The worst form of defence

New revelations of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan by Andrew Quilty

“I knew that you’re supposed to put your hands up in these situations. I put my hands up and they shot me.” MOHIBULLAH (35)

The Brereton Report into alleged war crimes by the Australian Defence Force in Afghanistan sickened the nation. But its public airing also inspired more Afghans to come forward, revealing new accounts of abuse at the hands of our special forces. Andrew Quilty met with the families of victims, heard their stories and learnt of their despair and, in some cases, their vengeful fury.

The village of Surkh-murghab, in southern Afghanistan’s Uruzgan province, was one of the regular hunting grounds of the Special Operations Task Group, the collective special forces component of the Australian Defence Force presence, first deployed in 2001–02, then 2005–06 and again from 2007 to 2013.

Mohibullah, better known as Lalai, a farmer, who is around 35 now, was at home making tea when he first heard the sound of their helicopters approaching the village.

“When you hear one,” he says, “you can’t be sure how many there are.” By 2012, locals, who referred to the special forces as “bearded devils”, were aware of at least intermittent Taliban activity in the area, so Lalai stayed inside for safety’s sake. Soon afterwards, four soldiers – three Australian and one Afghan – forced their way inside his house. “I knew that you’re supposed to put your hands up in these situations. I put my hands up and they shot me here,” he says, pointing to his left bicep. Still standing, he continued slowly towards the soldiers until one, holding his rifle like a weightlifter clutches a barbell, rammed it into his face.

“Blood ran out as if under pressure,” he says. Two of his back teeth broke and his nose, he points out, is still bent. “From that day I haven’t eaten bread on the right side of my mouth.”

With Lalai then on the ground, a patrol dog was let off its leash. The dog jumped on his chest and chomped at his shoulder as a soldier stood over them. He was sure he was going to be shot again, but his wife, mother and a sister-in-law, also in the house, were hysterical. “If the women weren’t screaming, I’m sure I’d be dead.”

While Lalai credits his wife for preventing his death, he feels her presence during the attack also stripped him of his honour. “If I was killed outside it would have been okay, but inside, in front of the women – I can’t tolerate this.”

He was taken outside and walked to another part of Surkh-murghab, where a further 30 men had been detained. One of Lalai’s nephews, Naqibullah, from the same village, was at the time in Tirin Kot (sometimes rendered “Tarin Kowt”), the capital of both the district of the same name and of Uruzgan province. He received a call from a friend when the raid began. Naqibullah was a member of the police special forces unit, known as Wakunish, which operated with the Australian special forces at the time. When he arrived, he recognised some of the Australians and approached, shook hands and spoke to them through one of their interpreters.

“They asked, ‘How do you know he’s not a criminal?’” recounts Naqibullah. “I said, ‘If he’s Taliban, I’m Taliban.’”

He saw dozens of men handcuffed. “I knew them all,” he says. “None of them were Taliban.”

Unlike many of the other detainees, Lalai was released and driven by relatives to hospital in Tirin Kot. He was given first aid and told to continue on to Kandahar city for further treatment. Before leaving, he presented at a human rights organisation to show staff his wounds and report his ordeal. In Kandahar’s Mirwais Hospital, the largest medical facility in southern Afghanistan, doctors counted “72 or 73 wounds”, many of which left scars still visible today.

Lalai told a doctor that he wanted to lodge a complaint against the Australians. The doctor scoffed sympathetically. “Even if you’re [Uruzgan’s police chief] Matiullah Khan they wouldn’t listen to you,” he said. “You’re just a simple man, forget it.”

The doctor was right. Lalai’s case was brought to the attention of command at Joint Task Force 633, Australia’s military mission for all of the Middle East and Afghanistan. An internal investigation into the incident suggested that Lalai had not been at home when he was attacked, as he claimed, but was running away, and that he had not been rammed with a rifle at all. According to the investigation, the Australian soldiers had acted professionally and in accordance with the laws of war. The matter was deemed closed and a commanding officer of JTF 633 saw no reason for further investigation.

In November last year, nearly nine years after he was shot and beaten, and mauled by an attack dog, he heard on the radio about the Brereton Report, the result of the inquiry by the Inspector-general of the Australian Defence Force into allegations of war crimes committed by ADF forces in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016. He returned to the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission in Tirin Kot to confirm to new staff the report he’d made in 2012.

“I’m so grateful to Allah that I survived the attack,” says Lalai. “Many villagers came to me and said, ‘We can’t believe you’re alive. Because when the Australians capture you, you never come back alive.’”

abdul Malik (pictured on the cover) wasn’t interested in reporting the murder of his son, Dad Mohammad, when it happened in 2012. It was a spring day, near their home, not far north of Tirin Kot. “I thought, They’ll kill me too, if I talk about my son,” he says. “They’ll kill me and my other sons. Just leave it to Allah.”

He wasn’t home the day Dad Mohammad was shot and killed in a wheatfield in the village of Dehjawze Hasanzi by a member of the Australian Special Air Service Regiment (SASR), operating as part of the Special Operations Task Group (SOTG). Dad Mohammad was around 20 at the time, and he and his wife had a young daughter and another on the way.

Video of the killing, first broadcast by the ABC’S Four Corners in March 2020, was recorded by an SASR patrol-dog handler. It showed Dad Mohammad, who had been taken to the ground by the dog, seemingly stunned, frozen. His bony legs are folded defensively towards his chest; he holds a loop of red prayer beads aloft as if they might ward off a trooper standing over him with an assault rifle. The trooper fires three rounds

into Dad Mohammad and continues through the kneehigh wheat.

The video of the incident wasn’t the first revelation of misconduct but it cast an immediate pall over the legacy of Australia’s military campaign in Afghanistan.

On November 19, 2020, a redacted version of the 531-page Brereton Report was released to the public, based on the four-and-a-half-year inquiry led by NSW Supreme Court judge and Army Reserve major general Paul Brereton.

Dad Mohammad’s killing and a handful of similar incidents documented by journalists, in addition to 23 cases identified in the Brereton Report (some of which almost certainly overlapped), came to define the Australian military’s legacy in Afghanistan, yet they represent only a fraction of the special forces’ alleged abuses.

Human rights organisations in Tirin Kot had established mechanisms for reporting abuses by parties to the conflict in the years following the Special Operations Task Group’s deployment in 2007, but even as isolated incidents began to form a pattern, few victims knew that such organisations existed, let alone what “human rights” were. As suspicion on all sides escalated with the intensity of the conflict, those who did know feared the consequences of reporting at all: being suspected of collusion with one side or the other was life-threatening. Many lived in villages more than a day’s drive away and couldn’t afford the cost of travel and lodging in Tirin Kot. Most of all, though, few believed in the prospect of justice.

Since word of the Brereton Report reached Uruzgan late last year, however, with renewed hope of justice and compensation, victims of SOTG operations began to come forward. The report investigated 57 incidents in detail, involving the killing of 39 people, and referred matters relating to 23 incidents to the Australian Federal Police for criminal investigation. Since then, staff from the office of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission in Uruzgan have fielded 38 claims of killings and abuse, with a total of 122 killed, including 28 women and children, and 40 injured. “Twenty to 25 of those are completely new cases that we weren’t previously aware of,” says Haji Abdul Ahad Bahai, the head of the commission office. During a trip to Tirin Kot in January, I also documented 10 cases and a total of 25 deaths previously unreported in the media.

For Abdul Malik, the father of the slain Dad Mohammad, the idea of coming forward had always been unimaginable. He hated the presence of foreigners, whom he saw as occupiers, despised the government and security forces they supported, and didn’t trust human rights organisations, which he assumed were in cahoots with the foreigners. Last year, after the footage of his son’s death was made public, Haji Abdul Ahad Bahai contacted Malik and asked him whether he’d like to register his son’s case. Even eight years on, Bahai says, “He was very angry. He [has] refused to meet us.” i met abdul malik on the roof of a hotel in Tirin Kot. It was late January, the middle of winter, but the day was unseasonably warm, so we sat on a square of red carpet in the sun. He’d come begrudgingly, arriving with two brothers, local tribal elders I’ll call Haji Hassan and Atiq, who had travelled to Dehjawze Hasanzi – 10 kilometres north-east of Tirin Kot and under Taliban control – and convinced the reluctant Malik to come to the city to speak with me.

Abdul Malik is around 75, six feet tall and wears a felt kosai, the full-length winter cloak of the nomadic Kuchi Pashtuns. He carries a stick of blond wood, polished by years of wear, to help him walk, and his eyes are partially hidden by eyebrows like thorny brambles. His scorn for “the foreigners” is vicious and vile and socially permissible only because of his age and struggle. “Fuck their mothers. Fuck their wives,” he hisses at the first mention of the Australian forces, demanding his words be translated verbatim. “Every day, they were on our shoulders. They destroyed the dignity of all Pashtuns.”

Malik’s family is poor, even by Uruzgan standards. His grandfather settled the family in Dehjawze Hasanzi when he was just a boy, forgoing nomadic seasonal migrations for a sedentary, agrarian life in a cluster of villages between Tirin Kot city and the Baluchi Valley, where Australian special forces would conduct countless operations between 2006 and 2013. As Kuchis, Malik’s family arrived with only what was strapped to their animals, purchasing enough land to build a home but not enough to sow crops of their own. That assured a life of subsistence; of earning enough to survive but with little hope of prosperity.

Dad Mohammad was the second of Abdul Malik’s eight sons and four daughters. He was born with a condition that caused stunted growth in his right leg; as an uneducated male who would rely on manual labour for his future livelihood, it was a serious disability. His father cast him as a black sheep, but his younger brother, Jamshid, was more sympathetic.

“Previously, he was unable to walk,” says Jamshid, who is now around 26 and spoke to me by phone from Dehjawze in January. “I took him for treatment and [a doctor] corrected his disability. When he became able to walk, we were so happy.” The leg continued to give Dad Mohammad trouble, though, and required treatment every few years.

For his family, Dad Mohammad’s murder represented a nadir in their attitude towards the invaders. Around two years before Dad Mohammad’s death, Abdul Malik’s eldest son, Sayeed Mohammad, a farmer, had also been shot and killed, along with several others, while running from another raid in Dehjawze. To the Australians, they were, as the Brereton Report noted, “squirters”; young men, or “fighting-aged males”, who, regardless of their affiliations, preferred to risk being shot running for safety than surrender to the treatment they knew awaited even the most submissive among them.

Atiq, the tribal elder from the nearby village of Surkh-murghab, remembers Sayeed Mohammad’s killing. “Whenever there was a raid,” he tells me, “it was like a fireplace. Anyone who got close would be burnt. Whether you stopped or ran, they’d shoot you.”

According to Jamshid, at the time, the family saw the killing of his eldest brother as the cost of being Afghan. “We saw this as war,” he says. “We didn’t know we should register the case.”

After the killing of Sayeed Mohammad, Jamshid, then 16 or 17, was studying at a madrassa in the hope of becoming an Islamic scholar, and was himself detained by Australian special forces. “When I was first arrested,” he says, “there were Taliban in our area, from our village. Of course I was sitting with them, but I wasn’t fighting with them.

“[The Australians] tied us with rope, covered our eyes. They tied us like a row of camels, one in front of the other. We were 11 [detainees]. They took the rope under our legs to the next person. We … were walking for 15 minutes … then [they] put us on the helicopters and took us to the airport.” It was the airfield in which all Australian forces and civilian personnel were based in Tirin Kot, and where the special forces had their own compound, Camp Russell. There, Jamshid tells me, he was subjected to days of sleep deprivation. To keep detainees awake, “there was a small room with a sponge mattress, and every five minutes you had to move it from one side of the cell to the other”.

Dad Mohammad disapproved of his younger brother’s interactions with the local Taliban, even if Jamshid was still too young to join them formally. “He didn’t like the Taliban,” Jamshid says. “I was prepared to sit with the Taliban; he wasn’t interested.”

Uruzgan was a major Taliban hub. The group’s founder and emir, Mullah Mohammad Omar, grew up in Deh Rawud district, southwest of Tirin Kot, as did other key figures, including Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s deputy leader who is currently heading a delegation in fitful peace negotiations with the Afghan government in Doha, Qatar.

In the spring of 2012, Jamshid travelled to Deh Rawud, where, like hundreds of thousands of itinerant workers across southern Afghanistan, he’d work for a fortnight scoring poppy bulbs and harvesting the opium resin for landowners. Days after Jamshid left, Dad Mohammad called to tell him that the government forces who had recently built an outpost in Dehjawze had come to their home. He, his brothers and some guests were harassed and beaten, Dad Mohammad said. One of the guests had a fistful of his beard pulled from his chin.

A few days later, Jamshid learnt of his older brother’s death. Though the video of the incident doesn’t indicate that either Dad Mohammad or his family’s house were specific targets, Jamshid and his father both suspect the Afghan government forces provided the information to the Australians that led to Dad Mohammad’s killing. “Maybe there were a few [Taliban] in the village,” says

Abdul Malik, “but the weak people in the villages, they would take money to spy – to make them feel powerful. The spies used the Australians to kill … They handed the soul of Uruzgan to the Taliban.”

Malik returned home the morning after Dad Mohammad was killed, to find his other sons waiting to bury him. “Before my son’s death,” he says, “I thought I’d never grow old. I was a strong man, but after his death I grew old very quickly.”

He saw little distinction between the soldier who killed his son and the human rights organisations to which a handful of victims and family members of similar attacks had begun reporting their cases. “I couldn’t tolerate sitting with them,” he says. And so, with Dad Mohammad’s wife and two infant daughters under his family’s roof, and with no prospect of justice, Abdul Malik put his son’s death behind him.

Jamshid decided to stay in Deh Rawud. “I was scared and didn’t want to go to my home,” he says. He was also enraged. “I can’t show you my heart, to describe how I felt, but if you lost someone and you faced the people responsible, what would your reaction be? My reaction was to take up a gun.”

The Uruzgan office of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) was opened in 2009 by Haji Abdul Ahad Bahai, himself from Uruzgan and known locally as “The Chancellor”, and Dr Abdul Ghafar Stanikzai, a medical doctor from Logar province in eastern Afghanistan. The property, in a residential compound off Tirin Kot’s main road, is made up of three small buildings surrounding a central concrete courtyard, and is rented from the Surkh-murghab tribal elder brothers Haji Hassan and Atiq.

The brothers, also former Taliban commanders who served under Mullah Baradar before 2001, elicited the kind of respect and influence that transcended political affiliation. Like many Afghans, their loyalties changed over the years and their pasts do not discredit them in the eyes of government supporters today. Haji Hassan is older and has more white in his beard than Atiq, but they both have George Clooney eyes and wear the black paaj, the distinct, scrunchy turbans foreign soldiers saw as synonymous with the Taliban but which, in Uruzgan, are ubiquitous on both sides of the frontline.

It wasn’t long before Haji Hassan began to see the staff at the human rights commission as more than tenants. In February 2009, a raid conducted by Australian special forces targeted a home in Surkh-murghab. The soldiers were looking for a suspected insurgent, but the intelligence on which they were acting was flawed. Six civilians were killed, including four children, a teenage girl and a man who had fired on the soldiers in defence of his family; four others were wounded. The soldiers responsible for the deaths, which have been widely reported, were later cleared of wrongdoing by the ADF’S Director of Military Prosecutions.

After bringing the incident to the attention of the commission, Haji Hassan says Stanikzai “encouraged me to continue recording such cases”.

“Because I was able to go everywhere,” he says, “to places Dr Stanikzai couldn’t go, I was like a bridge” between the commission and the people outside the city.

Haji Hassan remembers Stanikzai telling him, “Maybe sometime in the future, we will be able to publicise these cases. You and I know, but no one else is aware of the brutality.” He and his brother spent several nights talking it over with Stanikzai. “Eventually,” says Haji Hassan, “I decided that, yes, this is my responsibility.”

Stanikzai remembers Haji Hassan coming to the office the morning after raids north of Tirin Kot city. “I wasn’t from the area,” he says, “so we needed others like [Haji Hassan] to document the cases in these areas.” Stanikzai nurtured relationships with elders in other districts as well, especially those where Australian special forces were most active, such as Deh Rawud to the south-west and Khas Uruzgan to the north-east. He pushed Bahai, his boss in Tirin Kot, to allocate a portion of his budget to ferrying complainants to and from their villages so he could record their claims. In the early days there was no Australian to whom incidents involving ADF soldiers could be reported. Instead, Bahai would simply file his reports with the commission’s special investigations team in Kabul, which would forward the reports to the Australian embassy. But, says Stanikzai, “it was rare that we’d get any feedback”.

Few victims of wrongdoing by Australian forces were aware of the AIHRC at the time. Mohammad Omar Sherzad, Uruzgan’s governor in 2010–11 who resumed office in 2020, concedes the system at the time was flawed. “I did receive some claims,” Sherzad tells me, “but we didn’t have the capability at the time to investigate.”

In 2010, as part of an effort to expand support to the governor and courts in Uruzgan, an ADF legal officer began conferring with the recently established AIHRC office, bolstering support already provided by AUSAID, then the development agency of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). Stanikzai recalls that it was “a positive step”.

While Haji Hassan was the bridge between the commission and the people living in the battlefields north of Tirin Kot, Stanikzai, who spoke English, was the conduit to the Australians.

“I don’t know how the Australian chain of command works,” Stanikzai admits, “but every incident we were informed of – even small ones – we presented them to the [ADF] legal officers … The [Australian] commander[s] in Uruzgan were definitely aware of the operations and their outcomes. They knew because they acknowledged the incidents, but came up with alternative reasons for their outcomes.”

Other human rights groups who fielded allegations in Uruzgan at the time confirmed this for me.

According to Stanikzai, the obfuscation was not the work of ADF legal officers, whom he remembers fondly.

One, former major David Mcbride, who first met Stanikzai in 2011, is now awaiting trial in Australia on charges related to the leaking of documents subsequently published by the ABC relating to ADF attempts to cover up potential war crimes.

Asked via text whether there was any way Special Operations Task Group command could have been unaware of the patterns of behaviour described in the Brereton Report, Mcbride is emphatic: “No. Impossible.”

He cites how “operational reports and returns showed large numbers of Afghan deaths with little change in expenditure of ammunition or more missions. We were suddenly killing more people – with the same amount of missions and same [amount of] ammo. Less battles, more death. Could it mean prisoners were being shot?” Mcbride asks, rhetorically. “No questions were ever asked … Many SAS operators expressed concerns from 2007 to 2012. It was impossible that they were all considered fantasy until 2017.”

But it wasn’t only the ADF that discounted or ignored claims of unlawful behaviour. Stanikzai says that in “most of the meetings we had [with ADF legal officers], a DFAT political adviser was also present”.

Mcbride confirms this, saying that DFAT representatives also largely disregarded claims of potential war crimes from Afghan victims. “When the AIHRC and the [International Committee for the Red Cross] representative had issues to raise, they first sought permission from DFAT to bring them to the [ADF] legal officer,” he says. But, if complaints came from sources in the field other than the human rights organisations, ADF legal officers would be circumvented. “Apart from a notable few,” Mcbride says, “DFAT didn’t really believe anything Afghans said … If DFAT considered an allegation baseless, there was not much the legal officer could do.”

Mcbride says it may have been that DFAT personnel “simply didn’t have the information at hand to crosscheck things as they weren’t within the military structure and weren’t able to get access to patrol records”.

DFAT declined requests for interviews with personnel who worked in Uruzgan at the time, asking for questions to be emailed instead, to which answers were never provided. Past and present DFAT staff contacted independently declined to speak on the record.

“I don’t think they were necessarily complicit,” Mcbride says. “I think if you scratched the surface they would say, ‘Well, our job is to keep the minister happy, not act as policemen.’”

Another explanation for DFAT’S failure to act on claims of abuse by Australian special forces could be that individuals purporting to be with DFAT, and who were present in some of the meetings, were in fact members of an Australian spy agency using DFAT as cover. Several sources with first-hand knowledge of the matter said an agency’s infiltration of DFAT was a poorly kept secret on the base.

Stanikzai also noticed trends in the way his reports to the ADF would be handled. “When raids happened in faraway districts, the feedback we’d get claimed the killing was lawful,” and that civilian deaths had occurred “in the heat of battle” or despite compliance “with the rules of engagement”, he says.

Mcbride is more blunt. “[N]o credibility at all was given to [the] Afghan version of events. They were all considered to be Taliban agents [or] cynical people on the make.”

In cases that occurred close to the city where there was strong evidence and witnesses available, Stanikzai says the Australians “would ask the police chief or the governor to deal with the family”. Sometimes the Australians would pay some money, in the hope that it “would make the issue go away”.

Mcbride saw the way allegations of criminal behaviour were handled as evidence that the priority wasn’t actual success in Uruzgan but rather “about [the] perceptions of the Australian public, only”.

“As long as the Australian public didn’t know or ask, nothing should be done. Only if an incident was raised by the Australian media or in parliament – as occurred three times in 2012 – would the chain of command in Australia ask for an investigation in Afghanistan.”

As Stanikzai began to feed the accounts coming in from the districts to the ADF’S legal officers, with the help of Bahai and Haji Hassan, he was earning trust within the communities. “Building trust and proving our independence was key.”

It was when Bahai travelled outside Uruzgan in 2012 that Stanikzai was able to put that trust to the test. “It was a very high-threat area, but [Haji Hassan] convinced me we’d be okay,” he says of an area where an Australian raid had caused civilian casualties. He left his voice recorder and camera behind and took only pen and paper, to avoid raising suspicions that he was a spy working for the Australians. “I was very upfront with the people. I told them, ‘Yes, I am [speaking with the foreigners], yes, I’m meeting with [Uruzgan’s police chief] Matiullah Khan. But would you prefer to leave these incidents unreported?’” No, they’d tell him.

Stanikzai also stressed the limits of his powers, “because when I’d return, they’d expect results”. But he faced many difficulties in convincing victims to report their cases at all. Few knew to whom they should complain, and for those who did, phone networks were poor and roads connecting Tirin Kot to the districts were dangerous, in poor condition or non-existent. Those who made the effort to travel to Tirin Kot often did so weeks after family members had been killed or injured. Few had smartphones for taking photographs or knew to collect evidence. When Stanikzai was granted access to some locations, people from the villages were angry and afraid and wouldn’t allow him to take photographs either.

The greatest obstacles, however, were more visceral. People living in Taliban-controlled areas feared being locked up by the police – guilty by association – if they came to the government-controlled city. They also worried about returning home. “If someone is perceived to

“I don’t know how the Australian chain of command works, but every incident we were informed of – even small ones – we presented them to the [ADF] legal officers.”

have received assistance from the Australians,” Bahai says, “they’d be killed [by the Taliban].”

Allegations against the Australians began to pile up. Between 2010 and 2013, in response to complaints Stanikzai had lodged with the legal office, the AIHRC was provided with inquiry officer reports for around two dozen cases, some signed by Australian commanding officers of the multinational mission then known as Combined Team Uruzgan, including colonels, or by deputy commanders from Joint Task Force 633, including one-star generals or their equivalent. Most, if not all the reports absolved Australian forces of any wrongdoing. It has since been established that the reports were based almost entirely on the self-serving accounts of the special forces soldiers involved. (It is not clear why officers of CTU, which was not in command of the Special Operations Task Group, were responding to claims of wrongdoing against the group). The constant denial of wrongdoing compounded the acrimony developing towards the Australians. It also exacerbated an underlying distrust in the Afghan government and its fledgling judicial system, to both of which the Australians were inextricably linked. “People were hopeless,” says Haji Hassan. “They never thought justice would be done. It was an imaginary idea, justice.”

On november 19 last year, Chief of the Defence Force General Angus Campbell released a redacted version of the Brereton Report. It stated that “there is credible information of 23 incidents in which one or more noncombatants or persons hors-de-combat were unlawfully killed by or at the direction of members of the Special Operations Task Group”, and listed a total of 39 unlawful killings committed by 25 members of the SOTG.

A week prior, Shaharzad Akbar, the chair of the AIHRC, received a letter from General Campbell alerting her to the report’s forthcoming public release. Akbar, who works out of a spacious, top-floor office with a view over the mountains that encircle the capital, Kabul, had provided information on a handful of cases – including Dad Mohammad’s – to the Australian Federal Police, who were investigating independently of the Inspectorgeneral of the Australian Defence Force (IGADF).

Akbar instructed staff at the commission’s Tirin Kot office to contact victims who had registered their cases over the years. On the day of the report’s release, Abdul Ghafar Stanikzai, who had by then left the AIHRC and resettled in Adelaide, also mobilised. He transcribed Campbell’s televised address into Dari and Pashto, and sent it to radio stations in Tirin Kot. He also called Haji Hassan, with whom he’d remained friends since leaving Uruzgan.

“A window had finally opened,” says Haji Hassan. “It was my dream that one day the world would find out [what we knew].”

On local radio stations in Uruzgan, presenters encouraged victims who’d yet to report allegations of abuse to register with Haji Bahai at the AIHRC. “At that time, few people knew who the AIHRC or the [International Committee for the Red Cross] were,” says Bahai. But since local radio relayed the news about the Brereton Report, a colleague of Bahai’s at the commission said “people are coming every day”.

As it became apparent that renewed hope of justice and compensation was spurring victims to come forward, many for the first time, Shaharzad Akbar sent Alim Azizi, the head of the commission’s special investigations team, to Tirin Kot to assist in documenting the claims. The resulting AIHRC report, to be sent to Chris Moraitis, the director-general of the newly established Australian office tasked with investigating and prosecuting the alleged war crimes, details 38 cases – seven of which the commission says need further investigation – that plausibly account for the death, injury or cruel treatment of 162 civilians at the hands of Australian soldiers in Uruzgan. Moraitis had not received the report at the time of writing.

The Australian SOTG wasn’t the only international special operations outfit stationed in Uruzgan before 2013. US Navy SEALS also operated in the province, mostly in the far north, and conducted similar types of missions. The SOTG was, however, the largest special forces mission in Uruzgan throughout the period, and David Mcbride, the former ADF legal officer, says “the locals were pretty canny and could tell whether it was US or Australians”. They even knew the difference between Australian commandos and SASR. “When they said ‘Australians did this’… I can’t remember a single example where it didn’t turn out to be accurate.”

In the course of my research, I conducted interviews with dozens of alleged victims of abuse and relatives of those killed by Australian forces in Uruzgan between 2007 and 2013, all of whom registered or re-registered their cases with the AIHRC after the release of the Brereton Report in November.

Some of the incidents documented involve behaviour that, if proven, would constitute war crimes, while others describe incidents that, without knowledge of the perpetrators’ intent and despite resulting in the deaths of civilians, could plausibly be characterised as mistakes. It is likely that regular Australian soldiers (not SOTG) were responsible for the death of a civilian in one incident. In total, I documented 10 cases previously unreported in the media. Because of the redactions in the publicly released version of the Brereton Report, it is almost impossible to know whether any of these cases appear in it. However, none of the survivors or family members of victims I spoke with were asked to provide testimony for IGADF investigators who travelled to Kabul to interview Afghan witnesses for the inquiry, which suggests these 10 cases may not be included in the report.

three hours east Of tirin KOT, in the sparsely populated district of Chinartu, is a cluster of villages known as Langar, through which Australian military convoys

would occasionally pass during missions into the district. A single road runs alongside a river on the valley floor, and there is only one way in and one way out – perfect terrain for Taliban ambushes.

In 2009, Bismillah, who has never had more money than was required to survive, lived in Langar with his wife and their eight children. Even today, he doesn’t own a mobile phone; there has never been mobile service in Langar anyway.

At around 2pm on November 18 that year, Bismillah was working on his family’s land. A neighbour, Haji Mirza, says Taliban fighters came to Bismillah’s house to position themselves for an attack on an approaching convoy, opening fire with automatic weapons when it came within range. The Australian forces, who were partnered with soldiers from the Afghan National Army, fought off the assault from the road. It ended as quickly as it had begun. “You know the Taliban,” says Haji Mirza. “They hit and run. They attacked and then fled the area.”

When the ambush erupted, Bismillah took cover in his father’s home, which was closer to the field than his own house. The convoy remained on the road after the firefight ended and Bismillah remained at his father’s house. Two or three hours later, as dusk was settling into the valley, a single, loud explosion echoed through Langar. The Australian and Afghan soldiers stayed overnight, and villagers remained in their homes.

Early next morning, Bismillah left his father’s house and walked across fields and irrigation canals towards home. He was stopped by Afghan soldiers who asked where he was going. “This is my house,” he said, before explaining where he’d been the previous night. “When I entered, I saw my two cows and a calf lying dead.” Inside the house, “everything was destroyed. Corn and wheat flour were spilled on the floor. Sheets and mattresses were torn, and windows broken.” The soldiers must have searched the house during the night, he thought.

He walked out another door and into a separate section of the yard. “Then I saw my family… Their bodies were torn to pieces. There were pieces of flesh in the trees.” Noor Agha and Jan Agha, six-year-old twins, were dead. So too were his daughters Kafia, seven, and Shakira, eight, as well as his second youngest son, Mir Agha, three, and his wife, Saadia. Two boys were critically injured but alive. Ismatullah, 12, and Samiullah, who was only six months old, were carried from the house and transported back to a medical facility in the Australian base in Tirin Kot.

After four days, Bismillah was summoned to the entrance of the airfield in Tirin Kot, where he was handed Samiullah’s tiny, lifeless body. Ismatullah, meanwhile, had been transferred to Mirwais Hospital in Kandahar. Shrapnel from the airstrike had caused internal injuries and blinded him in both eyes. One leg was so badly damaged it required a below-the-knee amputation. It took two years for Ismatullah to succumb to his injuries. An eighth grave was dug in a small cemetery in Langar that now houses Bismallah’s entire family, along with a macabre ornament: a fragment of the missile that put them there. Amnesty International’s crisis team weapons expert viewed photos of the fragment and identified it as part of an American-made Lockheed Martin Hellfire guided missile.

The next thing to fall from the sky in Langar was an Afghan National Army propaganda flyer, a copy of which Bismillah keeps among the medical receipts, scans and X-rays from Ismatullah’s treatment. Below a photograph of an Afghan soldier carrying an infant child are three lines of Pashto script: “The Afghan National Army is here to assist you and your family.” Bismillah tells me the doorway behind the soldier and the shovel resting against the wall in the photo are his. The photo must have been taken by a soldier the morning after the airstrike. The child in the soldier’s arms is six-month-old Samiullah, who didn’t survive the week.

It took more than a decade for Bismillah to report the airstrike that wiped out his family. “Previously,” he says, “I wasn’t aware there was any commission or anyone to report to.” Since the publication of the Brereton Report, however, elders in Langar had begun to talk about attacks against families like his again. “I always wanted justice, and so I decided, finally, to come to Tirin Kot to find someone to tell.”

In June 2012, Australian forces had appeared in the village of Qalai Qala, in the Deh Roshan area north of Tirin Kot city. They were there, alongside an Afghan partner force, to secure the area prior to the construction of a road and a police outpost. Soldiers went house to house conducting search operations. The matriarch of one of the homes was Ferozha, a widow then in her early sixties who lived with her four adult sons and their families.

The first time the soldiers came to her home, they apprehended three of Ferozha’s sons. A decade on, inside a meeting room at the AIHRC, she hides tears behind a black chador as she describes the chaotic encounter involving the soldiers and her sons.

“I was trying to prevent their arrest,” she tells me. “I just hugged [my sons]. They had to beat us to separate us.” She describes pleading – “please, my brother” – and reaching to stroke one of the foreigners’ beards, a customary Afghan gesture for imploring mercy or charity. The soldiers eventually lost interest in their detainees and left without them.

“I boiled milk with oil,” Ferozha says, for her sons. “I said, ‘You’re injured, this will help.’” They debated travelling to Tirin Kot to have their injuries treated. The following morning, two of the men went to the city while another, Amanullah, left to work in his shop in Chora bazaar, 45 minutes north. Ferozha stayed home with her eldest son, Hamdullah, who was around 27 at the time, along with his wife and their two youngest boys.

Sometime around midmorning, a small group of men from the village appeared at the gate to their home. Their hands had been bound with plastic cable ties by the Australian soldiers, who, Hamdullah said, were outside