New book reveals detailed accounts of alleged war crimes by Australian forces in Afghanistan
A new book reveals detailed new accounts of alleged war crimes by Australian special forces in Afghanistan and alleged efforts to cover up the events.
The ABC investigative journalist Mark Willacy has pieced together eyewitness accounts, including how a soldier allegedly shot and killed a young disabled Afghan man as he limped away from the patrol group in March 2012.
According to soldiers interviewed by Willacy, assault rifle magazines were then planted on the body so photos could be taken indicating the man had been a combatant, and a commander claimed in a debrief back at base: “We got the guy we were after.”
In other alleged incidents detailed in the book, published on Wednesday, another member of the special forces said they had been ordered to destroy disturbing video footage of a commando shooting an Afghan who appeared to be dead, something which that soldier had warned a superior may constitute a war crime.
In an interview with Guardian Australia on the eve of the book’s publication, Willacy said he had spoken with dozens of veterans as part of the research. He praised “the good people of the SAS” who had “the guts to stand up and call out the bad stuff”.
“These are soldiers who want the regiment’s honour, its prestige, its reputation restored,” said the author of Rogue Forces: An Explosive Insiders’ Account of Australian SAS War Crimes in Afghanistan.
The book’s publication coincides with the Taliban seizing Kabul and declaring itself the new government of Afghanistan. Willacy said he understood it was a very distressing time for veterans of the 20-year-long war.
“It’s a tough time for them,” Willacy said. “[But] this is a book about veterans, it’s a book about veterans who are suffering, and they are suffering because of what they’ve experienced during their service in Afghanistan.
“And I believe right now, [with] the Taliban back in the presidential palace and in control of Afghanistan, it’s exactly the right time to ask ourselves what went so horribly wrong.”
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The long-running Brereton inquiry found “credible” evidence to implicate 25 current or former Australian Defence Force personnel in the alleged unlawful killing of 39 individuals and the cruel treatment of two others.
The new book attempts to explain the culture of the Australian special forces and recounts how some members felt under pressure to hide evidence.
A member of the special forces told Willacy how they were disturbed to see footage of the shooting of an Afghan who appeared to be dead, and told an intelligence officer about it.
But the intelligence officer allegedly pulled the soldier aside a few hours later.
“He said the footage did not contain a war crime and that I was to delete the footage and that I wasn’t supposed to discuss it further,” the soldier alleged.
The book says the soldier then copied the footage onto a secure server because they did not want to delete evidence of a possible war crime – but the intelligence officer found that and insisted that all copies be deleted.
“I knew that was wrong and I deleted it anyway,” the soldier told Willacy.
The book provides an account of at least one other alleged incident when the same soldier was “ordered to delete compromising images”.
Willacy has previously reported on the killing of a disabled man in a field on 28 March 2012, a person alleged to have been derisively labelled later by some special forces members as “the village idiot”.
But the book provides a much more detailed account on what allegedly happened that day in Shah Wali Kot, a region of Kandahar province.
The man – named Ziauddin – was limping and appeared scared and confused, according to soldiers Willacy spoke to. His family later reported that Ziauddin had a brain injury stemming from when the Taliban beat him two years earlier.
“He is frightened to death. It is abundantly clear to the patrol that this guy isn’t Taliban. Nowhere near it,” Willacy writes.
The person who allegedly shot him is not named – he is given the pseudonym Soldier C, and isalleged to be the same soldier seen in video footage in May 2012 shooting an unarmed Afghan man three times in the head and chest while the man cowers on the ground. That video footage was aired by the ABC’s Four Corners program in 2020.
In the alleged incident on 28 March 2012, Willacy writes, “there are no words or warnings, just two pops” – the sound of bullets “leaving the barrel of Soldier C’s suppressed M4 assault rifle” as Ziauddin approached an irrigation ditch on the edge of the field.
Tom, a soldier who says he was there when it happened and uses a pseudonym in the book, recounts being in shock: “Why would you do that? The guy just took a life, and he didn’t need to take a life. Why?”
A military medic also tells Willacy he saw the Afghan fall: “I remember it so clearly because his fucking brain literally hit the ground before he did … If somebody’s running away unarmed, why would you shoot them? Why? It didn’t make sense to me.”
Willacy is told that the men of the patrol gathered around the dead man, and silence was “broken by the patrol commander” who allegedly “orders his 2-I-C [second in command] to dress the body in a ‘battle bra’ chest rig containing assault rifle magazines”.
According to the account the body is photographed with that “battle bra”, allegedly to give the impression special forces were allowed to target him with lethal force.
The book says the dead man’s fingerprints were later checked against the Special Operations database, but there was no match: “He is not Taliban or a target of any kind.”
The book says the official patrol report also claimed the man had been ‘tactically manoeuvring’ – meaning that he was moving to gain tactical advantage – but this narrative was disputed by others interviewed by Willacy.
Tom says at the later debrief back in their patrol room at Camp Russell, the SAS base in Tarin Kowt, the commander praised the solider for taking out what he described as a “high-value target” and said: “We got the guy we were after.”
Tom tells Willacy he believes it was a cover-up. “He was just saying that to try and cover it up within the patrol dynamics.”
Tom spoke to Willacy eight years after the incident, saying he could not get the killing out of his head. “Clearly, there’s a sense of getting away with it all, with what they were doing over there,” Tom tells Willacy. “They were rogue.”
Andrew Hastie, a former SAS captain who is now the assistant defence minister, was interviewed for the book. He recalled a briefing given in 2012 by an SAS operator who had recently returned from a deployment in Afghanistan.
Hastie said: “And the one point he kept hammering home was, ‘Do not be too quick to take someone’s life. People are doing stupid things. And people have fired without cause. Or done worse. Don’t do it’.”