Hannah O'Grady, Joel Gunter and Rory Tinman
BBC Panorama
Former members of the British Special Forces have spoken out after years of silence to give BBC Panorama eyewitness accounts of alleged war crimes committed by their colleagues in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Speaking publicly for the first time, the veterans described seeing SAS members kill unarmed people in their sleep and execute handcuffed prisoners, including children.
"They handcuffed a little boy and killed him," recalled one SAS veteran who served in Afghanistan.
"He was clearly a child, not even close to fighting age."
The killing of detainees has become "routine," the veteran said.
"They would search someone, handcuff them, then shoot them," after which they would cut the plastic ties used to tie them up and "plant a gun" next to the body, he says.
The new evidence includes allegations of war crimes committed more than a decade ago, much longer than the three years currently being investigated by a public inquiry led by a judge in the UK.
The SBS, the Royal Navy's elite special forces regiment, has also been accused for the first time of the most serious allegations to date – of executing unarmed and wounded people.
A veteran who served in the SBS said some troops had a "mob mentality", describing their behaviour during operations as "barbaric".
"I've seen the calmest guys transform, displaying serious psychopathic traits," he said.
"They were above the law. They felt untouchable."
Special forces were sent to Afghanistan to protect British troops from Taliban fighters and bomb makers.
The conflict was deadly for members of the British armed forces - 457 of them lost their lives and thousands were wounded.
Regarding the new eyewitness accounts, the BBC requested a comment from the Ministry of Defence, which said it was "fully committed" to supporting the ongoing public inquiry into alleged war crimes and urged all veterans to come forward with relevant information.
They also say that "it is not appropriate for the Ministry to comment on allegations" that could be within the scope of the investigation.
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'Psychopathic killers' in the regiment
Eyewitness testimony offers the most detailed public account yet of the killings committed by former members of the British Special Forces (UKSF), an umbrella group that includes the SAS, SBS and several affiliated regiments.
The testimonies of more than 30 people who served with or alongside the British Special Forces follow years of BBC Panorama reporting on allegations of extrajudicial killings carried out by the SAS.
Panorama can also reveal for the first time that then-Prime Minister David Cameron was repeatedly warned during his term that British Special Forces were killing civilians in Afghanistan.
Speaking on condition of anonymity because of the de facto code of silence surrounding special forces operations, one witness told the BBC that the customs of warfare were routinely and knowingly violated by the country's most elite units, both in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Under these laws, people can only be deliberately killed in such operations if they pose a direct threat to the lives of British or other soldiers.
But members of the SAS and SBS were making up their own rules, eyewitnesses said.
"If a target had appeared on the list three or four times before, then we would have rushed in with the intention of killing them, there was no attempt at capture," said one veteran who served in the SAS, speaking of people who had previously been detained, questioned and then released.
"Sometimes we would confirm that we had correctly identified the target, check their ID, and then kill them," he says.
"Often the squad would just storm in and kill the people they found there."
One witness who served in the SAS said that "killing could easily become an addiction" and that some members of the elite regiment were "intoxicated by the feeling" in Afghanistan.
There were many "psychopathic killers," he said.
"In some operations, troops would storm boarding-type buildings and kill anyone they found there," he said.
"They would break in and kill anyone who was sleeping there, right after they entered. It's not justified to kill people while they're sleeping."
A veteran who served in the SBS told the BBC that, after taking control of an area, assault squads would comb it, shooting anyone they encountered on the ground, checking for bodies and killing any survivors.
"It was expected, not concealed. Everyone knew," he said.
Deliberately killing wounded people who pose no threat is a violation of international law.
But a veteran SBS officer told Panorama that the wounded people were simply being killed.
He described one operation during which a paramedic treated someone who had been shot but was still breathing.
"And then one of our guys approached him. There was a shot. He was shot in the head at point-blank range," he says.
The killings were "completely unnecessary," he added.
"These weren't mercy killings. These were real killings."
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Junior members of the assault squads would be ordered by senior SAS operatives to kill male detainees, according to testimony, with instructions such as "he is not returning to base with us" or "as far as this detainee is concerned, make sure the target is not missed."
The detainees were people who had surrendered, who had been searched by special forces, and were usually handcuffed.
British and international law prohibit the deliberate killing of unarmed civilians or prisoners of war.
A former SAS operative has described how he learned about an operation in Iraq during which someone was executed.
"It was pretty obvious from what I could see that he was not a threat, he was not armed."
"It's a disgrace. There's no professionalism in it," said the former operative.
The murder was never properly investigated, he added.
According to the SAS veteran, the problem began long before the regiment moved to Afghanistan, and "senior commanders knew about it."
The testimony, as well as new video evidence of SAS operations in Iraq in 2006 obtained by the BBC, also supports previous Panorama reporting that SAS units counted how many people they killed to compete with each other.
Sources told the BBC that some SAS members had individual accounts, and that one operative personally killed dozens of people during a six-month stint in Afghanistan.
"It seemed like he was trying to kill someone during every operation, every night someone would be killed," said a former colleague.
This operative was "notorious in the squad, he truly seemed like a psychopath," the former colleague added.
During one incident that sources say has become notorious within the SAS, an operative allegedly slit the throat of a wounded Afghan man after telling an officer not to shoot the man again.
It was "because he wanted to finish off the wounded man with a knife," said another former colleague.
"He just wanted, you know, to get the knife bloody."
Awareness of the alleged crimes was not limited to small teams or individual squads, according to testimony.
Within the British Special Forces chain of command, "everyone knew" what was happening, said one veteran.
"I don't want to diminish personal responsibility, but everyone knew," he said.
"There was a tacit approval of what was happening."
To avoid suspicion over the killings, eyewitnesses said, SAS and SBS members would plant so-called "weapon expendability" on dead bodies, to make it appear as if the people were armed in photographs routinely taken by special forces teams at the scene.
"There was a dummy grenade that they carried with them to the target, it couldn't detonate," said one SAS operative.
Another veteran said that operatives would carry AK-47 rifles that had folding stocks because they could fit more easily in their backpacks and were "easier to leave on target and plant on the body."
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The reports were "fiction"
The officers would then help falsify post-operation reports to avoid suspicion of the assault teams' actions in the field, according to testimony.
"We knew how to write reports about serious incidents without them being forwarded to the military police," said one of the veterans.
"If it looked like a killing might be a violation of the customs of war, you would get a call from a legal advisor or one of the staff officers. They would understand what you were doing and help you refine your vocabulary. 'Do you remember if anyone made any sudden movements?' 'Oh, yes. I remember now.' Things like that. It was part of how we operated."
The reports were "fiction," said another UKSF veteran.
An intelligence officer who spoke to SBS described reports that they had been caught in a gunfight, while photographs clearly showed bodies "with multiple shots to the head".
The falsified paperwork may have helped thwart the Royal Military Police investigation, but the British special forces operations caused deep concern among Afghan commanders and Afghan government officials.
David Cameron, who visited Afghanistan seven times as prime minister between June 2010 and November 2013, during the period now under the scrutiny of the SAS public inquiry, was repeatedly briefed on Afghan President Hamid Karzai's concerns, according to multiple people who attended those meetings.
Karzai "has consistently, repeatedly, repeated this problem," former Afghan National Security Advisor Dr. Rangin Dadfar Spanta told Panorama.
He said Cameron must have been aware that there were allegations that civilians, including children, were being killed during operations carried out by British Special Forces.
The Afghan president was "so consistent in his complaints about these night raids, about civilian casualties and detentions, that there was no senior Western diplomat or military leader who could miss the fact that it was extremely irritating to him," said General Douglas Lute, a former US ambassador to NATO.
General Lute said it would be "highly unusual if there was a complaint about British forces that the British chain of command was not aware of".
Lord Cameron's spokesman told Panorama that "if Lord Cameron remembers correctly", the problems the Afghan president was pointing out concerned NATO forces in general and that "specific incidents for which British Special Forces would be responsible were not mentioned".
The spokesman also said it was "right to await the official findings of the investigation", adding that "any suggestion that Lord Cameron was complicit in covering up allegations of serious criminal activity is utter nonsense".
Unlike many other countries, including the US and France, Great Britain does not have parliamentary control over its own elite special forces regiments.
Strategic responsibility for their actions ultimately falls to the Prime Minister, along with the Minister of Defense and the Chief of Special Forces.
Bruce Holder, the former director of the Service Prosecution Service, responsible for prosecuting and prosecuting those serving in the Armed Forces, told Panorama he hoped a public inquiry would investigate the extent to which Lord Cameron was aware of allegations of civilian casualties during British special forces operations.
"You have to know how far up the mountain the rot went," Holder said.
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