They called it “going up the Congo”. This was Afghanistan, not Africa, but it didn’t matter – the object was the same. The special forces soldiers put on their body armour, blackened their faces, checked their weapons by firing into sand pits and went out on patrol.

New members were given a test – the “blooding”, they called it – where they had to shoot an unarmed prisoner. His comrades then covered it up with a “throwdown”, a weapon not issued to the army, so they could claim that the alleged insurgent was armed when he was killed.

Others would cut off a hand as a souvenir.

There were at least 39 murders of civilians, probably many more, by members of the Australian Special Air Service and 2 Commando. Between 2009 and 2013, there were at least 10 incidents where special forces troops shot dead Taliban members, but also unarmed men and children. These are only the ones uncovered.

In September 2013, SAS soldiers burst into the home of farmer Bismillah Jan Azadi in his village of Ala Balogh on the outskirts of the Uruzgan capital Tarin Kot. Azadi was asleep with his six-year-old son Sadiqullah under a blanket on the verandah of their house. They were shot as the lay.

The soldier who shot them was later cleared in an internal investigation, claiming Azadi had pointed a pistol at him.

In another incident in the same month, an Afghan on a motorbike with a woman passenger was shot dead because SAS troops believed he might be a spotter for the Mujahideen. There was no evidence he was. The passenger was badly wounded. Again, two 14-year-old boys were stopped by an SAS patrol, who decided they might be Taliban sympathisers. Their throats were slit and their bodies bagged and thrown into a nearby river.

Troops even filmed their atrocities. One SAS soldier standing over an unarmed civilian asks his superior “you want me to drop this c***”,” before executing the man as he begged in a wheat field.

Top-secret files

IN 2014, David McBride was a major, a military lawyer for special forces. He began compiling evidence of war crimes. Over several months at night he gathered top-secret files from computers at the high-security joint operations headquarters near Bungendore, east of of the capital Canberra. Then he would drive home and stay up for hours compiling a lengthy dossier charting the atrocities, but also detailing how they were widely known by the military hierarchy and ignored.

McBride had a colourful background. He was the son of William McBride, a Sydney obstetrician who raised the alarm over the drug thalidomide but was later struck off for falsifying research about the artfulness of a different drug. The young McBride gained a law degree in Australia and then went to Oxford to study for a second one.

It was at Oxford that he decided soldiering was for him so he joined the British Army, spent a year in Germany in the dog days of the Cold War, then went to Sandhurst and subsequently commanded a platoon in Northern Ireland while IRA attacks on British soldiers were happening every day.

He quit the army, worked for a security company, got a job as a tracker on the reality show Wanted, returned to Australia, worked in TV again, then as as parliamentary aide before joining the Australian army this time as as lawyer.

In 2012 – “and probably before then as well” – he discovered that there “was a campaign of murder, extreme violence by some, very few, key members of the special forces”, he says. And, McBride alleges, at that point senior members of the Australian Defence Force knew about it, and did nothing other than try to cover it up.

A series of sham military trials, he continues, were carried out to divert attention from “a series of murders that was carried out simply to terrorise the population” and carried out by “decorated and famous soldiers”. The ones they pinned the medals on “were actually psychopathic killers” is how he puts it.

Indiscriminate killing

WHAT they called these murderous sallies was “going up the Congo”. He recounts: “We couldn’t beat the Taliban on normal grounds so the idea was that if we just kill indiscriminately the Afghan people would fear us more than they would fear the Taliban. Needless to say it wasn’t a very good plan.” As a result, the local populations hated the SAS soldiers and “many of their sons joined the Taliban”.

Anyone inside the military who wanted to speak out about it was in fear of their own life, McBride says. “It’s something of the Apocalypse Now story with life imitating art and I think what was most worrying for the government was that some of the key people had medals pinned on them by the Prime Minister, the Governor-General.”

He continues: “I think they were prepared to throw innocent soldiers under the bus to take attention away from the really big elephant in the room.”

Dossier ignored

McBRIDE had his completed dossier on the war crimes and at first he tried to push it up the line to his superiors, but it was ignored – the cover-up continued. Then he went to the federal police and was again rebuffed. So he decided to go to ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which jumped at the information and screened a seven-part series, The Afghan Files, based on McBride’s evidence.

It did not have the effect he intended. In June 2019, police raided ABC’s headquarters in a five-hour trawl and took away files. They raided and arrested one of the journalists who had worked on the programmes, but no charges were brought.

“I thought quite early someone would pat me on the back and say ‘good on you for picking this up’ but they didn’t,” McBride says with an air of bemusement. “It shows you our society is sicker than I thought, because I had real trouble in getting anyone interested in the story.”

Except his military bosses – for the wrong reasons. “It was the end of my career and I almost committed suicide. It [the story] spent years in the wilderness, no-one wanted to know,” he says. “I almost wanted to get arrested in the end because I thought my last card in the deck would be to be in front of a judge and jury … and I could call some of the generals and ask them, ‘Did you know about the war crimes?’”

He describes it as a high-risk strategy. “But the only way justice is going to happen is if we have a court case and some senior people in Australia have to answer some hard questions.”

Allegations confirmed

LAST November, after a four-year inquiry sparked by McBride’s revelations, the Brereton Report (named after Paul Brereton, a Supreme Court judge and army major-general) was published. Although heavily redacted, it confirmed former major McBride’s allegations.

After the report was published, 2 SAS was disbanded and 13 members suspected of being accessories or witnesses to the killings, or of being dishonest in testifying, were sacked. None of the 19 troops alleged to have carried out killings has yet been prosecuted. The only person who has been is the whistleblower David McBride. He faces five charges, including theft of classified documents and unlawfully disclosing information. His trial will take place later this month.

He realises the stakes. “Lifetime’s imprisonment, that’s the worst case. I believe in this cause so strongly that I’m prepared to do that,” he says. “If they can get away with this then Western democracies are on a trajectory to ruin. If we’re not already the bad guys of the world then we will be soon.”