From Schwartz Media. I'm Daniel James. This is seven AM. The Bread and Inquiry uncovered shocking allegations of war crimes committed by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan, but there was one
failing of Australian soldiers that wasn't investigated. According to documents and interviews, some Australian soldiers in Afghanistan used foreign rules of engagement in combat, rules they weren't trained in or permitted to use, and the use of these rules may have resulted in the killing of a large number of unarmed Afghans who would not otherwise have been killed today.
It contributed to the Saturday Paper Ben Mcalvey on how and when Australian's special forces are allowed to kill It's Friday, February fourteen. Ben, Thanks for joining us pleasure. I wanted to start in twenty twelve in a village called Sola in Afghanistan. Can you tell me a bit about what happened there?
So?
There was an SAS raid in Sola in August twenty twelve. The reason for that raid was because an Afghan sergeant who had been trained by some Australian forces had turned his gun on his trainers and killed three Australian soldiers.
A rogue Afghan soldier named heck Matula had killed three of their comrades. Special Forces soldiers from two Squadron SAS were going from village to village searching for him.
So heck Matula, this zabad or sergeant who shot these Australians and ran away. Some intelligence popped up that he was in this village of Solo, which is in the Tarankaut Bowl, and it was you know, poor my brick, like everywhere else in Orozgan where the Australians were primarily operating. And also it was a place of mixed loyalties, which was true of most places where the Australians would end up going.
Two squadrons swept into the village of Solar looking for heck Matulla. There they focused on the local mosque.
So the SAS was sent out almost immediately on a kill capture mission. Heck Matula. He was raised on this thing called the Joint Prioritize Effects List, which was basically a massive kill capture list across the country where if they found those people, they would kill them or capture them. He became a priority target THEESAS was sent off and then they went to Solar and tried to find him.
So they tried to find him what happened in the solo when they got.
There, they didn't find him and they didn't find the evidence of him, but they did detain a number of Afghans and one of the people that they detained in the official reporting, grabbed an Australian soldier's gun. They wrestled and then the Australian shot this man dead, and then
the Australian SAS killed another man. There were two soldiers that were involved in this killing where the official line was that they had seen this man with an icon which is a handheld radio, that he'd been reporting troop movements. So they were killed. And these men were father and sign. They were the Mallers, the two Malas of this village.
So you've been looking into the operation. What was it that stood out to you about the mission?
So one of the interesting things about this mission is that they sent someone in to investigate this because this mission and these killings had become a bit of a political hot potato because Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan,
had complained about this mission and about these killings. He'd complained to the Australian Prime Minister and the ambassador until there've been a bit of media interest, so they sent in a brigadier to do an investigation about what had happened here, and in interviewing the SAS soldiers, the SAS said that they had shot these people under IF rules of engagements. So ISAF is the multinational force that came to support the Australian government, So it's basically all of
the foreigners that were over there. The Ish rule's engagement and the Australian rules are engagement are classified, but there are parts of those rules of engagement that I can talk about. So the difference between the Australian rules of engagement ic rules of Engagement as they're understood by the SAS was that you can shoot someone who demonstrates hostile intent rather than having committed a hostile act. So the
standard for leffal force was directly participating in hostilities. It was accepted that the ICF rules of engagement were stricter than the Australian rules of engagement, but the way that the Australians applied those ICEF ruals of engagement that they weren't trained in then it gave them a little bit more leeway. The way that it had been applied by these guys was that you just had to have hostile intent. If we thought that you were acting in a hostile manner,
then we could legally target you. And then these investigators found that the entire rotation, that Rotation eighteen, had been using these ic rules of engagement and actually they were not meant to be using those rules of engagement. And the brigadier called this a systemic failure.
So the soldiers have cited using ISAF rules of engagement in the field. You said, there's a different standard was to watch constitutes hostile intent? What does that look like in practice when it's applied.
Well, there are multiple ways in which you can target the enemy, but the primary way is in self defense. You see them acting hostily in front of you, and then you can react and shoot them. Threats, however, don't just look like somebody raising a gun at you, varying ammunition, you know, sending information as to where your position is going,
and getting help, you know, things like that. Then that could potentially be somebody that is directly participating in hostilities as well, and that's where the nuance is with rules of engagement. So with the ISAF rules of engagement, it seemed that the Australian sas basically applied their understanding of what hostility looked like or had looked like previously, and then applying that to a circumstance. So they had seen a lot of Afghans running towards the river and getting
caged weapons and then coming back and attacking them. So if they came to a compound of interest and they saw someone running towards the river, then they may consider that to be a hostile act. But it's likely that something like that would not have been allowed under Australian rules of engagement. The best example of that is in
the report that I cited. They said that patrol reports would come back to legal offices and officers and they said that they had killed people who had just seen running away, and the legal officer said, you know, this really doesn't cut the mustard, so please, can you please rewrite this report with more descriptors so it's more in line with Australian rules of engagement. So that's what it happened.
So why were the soldiers following rules that they weren't actually training. They were trained in Australian rules of engagement. Why are they practicing in if rules of engagement if they're not trained in those.
Rules, Well, it certainly looks like the Australian soldiers thought that they were allowed to use these rules of engagement. And the thing that was really particularly interesting for me I had written a book about the kill capture program, and basically that's what the ESAs did primarily in Afghanistan. They come into country, there was multiple lists of people who were bad guys essentially as far as they were concerned.
One of the lists had six thousand people, and then they just went out there and did mission after mission, either capturing or killing them. One of the major issues with these twenty twelve killings and the report that I found after that, was that normally you have a very strict and codified understanding of when you can employ your weapons system, whereas in this instance, the sas were using their own understanding of what hostile intents and hostile acts were.
So it wasn't something that was written down. It was just them saying, we've been in Afghanistan for a long time, we know what the enemy looks like. I can tell when someone who's running away is a bad guy, so I can shoot him because I can make that distinction.
After the break. Who knew this was happening? Ben, There's now evidence that some Australian soldiers in Afghanistan used foreign rules and engagement. That's a way to justify killings. Did the bosses know this was happening. It's a question of which bosses knew. But some bosses almost certainly or undoubtedly knew that this was happening. I mean the fact that these patrol reports were being changed. They had to be changed by someone. They were being sent back to the soldiers.
So as soon as you see a report and it shows that the rules of engagement that were being used and not the ones that you should be using, then you are aware of that and you have an obligation to report that. But you weren't reporting that. You were sending it back to the soldiers, and it was this sort of go along to get a long attitude. The Breading Inquiry was supposed to be a sweeping investigation into misconduct and alleged crimes by Australian forces. Did they look into this?
They didn't look into.
This, turning to the Inspector General's report. He found none of the alleged unlawful killings were described as being in the heat of battle. None were alleged to have occurred in circumstances in which the intent of the perpetrator was unclear, confused or mistaken.
This is one of the things that I put to defense. I said, in the Breton Report, they say that the Australians had a good understanding of which rules of engagements they should be using and they applied those. But it seems that you know this report that I've seen that was a twenty thirteen report calling this a systemic failure. This would have been a report that would have been
available to Paul Burretton and his team. So it's something that should have been flagged in the Breton Report but wasn't.
Do we know why.
We don't know why.
And as you've been reporting on this, what do you think the skirting of these rules says about Australia's role in the war in Afghanistan.
I don't know whether it's a case of skirting the rules. I mean, it puts me in the mind of this quote from the Cromfort's report. So when Samantha Cromforts did her report. There was an officer who often of quote saying, you know, special forces, you've got to love them like
brothers and watch them like children. So if these guys think that they should be using or allowed to use this ICA rules of engagement that they weren't trained on and that their legal officers weren't briefing them on, then it's not exactly their failure if they're using this rule of engagement in the way that they thought that it could be used. But what it does say I think about our operations in Afghanistan is that we did get to a point where there was a maximalist attitude in
regards to kinetic activity. So there was a lot of shooting and a lot of killing that probably didn't need to happen.
What is the Department Offense sit to you about they're doing to address this.
I would be surprised if they're addressing this at all. My understanding is that they generally don't talk about rules of engagement with the media, But they did send me a line saying that, you know, Burton report had noted that rules of engagement changed temporarily and from a geolocation perspective suggesting that they were allowed to use these ICE rules of engagement. This report that I got from twenty
thirteen does not say that. It says that the Australians were obliged the Essays included to use Australian rules of engagement.
The Essays has suffered huge reputational damage from this, but also from the findings and the Bread inquiry. What impact has that had on our special forces capability?
I mean there's been two erosions of capability, and one's post Afghanistan. As you said, there's been this reputational damage. It's been difficult to deploy Australian sas, especially in theaters where it's sort of primarily a Muslim population. That's been an issue. A lot of soldiers have decided that they just don't want to be in the army anymore. So, you know, you invest a million dollars a year into these guys. You know they got these twenty year careers.
You've got twenty million dollars behind a corporal or sergeant. Then he just decides to walk away because this feels like he's being treated poorly. So you have that erosion, but then you have this other erosion. That happened over Afghanistan. Because theesas they're meant to be, you know, all of the cliches, the tip of the spear, the greatest soul,
they're also meant to be the Swiss army knives. And in a time when they were meant to be sort of migrating over to being able to do other things gray role intelligence gathering, they were being used as basically an American fungible force. They were just doing these kill capture missions. They were doing the same thing over and over again against a force that was not a near peer opponent, and so their martial skills went down in
that period as well. So you've had these two instances where we've had a lessening of capacity.
What are the chances of any of us getting to the bottom of this as to what actually happened, what rules were applied.
Well, I think that if you want to understand any one part of Afghanistan, then you kind of have to understand the whole thing. And I think the only way that we can understand the whole thing is it's not through defamation. It's not even through murder cases as the one coming up with Oliver Schultz. It's a raw commission.
You need to have a body with subpoena powers. You need to be able to get to the offices, you need to be able to get to the politicians, and you need to be able to talk to the soldiers
in an open, closed environment. So if you think, as this report suggests that there were systemic failures, that you know, officers had done things that sort of had allowed or fostered a circumstance in which unnecessary killings happened, I think the only way that we would get justice is through something like a royal commission.
Well, Ben, thank you so much for your reporting and thank you so much for your time. Thanks also within use. Today, nurses have gathered outside New South Wales Parliament to protest hate speech after two nurses were filmed threatening to harm Israeli patients. New South Wales and Midwives Association Assistant General Secretary Michael Waits s his members were horrified and devastated
by the footage. Meanwhile, the New South Wales Police Commissioner Karen Webb says police have spoken to the Israeli influencer who captured the video, who has agreed to say apply an unedited version. The investigation is ongoing and the nurses have been stood down and communities in Western Australias Pilbury region are bracing for impact as tropical cyclone Zelia intensifies to a category five system, bringing winds of up to
two hundred and ninety kilometers an hour. Authorities of closed schools, highways and the port Headling Port, while emergency services prepare for widespread flooding and damage. Evacuation centers have been set up as residents are worned to expect life threatening additions when the cyclone makes landfall. On Friday evening. Seven Am is a daily shave from Schwartz Media and The Saturday Paper.
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