Big Boys’ Rules

In yet another BBC documentary on the subject, a Panorama edition entitled Special Forces: I Saw War Crimes dropped on 12th May and investigated serious allegations against UK Special Forces, in particular the SAS and SBS, during operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Headlined as former British troops breaking a code of silence, the Corporation claimed over 30 onetime personnel came forward to detail incidents. These included the killing of handcuffed detainees, including civilians and children, and of the planting of weapons to justify such acts.

The programme also highlighted the role of General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, an SBS officer who led UK Special Forces through the period in question. Despite receiving reports of what the BBC described as ‘potential war crimes’ as early as 2011, it is alleged that Jenkins failed to refer these allegations to military police.

Later, as Head of Special Forces, Jenkins oversaw the rejection of over 2,000 resettlement applications from Afghan commandos who served alongside British troops. These rejections were criticised as attempts to prevent possible witnesses from testifying in an ongoing statutory public inquiry into alleged war crimes.

Entitled the Independent Inquiry Relating to Afghanistan, this was initiated by Conservative Prime Minister Mr Sunak on 15th December 2022 and is being chaired by Lord Justice Sir Charles Haddon-Cave.

The Ministry of Defence is committed to the investigation and encourages the submission of evidence. However, the BBC’s revelations have prompted calls from some for even greater transparency and accountability.

The full Panorama programme is available on BBC iPlayer. Material from the Haddon-Cave enquiry, both in video and transcript form, can be found here.

Of the operations in question, the procedure was to raid a compound, bind suspects with plastic wire, plant a ‘drop weapon’ from a British backpack and then shoot suspects dead. With plastic handcuffs removed, photographs of the scene were taken.

When written up, Army legal advisers might suggest adding phrases such as ‘sudden movement’ as further justification for the shooting.

We have been here before. In 2011, a killing caught on helmet-cam resulted in the prosecution of Marine A, who was later revealed to be Sgt Alexander Blackman of the Royal Marines. Blackman was to become the first British soldier to be convicted of a battlefield murder whilst serving abroad since the Second World War.

As part of Operation Herrick 14, the Marines were tasked with the impossible job of pacifying Afghanistan’s Helmand province the year following an Afghan general election held for the impossible objective of nation-building Afghanistan into a Western-style democracy.

During a tour from hell in which body parts of British soldiers were hung from trees by local insurgents, Sgt Blackman shot and killed an Afghan lying on the ground injured after fire from an Apache helicopter.

‘Shuffle off this mortal coil, you ****,’ he said as he administered the coup de grâce, ‘It’s nothing you wouldn’t do to us.’ He added, ‘I just broke the Geneva Convention.’

The dead man was thought to be a 23-year-old Taliban commander named Abdullah Jan Agha.

Convicted in November 2013 by a military court, Sgt Blackman’s sentence of a minimum ten years in prison was lowered to eight by the Courts Martial Appeals Court in May of the following year. Three years later, Sgt Blackman was released, his conviction having been reduced from murder to manslaughter with diminished responsibility.

This correspondent understands that while incarcerated – as well as breaking prison gym records – Sgt Blackman taught other inmates to read and write. We wish him and his family well.

Outwith the Geneva Convention, BBC Panorama accused our men and women in uniform in Afghanistan and Iraq of contravening the ‘warrior’s code’. During the programme, Navy SEAL Roger Herbert informed the camera of:

“The line between the soldier and the murderer. The difference is that the soldier – when the soldier has to take another human life. He or she will do so according to the warrior’s code, then kill according to the laws of armed conflict, the laws of war. We have to hold our soldiers to that standard.”

Although the BBC documentary didn’t, the rest of us must wonder of the warrior ethics adhered to by the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, Colonel Gaddafi, Putin et al. Closer to home, Sinn Féin IRA’s warrior code included bombing pubs and high streets full of civilians, while Islamists have bombed the Underground and stabbed little girls to death.

From the origins of the UK Special Forces (UKSF), their operations have divided opinion. Formed in July 1941 as L Detachment, Special Air Service Brigade, early incidents from the life of the SAS Regiment still raise some eyebrows.

Author of the 2016 book SAS Rogue Heroes, Ben Macintyre, tells of a mild North African night at an Axis airfield called Tamet. A long hut to the edge of the airfield caught the attention of the SAS’s Paddy Mayne. A light glimmered beneath its door. Sounds of merriment emerged from within.

According to Macintyre, ’With weapons drawn and flanked by two comrades, Mayne kicked open the door to find a smoke-filled room, lined with confused and inebriated enemy officers whose “merriment” was slowly subsiding into an uneasy silence.’

Mayne and his men opened fire while the scarpering officers put up what little resistance they could. This episode, says the author, “veered away from sabotage and close to assassination” and, again via Macintyre, dogs Mayne’s reputation.

However, at the time of Mayne’s peacetime death in 1955, aged only 40, in a road accident near his Newtonards home, the newspapers recalled the Tarmet incident in a simplicity shorn of more recent sensitivities; ‘strolled into the officers’ mess and attacked everyone in it before moving away.’

Mayne’s own contemporary report on the raid noted: ‘Some Italians were followed, and the hut they came out of was attacked by sub-machine gun and pistol fire and bombs were placed on and around it. There appeared to be roughly thirty inhabitants. Damage inflicted unknown.’

Remaining with the wartime SAS, let’s not forget they fought in a symmetrical war against an enemy in uniform – a luxury not afforded to UKSF in Afghanistan.

Besides the shaky certainties of a warrior’s code, another Panorama quote, almost an aside, catches the attention. This takes us to the nub of the issue in Afghanistan – a nub not developed by the BBC in their documentary.

Spoken in a mild Scottish accent, an actor wearing short hair, goatee, and a kharki round-necked jumper sat before a bare floor ending in multins windows – as if in a deserted factory. The following words were accompanied by the caption ‘served with the SAS.’

‘If a target had popped up on the list two or three times before, then we’d go in with the intention of killing them. There was no attempt to capture them. Sometimes we’d check we’d identified the target, confirm their ID, and shoot them.’

Two or three times before? How come? Because the same Taliban fighters showed up on the intelligence radar more than once. When apprehended by UKSF and handed over to the Afghan authorities, those corrupt and compromised authorities released them to keep on killing British and other coalition servicemen and women.

So much for a ‘warrior code’ of apprehending suspects and passing them to the civil powers for the law to take its proper course.

The BBC might disapprove, but the military establishment and politicians maintain their confidence in General Sir Gwyn Jenkins. On 15th May 2025 (ie last week), the Royal Marine and SBS officer became First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff. His reticence to take Afghan commandos now appears based upon their dubious and costly loyalties rather than as an attempt at cover-up.

As for shooting children, the reality is that if you can pull a trigger, act as a courier, push a box containing an IED into the roadside dust or pad one into a mud wall, then you’re old enough to kill a British soldier.

Closer to home, Rudakubana was 17. Parsons Green Tube bomber, Ahmed Hassan, was 18. Two of the 7/7 London bombers were teenagers.

Back in Afghanistan, according to a Human Rights Watch report dated 2016, ‘Taliban have increasingly used madrasas, or Islamic religious schools, to provide military training to children between the ages of 13 and 17, many of whom have been deployed in combat.’

We must take note of the following: Sgt. Blackman’s acute observation of what they’ll do to us. Unreliable native allies. A Taliban-leaning corrupt Afghan administration. A civil population indistinguishable from the insurgents. The absence of anything approaching a warrior code.

The conclusion being, no matter how squeamish the BBC is, or how squeamish Lord Justice Sir Charles Haddon-Cave may prove to be, Big Boys’ Rules apply. In such circumstances, our men and women in uniform deserve our full support.
 

© Always Worth Saying 2025