How Whitehall penpushers obsessed with human rights stabbed the SAS in the back in Afghanistan: MARK NICOL

DAILYMAIL.COM • 6h ago

By MARC NICOL DEFENCE EDITOR 00:22 10 Oct 2026, updated 00:24 10 Oct 2026

A Union Jack fluttered in the breeze in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, as SAS soldiers – Blades as they were proud to call themselves – clambered aboard a Land Rover to pose for a photo against a backdrop of sandy wilderness.

In their desert fatigues, unkempt and unshaven, some reclined against the front bumper while others sprawled on top of the chassis: an image that harked back six decades to when the SAS, led by its legendary founder David Stirling, ransacked German airstrips and ammunition depots in North Africa.

The weight of this history was on every soldier’s mind as they set out on Operation Trent to destroy an Al Qaeda strongpoint concealed in an opium factory, a 36-hour drive away.

Weeks earlier in 2001 Osama bin Laden had masterminded the world’s most audacious terrorist attack. Trent was the SAS’s opportunity to avenge the deaths of 67 Britons on 9/11.

They scaled mile after mile of sand dunes until reaching an assembly area ten miles from the target. Ahead of them, US airstrikes hit enemy machine-gun posts; motorcycle outriders identified a laying-up position 500 metres from the enemy HQ.

‘A’ Squadron dismounted under enemy fire from the top of a hill and scrambled over ridges and gullies. Every enemy position had to be cleared and every combatant eliminated. No prisoners.

With dusk approaching, Al Qaeda exploited their advantage, firing from the shadows. They were determined to fight to their deaths.

Leading from the front, SAS officer Richard Williams and his assault team ‘pepper-potted’ uphill across 50 metres of open ground – one taking a knee and providing covering fire for the others to dash forward.

Williams’s body armour deflected an accurate round before he was shot full force in his chest. Thankfully,

the two 7.62mm rounds lodged in his magazine pouch.

Moments later, one of his men made a dash between boulders but was pinned down. Without hesitation, two of his comrades ran from their protected positions and dragged him into cover.

The battle quickly hotted up. The RSM (regimental sergeant major) was shot in the leg, a sergeant cried ‘man down’.

Yet still they advanced up the hill, clearing enemy positions until the Taliban trenches were littered with dead bodies. Running low on ammunition, they came to a halt, with no prisoners taken.

Eighty enemy lay dead. Two Conspicuous Gallantry Crosses (CGCs) and two Military Crosses were earned that day.

When Richard Williams was addressing troops on his appointment as their Commanding Officer (CO) in 2005, he declared: ‘I expect all in the SAS to always do more than is expected.

Prince William was a frequent visitor to Stirling Lines, 22 SAS headquarters in Hereford, long before he became patron of the SAS’s Regimental Association in 2025.

Its secluded environment provided respite from relentless media attention.

From his first visits William endeared himself to SAS officers and soldiers and their families, with his humility leaving a mark on all those he met. By coincidence he was on camp the day of SAS soldier Kev Pearson’s funeral in 2008.

Pearson lost his life in a motorcycle accident. Hugely popular and respected, he was granted a full funeral with a 21-gun salute, an RAF flypast and a bugler. Hundreds of colleagues, past and present, paid tribute.

An officer asked William whether he would meet Pearson’s family. Displaying the empathy that has become his hallmark, the prince charmed grieving relatives and shared drinks with SAS soldiers.

Some time later William, a qualified RAF helicopter pilot, flew to Stirling Lines and on landing tried to contact the same officer to share a brew.

But it turned out the officer was at the SBS’s headquarters in Dorset, where he had driven the previous day with a party of senior US officers touring British Special Forces bases. He and the prince spoke on the phone and, with a rendezvous in Hereford ruled out, the officer suggested William reroute to Poole.

There William landed and the officer and his party scaled the rear ramp of the prince’s helicopter. When he suggested the Americans glance inside the cockpit towards the jockey’s seat, they could scarcely believe their eyes.

For running through the heart of the SAS is the very essence of initiative, leadership and risk-taking professionalism.

Use it, trust it. Only your judgment, experience and skill will enable you to make the difference between securing a mediocre result and a breakthrough. Aim high. Dare.’

His three years as CO were dramatic. In Iraq, under his command, the SAS played a key role as part of the US-led Joint Special Operations Command, taking down Al Qaeda’s network of car bombers in Baghdad – who at their peak were responsible for the deaths of more than 1,000 civilians a month.

It was one of the most successful campaigns in the regiment’s history, showcasing the bravery, skill and ingenuity of its soldiers.

Not long after his appointment in 2005, Williams was invited to review plans for another campaign, to run alongside the one in Iraq.

Task Force Helmand involved the deployment of thousands of British troops into Afghanistan’s main drug-producing region.

From Iraq, Williams knew that effective Counter Insurgency (COIN) operations required the capability to detain suspects, as well as Rules of Engagement that allowed for offensive action. Also vital was the full backing of the host nation.

Iraq’s prime minister Nouri al-Maliki offered that support.

He had signed a Status of Forces Agreement that meant jihadists in Iraq could be held and soldiers could engage in combat on the basis of their enemies displaying hostile intent, rather than posing an immediate threat to life. Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai was very different.

He was opposed to detention as well as to the house searches and ‘kill or capture’ night raids favoured by Special Forces.

Williams feared that if his SAS soldiers were sent to Afghanistan under these circumstances to safeguard the troops deployed, they would be bound by MoD-imposed legal restrictions which made their job virtually impossible.

He could have told senior officers what they wanted to hear – that their intention to run their light-touch campaign to stabilise Helmand and reduce its dependency on opium production was feasible and beneficial.

Instead, he warned that the presence of troops was more likely to cause an insurgency, not prevent one. And he predicted that, thanks in part to those legal restrictions on Counter-Insurgency operations, as many as 500 British soldiers could lose their lives. It was a highly prescient estimate given that when combat operations ceased in 2014, the death toll in Helmand was 407.

Williams point-blank refused to commit an SAS sabre squadron to Task Force Helmand.

He insisted the UK’s strategic priority should remain defeating Al Qaeda in Iraq. He was asked to change his mind but again refused. In 2008, at the end of his tenure as CO, colleagues thought Williams could end up as a future Director, Special Forces or even Chief of the General Staff. Instead, he resigned his commission.

In his leaving speech he warned of the growing dangers of the Ministry of Defence’s apparent acceptance of ‘lawfare’ and the imposition of the Human Rights Act some years earlier: ‘You may find you are stabbed in the back by those in London who refuse to accept or support the essential and often brutal nature of the counter-terrorist fight.’

He was replaced by a more compliant CO who accepted the MoD’s terms for sending an SAS sabre squadron to Helmand.

Defence officials expected the SAS to repeat their success in Iraq. But they had failed to recognise the differences between operating there and in Afghanistan.

The ability to detain captives had been crucial in Iraq. Yet in Afghanistan, nine out of ten insurgents captured by UK forces were set free to return to the battlefield within days. SAS officers likened the process to a ‘revolving door’.

Streetwise Taliban soon caught on, realising they needed only to remain silent for 96 hours to ensure their release.

Meanwhile, the UK’s Human Rights Act prevented Afghan terror suspects being transferred from British to Afghan jurisdiction – because the suspects’ safety could not be assured in local prisons.

Put simply, the lives of British soldiers were being sacrificed to preserve the human rights of those determined to blast them into the afterlife.

The bombmakers and facilitators, those responsible for acquiring the components for Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), also exploited UK Rules of Engagement which insisted soldiers could only open fire when they believed their lives were in immediate danger.

This may have sounded reasonable to a pen-pushing lawyer but not when life-or-death decisions had to be made – bombmakers who might go on to cause multiple deaths with their IEDs, for instance, stopped carrying weapons so they could never be considered to pose an ‘immediate threat’ to life.

The UK ambassador to Afghanistan Sir Mark Sedwill took the SAS’s side, telling Foreign Office officials too much was being expected of soldiers.

As he recounted when interviewed for my book, he was told to concern himself with an ambassador’s core functions rather than military matters.

Sir Mark refused. To him it was unacceptable that those at the policy end in Whitehall should fail to resolve problems around ineffective Rules of Engagement and detention – and yet still expect exhausted, anxious soldiers to operate effectively.

Meanwhile, insurgents continued blowing up British troops seemingly at will – and they were released essentially as soon as they were captured.

So, for better or worse, the SAS set aside those life-endangering Rules of Engagement and found methods around the criteria that anyone they engaged needed to be carrying a weapon.

Before you judge any SAS soldiers harshly, consider what you would have done in those circumstances, when the choice was that stark.

The specific difficulties the SAS encountered were exemplified by Operation Tyburn in early 2011. The target was a bombmaker called Sadam Hussein who had been tracked by drones to an enemy compound in Helmand.

The soldiers’ choice was to detain Hussein and his Taliban gang, knowing they would be recycled back on to the battlefield; or to eliminate them, thereby preserving the lives of those British soldiers and Afghan civilians who would otherwise have been targeted by Hussein’s gang.

In the dead of night, Chinooks touched down and soldiers sprinted towards the compounds. A pair of ‘Bravos’ (military jargon for enemy men – women were ‘Echoes’ and children ‘Kilos’) were seen escaping along a canal and diving for cover.

The target area was cordoned off and a family of two men named Haji Abdul Khaliq and Mohammed Bang, four women and two children, emerged from a compound. The men were separated from the dependents and,

according to eyewitness accounts, hooded, cuffed and pushed down on to their knees.

Bang tested positive for traces of explosive. Khaliq was sent back inside the building, shadowed by a British soldier, to open curtains and windows – standard SAS practice before searching a house.

According to the unit’s subsequent report, Khaliq had produced a grenade once inside and was shot dead. The grenade didn’t go off because he had failed to depress the safety lever.

As was customary SAS practice, the grenade (or, in different circumstances, any other weapon the enemy was carrying) was placed beside the body and photographed as proof that he had been armed and dangerous.

Documents and personal property were taken from the building.

At another compound, Khaliq’s son, Saifullah, 19, and his cousin Atta Ullah, 23, emerged, accompanied by five women and three children.

The menfolk were shepherded aside, hooded and bound. Then Saifullah was taken inside a building where, again according to the unit’s report, he picked up an AK-47 rifle from behind a table and attempted to engage his captors. He was shot dead.

An hour later, Sadam, the main objective of the raid, was found hiding under a bush. The unit stated that he had his hands tucked under his body, apparently hiding a grenade.

He was therefore considered to pose an immediate threat to life, meeting the threshold for the legitimate use of lethal force.

He was shot dead, the fourth and final EKIA (enemy killed in action) that night. An operational report said the SAS ‘recovered’ two rifles, two Russian grenades and 37 rounds of ammunition.

Within hours, Objective Tyburn triggered a chain reaction. Relatives of the dead claimed the EKIA were unarmed civilians.

At Special Forces headquarters in London, there were many who recognised the brutal necessity of the SAS’s actions, its soldiers having been placed in such a lose-lose situation by Rules of Engagement and legal restrictions.

But Special Forces lawyers were worried. As Senior Legal Adviser Alistair McAndrew emailed a colleague after reading the field report on Operation Tyburn: ‘I share concerns about the recent spate of high EKIAs and have noted the emerging Taliban tactic of supposedly hiding grenades behind curtains.’

As we have seen, this was often the explanation the SAS troopers reported as their case for opening fire.

The lawyer went on: ‘This may be entirely appropriate, but I get the sense that the way we are writing these up will not bear scrutiny in years to come.

‘My comments are demonstrations of the kinds of things that Public Interest Lawyers may undoubtedly raise in the inevitable public inquiries. How do we highlight our concerns in a fashion that does not constrain our people to use force legally when under threat?’

The law firm Public Interest Lawyers was the scourge of the UK military, trawling Iraq for claimants and bringing hundreds of cases to the attention of military police.

Interviewed for my book, SAS sources vehemently denied the accusation that there had been a casual disregard for life in their operations.

Those Bravos targeted had been tracked for days, sometimes weeks. Cases were built and the operations were authorised by MoD lawyers.

Hussein’s compound could have been struck by a missile. The benefit of the SAS’s presence was to ensure the protection of the innocent, the wives and children of Taliban commanders.

According to Sir Mark Sedwill and others, those soldiers should never have been put in that predicament.

Ask yourself again: what would you have done? Where would your sympathies have lain? With the insurgents responsible for the IEDs? Or the British soldiers setting out on patrol fearful that every step could be their last? The choice was that stark.

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