Tag: afghanistan

SAS war crimes inquiry obtains huge cache of new evidence, BBC reveals

The public inquiry into alleged SAS war crimes in Afghanistan has obtained a previously deleted cache of data that could hold crucial evidence, the BBC can reveal.

The files were permanently erased from a server by a UK Special Forces contractor in 2016, during a murder investigation into the SAS.

But the public inquiry team has now secured backups of the server – part of a Special Forces communications system codenamed “Sonata” – believed to have been created before the files were erased.

The backups are likely to contain information about SAS operations on which members of the elite regiment were suspected of unlawfully killing unarmed Afghan detainees and civilians.

A spokesperson for the inquiry confirmed to the BBC that they had obtained the backups, adding: “We now hold the relevant material and are exploring a technical solution to retrieve and review the data to determine its relevance to the investigation.”

The spokesperson said the inquiry team was approached during several days of hearings about computer evidence last December by someone offering them access to the backups, but the inquiry declined to comment on the source of the offer.

This is the first time backups of Sonata have been obtained by investigators outside UK Special Forces, which blocked previous efforts by the Royal Military Police (RMP) to copy the server.

To the dismay of the RMP investigators, a contractor hired by UK Special Forces (UKSF) during the murder investigation ran a program on the server in 2016 designed to permanently erase previously deleted files.

This process, known as “zeroing”, flew in the face of explicit instructions the RMP had given to UKSF that no data should be tampered with before the server could be copied.

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Biden Has Delivered Millions in Taxpayer Money to … the TALIBAN!

A federal watchdog report reveals that after America had been at war with the Taliban for two decades, the Joe Biden administration now has delivered at least $11 million in U.S. taxpayer funds to the terrorists. Probably much more.

A Center Square report posted at Just the News explains much of the cash has been delivered through various aide groups that get federal tax dollars.

And, the report warns, “experts” suggest the actual total Biden has delivered to the Taliban could be much higher.

The Taliban, previously in control in Afghanistan, took control again within days of Biden’s abrupt decision to yank American troops out, a scheme that cost American lives and left behind tens of billions of dollars in American war machinery for the Taliban to use or sell.

Further, Biden left behind hundreds of Americans and thousands of Afghanis who had worked with the American presence there for years – all in danger of death at the hands of the Taliban.

The report cited the conclusion of SIGAR, a federal watchdog, which found, “The U.S. government has continued to be the largest international donor supporting the Afghan people since the former Afghan government collapsed and the Taliban returned to power in August 2021.”

The report continued, “Since then, the U.S. government has provided more than $2.8 billion in humanitarian and development assistance to help the people of Afghanistan.”

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Convicted sex offender wins right to remain in UK despite doctors saying he still ‘acts inappropriately towards females’ – because judge said he faced risk of ‘mob violence’ if sent back to Afghanistan

A convicted sex offender has won the right to remain in the UK despite doctors saying he still ‘acts inappropriately towards females’ – because judge said he faced the risk of ‘mob violence’ if he was sent back to Afghanistan.

The man was convicted of ‘outraging public decency and exposure’ in 2017 but was still given permission to stay in the UK.

This is despite doctors saying he ‘continues to act inappropriately towards females’ at his asylum appeal hearings.

But in immigration tribunal judge said he could not go back to Afghanistan in 2020, because his ‘risky behaviours’ would would put him at risk of ‘ill treatment’.

It comes after Home Secretary James Cleverly called for a light to be shone on tribunal decisions, many of which are shrouded in secrecy because judges often impose draconian reporting restrictions.

The tribunal courts have allowed more than half of asylum seekers to stay in country since 2021 – with most of the unsuccessful candidates staying illegally.

Immigration adviser Jayne Mercer said there were as many as 500 living in Hull alone who are living ‘in plain sight’.

She told the broadcaster: ‘It costs a lot of money to deport people. So they’re left in a situation of limbo.

‘Quite often, after a few attempts, they do get status.

This is funded by an average of more than £34million of taxpayers’ money since 2017, analysis of legal aid figures by the broadcaster reveal.

Director of public law at Duncan Lewis Ahmed Ayeed, whose company respresented the sex offender, slammed the suggestion lawyers are to blame for the crisis- saying the British public would be left furious if they knew the extent of the system’s failings.

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New Book Claims Biden Doesn’t Think He Did Anything Wrong in Botched Withdrawal From Afghanistan

A new book claims that behind closed doors, Biden doesn’t think he did anything wrong in his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, that left 13 service members dead and saw Afghans clinging to the wheel wells of departing American airplanes.

This is an excellent reminder of just how detached from reality Biden is right now. His poll numbers cratered after the withdrawal and have never recovered.

Americans across the country were horrified by how the withdrawal was handled and outraged by the deaths and the amount of equipment that was left behind in the process.

FOX News reports:

Biden privately defiant that he didn’t botch Afghanistan withdrawal: book

Behind closed doors, President Biden strongly believes that he made the right decisions on the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal that led in part to the deaths of 13 American soldiers, according to an upcoming book.

An excerpt from “The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore Foreign Policy After Trump,” obtained by Axios, suggests that Biden remains defiant that the history books will look favorably on his decision to leave Afghanistan after American troops spent 20 years fighting the nation’s longest war.

Following the withdrawal, “no one offered to resign, in large part because the president didn’t believe anyone had made a mistake. Ending the war was always going to be messy,” author Alexander Ward writes.

Biden allegedly told his top aides, including White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, that they had done their best given the situation and vowed to stand by them.

“There wasn’t even a real possibility of a shake-up,” a White House official told Ward.

The author claims that Biden knew he was making promises to get people out of Afghanistan that he could not keep as confusion and chaos unfolded at the Kabul airport.

You can see the exact moment the withdrawal unfolded in Biden’s approval polls.

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Watchdog: Afghanistan Has Received $11 Billion In Aid From US Since Withdrawal

A new watchdog report reveals that the country of Afghanistan has received a staggering $11 billion in foreign aid from the United States since the country’s collapse in August of 2021.

As Breitbart reports, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), John Sopko, issued his report on Monday.

Sopko says that the U.S. and its allies have been sending “cash shipments” of about $80 million to Afghanistan “every 10-14 days” since the Taliban took over the country shortly before the withdrawal of all American forces.

Sopko said that the United Nations has assured him that all of the money has been “placed in designated U.N. accounts in a private bank,” and is not being “deposited in the central bank or provided to the Taliban.”

The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) similarly claimed that all of the cash shipments are being “carefully monitored, audited, inspected, and vetted in accordance with U.N. financial rules and processes.”

Despite these claims, Sopko’s report noted that the Taliban has stolen foreign aid before, and has also been able to prevent the poorest elements of a foreign population from receiving aid that has been designated for them; some of the Taliban’s methods for stealing foreign aid include “siphoning cash from U.N. shipments, or collecting royalties, or charging fees on cash shipments.”

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Afghanistan: UK special forces ‘killed 9 people in their beds’

UK special forces killed nine people “in their beds” during an Afghanistan night raid, an independent inquiry has heard.

Family members say the victims were unarmed civilians. The SAS had claimed they acted in self-defence.

Senior officers suspected troops of carrying out a policy of executing “fighting age” men even if they posed no threat.

The government announced the inquiry after BBC Panorama revealed an SAS squadron killed 54 people in suspicious circumstances on one six-month tour.

As substantive hearings got under way at the Royal Courts of Justice in London on Monday, UK special forces were accused of “abusing” night raids in order to commit “numerous” extra-judicial killings – which were allegedly later covered up.

Hundreds of deliberate detention operations were carried out by special forces between 2010 and 2013.

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Weapons left by the US in Afghanistan reached the hands of Palestinian militants, says Israel

A high-ranking Israel Defense Forces (IDF) commander said that US weapons left in Afghanistan were found in the hands of Palestinian groups active in the Gaza Strip.

The commander told Newsweek that Israel is concerned over the risks of weapons provided by the United States and other Western nations to Ukraine ending up in the hands of Israel’s foes in the Middle East, including Iran.

This Israeli commander added that some of the US small arms left in Afghanistan have already been seen in the hands of Palestinian groups active in the Gaza Strip.

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U.S. Weapons from Afghanistan Ended up with Palestinian Groups Operating in the Gaza Strip

A claim in a news report that American weapons seized in Afghanistan have ended up in the hands of Palestinian groups operating in the Gaza Strip has taken on renewed significance after Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist group, launched an attack on Israel on Saturday.

According to a Newsweek report published in June, an Israeli commander said some of the US. small arms seized in Afghanistan have already been observed in the hands of Palestinian groups operating in the Gaza Strip.

The report began recirculating on social media, amid accusations that the Biden administration funded Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel by releasing $6 billion in frozen funds to Iran, the main backer of Hamas.

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Taliban weighs using U.S. mass surveillance plan, met with China’s Huawei

The Taliban are creating a large-scale camera surveillance network for Afghan cities that could involve repurposing a plan crafted by the Americans before their 2021 pullout, an interior ministry spokesman told Reuters, as authorities seek to supplement thousands of cameras already across the capital, Kabul.

The Taliban administration — which has publicly said it is focused on restoring security and clamping down on Islamic State, which has claimed many major attacks in Afghan cities — has also consulted with Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei about potential cooperation, the spokesman said.

Preventing attacks by international militant groups – including prominent organisations such as Islamic State – is at the heart of the interaction between the Taliban and many foreign nations, including the U.S. and China, according to readouts from those meetings. But some analysts question the cash-strapped regime’s ability to fund the program, and rights groups have expressed concern that any resources will be used to crackdown on protesters.

Details of how the Taliban intend to expand and manage mass surveillance, including obtaining the U.S. plan, have not been previously reported.

The mass camera rollout, which will involve a focus on “important points” in Kabul and elsewhere, is part of a new security strategy that will take four years to be fully implemented, Ministry of Interior spokesman Abdul Mateen Qani told Reuters.

“At the present we are working on a Kabul security map, which is (being completed) by security experts and (is taking) lots of time,” he said. “We already have two maps, one which was made by U.S.A for the previous government and second by Turkey.”

He did not detail when the Turkish plan was made.

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A US soldier may have falsely reported a US raid in Afghanistan while attempting to secure the adoption of a baby he found in the rubble

The Afghan villager was afraid the American soldiers might come. And one cool night in fall, as his children lay asleep, helicopters roared overhead.

At the first sound of gunshots, he yelled for his wife and 10 children to take cover. His young daughter grabbed her sleeping infant sister off the bed. Their mud compound exploded, and a blast sent a huge shock through the home.

“My small sister fell away from my arms,” the girl, now a teenager, whispered, so quietly she could barely be heard above the breeze. “The wind blew her out of my hands.”

Today, what exactly happened that night is at the center of a bitter international custody dispute over an orphaned baby found amid the rubble. The high-profile legal battle pits an Afghan family against an American one, and has drawn responses from the White House and the Taliban.

The Afghan government and the International Committee of the Red Cross determined that the baby belonged to this Afghan villager. Friends and family say he was a farmer, not a militant. The Red Cross found surviving relatives and united her with them.

However, a US Marine attorney, Maj. Joshua Mast, believed he should get the girl instead. He insists that the child is the stateless orphan of foreign fighters who were living in an Al Qaeda compound, and convinced a rural Virginia judge to grant him an adoption from 7,000 miles away.

Were it not for this little girl, now 4 years old, the events that began on the night of September 5, 2019, in this remote, impoverished region might have remained locked away among clandestine stories of the thousands of raids the American and Afghan militaries carried out during the long war.

But once-secret documents, now filed in court records, reveal details that thrust this raid into an ongoing controversy over who the military killed when they blew down walls in the middle of the night in Afghanistan, if those people were fighters or civilians, and whether the military ever tried to find out.

The Mast family has submitted a summary of the raid in a federal court case, an account Mast helped create after he said he “personally read every page of the 150+ classified documents” on the operation. The summary describes how as many as six enemy fighters were killed and possibly one civilian. The only child the document mentions is the injured baby.

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