We were told they were elite. The best of the best. The quiet professionals. Silent, swift, surgical. That’s the language used to describe Western special forces. Britain’s SAS and SBS, America’s Navy SEALs, Australia’s SASR. But now, after two decades of occupation and bloodshed in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s clear they weren’t elite soldiers. They were, in too many cases, extrajudicial death squads operating with state approval. The longer the so-called “War on Terror” stretched, the more it looked like a license to kill, and then lie about it.
The revelations from BBC Panorama are staggering not for their contentrumours of SAS war crimes have circulated for years, but for the sheer volume of testimony now on the record. Thirty special forces veterans. Eyewitness accounts. Executions of handcuffed detainees, including children. Slitting the throats of wounded Afghans. Staging photos with planted weapons and doctored reports. It was a game, a leaderboard. “Kills” were counted and compared, like COD points in a snuff video game.
None of it was hidden. It wasn’t a case of rogue actors or one-off atrocities. It was standard operating procedure. Entire regiments were intoxicated by violence. “Mob mentality,” one veteran said. “Psychotic murderers,” said another. If a man had been detained and released more than once, “there was no attempt to capture him” the next time round. You confirmed the ID, then you executed them. Sometimes they didn’t even bother with that. “They’d go in and shoot everyone sleeping there, on entry.”
This isn’t counter-insurgency. This is a kill culture.
And it wasn’t confined to the British. In Australia, the Brereton Report uncovered “credible evidence” of war crimes committed by SAS soldiers between 2005 and 2016. Afghan civilians shot dead in fields and villages. Weapons planted. Junior soldiers ordered to execute prisoners to “blood” themselves. One ex-soldier, Oliver Schulz, is now the first Australian serviceman charged with a war crime. Footage apparently shows him calmly shooting an unarmed man at close range.
The Americans, as ever, were more brazen. Navy SEAL Chief Eddie Gallagher posed for photographs with a dead teenage ISIS fighter he was accused of stabbing to death. Witnesses said he shot civilians for fun. His SEAL team members tried to report him and were smeared as traitors. Gallagher was ultimately acquitted of murder, convicted only for the selfie with the corpse, and was later pardoned by Donald Trump. A war criminal elevated into a culture-war martyr.
So what links these cases? The answer isn’t just a breakdown in discipline. It’s impunity. State-sanctioned violence against racialised others. The same pattern: elite troops acting as if laws don’t apply to them, covering up their crimes with help from above. Reports falsified. Photographs staged. Legal advice given to make extrajudicial killings look like legitimate threats. In one SAS case, “Do you remember someone making a sudden move?” a senior officer asks. “Oh yeah, I do now.”
It was systemic. And they all knew.
David Cameron was warned again and again by Hamid Karzai that British forces were murdering civilians. He chose to do nothing. The Ministry of Defence continues to stonewall. Australia is only now moving to prosecute individuals. In the US, the worst offenders are lionised. Meanwhile, the families of the victims. Afghans mostly, nameless to us. Have had to bury their children and live under the threat of drone warfare, economic sanctions, and now, the return of the Taliban.
These were not wars for democracy. They were colonial wars of pacification, waged by rich nations on poor ones, and sold as moral crusades. The West exported barbarism, then called it civilisation. The perpetrators, as they always do, came home to medals, promotions, and PR campaigns. The dead were left in shallow graves. Their stories buried until whistleblowers, at great personal risk, spoke out.
We were told this was about hearts and minds. But what we gave them were bullets and knives.
And if the inquiry drags on, delayed, defanged, buried under legal process, redaction, and official denial. Then Britain will have done what empire always does: made its own atrocities disappear.
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