A former high-ranking UK Special Forces officer claimed in a public inquiry into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan that the SAS enjoyed impunity for murder. The comments were revealed Wednesday as part of seven closed-door hearings with members of UK Special Forces, and were made by a former operations chief for the Special Boat Service (SBS), the UK’s naval special forces. He revealed that he and others had raised concerns in 2011 that the SAS was executing people and covering up their actions. The officer described the SAS and murder as “regular bedfellows,” and heavily criticized the regiment’s operational descriptions of killings.
The officer in question was one of several senior officers from the Royal Navy’s special forces regiment who spoke to the inquiry behind closed doors in 2024. The inquiry focuses on night raids by UKSF between 2010 and 2013 and represents the culmination of years of reporting by BBC Panorama into allegations of murder and cover-up by the SAS. The material summarising the testimony from these hearings was released on Wednesday, and reveals that the SAS arrived in Afghanistan in 2009 and took over hunting the Taliban from the SBS.
Several senior SBS officers expressed deep concerns that the SAS was being driven by “kill counts,” the number of dead they could achieve in each operation. One SBS officer stated that on some operations, the SAS was carrying out murders. These officers were part of a small group of senior servicemen who expressed doubts that the SAS reports coming back from Afghanistan were truthful. The two seniors were in a position to interpret the regiment’s reports’ language, having served with SBS operational units in Afghanistan before the SAS’s arrival.
These SBS officers believed that the SAS might have committed murder and described what they viewed as a cover-up in Afghanistan. They reported a “culture of shut up and don’t question” and a “massive failure of leadership” with no accountability. They expressed doubts about the veracity of SAS operational reports. Lists of civilians killed or detained proved to be substantial, but the sources claimed they couldn’t be verified.
In the UK, individuals are innocent until proven guilty. None of these allegations have been tested in a court of law, and the SAS and its members have denied the claims
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