Blades: The Untold Story of SAS Operations in Afghanistan

The newsthat the SAS was being investigated over allegations its soldiers had executedscores of unarmed captives in Afghanistan - and its officers had covered up theevidence - broke like a bombshell in 2017. Almost overnight, elite Britishsoldiers, long considered heroes, found themselves rebranded as war criminals. Blades lifts the lid on Special Forcesoperations in Afghanistan, revealing a fuller picture - one that is rarelyacknowledged. Government-imposed restrictions meant the enemy's bomb-makers,responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians, could not legally beshot, nor detained beyond a few days. SAS soldiers, undermined by theirgovernment and their generals, faced an agonising dilemma: obey the rules andlet colleagues and innocents be killed or enact frontier justice and faceaccusations of war crimes. AddressingOperation Northmoor - the furthest-reaching and most sensitive UK militarypolice investigation ever undertaken - in full for the first time, Bladesexposes how detectives faced a wall of silence and collusion by senior officersand found vital evidence destroyed. Drawing on thorough research, an exclusiveinterview with an SAS soldier who pulled the trigger during the contestedoperations and decades of experience covering military and foreign affairs,Mark Nicol offers a vital corrective to false reporting on Afghanistan, onethat forces us toconfront an uncomfortable question: when the rules of engagement make asoldier's job impossible, who should be held accountable for what happens next?

• Publication date: 8 October 2026
• Page count: 432
• Publisher: Biteback Publishing
• Format: Hardback
• ISBN-13: 9781837360789