“Anyone [the Australians] would see, they’d just shoot them.” SHARIFULLAH (23)

abdullah, 25, was working in his field in the village of Surkh-murghab, 10 kilometres northwest of Tirin Kot. It was June 2014 and Abdullah’s elderly father, Dost Mohammad, and his brother, Sharifullah, were also working nearby when two helicopters appeared above the treetops. Their pilots positioned the aircraft to land either side of Abdullah as another two helicopters circled slowly above.

Dost Mohammad, shouldering a load of grass he’d cut for animal feed, was knocked to the ground by the helicopters’ rotor wash. Abdullah, shovel in hand, stood still and faced one as it neared the ground. An Australian soldier aboard the helicopter behind him fired several times, striking him in the leg, flank and neck. Sharifullah watched a patrol dog race for a motionless Abdullah, before appearing to bite him. The dog’s handler arrived with more soldiers seconds later and removed Abdullah’s bloodied clothes. No effort was made to revive him.

Naqibullah, a former member of an Afghan police special forces unit partnered with Australian special forces at the time, says that one of the Australians told him the man they’d killed was “a big Taliban commander”. Naqibullah responded in disbelief: “Why would a big Taliban commander be watering the field?”

Members of the partnered forces searched a handful of homes and, according to Sharifullah, found only women chastising them for killing the labourer. The soldiers departed in their helicopters within 30 minutes of their arrival.

“We didn’t report it to anyone at the time,” says Sharifullah. Recently, after others from Surkh-murghab told his family what they’d heard on the radio about the Brereton Report and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, he learnt they’d reported their experiences and that he should too.

Sharifullah says he was only aware of one other raid in Surkh-murghab that resulted in the deaths of civilians, “but there was a lot of fighting there. Anyone [the Australians] would see, they’d just shoot them.”