‘They have taken out two’
In name of Government’s credibility and respect for international law, truth about failed raid must come out
An NZ Special Air Service soldier has confirmed civilians were killed in a 2010 raid carried out by the unit in Afghanistan and says the truth is widely known among the elite military group.
The soldier told the Herald the two people found shot dead were killed by NZSAS marksmen who believed they were acting under “Rules of Engagement” governing their actions on the battlefield.
“They have taken out two,” he said of the marksmen, who usually act in pairs with one sniper and one spotter.
He said the other four people killed
died in a barrage of fire from United States aircraft called in by a New Zealander operating as the Joint Terminal Air Controller — the person responsible for directing air support.
The soldier said it emerged there were no combatants identified on the battlefield.
But he said the lack of an obvious opposing force contradicted the soldiers’ expectation based on USsourced intelligence before the raid.
The controversy over the NZSAS and civilian casualties has been sparked by the release of a book, Hit & Run, written by Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson. It alleges six civilians were killed and 15 injured in a “revenge” raid on two villages in Afghanistan following the death of New Zealand soldier Lieutenant Tim O’Donnell on August 4, 2010.
It alleges New Zealand was responsible for the deaths and injuries, including those killed by air support, because NZSAS troops sourced intelligence, planned the raid and then carried it out using US resources. Hit & Run says none of those implicated in O’Donnell’s death were killed.
The SAS soldier’s account largely supports one of the main contentions of the book: that civilians were killed in the raid.
The claim is in conflict with the NZ Defence Force’s position since 2011 “that the allegations of civilian casualties were unfounded”.
The position was attributed to an investigation led by the International Security Assistance Force, which has never been made public.
But the soldier’s account conflicts with claims in the book the NZSAS were driven by “revenge” over the death of O’Donnell. He said “revenge” had no part to play in how the NZSAS did its job.
The soldier said: “SAS boys are a different breed. Everything is a lot more calculated.”
While not personally involved in the raid, the soldier — who has served
SAS boys are a different breed. Everything is a lot more calculated. SAS soldier
in Afghanistan — told the Herald he learned details as part of his role in the military which required detailed information on what transpired.
The soldier said a marksman and another NZSAS trooper were dropped off by a Blackhawk helicopter to watch over soldiers flown in by the larger Chinook transports. There were Apache helicopters in support.
The marksmen walked into a position above the villages. Once there, they “came into contact with potential insurgents on the high ground”. “One of our guys killed one of theirs.”
That fatality and the other would have been identified, in a subsequent Battle Damage Assessment, as “military-aged males”. “That would have found they were unarmed.”
The book states that the one of the Chinooks dropped the first group of soldiers near the village of Khak Khuday Dad while the other left its group near the close-by village of Naik.
The Herald source said the soldiers, having taken up position, saw movement in the villages.
“It was people moving to cover. When you see a whole bunch of people moving into high ground, into a threatening position, you need eyes on that position.”
One of the soldiers acting as a Joint Terminal Air Controller was able to see movement matching intelligence reports of what to expect from an armed opposing force.
“If your intelligence tells you everyone . . . is armed, then you assume everyone moving from that compound is armed”.
He said there were people in one of the villages “running around, dodging, all over the place”. It fitted the profile of what to expect from an armed group.
The JTAC then called fire on to the areas of concern, he said.
The account expanded on details in Hit & Run which said air support came from the Apache helicopter gunships, one of the few details later publicly released. ISAF said a gunship with faulty sights led to rounds hitting buildings in one of the villages, potentially causing civilian casualties.
The Herald source said the bombardment was followed by a ground assault on the village which saw NZSAS soldiers going house-to-house to clear buildings of any combatants. Flash-bang grenades — sometimes called stun grenades — were thrown into the houses before the soldiers entered.
He said it was a flash-bang grenade which accidentally sparked fires. This contrasts with Hit & Run’s claim that the fires were deliberately sparked.
As the soldiers moved through the village, it became clear there was no opposing force.
“The info that the boys had been fed was that everyone was a combatant. They were indeed civilians.”
The soldier said a number of those involved in the raid had received medals for their role in the raid which sat uncomfortably given the civilian casualties.
Hager said last night the new details were “very timely” as the Defence Force and Government continued to make denials.
“Another person has come forward and not only confirmed what we have said but has taken it further.”
A NZDF spokeswoman said its position of not commenting on the book’s allegations would not change.
Let’s start with what Hit & Run is not. It is not a sequel to Nicky Hager’s last bombshell, Dirty Politics.
Mercifully, the word “blog” does not, I don’t think, appear even once in the 120-odd-page length of the book, subtitled The New Zealand SAS in Afghanistan and the meaning of honour, which documents a disastrous 2010 raid, led by New Zealand, with US and Afghan forces, in Baghlan, the province neighbouring New Zealand’s Bamiyan base.
It is not an election campaign coup de theatre; it is not the “real reason John Key resigned” thunderbolt that those who see horns sprouting from the former Prime Minister’s hairline so craved.
It was not timed — as anyone who has been involved in publishing a book can tell you — to disrupt the eve of Key’s valedictory speech.
Hager and his co-author, Jon Stephenson, have stressed both these points.
The then Prime Minister did sign off the raid, which apparently killed six civilians and injured at least 15 more, but there is no claim that he masterminded any cover-up.
“I suspect we know far more about what happened than John Key was told,” said Hager.
Hit & Run is not some cooked-up, conspiratorial yarn. It is not “bogus crap”, as National MP Paul Foster Bell tautologously described it in an embarrassing Twitter tirade late on Wednesday night.
Paula Bennett, the Deputy Prime Minister, seemed about to call Hager a “left-wing conspiracy theorist” on the radio the other morning, but abandoned the slur one syllable into the second word, perhaps thinking, given the nature of the allegations in the book, that line may not wash this time. Or maybe she was going to say left-wing conscience and critic.
The Prime Minister Bill English has not, as far as I know, used the term his predecessor favoured, either. He did describe the book as “politically motivated”, a remark that can reasonably be characterised as, well, politically motivated. But to his credit he has left the door open to an independent investigation.
The book is not suggesting that the New Zealand elite forces involved in the awful events of August 2010 set out to hurt civilians.
It does make the case, however, that the attacks on Naik and Khak Khuday Dad, neighbouring villages in the Tirgiran Valley, in retaliation for the appalling killing of a New Zealand soldier, were overhastily planned, based on bad intelligence, poorly executed and ultimately bungled. It details 21 civilians killed or injured, most of them seemingly struck by gunfire from US attack helicopters operating in support of a New Zealand led and commanded raid.
It is not disputing that the New Zealand Defence Force is replete with morally upstanding and courageous men and women.
Indeed, it seems precisely in the service of those values that sources have spoken to Stephenson and Hager about what they perceive as a cover-up, not just of the civilian deaths, but of failure to assist the injured and the transfer of a prisoner into the hands of an apparent torture squad.
That hundreds of thousands of innocent people have been killed already this century in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere, does not make this story less important, but more so — precisely because it is unconscionable in our name, precisely because we are told their names, about their lives as human beings.
In the case of Fatima, killed by shrapnel from the NZ-led attack, we see her photograph, her bright blue dress, her toes poking out of sandals too big for her feet, plump-cheeked, grinning a 3-year-old’s grin.
Fatima’s mother was hospitalised, her two brothers wounded. One of them, Abdullah, then 7, said when interviewed last year, “When we have cold weather the pain in my head gets worse. We become angry and upset when we remember that time, but what can we do?”
The human misery is compounded by the knowledge that a civilian death is a recruiting gift to insurgent groups like the Taliban. US generals have stressed this point. So have their enemy.
In 2010, around the time of the Baghlan attack, former Taliban spokesman Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef told Jeremy Scahill, investigative journalist and author of Dirty Wars, that the raids, claiming so many innocent lives, “are encouraging people to become extremist . . . When you are killing one person, four or five others rise against you.”
Today, the Taliban remain active across swathes of Afghanistan, including Baghlan. Last month, they seized control of a second district in the province.
In response to the publication of the book, the NZ Defence Force issued a statement standing by an earlier release in 2011, which insisted that, based on an investigation conducted by the Afghan ministry of defence and Isaf, the Nato-led security mission in Afghanistan, “the allegations of civilian casualties were unfounded” and that “nine insurgents were killed in the operation”.
In the face of compelling evidence that the insurgents had fled to the mountains, expecting a reprisal, in the face of documentary evidence of civilian deaths, that is now untenable.
It is untenable, further, given the remarks of Wayne Mapp, the defence minister at the time. He yesterday told RNZ, “the mission did not achieve its objectives . . . the people we were aiming to get, we did not get”. He confirmed he had previously described the raid as “our biggest and most disastrous operation. A fiasco.”
Mapp maintained that the soldiers had acted reasonably, and had responded to a threat.
But, he said, he had not known that any civilians had been killed, and acknowledged there now was compelling evidence to that end.
He is not some casual observer. He was the minister of defence. The minister of defence has the statutory “power of control of the New Zealand Defence Force”.
It is inexcusable, to put it mildly, if information of this gravity was withheld from him.
Hit & Run is an important book. Whether you admire or viscerally loathe its authors is immaterial to the evidence it documents.
Not all of the allegations are new, but the depth of research and detail are compelling.
Any journalism that heavily depends on unnamed sources should, of course, be subject to scrutiny, even if, as here, they are numerous and corroborated.
Critically, many of the sources would be willing to speak to an appropriate, independent investigation, says Stephenson.
For their sake, for the sake of the NZ Defence Force, whether to censure or vindicate, for the sake of the Government, for the sake of respecting international law, for the sake of the dead, and in the public interest, that investigation needs to happen.
Not to do so for fear of creating difficulty for our military bosses or politicians or, even, the Americans, would be wrong.
“We’re not going to be rushed into an inquiry,” was an early response from the Prime Minister, and that is fair enough, but the case is now urgent and overwhelming.
When you are killing one person, four or five others rise against you. Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, former Taliban spokesman