The imbalanced ratio of dead to weapons recovered can be an indication that people were killed who did not pose an immediate threat to the lives of the soldiers or others, which is necessary for the use of lethal force in self-defence.
UKSF headquarters was also made aware of a complaint from a high-profile international organisation monitoring the conflict on the ground relating to alleged extrajudicial killings by the SAS, and complaints from Afghan special forces who were so infuriated by what they believed was the murder of civilians that they refused on several occasions to fight alongside the SAS.
N2252 told the inquiry that alerting the Royal Military Police to these concerns in 2011 would have interfered with the high tempo of SAS operations, at a time when the regiment was tasked with going after Taliban operatives and bombmakers responsible for laying IEDs.
“You would take the sub-unit out, you would conduct the investigation and they would be thinking about the investigation and not on planning the next operation,” he said.
N2252 also said that applying that kind of scrutiny to the SAS’s operations could have undermined trust within UK Special Forces, telling the inquiry that if headquarters had questioned the accounts given by troops “the message that will have gone back to them is ‘we don’t believe you’.”
Another witness, a senior officer at headquarters known at the inquiry as N1788, criticised the way the SAS was carrying out operations, testifying that it “should have been obvious” to commanding officers in Afghanistan that things were going wrong.
N1788 told the inquiry that while he was aware of tactical errors, there was “never any mention to me of complaints or rumours that members of UKSF were performing extra-judicial killings or war crimes, planting weapons, or falsifying records”.
A lawyer for the inquiry put it to N1788 that his claim was directly contradicted both by testimony from his superior officer at special forces headquarters – who testified previously that the two had discussed the possibility of extrajudicial killings and planted weapons – and by testimony from another senior officer in Afghanistan, who said N1788 asked him during a phone conversation if “the ‘m-word’ was relevant”, referring to murder.
A third witness, a UKSF officer based in Afghanistan and ciphered as N889, told the inquiry he may have been too quick to believe the SAS’s operational reports. “I totally accept, you know, all these years later looking back that perhaps one should have taken a slight harder view,” he said. “I maybe naively read this stuff, believed it and carried on”.
