Week 1 of the Independent Inquiry related to Afghanistan

The APPGMC is closely following the ongoing Independent Inquiry investigating matters arising from the deployment of British Special Forces to Afghanistan from mid-2010 to mid-2013. Public hearings are now being held in the Royal Courts of Justice.

At its core, the Inquiry seeks to establish whether the UK Special Forces committed war crimes in Afghanistan. In the words of the Chair, Sir Charles Haddon-Cave: The allegations “are threefold: first, that numerous extra-judicial killings were carried out by British Special Forces in Afghanistan during the period mid-2010 to mid-2013; second, that these were covered up at all levels over the past decade; third, that the five-year inquiry carried out by the Royal Military Police was not fit for purpose.” 80 individuals are said to have been killed summarily by UKSF. The Inquiry will also determine whether steps have been taken to conceal any evidence of the UK Special Forces’ conduct. Questions pertaining to any intelligence that was used during these operations are outside the Inquiry’s scope.

Seven deliberate detention operations – night raids conducted by one SF Unit in the southern Afghan province of Helmand - were presented to the Inquiry. All but one of these had previously been investigated by the RMP’s Operation Northmoor - which took place between 2014-2019 and investigated 675 allegations of wrongdoing by UK Armed Forces in Afghanistan - and the BBC Panorama investigative documentary of 2022. To date, no one has been convicted of any criminal acts committed in Afghanistan.

The representative of the RMP, Mr Greaney KC, lamented that investigations into the conduct of British SF experienced a significant delay, noting the impact this will have had on witness statements and forensic investigations. In addition, it emerged that RMP officers were physically blocked from accessing key witnesses by military commanders.

Concerningly, the MoD also claims a server containing the data form the Special Forces Unit operations in question was accidentally and permanently deleted during a data transfer between servers. While details on the server transfer are not disclosed in the public hearings, it is worth noting that the deletion occurred several months after the RMP initially requested access to the data. The RMP’s repeated requests to extract the server in the period leading up to the data transfer were denied.  

The evidence presented during the first week of the Inquiry has laid bare that knowledge of the Special Forces Unit’s killings spread up the chain of command, and that concerns were raised internally on a number of occasions. Notably, the recurring chain of events, where a detained male would be taken back into the raided compound and proceed to grab for weapons stashed behind curtains, rose suspicions that the SF Unit were committing extrajudicial killings. The number of weapons extracted from the raids often exceeded the number of bodies, fuelling suspicions that "all fighting age males are killed on target regardless of the threat they posed".

We will be publishing blogs covering the subsequent Inquiry hearings soon.