SAS Death Squads: NATO's Phoenix Program in Afghanistan?

SAS Death Squads: NATO's Phoenix Program in Afghanistan?
by Anthony C Heaford --- @mancunianquiet on twitter
Updated June 23 2024

Killed-in-a-Field: British special forces stand accused of the extra-judicial killing of prisoners during Deliberate Detention Operations in Afghanistan, known locally as night raids and referred to tactically as kill-capture missions, a Special Forces (SF) euphemism for assassination. From the available evidence and what I was told during my military service in 2012 Afghanistan I’ve little doubt these summary executions did occur. The intention of this report, mine, is not to help convict the perpetrators of such crimes. I'm trying to give them their best defence - that they were carrying out the implicit directions of in-theatre commanders, senior NATO commanders and government ministers, and only after being placed in the most abhorrent of situations. That situation was the dysfunctionality of the Afghan judicial system that we had put in place – it didn’t work. Prisoners taken by NATO and then handed over to the Afghan police were often freed without charge – via bribes, connections, corruption and culture. So known bomb makers captured by NATO kept returning to the battlefield. There was nowhere for NATO forces to securely hand their prisoners to. This left commanders with two choices: accept that captured and known enemy forces would return to the battlefield time-and-time again or remove them from the battlefield (a military euphemism) in a permanent sense with summary executions.

An Independent Inquiry relating to Afghanistan (IIA) was established in December 2022 to ‘inquire’ about extra-judicial killings (EJK) allegations but restricted to operations conducted between 2010 and 2013. That limited remit coincides with General David Richards' 2010-13 tenure as Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS), commander of all Britain's armed forces, the first of many such ‘coincidences’ between Richards and EJKs. Richards was the commander of all NATO forces in Afghanistan from May 2006 to February 2007, which is when many Afghans claim the night raid EJKs began. I believe Richards’ use of the term 'killed in a field' in this 2006 diary entry is a euphemism for execution, one he will have picked up during his service during The Troubles (another English euphemism) in Northern Ireland:

“Monday 21 August - The good news is that the operation I authorized yesterday was 100% successful.
Nine Taliban killed in a field in Helmand, one of them a known IED maker and commander.”

They weren't enemy combatants‘killed in a firefight’ or ‘during NATO operations’ . They were known idividuals ‘killed in a field’. If you google <"killed in a field" "IRA"> there are plenty of examples. Most are executions perpetrated by the IRA but there are other examples committed by British and allied forces, such as three IRA members killed in a field – shot-on-sight – by a hidden British SF team watching an IRA arms cache in 1985. Richards served three operational tours of Ireland between 1971 and 1989, dates unknown (to me). One tour can last anywhere from four months to two years (Wikipedia), and with Richards having passed the illustrious commando course at the very beginning of his career, it’d beggar belief to think Richards didn’t know the SF connotations of killed in a field when he wrote it in his diary in 2006. That’s just one of the reasons I believe the EJKs were carried out under the direction of some of NATO’s most senior commanders and for far longer than the Independent Inquiry’s current 2010-13 remit.

Upon retiring from the army Richards was made a Baron in 2014, entitling him to a seat for life in the House of Lords. In 2016 he used that privilege to call for the ‘retrospective disapplication of the European Convention on Human Rights [ECHR] for members of Her Majesty’s armed forces who served in Iraq and Afghanistan’. I had raised a complaint with the House of Lords Commissioner for Standards and after investigating The conduct of Lord Richards of Herstmonceux (as David Richards is also known) the Commissioner upheld my complaint. Richards admitted he ‘was part of a group of persons who might benefit from retrospective disapplication of the ECHR in respect of those campaigns’. He was compelled to apologise for failing to declare that interest, and admitted his own liability to prosecution under the very ECHR Laws he was asking to be retrospectively disapplied. Coincidentally, in the months before the Independent Inquiry was announced Richards went from having one of the House of Lords longest registers of interests (pictured above) to having one of the shortest, via a slew of resignations and company closures. Richards resigned two company directorships (here and here) in February 2022 and dissolved his and his wife’s company Palliser Associates in September 2022. Was Richards perhaps clearing the decks in anticipation of trouble ahead? Was his role carrying The Sword of Justice at King Charles’s 2023 coronation a calculated move by The Establishment on Richards’ behalf? In the first of Richards multiple identities registered with Companies House (pictured above) he gave himself the title Sir David Julian Richards, clearly the honour he was expecting upon retirement. Was the relegation to Baron in 2014 a political reprimand?

Following a 2011 review of Special Forces Tactics, Techniques & Procedures (TTPs), in 2014 the Royal Military Police (RMP) were initially tasked with investigating the killings listed below that occurred during just three Deliberate Detention Operations (DDO), all in 2011 Helmand (source aoav.org):

• 7th February – Nine killed
• 9th February – Eight killed, one detained
• 16th February – Four killed, one detained

The frequency and number of those deaths give context to the internal SAS emails that show officers reacted with disbelief to such reports, describing them as "quite incredible" and referring to the squadron's "latest massacre". In 2016 the RMP investigation, named Operation Northmoor, setup headquarters at one of Britain’s most beautiful but also most remote mainland RAF bases – St Mawgan in Cornwall, a couple of miles from Newquay. I spent two weeks at RAF St Mawgan in September 2011. It was my unit’s (207 Field Hospital Army Reserves) first annual camp since they’d deployed (I didn’t) to the trauma hospital in Camp Bastion, Afghanistan from October 2010 to January 2011. Annual camp at St Mawgan was a hard-earned reward for their Helmand service in the bloodiest of theatres – the emergency room. There was surfing, coastal walks and discos but very little soldiering, which was excellent mentoring of those still decompressing veterans by 207 Field Hospital’s commanders. The RMP investigation working from St Mawgan wasn’t a hard earned reward but it may as well have been a holiday destination because they achieved nothing; the investigation wound down in 2017 and closed in 2019. Its own advisor, ex-police officer Professor Sir Jon Murphy, called it "flawed and consequently ineffective". Are those attributes – flawed and ineffective – the real reasons Afghan war veteran and veterans minister Johnny Mercer protested so much about Northmoor’s closure without conclusion in 2019? A British army veteran of Afghanistan who served as a SF Operations Officer on the DDO’s support staff, Mr Mercer is a witness to the new Independent Inquiry. He will have served with RMP officers supporting the SF DDO, officers who we will find out were party to specific tactical DDO briefings, as shown shortly. So perhaps he thought the RMP officers on Operation Northmoor would have been the most ‘sympathetic’ judges? Mr Mercer was also the incumbent government minister for veterans’ affairs until Prime Minster Rishi Sunak called his impromptu general election, which is why the inquiry is currently suspended, so as not to prejudice Mercer’s re-election chances further. His 2017 autobiography - We Were Warriors - reads like a confession. Describing SF DDOs, he said:

"Our targets were f***ing bad people, and there was nothing wrong with ending their lives."

“Government ministers - including the Prime Minister - and other
political decision makers would regularly visit our compound”

“I was impressed by then Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague’s capacity to absorb information. He was very sharp and asked the questioned you’d expect... David Cameron was also very good, if very tired. I fear we sent him to sleep... Gordon Brown’s visit just before I arrived apparently didn’t go so well. He asked the team to fast forward some Predator drone footage of the blokes ‘on target’ because he didn’t want to see it."

As minster for veterans’ affairs Johnny Mercer was perhaps the most vocal advocate of the 2021 Overseas Operation Bill proposed legislation designed to prevent the prosecution of soldiers for crimes committed abroad after five years. He was also instrumental in implementing the 2023 Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act. But because of the Independent Inquiry Relating to Afghanistan’s limited remit to operations conducted between 2010 and 2013, Mercer isn’t there to speak about his 2008 service with the SF DDO task force that’s under investigation. As minister for veterans’ affairs in January 2020 he told the House of Commons that the EJK allegations were untrue. Mercer now admits that after he became a government minister on May 28, 2019 he was shown a secret memo written by a Special Forces commander in 2011. The memo cited ‘rumours’ among elite troops about the SAS “conducting summary executions of supposed Taliban affiliates” (Source Declassified UK). That secret memo also states:

“In some instances this has involved the deliberate killing [of] individuals after they have been restrained
by [SAS soldiers] and the subsequent fabrication of evidence to suggest a lawful killing in self defence.”

Mr Mercer’s appearance as a witness (with his book We Were Warriors on display) before the Independent Inquiry on 20 & 21 February 2024 was not because he appears to have lied to the House of Commons about EJKs in 2020. It’s because:

'Mr Mercer repeatedly refused to reveal the names of the "multiple officers" who he said had approached him during his time as a backbench MP [2015-July 2019], and privately warned him there might be truth to the allegations of extrajudicial killings by special forces. Defending his decision not to disclose the names, he told the inquiry last month: "The one thing you can hold on to is your integrity and I will be doing that with these individuals." '(BBC source)

The Independent Inquiry made numerous time-limited rulings over Mercer since the February hearings, all of which passed without action. Finally on 28 May 2024 Sir Charles Haddon-Cave was able to suspend the matter on account of Rishi Sunak’s random general election declaration, so’s not to interfere with Mr Mercer’s re-election bid.

Johnny Mercer at the Inquiry with his book on display

I suspect Mercer’s obstruction of the inquiry is a staged distraction, literally theatrics, overshadowing the critical testimony given by the previous witness Mark Nicol, a SAS-specialist defence journalist. Quoting an unnamed source from within the SF DDO task force Mr Nicol gave the most startling, damning and revelatory account of the task force’s real TTPs, including an apparent admission to an EJK by the source.

Kill-Capture

Johnny Mercer uses the SF kill-capture euphemism in his 2017 book, saying:

“The task force’s specific job was to kill or capture as many
of the Taliban/AQ leadership within the country as possible.”

And the claimed SF DDO operator source quoted by Mark Nicol to the Independent Inquiry the day before Mercer appeared, when asked:

"So in that case you're not going to tap them on the shoulder and
try to arrest them, you're going to eliminate them?” (IIA YouTube):

- the source replied:

“No, we go in and, remember our brief, when I get my orders that night, before I go on that helicopter, my orders are, right, this is the target set, this is where we are going, [INAUDABLE] and then the... Officer Commanding's open brief is 'kill, capture, it's not the other way round, it's kill, capture, and that's what our orders are at Tier 1 level, it is kill, capture... it is not a secret I'd say, it is kill, capture, them main words, kill, capture, it was never the other way round."

Nicol asks: “But so the RMP would have been aware of that, aware of that at the time?”

Source replies: “Yes, because they are sat in the orders with us. We get a full ground brief,
everyone involved in that mission is sat in them orders.” (IIA YouTube)

In the euphemism ladened recorded conversation between Mark Nicol and his SF source, the source appears to admit to killing a detained prisoner. He describes getting it okayed by his team leader after the event - the event being an EJK, a murder under the Armed Forces 2006 Act:

“I took him back in, he was a major commander, I got it, I thought I’d fucked up because my [team leader] was like [inaudible] that, [redacted] ‘take him back in and do a search’, I sort of read between the lines there, done what I needed to do and he was like ‘yeah’, fucking… pulled a pistol out on the search so I, that was my thing behind it. And then when we went to the bar afterwards, I went quietly, I was like that ‘have fucked up hereby doing what I did?’ But he went ‘No, I will never give you anyone to take anywhere if it isn’t for a reason.’ … we’re hunting these men individually, hunting them so [inaudible].” (IIA YouTube)

Frank Ledwidge - a British army veteran of the Balkans and Iraq, a professor, barrister and author - compared the kill-capture used by British forces in Afghanistan to the Phoenix Program run by the CIA in Vietnam . Ledwidge served as the Justice Advisor to the British Provincial Reconstruction Team in Helmand from June 2007 to January 2008 and in his 2013 book Investment in Blood: The True Cost of Britain's Afghan War Mr Ledwidge said:

“A new military approach was introduced: the ‘capture or kill’ policy… there was at least as much killing as there was capturing. This tactic, like so much else in the current phase of the Afghan War, was more than a little redolent of the desperate days of the Vietnam War, when the CIA instituted Operation Phoenix to target key Viet Cong officials.”

“… the so called ‘kill-capture’ tactic, which has recently come to greater prominence as the latest scheme to end the war. Based on similar operations in Iraq against Al Qaeda, it has been taken up by NATO forces throughout Afghanistan. It bears some resemblance of Operation Phoenix - the US’s so called ‘black’ operation in Vietnam to neutralise the political leadership of the Viet Cong..."

I'd describe Frank Ledwidge book’s Investment in Blood and Losing Small Wars as the most comprehensive and honest accounts of Britain’s occupation of Helmand. A 1971 US Congressional hearing described the Operation Phoenix that Ledwidge referenced as: “a sterile, depersonalized murder plan.” (source). In 2017 Ledwidge tweeted: "Loads more on war crimes to come out idc [in due course], SF got a free ride… "

One of the most courageous English-speaking journalists to have reported from Helmand is Ben Anderson. In his 2012 book No Worse Enemy (essential reading in my opinion) he notes:

“There had been a recruitment surge , as young men joined the Taliban to get their revenge.
The increase in special forces’ kill-or-capture raids exacerbated the problem.”

Mr Anderson clearly states the link between SF kill-capture night raids and the subsequent insurgent repercussions exacted against soldiers who patrol in the daytime on hearts and minds operations, likely unaware of what SF EJKs may have taken place in a neighbouring area the night before. SF veteran Tom Petch makes that point in his outstanding director/ producer/ writer debut with the 2013 film The Patrol. Following a fictional British army unit in Helmand, they are woken one night by an unexpected SF DDO fire fight in a neighbouring valley. The officer calls it ‘part of kill or capture’ before a private soldier comments:

“Someone’s going to get it for that… It’s all good the SAS out there playing boy scouts, but they’ll be gone in the morning… It means that Terry’s [Taliban] going to be pissed-off at having their beauty sleep disturbed. They’re going to be looking for someone to take it out on.”

The last kill-capture reference I’ll list is from Tom Petch’s 2023 book - Speed, Aggression, Surprise – the definitive history of the true origins of the SAS in my opinion. Mr Petch is a former 22 SAS Troop commander who ‘served with the British Army until 1997, leading small teams gathering Intelligence on the Khmer Rouge in the jungles of Cambodia and persuading the Bosnian Serbs to accept peace’. This most qualified of commentators states:

“The order ‘kill or capture’ is a special forces euphemism… ”

Admittedly Petch was talking about Operation Flipper in November 1941 Libya, the SAS’s doomed behind-enemy-lines mission to assassinate Field Marshall Erwin Rommel. For the SAS members on a kamikaze mission in 1941 Libya (two were KIA, twenty-eight taken as POWs, and three escaped) few would argue that an EJK of Rommel, in wartime conditions, wouldn’t be justified. But in Afghanistan I guess the targets were more part-time Mujahedeen in flip-flops than legendary Field Marshalls, and they were detained by an overwhelming force with vehicles, drones and helicopters standing close by. It strikes me as very hard to justify EJKs in those Helmandi circumstances. What’s key to Petch’s kill-capture reference is a) his 1990s SF operational service, and b) he says it, ‘is a special forces euphemism’ not ‘was a special forces euphemism’.

Remove from the Battlefield

Remove from the battlefield is the last and politest euphemism I know of for EJKs, used by those in the refined atmosphere of the rear echelons. This September 2010 Times newspaper report describing ‘kill or capture’ operations said:

“More than 65 senior insurgent commanders or bomb-makers have been "removed from the battlefield"
by SAS troopers, leading to significant disruption of the insurgency..."

British Defence Secretary Philip Hammond used the phrase when advising British commanders on their TTPs when visiting Camp Bastion in September 2012. Sending a very clear message to the commanders in theatre with an overt reference to the kill-capture missions in a statement to the press, the Guardian newspaper reported Hammond saying:

"… tracking people down and removing them from the battlefield…
… [was not the best way of finding a settlement]"

I've little doubt that Hammond’s use of the phrase ‘remove from the battlefield’ was a euphemism for the extra-judicial killing of individuals on the special forces' kill-capture list (and there was a list). I suspect Mr Hammond’s use of the term in September 2012 while visiting British commanders in Afghanistan marked an end to that kill-capture policy.

My experience in 2012 Helmand

My one and only operational tour with the British army ran from April to October 2012; I was a 42-year old reserve vehicle mechanic and it goes without saying my contact with British Special Forces was absolutely minimal. I once saw one of their Bushmaster armoured vehicles in our light vehicle’s workshop and I think I briefly visited a Special Forces Forward Operating Base near Gereshk in the dead of night during a resupply convoy operation. I didn’t even see a sandy coloured beret out there but I do still have some relevant information that may aid the inquiry.

My tour, Operation Herrick 16, was theoretically the last 'offensive’ tour before the final drawdown of NATO forces preparing for our 2014 departure date. The reality was we were already in the drawdown phase. There was a token operation in April 2012, Operation Shafuq, intended to demonstrate ongoing poppy eradication efforts and our ability to handover to Afghan national forces. The reality was Operation ‘Sure-fuck’ as it was nicknamed failed 24-hours before it’d begun when the Afghan force deployed early, therefore losing the element of surprise. The poppy eradication element was a joke too, given at the same time I was in a Camp Bastion guard tower protecting opium harvesting from Afghan security forces interference. The poppy fields were on the edge of our airfield and were irrigated with water from a multi-million-pound sewage treatment facility inside the main NATO operating base. A couple of months after Op Sure-fuck and after returning from my two weeks R&R, I asked a junior officer why we weren’t conduction any more such operations. I don’t remember the exact phrasing, but he said something like ‘Don't worry, they are still removing the bad guys from the battlefield’ - a euphemism for the SAS are out there executing the enemy. I don’t remember the exact phrasing because the implication was clear. I shook my head in disappointment, and to close that conversation. I had three months left in Helmand and I just wanted to focus on doing my job, not worrying that we were supporting death squads executing prisoners in the dead of night. It was out of my control and I had my airfield guard and top-cover patrol duties to concentrate on. I didn’t pursue that line of questioning any further. I remember the junior officer's name because he was the same person who told me about the Foxhound vehicle’s inherent design faults prior to them being signed in to service and, on the 15 September 2012, that the British guard towers fifteen Taliban attackers had walked between the previous night hadn’t had any night vision equipment.

The second time the issue of prisoner handling was referred to to me was in July 2012 during a briefing for a 24-hour guard duty at the Torchlight prisoner temporary holding facility inside Camp Bastion. We were told that the dozen or so prisoners were long term residents because there was no functioning Afghan police or judiciary to hand them over too. They also said the Torchlight commanders were doing their best not to accept any more prisoners because of the troop drawdown that was already underway. Combined with the following quotes from a British army medic who served with SF DDOs in 2012, this alludes to that most abhorrent situation our Special Forces were put in, resorting to killing because there was no effective capture option available. No one – Afghan or NATO - wanted any Prisoners of War.

• The Torchlight temporary holding facility was the only option to remove ‘known’ insurgents alive from the battlefield due to the dysfunctional Afghan police / judicial system and their inability / unwillingness to hold or prosecute NATO prisoners. I know from my July guard duty that Torchlight wasn’t accepting new prisoners willingly.

My Conclusions

I’ve little doubt that EJKs of known insurgents / their collaborators were carried out by NATO forces. Evidence suggests this was often done when the target was detained and secured, i.e. prisoners. These were summary executions during a counter insurgency battle in a NATO occupied nation. They were murders. Might I have done the same in their situation? I hope not but then again, I’ve never had to pick up body parts of fellow soldiers and civilians after an IED strike, an experience which undoubted would cause you to reevaluate what tactics were acceptable.

But as Tom Petch and Ben Anderson highlight, there are consequences to such actions. The night raids into people’s homes broke so many local taboos that that alone may have accounted for the increase in green-on-blue insider attacks. They peaked in 2012 when sixty-one NATO members were murdered by their Afghan allies, some proverbially and others literally shot in the back. The EJKs will have acted like a Taliban recruitment bonanza too, increasing hostility towards us at every level, even including some SF Afghan allies who refused to take part in the kill-capture DDOs. Perversely the fate of those Afghan SF allies still lies in the hands of British SF officers who decide who does and who doesn’t deserve sanctuary and resettlement (source). And the ultimate judge is the result – NATO spent twenty years and Trillions of dollars to achieve nothing. The Taliban were in power when we arrived, and they were in power when we left. Global Terror – the entity we declared war on – is thriving, possibly the greatest beneficiaries of our reaction to 9/11. The worst legacy for NATO frontline forces is now our potential foes know the TTPs we deem acceptable and may apply the same procedures to our armed forces’ personnel. The British state’s efforts to dismiss, delay and deny justice are blatant and shameless.

Going off the result of Britain’s fourth invasion and occupation of Afghanistan – we lost – the kill-capture tactic did not work. At a strategic level it increased hostility to the foreign occupation, increased enemy numbers, and likely contributed significantly to the increase in green-on-blue insider attacks too. Britian’s reputation for military prowess is in tatters and our legal system’s a global joke. On a military level we must ensure the rule of law (Armed Forces Act of 2006) is obeyed and on a diplomatic level justice needs to be seen to be done. And Justice begins with the Truth. The bereaved Afghan families know how their loved ones died but I’d bet they’ve heard nothing but lies from NATO spokespersons. Here’s one shining exemption, a YouTube video of an Australian SAS medic apologising to the family of a wounded Afghan brutally murdered by one of his SAS colleagues.

My suggestion is to allow the Nurenburg defence - just following orders - to witnesses appearing before an inquiry, on the proviso that at least two people will go to prison for these murders. Only the most senior military commander deemed responsible, and the most senior government minister deemed complicit should serve custodial sentences. If two or more Prime Ministers are deemed guilty then of course they should all serve a custodial sentence. Some retribution must be served on the perpetrators and assuming they cooperate fully with an inquiry, that could be limited to the withdrawal of their service pensions. And the same pension-penalty for the military officers, members of parliament, civil servants and police who were complicit in the crime or the coverup. Hold a General and Prime Minister accountable for their command and I can almost guarantee such tactics would stop overnight. If we instead convict a few frontline Special Forces operators, nothing will change other than the level of secrecy with which such operations occur.

As per the email image below, I submitted most of this information to the Independent Inquiry in March 2023 and will submit this update to them too. They’ve not expanded their time remit from 2010-13, to all British operations conducted in Afghanistan since 2001. Beyond acknowledging receipt of my claims, the inquiry team appears to have taken no action, other than perhaps stage managing Johnny Mercer’s performance. I have offered them the name of the junior officer who alluded to EJKs in 2012 Camp Bastion but I’m still waiting to hear back from Sir Charles Haddon-Cave’s inquiry on that one. The letter to me from the RMP (below) is on a different subject: British complicity in opium production during my 2012 tour. Provost Marshall Major Grant signed off his patronizing response to my irrefutable evidence (analysed satellite images, photos and testimony) using a British army euphemism for Fuck off – Yours Fucerely. That, and Baron the Lord Sir General David Richards getting to carry the Sword of Justice for King Charles, is the level of arrogance of those we're trying to hold to account.