Revelations confirm a system designed to shield UK war crimes in Afghanistan

London — The latest testimony to the Afghanistan Inquiry, revealing that the former head of UK Special Forces made a deliberate decision to suppress evidence of unlawful killings, exposes yet again how deeply impunity sits at the heart of Britain’s “War on Terror” record. Senior military leaders did not merely fail to act on such atrocities - but they chose to protect the institution rather than the truth, even when that meant obstructing justice for Afghan civilians who were unlawfully killed. 
 
The gravity of the crimes committed, is evidenced by one of the testimonies, “We could have stopped it in February 2011. Those people who died unnecessarily from that point onwards, there were two toddlers shot in their bed next to their parents…all that would not necessarily have come to pass if that had been stopped.”
 
Moazzam Begg, Outreach Direction at CAGE International, said: 
 
“In 2014, following the £10million Operation Northmoor investigation, no charges were brought against British Special Forces soldiers and their commanders for carrying out war crimes, including the execution of Afghan children.
 
Earlier this year, the Ministry of Defence disclosed that a UK special forces officer personally rejected over 1500 applications for asylum by Afghans who had worked alongside British special forces. MOD explained at court that the "sprint" of rejections was connected to the war crimes investigations against the SAS. Afghans who served with SAS units, known as "Triples" would potentially stand as eye-witnesses to the abuses carried out against their countrymen by the SAS.
 
Australia, which had a far smaller military presence in Afghanistan than the UK, recognised that its special forces committed heinous war crimes in a report more than five years ago. Predictably, Britain will deny culpability because that would mean owning up to the fact that the SAS, the "best of the best", can actually be the ‘worst of the worst.’”
 
CAGE has long highlighted the complicity of Britain in war crimes and torture as part of its ‘War on Terror’ campaign. According to Brown University research, at least 408,749 civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen died as a direct result of the post-9/11 wars. The victims and the millions displaced have had no recourse to justice at the ICC or through any domestic process. Their calls for justice are labelled as ‘false grievances’ and the rank hypocrisy of the West, and in particular Britain, arcs through its colonial past to Afghan and continues in Gaza today. 
 
Until the full scale of abuses is acknowledged, and accountability pursued at every level, the injustice at the heart of Britain’s military conduct in Afghanistan will remain an open wound - and Afghan victims and their descendants will continue to be denied the dignity they deserve. 
 
[ENDS]

Photo by Alexander Jawfox and Mohammad Husaini on Unsplash