A British website highlights abuses by British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan

Author Richard Norton Taylor says an investigation alleges that British soldiers have killed and tortured unarmed civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, adding to Britain's dark history of further wartime abuses.

In his article, published by the Middle East Eye website, the author highlights new evidence of British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan committing torture and murder abuses.

Such allegations are not surprising, he said, adding that although few British soldiers have been held accountable for such crimes, there have been many cases of unregulated British troops who have received poorly trained military abuses against detainees.

In a joint investigation with the Sunday Times, the BBC's Panorama program interviewed witnesses who said they saw soldiers from the Black Watch in Iraq and the Special Air Service in Afghanistan kill and torture civilians. Including children.

Bahaa Musa
The first British soldier convicted of a war crime is Corporal Donald Payne, who was jailed in 2007 for his role in the killing of an Iraqi hotel worker, Baha Mousa, while in British custody in September 2003.

The charge against a Royal Marine sergeant, Alexander Blackman, of killing a wounded Taliban prisoner in Afghanistan in 2013 was also overturned and replaced with manslaughter, and in another case, four British soldiers were acquitted of manslaughter in a military court in 2006. They forced a 15-year-old Iraqi boy to swim in a canal as they watched him drown.

British security and intelligence figures believe that the effects of abuses and crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been disastrous, encourage religious extremism and terrorism, and have a devastating impact on soldiers' self-esteem and public support for the armed forces.

The British Ministry of Defense has tried, as usual to British classical tradition, to explain the occurrence of such incidents, noting that these soldiers were bad elements in the army, but many cases revealed attacks and abuses despite the lack of sufficient evidence to charge the British forces.

secret information
One former SS soldier, Ben Griffin, was ordered not to disclose classified information after he began to reveal how British forces handed detainees over to US forces despite knowing they might be tortured.

By 2016, the Ministry of Defense had paid about $ 25.9 million to compensate victims of alleged attacks in Iraq in 326 cases, and evidence that prompted the government to conduct a public inquiry into the Baha Mousa case revealed that British soldiers in Iraq had used strict interrogation techniques. The detainees, similar to head covering, sleep deprivation and painful postures causing stress, were banned by the British government since 1972.

The writer explains that investigations and hearings in the court clearly showed that British forces violated international law, including the Geneva Conventions, because of their lack of adequate equipment and training, because of the positions of their commanders on the ground, and the sudden violent insurgencies raised in both Iraq and Afghanistan.