SAS soldier shot Afghan toddlers in bed, received medal
It's touted as the UK military's best and brightest, but now the country's Elite Special Air Service, SAS, is accused by its own members of acting like a death squad in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013.
An independent inquiry launched by the government in 2022 has released a redacted version of secret testimony given by an SAS member.
The whistleblower, a senior officer known only as N1466, told the inquiry last summer that in one of the SAS's notorious night raids his colleagues gunned down women and toddlers sleeping under a mosquito net.
The soldier who pulled the trigger received an award, not a court martial.
The senior officer also told the inquiry, which covers just three years in Afghanistan and only this Special Air Service, about a deliberate policy to kill fighting age males, even when they did not pose a threat, dig deeper, and you might see a trend.
They were deployed for a long time in The North of Ireland, were engaged in all sorts of activities there, including many extrajudicial executions.
The most famous one, perhaps, is the one I first came to study in my first ever research article, which was on the killings in Gibraltar in March 1988 in which they executed three unarmed members of the IRA alleged to have been on a bombing mission; but they didn't have a bomb and they didn't have arms.
So this is exactly what you would expect from the SAS.
They engage in illegal activities, atrocities, and we will expect them to do more wherever they are deployed, including, of course, they may well be in Gaza.
David Miller, Academic
Under both British and international law, deliberately killing unarmed civilians or prisoners of war is a war crime.
The whistleblower says his warnings were ignored by the chain of command.
The Minister of Defense says it supports the ongoing inquiry, but it turns out the inquiry was forced upon it after increasingly credible reports of cold-blooded murder by SAS soldiers, of planting weapons on innocent civilians and of destroying incriminating evidence.
For years, the war crimes were shrouded in secrecy, but with the new evidence from the eyewitness, that wall of secrecy around the SAS members is fast crumbling.
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