The file photo shows UK Special Forces (SAS) raiding a village in Afghanistan.

A former UK Special Forces officer has revealed that British troops committed "war crimes" in Afghanistan while the chain of command tried to suppress evidence of long-term executions of detainees by Special Air Service (SAS) units operating across the country.

The former Assistant Chief of Staff for Operations at UK Special Forces headquarters said in a testimony under the name of cipher N1466 that as early as 2011 he believed there was a "strong potential of criminal behavior" by SAS units, yet the top commanders chose internal reviews over criminal investigation.

"I will be clear, we are talking about war crimes," he told the Independent Inquiry relating to Afghanistan, which on Monday released redacted transcripts of his previously closed-door sessions.

N1466 stressed that the chain of command failed to stop extrajudicial shootings, including of two small children, after the alarm was first raised in early 2011, and that the failure allowed them to continue until 2013.

Commissioning a review in April 2011 from an officer at Special Forces headquarters of recent SAS operations, N1466 said the results looked "startlingly bad" for the SAS.

The review formed part of the evidence he presented to the then-director of Special Forces in 2011.

N1466 testified that the director "absolutely knew what was happening" in Afghanistan with regard to the war crimes, and "absolutely knew what his responsibilities were" when it came to reporting the allegations to military police.

The director did not contact police, but instead ordered an internal review of the SAS squadron`s tactics - a move N1466 described as a "warning shot" to the squadron to tone down the violence.

The director had made "a conscious decision that he is going to suppress this, cover it up and do a little fake exercise to make it look like he`s done something," N1466 said.

In an inquiry launched in 2023 by Lord Justice Haddon-Cave, there are claims that 80 people were summarily killed by members of three different British SAS units operating in Afghanistan, with N1466 saying it was "not just one director that has known about this," adding that UK Special Forces leadership was "very much suppressing" the allegations.

British forces were among the largest contingents of the US-led NATO military alliance forces that invaded Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021 to purportedly root out the ruling Taliban government and terrorism across war-ravaged Afghanistan.

However, after 20 years of their military occupation of the country - marked by many reports of war crimes against Afghan civilians and militants by the US-led forces - terror acts remained prevalent across the country and the Taliban rule was re-established in Kabul.

Over the course of the deployment, 454 British service personnel lost their lives in Afghanistan.

SAS soldier shot Afghan toddlers in bed, received medal

It`s touted as the UK military`s best and brightest, but now the country`s Elite Special Air Service, SAS, is accused by its own members of acting like a death squad in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013.

An independent inquiry launched by the government in 2022 has released a redacted version of secret testimony given by an SAS member.

The whistleblower, a senior officer known only as N1466, told the inquiry last summer that in one of the SAS`s notorious night raids his colleagues gunned down women and toddlers sleeping under a mosquito net.

The soldier who pulled the trigger received an award, not a court martial.

The senior officer also told the inquiry, which covers just three years in Afghanistan and only this Special Air Service, about a deliberate policy to kill fighting age males, even when they did not pose a threat, dig deeper, and you might see a trend.

They were deployed for a long time in The North of Ireland, were engaged in all sorts of activities there, including many extrajudicial executions.

The most famous one, perhaps, is the one I first came to study in my first ever research article, which was on the killings in Gibraltar in March 1988 in which they executed three unarmed members of the IRA alleged to have been on a bombing mission; but they didn`t have a bomb and they didn`t have arms.

So this is exactly what you would expect from the SAS.

They engage in illegal activities, atrocities, and we will expect them to do more wherever they are deployed, including, of course, they may well be in Gaza.

Under both British and international law, deliberately killing unarmed civilians or prisoners of war is a war crime.

The whistleblower says his warnings were ignored by the chain of command.

The Minister of Defense says it supports the ongoing inquiry, but it turns out the inquiry was forced upon it after increasingly credible reports of cold-blooded murder by SAS soldiers, of planting weapons on innocent civilians and of destroying incriminating evidence.

For years, the war crimes were shrouded in secrecy, but with the new evidence from the eyewitness, that wall of secrecy around the SAS members is fast crumbling.