A vengeful fury accompanied the killing of Haji Mohammed Ibrahim.
As his family watched, kneeling on the ground in their yard at gunpoint, the former district governor and deputy police chief was first hooded and had his hands bound. Next he was led back across the yard into his home. There, he was savaged by an attack dog. Then he was shot three times: once in the head and twice in the chest. Finally, before they departed, the killers ransacked the dead man’s room, torched two of the family’s motorbikes and their car, and destroyed their tractor with an incendiary device. They left by helicopter.
“I found my father’s body lying on the floor, face up, covered in dog bites, shot three times,” recalled the dead man’s son, Abdulwali Ibrahimi, 35, in a field behind his family compound last week. “It seemed the foreigners had hated us, coming into our home at night, killing my father, burning our vehicles. No one ever explained to us why he was killed. After that night, we felt hatred for them too.”
Indeed, Haji Ibrahim’s killing in Noorzai village, near Gereshk, was no ordinary killing, nor were his killers ordinary men.
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Though he was shot nearly 14 years ago during the early hours of November 30, 2010, Haji Ibrahim’s death still reverberates today in his community in Helmand. It is also among cases being examined by the Independent Inquiry Relating to Afghanistan, chaired by Lord Justice Haddon-Cave.
The inquiry, which began work last year, is currently investigating the conduct of British special forces during night raids in southern Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013: operations which may have involved the unlawful killings of at least 80 unarmed Afghans.
Haji Ibrahim’s death is among the earliest and most prominent of the night raid deaths being considered by the inquiry, which has been asked to examine whether the allegations of unlawful killing by Britain’s elite unit meet the credibility threshold required for further investigation.
Depending on its findings when it concludes next year, the inquiry may request further investigation into the killings is undertaken by the Metropolitan Police War Crimes Unit, which could lead to the prosecution of serving and former soldiers.
Nearly three years after the Taliban swept back to power in Afghanistan, The Times spent a week travelling through the group’s heartland, among the ruins of British bases, and speaking to some of the families at the centre of allegations that Britain’s elite special forces unit had gone rogue.
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A tainted legacy
In Helmand, more than 4,000 miles from the Royal Courts of Justice in London where the evidence is being heard, the recollections of Afghans who survived or whose relatives were killed in those SAS night raids have shaped the narrative of Britain’s eight-year deployment in the southern province.
British troops joined America’s invasion in 2001 and suffered few casualties until they were deployed to Helmand in 2006. As soon as they arrived in southern Afghanistan, the British became embroiled in heavy fighting with the Taliban. Helmand claimed the lives of the majority of the 457 British soldiers who died during the war — and was where they killed most Afghans too.
The public inquiry has already examined detailed evidence suggesting that on their night raids in the province, the SAS routinely detained and unlawfully killed unarmed Afghan men of fighting age whom they suspected of Taliban membership.
The evidence includes the claim that SAS soldiers placed and photographed “drop weapons” next to the corpses of their victims to make it look as if they had been armed and were shot in self-defence.
The judge is also considering whether earlier investigations into such extrajudicial killings, both by the SAS internally and by the Royal Military Police, were obstructed, sidelined and closed down by senior military figures.
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Dissenting voices
In a redacted post-operation SAS report given to the Haddon-Cave inquiry, the night raid on Haji Ibrahim’s compound was described as a “deliberate detention operation” targeting a mid-ranking Taliban member known as “Objective 3”.
The SAS mission report describes their target being successfully detained, but then states that he tried to grab a hand grenade hidden behind a curtain, whereupon he was shot and killed. The soldiers claimed to have recovered a shotgun, detonators, and the hand grenade from the compound.
However, it transpired that the 55-year-old dead man was not actually “Objective 3”, and Abdulwali Ibrahimi and other witnesses recall his father’s shooting entirely differently. They testify that Haji Ibrahim had already been bound and was in SAS custody when he was led back into his house by the soldiers, supposedly to assist them in their search, where he was then mauled and shot.
Moreover, as the sound of the three gunshots echoed among his 30 or so family members detained in the yard, members of the Afghan special forces unit accompanying the SAS became angry, they claim.
“There were Pashtun soldiers with the British, and as soon as the shots sounded I could hear them saying ‘get the young men out of the yard, or the foreigners may kill them too’,” said Malim Abdulahad, one of Haji Ibrahim’s nephews. He was 20 years old at the time, and among a group of young adult men detained by Afghan commandos at the scene. “The Afghan soldiers there were not happy with what was going on,” he said.
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Those Afghan commandos who fought alongside the SAS in Helmand, known as “the Triples” for their unit numbers 333 and 444, have been among those most at risk of reprisals after the resurgent Taliban regained control of the country in August 2021. They were eligible to apply for resettlement in the UK, yet this year it emerged that British special forces had veto power over their applications and that hundreds had been rejected. This revelation is particularly contentious, given the key role that the Triples could have as witnesses to the Haddon-Cave inquiry. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) insists that there has been no evidence that it sought to prevent members of Afghan units from giving evidence.
‘Not this one’
Dissent among the Afghan special forces who accompanied the SAS was a theme described repeatedly to The Times by witnesses to night raids. Just over two months after Haji Ibrahim was killed, Haji Saifullah, the survivor of another SAS raid, told The Times that Afghan troops probably saved him from being killed during an SAS night raid on February 16, 2011, during which his father, two brothers and a cousin were killed.
Saifullah was only 19 when two Chinook helicopters landed either side of his family’s compounds in Gawahargin village, south of the provincial capital Lashkar Gah. Unbeknown to him, the SAS had arrived on a mission to detain one of his two brothers, Saddam, 21, whom the British believed was a Taliban bomb maker and had codenamed “Objective Tyburn”.
There was no doubting the requirement for night raids. British forces were suffering severe casualties in Helmand. More than 300 soldiers were killed in the province, most by improvised explosive devices, between 2009 and 2012 alone. The accurate targeting of Taliban cells by special forces was a necessity in removing key insurgents, and saving soldiers’ lives.
However, a combination of factors may have led to deadly misconduct. Flawed intelligence meant the SAS sometimes targeted the wrong individuals altogether, while once on a mission, troops’ alleged distrust of the Afghan judicial system led some SAS units to believe that it was better to kill the adult men they found in compounds than to arrest and investigate them.
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Sources inside the special forces community have also suggested that there was a body count competition between SAS units, to see who could kill most Afghans during six-month tours. The impact of the claims of summary killings on local communities was severe, undermining the work of regular British troops to win over the trust of locals.
The Afghans who experienced the SAS night raids described a loosely similar modus operandi. First, they recalled the sound of drones overhead. Next came the sound of helicopters landing, usually followed by explosions as commandos blew open the gates or walls of the targeted compounds to gain access. Then, using accompanying Afghan troops, the soldiers ordered everyone to come out of the compounds, and directed women and children to kneel and be searched beside a green glowstick thrown to the ground, and the men to kneel beside a red one.
The men, including teenagers, were then bound and hooded, and some were selected to go back into the buildings with the SAS to assist in a house search operation, it is claimed.
In this way, in a short space of time, the SAS shot dead both of Saifullah’s brothers, Saddam, 21, and Attah, 23, his father, Haji Abdul Khaliq, 55, and his cousin Ahmed Shah, 23 — despite having already taken them into custody and restrained them with plastic handcuffs in the yard.
Saifullah was kneeling, tied and hooded, in a separate section of the compound when the shooting began, guarded by Afghan commandos. He recalls angry words between these Afghan soldiers and the British as soon as the shots rang out. At one point it seemed a British soldier was ordering Saifullah to be moved to the source of the gunfire, but the Triples refused to co-operate.
“The Afghan soldiers were angry when the shooting started,” Saifullah said. “They refused to move me from where I was being held. One shouted ‘not this one’ towards the British. Another soldier said to me: ‘We are here to kill Taliban, not do this.’ Then the soldiers asked me if my family had any private vendetta, as if someone’s false information was what had brought the foreigners to raid us.”
The soldiers — Afghan and British — all departed in helicopters before dawn, cutting Saifullah’s hands free of the restraints before they left. He found the four bodies of his relatives in three parts of the compounds. His father had been shot in the head and leg, his brothers and cousin shot in the chest.
“I had earlier seen them being tied and hooded in the yard,” he said. “The last I saw of my father, he was alive and a detainee. If the British were so interested in them they could have held and investigated them, not killed them like that.”
Ghost weapons
The SAS post-operation report into the shooting, which was accompanied by photographs of weapons beside the dead Afghans, claims that one of the detained men, assisting the soldiers in the house search, was killed after pulling a grenade from behind curtains which failed to explode; another detainee then picked up an AK47 from under a table and was killed; another hid in a bush with a grenade and was killed; while the last man was shot dead after grabbing an AK47 from under a blanket.
Saifullah was not alone in disbelieving the SAS claims that his father and two brothers, whom he last saw alive with their hands tied, had afterwards one after the other decided to consecutively grab concealed weapons and die. In the immediate aftermath of the raid, two special forces non-commissioned officers exchanged emails that have since been disclosed to the Hatton-Cave inquiry.
Incredulous with the official account justifying the killings, one senior NCO describing the shooting of Saifullah’s relatives as the “latest massacre”, while the other derided the claim of detainees grabbing concealed weapons, remarking that it was the eighth similar account he had learned of in a fortnight and writing “You couldn’t MAKE IT UP!”
The deaths of the four men caused outrage in Gawahargin, and prompted many of the locals to join the Taliban. Some of the Afghan special forces soldiers on the mission were so disgusted with the killings that they refused to work further with the SAS unit involved. The British-backed governor of Helmand, Gulab Mangal, arranged for Saifullah and a family elder to meet two senior British officers at Camp Bastion, the main British base in Helmand. They failed to offer the grieving men a satisfactory explanation.
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Calls for justice
Outraged by the lack of coherent justification for the killings, the Saifullahs and another family who lost four men during a 2012 SAS night raid, the Noorzais, brought judicial review proceedings against the UK government in 2019, following the closure that year of a flawed Royal Military Police investigation into the killings — Operation Northmoor — which had failed to find sufficient evidence to prosecute.
Represented by the British law firm Leigh Day, the families’ legal action was strengthened by the findings of a BBC Panorama and Sunday Times investigation into the night raids. In the course of proceedings the MoD was compelled to disclose a trove of internal documents showing widespread concern within the special forces hierarchy over the killings, as well as suggestions that the military police had not properly investigated the allegations.
In the face of this new evidence, the UK government conceded the judicial review proceedings and established the independent inquiry to assess the credibility of allegations that dozens of Afghans were unlawfully killed by the SAS between mid-2010 and mid-2013, and whether any crimes were covered up.
The MoD has not commented on allegations against the SAS while the Haddon-Cave inquiry is ongoing, but a ministry spokeswoman added: “This is a fully independent inquiry which has the full support of the MoD, and we encourage anyone with relevant information to come forward.”
Saifullah is seeking not just information, but justice for his relatives. “I want the court to lead eventually to punishment for those involved, not just the British soldiers but also any Afghan who supplied them with false information,” he said last week, speaking softly but with anger burning in his eyes. “But if that doesn’t happen, then at least we want to learn the truth of why the British killed our men so cruelly, and we want the British people to learn of the killings done by their soldiers that caused so much suffering and anger here.”
Yet just three weeks after Saifullah’s father, brothers and cousin were killed in a night raid, the SAS became embroiled in another contentious might mission, this time in Sangin, the most bitterly contested district in Helmand. A mix of civilians, the Taliban and the SAS was to conclude with another eight men dead, alongside allegations of summary killings, the murder of a mentally disabled man and the electrocution of a prisoner.
Read the second part of Anthony Loyd’s dispatch from Afghanistan in The Times next week
