Thus, while accusing other countries of violating international humanitarian laws and committing all sorts of war crimes, British political elites are reluctant to discuss multi-billion arms delivers it has been shipping to the Persian Gulf states even though the latter are still committed to carry on their armed aggression against Yemen. Moreover, London has been overseeing the Yemeni dossier in the UN Security Council for a long while now, never mentioning its role in the suffering inflicted upon the Yemeni people.
Even those high-ranking British officials who are directly responsible for numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by UK servicemen during the war in Iraq, including mass killings are still enjoying impunity today. Bitter hunger and poverty is the direct result of the adventurous armed invasion of Iraq committed by the United States and Britain, yet no one has been held responsible for this.
At this point it seems that we’ve seen it all, we’ve seen fake publication of London-controlled media sources and politicians who support the spread of false information about what is going on in the areas of armed conflicts, those are usually accompanied by efforts to justify the failure of various developments programs that are made in bid to save the UK from the public condemnation of the role it played in various armed conflicts in the Middle East and Africa.
British secret services have completely discredited themselves with a string of fake reports about “indiscriminate” Russia’s air raids in Syria, about the alleged involvement of Damascus in so-called “chemical attacks”, that were used to advertise the non-existent human rights organization that is being widely referred to as White Helmets.
Recently, we’ve seen yet another example of such a dubious practices UK officials, as a journalistic investigation has just uncovered how an elite counter-terrorist unit known as SAS used to falsify its reports in a bid to hide the war crimes committed by its members, describing cases of cold-blooded murder of Afghan civilians as the fight against “potential Taliban fighters”, while pushing the blame on the Afghan Security Force. According to the above mentioned investigation, there is strong evidence indicating that civilians were routinely murdered in their homes instead of being detained.
In 2014, the United Kingdom started the so-called Operation Northmoor, an investigation of war crimes committed by British servicemen in 2010-2013, and it remains the largest operation conducted by the Royal Military Police to date, since it got over a 100 officers engaged in it. They managed to find out that the British special forces forged documents, pushing responsibility for civilian deaths on their Afghan counterparts.
Moreover, it turned out that military drones that were overseeing the majority of operation captured the brutality of British servicemen on footage.
The UK Ministry of Defence wanted to suppress this information, since they believed it would harm “national security, public confidence and Britain’s relations with it allies.” Nevertheless, the generals of the Ministry would describe presented evidence as reliable and “pretty serious.” According to the military brass, should all the details of the investigation become known to the general public, the British government could find itself in a deep trouble.
Local political opposition forces are pretty articulate in their demands to conduct a thorough investigation and bring to justice all those responsible for countless civilian deaths. However, the sitting political elites of the UK, just like it was with the investigation of British war crimes in Iraq, are drag this matter for a long time just like it was with the Chilcot Inquiry, making sure that war criminals would escape justice yet again.
Jean Périer is an independent researcher and analyst and a renowned expert on the Near and Middle East, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.
