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Prince Harry slammed for “dehumanising” Afghan kill count

2 years ago
Prince Harry slammed for “dehumanising” Afghan kill count

(Credit: Sgt Russ Nolan /defenceimages.mod)

Elham Asaad Buaras

The recent claim in Prince Harry’s new memoir, Spare, that he killed 25 Taliban fighters during his 20-week military posting in Afghanistan’s southern province of Helmand has elicited significant backlash and criticism from Afghans, British military personnel, veterans, and human rights advocates.

The Duke of Sussex was a forward air controller (FAC) guiding fighter jets towards suspected Taliban targets.

In his role as a FAC, Harry recalls wanting to use an almost one-tonne bomb on his first attempted air strike on a suspected Taliban position, which even his American counterparts saw as too much, something he jokingly thought was “very un-American.”

In the book, which was mistakenly released early in Spain, Prince Harry described the people he says he killed as “chess pieces taken off the board, bad guys eliminated before they kill good guys.”

Harry added that it is not possible to kill someone “if you see them as a person,” he says, but the army had “trained me to ‘other’ them, and they had trained me well.”

Christian army training

One scenario that Harry recalls having to act out in a training exercise before his planned deployment to Iraq was fighting as part of a “Christian army.”

“We’d been given a meta-narrative, which we now recalled: We were a Christian army, fighting a militia sympathetic to Muslims,” he writes.

In describing his military training, he muses that “much of what they did to us was illegal under the rules of the Geneva Conventions, which was the whole point.”

Prince Harry also used radicalised Muslims to describe “the grotesque” paparazzi, who had grown “more emboldened, more radicalized, just as young men in Iraq had been radicalized,” Harry writes. “Their mullahs were editors.”

The comments were met with anger by leading figures in the Afghan government, which was taken over by the Taliban insurgency in August 2021.

Many have argued that publishing a head count violates an unspoken code and could potentially jeopardise the security of British forces and the prince himself. Retired British Army Colonel Tim Collins, who led troops in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, said that “it is not helpful for anybody in the military to be talking about their kill rate.

It is not helpful for security, it is not helpful for operations, it is not helpful for morale, it is not helpful for families.”

Other veterans have also expressed concern over the potential consequences of such a disclosure, with some pointing out that it could be used as propaganda by the Taliban and others arguing that it could lead to increased threats against the prince and his family.

The Taliban, which returned to power in Afghanistan last August, reacted to the statements with fury. A senior Afghan official has accused the prince of killing innocent civilians and called for him to be tried for war crimes.

“We checked and found that on the days on which Prince Harry is mentioning the killing of 25 mujaheddin, we did not have any casualties in Helmand,” said Taliban leader Anas Haqqani. “It is clear that civilians and ordinary people were targeted.”

“Prince Harry will always be remembered in Helmand; Afghans will never forget the killing of their innocent countrymen,” said Khalid Zadran, the Taliban’s spokesman in Kabul.

“The perpetrators of such crimes will one day be brought before the international court, and criminals like Harry who proudly confess their crimes will be brought to the court table in front of the international community.”

Zadran called Prince Harry’s description of those he had killed as “chess pieces” and his statement that he was “neither proud nor ashamed” of his actions “cruel” and “barbaric,” and claimed that such actions had legitimised the Taliban’s deadly insurgency against Nato troops in Afghanistan.

“Occupying forces in Afghanistan used to start operations under nightfall on our villages. Prince Harry was involved in this, and he has taken the lives of dozens of defenceless Afghans,” said Zadran.

“The cruel and barbaric actions of Harry and others aroused the Afghan population and led to an armed uprising against them. We call this kind of uprising holy jihad.”

In addition to the backlash from Afghan officials and the military, Harry’s claims have also drawn criticism from human rights groups. In a statement, Amnesty International said that “anyone who has committed unlawful killings must be held accountable and brought to justice,” and called on the authorities to investigate the matter.

Arash Azizzada, the co-founder of the NGO Afghans for A Better Tomorrow, told Insider that the statement was “shocking yet unsurprising.”

“It is shocking yet unsurprising to hear Prince Harry speak so flippantly about his military service in Afghanistan, especially considering the UK’s 20-year-long occupation helped bring the Taliban back to power last summer. His inhumane rhetoric is why Afghans gave borne the brunt of war for so long and at such a high cost,” said Azzizada.

“Rather than brag about his military exploits, he should urge his native country to actually implement the Afghan resettlement scheme—the number of folks resettled by the UK government currently stands at zero, despite the promise of 20,000 slots. Until that happens, Afghans are reluctant to listen to his experiences in a war that has come at an unspeakable cost for Afghans.”

Harry’s revelations come just six months after a BBC expose revealed that British commandos in the SAS corps killed at least 54 Afghans in suspicious circumstances. The alleged unlawful killing occurred during a six-month tour of Helmand province from November 2010 to May 2011, but the military chain of command concealed concerns.

Social media users also criticised Harry’s confession. Emran Feroz, an Austrian Afghan journalist, described him as an “imperial mass murderer.”

Meanwhile, Ali Abuniman, an American-Palestinian journalist, tweeted that the prince is a “monstrous, murderous psycho” and called for him to be extradited to Afghanistan to face criminal charges.

Author Khaled Diab tweeted that ‘by dehumanising Afghans and reducing them to mere chess pieces, the anti-racist prince is expressing a deadly strain of racism.’

Repeat crass comments on killing Afghans

This is not the first time Prince Harry has been accused of exhibiting a callous attitude towards killing Afghans. Stop the War Coalition accused the prince of being “arrogant and insensitive” for justifying killing insurgents in January 2013.

In a series of interviews to mark the end of his service in Afghanistan, Prince Harry said, “Take a life to save a life.

That’s what we revolve around, I suppose.”
Promoting Lindsey German, convenor of the Stop the War Coalition, branded his comments “crass”, and asked how he knew those he’d killed were members of the Taliban.

“In recent months, many civilians have been killed by air strikes. This arrogant and insensitive attitude to killing Afghans, whoever they are, is hardly likely to win hearts and minds—a supposed aim of the war,” German said.

She added: “Prince Harry returns to a life of idleness and luxury, unlike most soldiers who face unemployment, austerity and social problems.”

After the fallout from his comments, Prince Harry denied he was “boasting” about killing Afghans and instead shifted the blame onto the press for twisting his words.

“Without a doubt, the most dangerous lie that they have told is that I somehow boasted about the number of people that I killed in Afghanistan,” Prince Harry said on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

“I should say, if I heard anyone boasting about that kind of thing, I would be angry. But it’s a lie. My words are not dangerous, but the spin of my words is very dangerous.”

He added: “My whole goal, my attempt with sharing that detail, is to reduce the number of suicides.”

When asked to respond to Harry’s latest claims in his book, a spokesman for the Ministry of Defense said in a statement that the ministry did not comment on operational details for security reasons. Kensington Palace and Buckingham Palace declined to comment on the memoir.

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