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UK special forces fighting in Afghanistan had a “golden pass” that allowed them to get away with murder and they operated under “a code of silence” that prevented soldiers from speaking out, a public inquiry into suspected war crimes has heard.
The accusations were contained in testimonies published on Wednesday by the Afghanistan inquiry as part of a release of material that summarised closed hearings held with seven UK special force soldiers.
The inquiry is examining allegations of murder carried out by UK special forces during night raids against the Taliban between 2010 and 2013, which were then covered up.
One officer told the inquiry that UK special forces seemed to have “a golden pass allowing them to get away with murder”.
Asked by Oliver Glasgow, counsel to the inquiry, if operational reports of missions could be read in a way that also indicated that UK special forces “might have been committing extra judicial killing”, the officer replied: “Yes.”
Another officer said that soldiers who sought to expose suspected wrongdoing allegedly got a “bollocking” from their peers, and were told “it’s not your place to question”.
“I believe that UKSF operates a code of silence or omerta, which prevents people from speaking out,” he said. “I am concerned about my personal safety having provided this statement.”
The mystique of the UK’s special forces, the Special Air Service and Special Boat Service, is sustained by the secrecy of their operations. In practice, political oversight is limited to a select few — often just the Minister of Defence and the prime minister.
The material released to the public on Wednesday summarises the testimonies of the closed hearings that were held last year, which only the inquiry team and Ministry of Defence representatives were allowed to attend. The testimonies have also been anonymised.
But the hundred of pages of released documents paint a rare picture — in sometimes graphic detail — of the allegedly aggressive tactics that some special forces units used to hunt down the Taliban.
One unit “adopted a policy of killing all fighting-aged males on target,” the inquiry heard. Some units may also have decided to take “the law into their own hands” rather than release suspected Taliban insurgents.
“It was plausible that the frustrations at the inadequacies of the detention processes in Afghanistan could have led people to conclude that they should take the law into their own hands,” one soldier said.
Another officer told how some special forces soldiers referred to killed Afghans as having been “flat-packed”. He was also asked about planted weapons — colloquially known as “Mr Wolf” — that were sometimes placed next to corpses so that it appeared they had been armed when killed.
Glasgow, the inquiry’s counsel, asked if that was a reference to the Hollywood movie Pulp Fiction, in which a character, Mr Wolf, arrives at a murder scene, and announces that he is there “to solve problems”.
The officer replied: “Right. I had not put two and two together.”