliban taking control of more territory. This is why the U.S. government has stopped its tally.
It is likely that whether the U.S. troops remain or go, the Taliban will soon have control of key districts--including access roads out of landlocked Afghanistan. If a deal is reached in Qatar to have the U.S. forces withdraw, the Taliban will eventually take Kabul.
Moscow
Having made his call for the withdrawal of foreign forces in Qatar, Baradar went to Moscow for the Russia-backed peace talks. Here the Taliban co-founder found a willing ear in Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Both affirmed the need for the departure of U.S. troops from the country as a precondition for further talks.
Karzai, who has emerged as the leader of a section of Afghanistan's opposition, agreed with this position. Karzai's former interior minister--Mohammad Hanif Atmar--has now said he would run against Ashraf Ghani in September's presidential election. Although Atmar fell out with Karzai about eight years ago, the two men are now said to be close. Atmar favors a full deal with the Taliban, whom he sees as a necessary ally in the Afghan government's fight against ISIS. Ghani, whose term ended on May 22, will face Atmar, who many believe was responsible for Ghani's victory in 2014.
Russia is eager to see an end to the 18-year war in Afghanistan. Threats of insurgency from Afghanistan have long troubled the Central Asian states, which continue to have close ties to Moscow. Chinese ambitions of the Belt and Road Initiative have suffered from the trouble in Afghanistan, which would be key territory not only for rail and road lines but also for the mining of minerals. Pressure from China on Pakistan--a key Chinese ally--will certainly mount. The Taliban is close to Pakistan, which would like to see the Taliban share power in Kabul in order to protect its interests and to sideline India. In June 2017, China and Russia brought both India and Pakistan into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and one of the group's main mandates is to settle the instability in Afghanistan. Both China and Russia are pushing for a peace deal--even if this means that the Taliban will emerge as a political force in Kabul.
War
The war on Afghanistan has been ugly. Untold numbers of Afghans have died in this conflict, whose aims are not easy to formulate. United Nations figures show that in 2018 the civilian death count was 3,804--with 900 of them being children. This is the deadliest year for civilians since the United States first began to bomb Afghanistan in 2001.
Death is one consequence of war. Starvation is another. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Afghanistan said that half of the population would need food assistance over the course of this year. These 3.3 million people will starve as a result of crop failures and dry irrigation channels. Drought in western Afghanistan sent an additional 275,000 people in search of food, walking across the country, bewildered. Hunger will intensify malnutrition and illness. There is little sign of any help for these people.
All signs point to the desire in the Trump administration to withdraw U.S. troops. The International Criminal Court had tried to open a war crimes investigation on the basis of a preliminary finding that U.S. troops had violated international law in Afghanistan. The Trump administration blocked the investigation. On June 7, however, the ICC's chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda filed a request to continue her work. It appears that Bensouda is unwilling to allow the case to be politically closed down. On the table in Qatar is a side deal from the United States to accept some of the Taliban's demands if the Afghan government that will emerge asks the ICC to withdraw the case.
Many European states have begun to deport Afghan asylum seekers on the grounds that they are not "refugees" but are merely "economic migrants." A Norwegian Refugee Council report from 2018 shows, however, that those deported are forced to flee again. None of this matters to the European states. The rejuvenation of European racism and xenophobia drives the policy. Pressure from Europe to end this war is growing daily. It is likely that this pressure will mount at NATO headquarters, which will have an impact on the timetable for a U.S. withdrawal.
The peace talks in Qatar and Russia will not immediately result in any direct outcome. Afghanistan is damaged beyond belief, its own future less important to the external parties than their own petty gains.
This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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Nothing to See Here: The U.S. Government Prevents Investigations Into War Crimes in Afghanistan
The U.S. war on Afghanistan, which has been ongoing since 2001, has produced an unknown death count with unknown numbers of war crimes
Apr 23, 2019
On April 12, 2019, the International Criminal Court said that it would not pursue a war crimes investigation against the U.S. military for its actions in Afghanistan. A very thick file was closed in The Hague.
Almost a decade ago, on February 12, 2010, U.S. Special Operations Forces arrived at the home of Haji Sharabuddin in Khataba (Paktia Province, Afghanistan). The family of Sharabuddin was celebrating the birth of a grandson. Inside the home were close family members (including a police investigator and a government prosecutor) as well as the vice-chancellor of Gardez University, Sayed Mohammed Mal. At 3 a.m., the U.S. forces attacked the home, killing five members of the family including Sharabuddin's son--Mohammed Dawood--who was the police investigator. After the killing, the soldiers carried the bodies into the house and removed the bullets with a knife. They did not want to leave evidence of their actions. They then ransacked the home--including stealing money--and left. The U.S. military said that those whom they killed were insurgents. Both the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and the Criminal Investigations Department of the Afghan Ministry of the Interior found this allegation to be false. A war crime had been committed here.
But, thanks to the withdrawal of the International Criminal Court, this crime--and hundreds of others--will neither be properly documented nor will there be justice for the victims and survivors. Thousands of family members, who know very well what happened in little villages like Khataba and Nangalam, will have no recourse either to an admission of guilt or punishment for the killers. The killing in Nangalam was by a U.S. helicopter on March 1, 2011. The pilots fired on nine boys, killing them all. "My son Wahidullah's head was missing," said Haji Bismillah. "I only recognized him from his clothes." The U.S. apologized for the killing but did nothing other than that.
One village and one town after another has families with stories of such violent and senseless deaths. This U.S. war on Afghanistan, which has been ongoing since 2001, has produced an unknown death count with unknown numbers of war crimes (by the U.S. troops, by the Afghan armed forces and by the Taliban). Afghanistan remains an open sore of crime and impunity.
The ICC
It was for good reason that the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai became a member of the International Criminal Court in 2003. There was pressure on Karzai from the U.S. government not to join the ICC, but he prevailed. It was hardly a victory. The ICC came out of the Rome Statute, which was drafted in 1998 and which came into force in 2002. The United States signed the original treaty, but then refused to ratify it. Worse, the U.S. Congress passed the American Service-Members' Protection Act of 2002 to discourage any cooperation with the ICC if the behavior of U.S. soldiers came under scrutiny. U.S. Senator Jesse Helms referred to the ICC as the International Kangaroo Court. Even if Afghanistan became a member of the ICC, no one in the U.S. establishment thought that this would have any consequences.
But prosecutors in the court had other ideas. In 2006, the ICC investigators opened a "preliminary investigation" into war crimes in Afghanistan. They were interested in war crimes committed by the U.S. forces, by Afghan forces and by the Taliban. An investigator, a few years later, told me that they had found "captivating evidence" of war crimes--mostly related to the torture centers run by the Central Intelligence Agency and by U.S. military intelligence. They sought more material evidence not only by interviewing former prisoners but also through access--which they did not get--to U.S. official documents.
In 2007, the Afghan parliament--a parliament of warlords--passed a law that gave immunity to all for war crimes committed in the country. This was a blanket--and shameful--immunity that was only in May 2017 amended to allow the country to be in compliance with the Rome Statute.
In 2010, WikiLeaks provided some of this evidence in the Afghan war logs, in whose 90,000 pages there was some--but not sufficient--documentation of various operations run by the U.S. forces. This did not shape the ICC investigation, which proceeded with deliberate intent with interviews and with scrutiny of whatever documentation was available.
On November 20, 2017, with almost a decade of careful investigation behind it, the ICC released a report with a bland title: "Situation in Afghanistan: Summary of the Prosecutor's Request for authorization of an investigation pursuant to article 15." The significant sentence of the brief report is the following: "Finally, the information available provides a reasonable basis to believe that members of the United States of America... armed forces and members of the Central Intelligence Agency... committed acts of torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, rape and sexual violence against conflict-related detainees in Afghanistan and other locations, principally in the 2003-2004 period." This did not mean that the crimes of 2010 and 2011 would not be investigated--only that the focus was on this early period and would later expand to include the entire span of the ongoing war.
The ICC's special prosecutor--Fatou Bensouda--asked the court to allow a full investigation of war crimes in Afghanistan. She received a green light.
Trump's Men
A year later, on September 10, 2018, U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton said that if the ICC continues with its work on the U.S. war crimes docket, the U.S. government would place sanctions on the ICC and even criminally prosecute ICC officials in U.S. courts. This was not just for the ICC investigation of U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan, but also if the ICC persisted in its work on Israeli war crimes against the Palestinians.
Investigators at the ICC said, at that time, that gloom descended on their department. The sense was that the investigation would not be allowed to proceed. But, for the time being, there was no immediate attempt within the ICC to shut down the investigation. The process continued, with Bensouda's team building up the case against the United States--and others--for war crimes in Afghanistan.
It is important to bear in mind that the evidence was in the plain light of day. In 2005, the New York Times published a 2,000-page U.S. army investigation on the killing of Habibullah and Dilawar at Bagram in December 2002. None of the soldiers charged with the murder of these two men were convicted. All charges were dropped. But the evidence against them was clear in the army report (please see Alex Gibney's Oscar-winning documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, 2007).
The ICC's special prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, who was in charge of this file, visits the UN Security Council in New York City to deliver her report to the member states of the UN. For this, Bensouda--like other foreign nationals who work in the UN--must get a U.S. visa. On March 15 of this year, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the United States would deny a visa to ICC personnel if they continue to investigate U.S. war crimes. A few weeks later, on April 5, the United States revoked Bensouda's visa. This was an act of immense hostility, little remarked in the press.
The pressure on the ICC from Trump's men rose. It would have taken international outcry to prevent them from getting their way. The revocation of Bensouda's visa was met with silence. The UN said nothing, nor did the member states. It was this silence that had a chilling effect on the ICC. On April 12, a three-judge panel rejected Bensouda's request for the investigation. This pre-trial chamber comprised of Antoine Kesia-Mbe Mindua of the Congo, Tomoko Akane of Japan and Rosario Salvatore Aitala of Italy. They decided that an investigation into U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan "would not serve the interests of justice."
So it goes.
This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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