In November 2001, eight men jumped from the back of a C130 cargo plane into the freezing Afghan night sky. They were falling at terminal velocity above the Registan Desert in Helman Province. Their parachutes set to open automatically at just 4,000 ft. These were not American operators. They were members of G Squadron, 22nd Special Air Service Regiment.

Britain is most secretive about this unit and they were about to carry out the largest SAS operation since the Second World War. If you want more real stories like this where elite units operate in the gray areas no one talks about, hit subscribe. Their mission was cenamed Operation Trent.

The target was an al-Qaeda opium processing facility at the base of a mountain near the Pakistan [music] border. Somewhere between 60 and 100 um fighters were dug into trenches, bunkers, and caves, guarding a facility that funded the Taliban’s entire war machine. The Americans did not want the mission.

They would have flattened the place from the air and moved on. But the British pushed for boots on the ground because they believed the facility held intelligence that bombs could not collect. So roughly 120 SAS operators loaded into uh into Land Rovers, drove across open desert and attacked a fortified mountain position in broad daylight.

The al-Qaeda fighters inside were, according to one SAS soldier who was there absolutely fanatical. They charged straight into gunfire like something from the First World War. Surrender was the last thing on their minds. After 2 hours of close quarters fighting, the SAS cleared the caves and captured two laptops along with the mass of paperwork that would drive future operations across Afghanistan.

Up to 73 enemy fighters were killed. Four SAS soldiers were wounded, none fatally. The operation earned multiple gallantry awards, including two conspicuous gallantry crosses, the second highest combat honor in the British military, and it sent a message across southern Afghanistan.

the SAS could go anywhere, strike hard, and walk away. That reputation would grow over the next decade. But so would something much darker because the same fear that paralyzed the Taliban would eventually poison the intelligence networks that the SOS relied on to find them and the people who paid the highest price were the Afghan informants who made those operations possible [music] in the first place.

To understand how this unraveled, you need to understand how the SAS found its targets. By the late 2000s, British special forces in Helman Province had shifted from large-scale raids [music] like Operation Trent to something far more surgical. Task Force 42, the designation for UK special operations in Helmond, was running nightly kill or capture missions.

[music] The stated goal was to dismantle Taliban leadership networks and disrupt bomb-making cells. The whole system ran on intelligence. Specifically, it ran on human intelligence, [music] which meant Afghan informants. Coalition forces had built networks of local Afghans [music] who were paid for tips, elders, [snorts] farmers, sometimes just men who happened to overhear a conversation at the market.

If you knew where a Taliban commander slept or where roadside bombs were being assembled, you could collect a payment from the coalition, the information would get added to a target list, discussed briefly at a planning meeting, and then passed to special forces operators who would receive a kill or capture order.

According to a British representative who was involved in the targeting process in Helmond in 2011, intelligence officers were putting together lists of people they figured were Taliban. The names went through a short process of discussion and then they went to the operators. [music] There was pressure to increase the tempo to pass judgment quickly and move on to the next name.

That pressure created an enormous vulnerability. In a country as fractured by tribal and ethnic divisions [music] as Afghanistan, paying people for the names of enemies turned out to be a catastrophic [music] idea. Human rights investigators discovered that informants were routinely settling personal grudges by feeding false intelligence to coalition forces.

A land dispute with your neighbor, call him Taliban, a rivalry with another clan, report their sons as bomb makers, a grudge against a former business partner. His name goes on the list. According to an Open Society Foundation’s report, informants were exploiting the payment system to settle tribal rivalries, and the raids that followed resulted in wrongful detentions and deaths.

The intelligence agencies called it triangulating sources. In practice, having multiple sources sometimes just meant having an overhead satellite image of a house and one informant pointing at it. The consequences were devastating. An SAS was about to make them far worse. In November 2010, a single SAS squadron deployed to Helman Province for a six-month rotation.

Their primary mission was deliberate detention operations, the official term for night raids on Afghan compounds. The raids followed a pattern. Helicopters would arrive in total darkness over a village in Helman. Soldiers would fast rope down or land nearby and move on foot toward a compound. Doors would be breached.

Families inside, often asleep, would wake to armed men with night vision goggles and weapon-mounted flashlights sweeping through their homes. In the best case scenario, a suspected Taliban fighter would be captured and removed for interrogation. But the reports coming back from this particular squadron told a very different story.

A senior officer at UK special forces headquarters in London, known only by the cipher N1466, began noticing something deeply troubling in the operational reports landing on his desk. [music] The squadron was killing people in numbers that did not match the weapons being recovered from the scenes.

One night raid stood out immediately. Nine Afghan men were killed, but only three weapons were found at the scene. That ratio made no tactical sense. In a normal engagement, the number of weapons recovered should roughly match the number of combatants killed, and the pattern kept repeating. The body count was climbing, but the weapons count stayed low.

More Afghans were dying than could possibly have been armed. By February 2011, just 9 weeks into the squadron’s deployment, N1466 was deeply concerned. He had heard whispered allegations that were circulating through the special forces community. Soldiers had reportedly been overheard during a training course boasting about killing all fighting age males during operations, regardless of whether those men actually posed a threat.

N1466 commissioned an internal review of the squadron’s recent operations. When the results came back, the picture was startlingly bad. He brought his findings to the director of special forces. He made it clear that there was a strong potential for criminal behavior and he recommended a formal investigation.

The response was not what he expected. Instead of contacting the Royal Military Police, the director ordered a limited internal review of the squadron’s tactics. One officer was sent to Afghanistan where he spoke only to other SAS soldiers and took their accounts at face value. He never visited any of the raid sites.

He never interviewed a single Afghan witness or family member. N1466 would later describe this review as a little fake exercise designed to create the appearance of action while the real problems were buried. Meanwhile, back in the villages of Helman Province, something was breaking inside the informant networks.

Word travels fast in Afghan communities. When a night raid hits a compound and kills a farmer who had nothing to do with the Taliban, the village knows within hours. And they know someone provided the name. The very system that paid informants for intelligence was now putting informants in mortal danger.

Not from the Taliban, but from their own communities. If you were suspected of being a spy for the British, if your neighbor believed that you whispered his cousin’s name to the foreigners, the consequences were swift and brutal. The fear cut in both directions. Informants who had provided genuine, accurate intelligence began refusing further contact.

It was not because they feared the Taliban’s retaliation. It was because they had seen what happened after they handed over over a name. They had watched helicopters descend on compounds where the men inside were farmers, teachers, fathers of young children. Paid informants started refusing the money. The payment itself had become toxic, a marker that connected them to operations that their communities now viewed as collective punishment.

According to investigative journalist Patrick Cochburn, many of the prisoners targeted during night raids were held on the flimsiest evidence often provided by paid informants who were personal or tribal enemies of the targets. By conducting these raids and killing based on that corrupted intelligence, the SAS effectively delegitimized [music] the Afghan government, delegitimized foreign intervention and became, as Cochburn put it, the recruiting sergeant for the Taliban.

The damage was not just moral, it was operational. The SAS needed intelligence to function. Without informants willing to talk, the target list would dry up. And the target lists were drying up. Even the Afghan forces who fought alongside the British were reaching their limit. Commando Force 333 was an elite Afghan unit trained, funded and mentored by SAS.

These were not ordinary soldiers. They were some of the best trained commandos in the entire Afghan security apparatus. SAS had built them from scratch, starting with counter narcotics operations and eventually developing them into a sophisticated counterterrorism force. For years, CF300 33 and SAS operated side by side.

Afghan commandos would accompany British operators on night raids, providing cultural knowledge, language skills, and legitimacy. Having Afghan faces on the operation was supposed to make the raids look less like a foreign invasion and more like a joint security [music] effort.

But by 2010, that partnership was fracturing. According to the Sunday Times, a British special forces officer confirmed that CF 333 commandos refused at one point to patrol with SAS because of concern about their conduct. One CF 333 commando told reporters that he had personally witnessed SAS soldiers planting drugs and weapons on a victim who had been shot at a checkpoint.

During one operation, Afghan troops accused UK forces of targeting civilians who were not combatants. They used a specific word for what [music] they believed was happening. The word was assassinating. Afghan President Hamid Carzai raised the issue directly with British leadership. His national security adviser later confirmed that Carzi consistently and repeatedly mentioned the killings during meetings with British officials.

And still, the squadron was allowed to finish its tour. It was deployed again for another six-month rot rotation in 2012. During that second deployment, a raid in Nimuse province hit a family home in the village of Shesh Abba. Two young parents, Hussein Usbakai and his wife, Rukia Haleem, were shot in their bed. Sleeping next to them were their two sons, Imran and Bal, ages 3 and 18 months.

Both children were shot and were gravely wounded. When N1466 later reflected on the timeline, [music] he pointed directly to this incident. If more had been done in 2011, when he first raised his concerns, he said, those children might never have been harmed. The informant networks across southern Afghanistan had effectively collapsed by this point.

The cycle was complete. Paid sources gave names. The names led to raids. The raids killed people who should not have been targeted. The villages turned against the informants. The informants stopped talking and without intelligence, the operations became even more reliant on the corrupted scraps of information that remained, which made the targeting even less accurate, which generated more civilian casualties, which drove more informants away.

It was a feedback loop of fear, and the SAS, one of the most capable military units on the planet, was trapped inside it. The Americans had seen this exact pattern play out in Iraq. A military survey had found that targeted killings of suspected bomb makers did not reduce attacks. They increased them.

Every time a coalition force killed a suspected insert in insurgent leader, a more motivated deputy stepped in. Family members took up the fight out of revenge. The violence compounded itself and the British special forces who had studied counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland, in Malaya, and in a dozen other theaters made the same mistake.

They relied on a system that rewarded speed over accuracy. Body counts over intelligence quality and tactical victories over strategic outcomes. The full scale of what happened during those years is still being investigated. The independent inquiry relating to Afghanistan chaired by Sir Charles Haden Cave is examining up to 80 suspicious deaths on SAS counterterrorism raids between 2010 and 2013.

A BBC investigation identified 54 people killed in suspicious circumstances by a single squadron during just one six-month tour. The total death toll for that deployment reached triple figures with no injuries reported to SAS soldiers across any of the raids examined. Internal emails between senior officers at the time revealed just how aware the chain of command was.

One officer referred to a deadly raid in February 2011 as the latest massacre. Other SAS soldiers from separate units were shocked by what they were reading in the afteraction reports. For what seemed like the 10th time in two weeks, they noted that a detained Afghan had supposedly produced a hidden weapon after being searched and restrained.

The reports were using the same scenario over and over. A man sent back into a room to pull open curtains or retrieve belongings only to reemerge with an AK-47 or a hand grenade. The same script repeated across dozens of operations [music] as one group of SAS soldiers commented in an internal message, “You could not make it up.

” Meanwhile, the Afghan commandos of CF333 and the related unit ATF44, known collectively as the Triples, were left behind when the coalition withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021. Despite having been trained by the SAS, despite having fought alongside British soldiers for nearly two decades, despite being among the Afghans most at risk of Taliban reprisal, more than 2,000 of their visa applications to the United Kingdom were rejected.

The SAS had been given veto power [music] over those applications, and they used it to deny nearly everyone. Former members of the triples have since been hunted by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Nor Aga, a CF333 sniper, was murdered in front of his wife and children. Riaz Amazai was shot dead outside his home. Others are in hiding, having buried their unit badges and medals from what they once considered the proudest period of their lives.

A former triples officer told reporters that the Afghan commandos had worked alongside the SAS like brothers and felt completely betrayed by the mass rejections. The irony is devastating. The very Afghan soldiers who refused to participate in questionable operations who raised concerns about the conduct of their British partners who tried to uphold the standards they had been taught during SAS-led training were the ones who were abandoned.

N1466, the senior whistleblower who first raised alarms in 2011, eventually took his evidence directly to the Royal Military Police in January [music] 2015. It was nearly 4 years after he had first flagged the problem to his superiors. He told the inquiry it was a matter of great regret that he had not gone sooner. He was asked why he waited.

His answer was painfully honest. He was worried about his position. He was worried about the organization. [music] and he believed that someone above him was going to do the right thing. Nobody did. The SAS in Afghanistan demonstrated something that military strategists have been warning about for centuries.

When a force becomes so feared that it terrifies not just the enemy but the civilian population, it relies on for intelligence. It does not become stronger. It becomes blind. [music] And a blind special forces unit operating in the dark in every sense is capable of doing extraordinary damage to the very mission it was sent to accomplish.

[music] The Afghan informants who once took payments to identify Taliban positions learned the hardest possible lesson. That the money was not worth it. That handing a name to the British could result in the death of someone innocent. And that once the killing started, there was nobody in the chain of command willing to make it stop.

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