Insurgent leaders admit they were in Afghanistan village raided during NZ SAS's Operation Burnham

Wednesday, 19 June 2019

One of the authors of the book that criticised a NZ SAS raid in Afghanistan, Jon Stephenson, has retracted one of the key claims.

Two insurgent commanders hunted by the New Zealand SAS have admitted they were present in a village raided during Operation Burnham.

In the first public account of the insurgents' movements, they have contradicted some of the locals' claims about the 2010 raid, in which six civilians were killed and 15 injured. The raid is the subject of a current Government inquiry sparked by the book Hit & Run.

Lawyers for Afghan villagers confirm their clients want to end their part in Operation Burnham investigation.

In interviews with Stuff, both Qari Miraj and Maulawi Naimatullah admitted to being in or around the village of Naik during the night raid, which was led by the SAS with US and Afghan allies.

Miraj, Naimatullah, and another senior insurgent, Abdullah Kalta, were wanted by the SAS for their role in the attack on a New Zealand Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) patrol in Bamiyan three weeks earlier. That attack killed Lieutenant Tim O'Donnell and injured other soldiers, some seriously.

New Zealand military personnel during desert training. (File photo)

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Maulawi Naimatullah admitted to being in or around the village of Naik during the night raid.

* Chief Ombudsman backs NZDF's refusal to release information about Operation Burnham

* Killed girl's parents demand NZ Government inquiry**

Qari Miraj: 'On the night of the operation, I was at Maulawi Naimatullah's house [in Naik] with two of my bodyguards until 11 o'clock.'

The insurgents' presence in Naik differs from what villagers have previously said. The New Zealand Defence Force has said there were armed insurgents on the ground that night. The Taliban commanders do back up the villagers' claims that no insurgents were killed or wounded.

'On the night of the operation, I was at Maulawi Naimatullah's house [in Naik] with two of my bodyguards until 11 o'clock,' said Miraj. 'Then, after 11 o'clock I went to another house [in Naik] that was approximately 200 metres from Maulawi Naimatullah's home.'

Fatima, 3, one of the Afghan children killed in the Afghanistan raid, according to Hager and Stephenson in their book Hit & Run.

Miraj confirmed Naimatullah was present when he left the house at 11pm, leaving one of his bodyguards to sleep there. The raid began around 12.30am.

'When the operation began, I was in the village [of Naik] with one of my bodyguards and my other bodyguard was at Maulawi Naimatullah's house,' said Miraj.

Deborah Manning, representing the former residents of Khak Khuday Dad and Naik villages, during her submissions at the Operation Burnham Inquiry at the High Court in Wellington.

He said they escaped from Naik without firing any shots.

'When the New Zealand forces started their operation, I decided to go and see whether there were just ground forces because, if there were only ground forces, I would have gone and fought against them. But when I saw helicopters I decided that any attack would not achieve results and I decided to avoid a fight with them.'

Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson during the launch of Hit & Run in 2017.

In a separate interview, Naimatullah gave a slightly different account. He said during Operation Burnham he was not at his home, but a short distance away, and 'escaped from the area because I'm someone who knows how to escape'.

Miraj and Naimatullah's admissions contradict the accounts of numerous residents from the village of Khak Khuday Dad, a few hundred metres from Naik. Those villagers have maintained for years that there were no insurgents in either their village or Naik when Operation Burnham took place.

Miraj told Stuff that he, Naimatullah and two of their bodyguards had been at Naik for 'two nights and one day' and that 'everybody knew that'.

'Everybody [in Naik and Khak Khuday Dad] knew that I was there because I was going to Naik village. I was going five times a day to pray in the mosque, and everybody knew that Qari Miraj and [one of his bodyguards] Maulawi Abdul Khaliq were guests at the house of Maulawi Naimatullah.'

Deborah Manning, who is representing former residents of Khak Khuday Dad and Naik villages at the inquiry, said none of the information changed what the villagers have said.

'My clients were in the other village, nearly 2km away from this new information. My clients were civilians, only civilians were killed. This so-called new story confirms my clients' account that only civilians were killed,' Manning told Radio NZ on Thursday.

She had not been aware of the information before Thursday morning, but said that according to reports the inquiry had been aware of the information for several months.

'What the timeline is, according to what I'm piecing together this morning, is Jon (Stephenson) is saying he's got new information that would be relevant for my clients to comment on,' Manning said.

'Yet the inquiry issued a minute saying that they weren't proposing to speak to my clients, and they could just rely upon what the journalists are telling them… This is not a process that I profess to understand, in terms of the inquiry and, to my mind, it confirms why my clients lost confidence in the inquiry,' Manning said.

After the attack on the New Zealand patrol in Bamiyan, the SAS placed Kalta, Naimatullah and Miraj on a top-secret kill/capture list and tracked them to an isolated and mountainous area of Tirgiran valley in Baghlan province, which borders Bamiyan. Kalta and Naimatullah had houses at Naik.

SAS troopers and Afghan police commandos from the Crisis Response Unit were helicoptered in to Khuday Dad before raiding Kalta and Naimatullah's houses at Naik, a short distance away.

The Defence Force says the SAS called in air strikes from US helicopter gunships on armed insurgents at Khak Khuday Dad shortly after arriving there. It says multiple insurgents were killed in those air strikes and in air strikes near Naik.

Recently, the Defence Force confirmed in documents presented to the Government inquiry into Operation Burnham that an SAS sniper shot and killed a man near Khak Khuday Dad, who they say presented a threat to their troops. The documents appear to confirm that this man was unarmed.

Earlier this week, the Afghan villagers pulled out of the Operation Burnham inquiry.

Villagers spoken to by Stuff have consistently claimed no insurgents were killed during the operation, but that six civilians were killed – three men and a three-year-old girl at Khak Khuday Dad, and two men at Naik. They say 15 civilians were also injured.

While Naimatullah and Miraj openly acknowledged their involvement in the attack on the PRT convoy that killed O'Donnell and their presence in or around Naik during Operation Burnham, they both strenuously denied that insurgents were present at Khak Khuday Dad.

'The people who were killed, all of them were civilians,' said Naimatullah. 'There was not even one person [killed] who was not a civilian. I was there, and I performed the prayers at the funerals.'

Naimatullah said: 'The New Zealand forces want to make a justification for themselves, so they want to deny this and give the world a false message – that they have only killed insurgents'. He said only three men were wounded during the raid and the rest of the wounded were women and children.

'How can women and children get weapons and fight?'

Naimatullah repeated what Stuff has been told by numerous villagers and investigators from the Afghan government, including intelligence and security force personnel – that the two men killed on the outskirts of Naik, around a kilometre from the village, were his father, Mohammad Iqbal, and one of his brothers, Abdul Qayoom.

He insisted neither were Taliban members, but simply fleeing the raiding forces.

Miraj agreed they were civilians, not Taliban members, but added that Naimatullah's father, Mohammad Iqbal, took an AK-47 rifle with him when he fled his home.

'Naimatullah's brother had no weapon with him; he was sick. Maulawi Naimatullah's father had a weapon with him, but it is clear that fighting against a helicopter with a Kalashnikov is futile, so nobody fired.'

Miraj says that he, one of his bodyguards, Qari Abdul Latif, and Maulawi Naimatullah – all of them armed – had fled Naik together and were close to Naimatullah's father and brother when a US helicopter gunship fired on the group as they fled into the mountains.

'I was with [Maulawi Naimatullah's father when he was martyred [killed]. I was about three or four metres away.

'I put myself on the ground. There were some big rocks, and I hid myself behind the rocks. But Maulawi Naimatullah's father was unable to hide himself'

Miraj said Maulawi Naimatullah's brother was also unable to hide and was killed about 200 metres from their location.

The Defence Force initially denied that any civilians were killed or injured in the operation. It changed its position in 2014, using the word 'categorical' when stating that any civilian deaths or injuries were not caused by the SAS.

Since the publication of Hit & Run it has conceded that civilians may have been killed at Khak Khuday Dad by stray shots caused by a gun-sight malfunction on one of the US helicopter gunships.