Blades

The news that the SAS was being investigated over allegations its soldiers had executed scores of unarmed captives in Afghanistan – and its officers had covered up the evidence – broke like a bombshell in 2017. Almost overnight, elite British soldiers, long considered heroes, found themselves rebranded as war criminals.

Blades lifts the lid on Special Forces operations in Afghanistan, revealing a fuller picture – one that is rarely acknowledged. Government-imposed restrictions meant the enemys bomb-makers, responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians, could not legally be shot, nor detained beyond a few days. SAS soldiers, undermined by their government and their generals, faced an agonising dilemma: obey the rules and let colleagues and innocents be killed or enact frontier justice and face accusations of war crimes.

Addressing Operation Northmoor – the furthest-reaching and most sensitive UK military police investigation ever undertaken – in full for the first time, Blades exposes how detectives faced a wall of silence and collusion by senior officers and found vital evidence destroyed. Drawing on thorough research, an exclusive interview with an SAS soldier who pulled the trigger during the contested operations and decades of experience covering military and foreign affairs, Mark Nicol offers a vital corrective to false reporting on Afghanistan, one that forces us to confront an uncomfortable question: when the rules of engagement make a soldiers job impossible, who should be held accountable for what happens next?