SAS inquiry hears soldiers dropped detainees from forklift 'for fun' as war crimes investigation grinds on

Public testimony at a long-running British inquiry has produced one of the more arresting images of the post-Iraq accountability process: Special Air Service operators allegedly lowering detainees from the tines of a forklift during night operations, in accounts described to the chair as conduct carried out "for fun". The detail, aired on 15 July 2026, sits inside a wider pattern of alleged unlawful killings by UK special forces in Iraq between 2003 and 2009 that has been under formal investigation for more than a decade.

The inquiry, chaired by Sir Charles Haddon-Cave, is the public face of a process that has already cost the Ministry of Defence politically and financially. Its job is narrow in legal terms: establish what happened, and what the chain of command knew. Its political weight is broader, because it tests whether a state that spent two decades prosecuting accountability for foreign wars can hold its own special operations community to the same standard.

What the inquiry has now heard

Witnesses have told the panel that SAS detachments, deployed in support of US-led counter-insurgency operations in southern Iraq, used a forklift as a coercive prop while questioning detainees at a holding site near the border with Iran. The forklift, the testimony runs, was used to lift a man above the ground and lower him repeatedly until he talked. Other detainees, by contrast with the "for fun" framing, were reportedly simply dropped, the act treated as a unit in-joke rather than a tactic. The accounts come from former members of the regiment who have given evidence under conditions of partial anonymity, a routine concession in inquiries touching live operational matters.

The wider case before Haddon-Cave concerns a body of allegations, originally aired by the investigative outlet ITV News and later consolidated by the Metropolitan Police's Operation Northleigh, that special forces personnel were responsible for the unlawful killing of dozens of Iraqi men in custody or during night raids. The Ministry of Defence has previously acknowledged that some of those deaths were unlawful. It has not conceded the systematic claim.

What the inquiry has not yet resolved

Three questions remain open at the time of writing. First, the question of knowledge: whether senior officers in the Special Air Service, in the Permanent Joint Headquarters at Northwood, or in the Ministry of Defence's senior military chain knew that their people were operating under rules of engagement looser than those on the book. Second, the question of accountability for officers above the rank of warrant officer and below the level of the Chief of the Defence Staff: the inquiry has so far heard less about the role of majors and lieutenant colonels than it has about patrol commanders. Third, the question of remedy: what reparation, if any, the families of the dead will receive, and on what legal basis.

These gaps matter because they map onto a recurring British pattern. The Iraq Inquiry under Sir John Chilcot ran for seven years and produced a verdict that the country had gone to war on the basis of intelligence presented with "certainty" that was not justified. The Al-Sweady Inquiry examined allegations of unlawful killing by British soldiers after the Battle of Danny Boy, and ultimately concluded that the core claims were unfounded, while finding individual failings in detention. None of those processes produced a criminal conviction of a senior officer. The Haddon-Cave inquiry sits in that lineage, and the political test is whether the line bends at last.

Why it matters outside the courtroom

For the British armed forces, the inquiry is an institutional question as much as a legal one. The Special Air Service retains an operational mystique that few other British units still command. That mystique is built on a particular self-image: small, professional, scrupulously legal, decisive in the close fight. Testimony about forklift tines and amusement corrodes that image in public, regardless of how the inquiry ultimately weighs individual acts against unit culture. Defence planners have already begun, privately, to consider what a finding of institutional failure would mean for the regiment's freedom of action on future deployments, particularly in advisory roles where UK forces work alongside allied special operations units in Africa and the Middle East.

For Britain's standing in international humanitarian law, the stakes are more concrete. The UK is a state party to the Convention against Torture and a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Its foreign policy sells the rules-based order in part on the credibility of its own conduct. A finding that British forces tortured detainees, even episodically and even under conditions of allied pressure, is not an embarrassment to be managed; it is a piece of evidence that the country's lawyers and diplomats will be obliged to reckon with in Geneva and The Hague for years.

The limits of what is known

It is important to mark what the public record does not yet support. The "for fun" characterisation comes from testimony, not from documentary or forensic evidence that has been aired in open session. The number of detainees subjected to forklift treatment is, on the public record, undefined: a small number of named witnesses refer to a small number of incidents. Operation Northleigh, the Metropolitan Police investigation, ran from 2014 and closed without bringing charges, although it identified grounds for suspecting criminal conduct. The Ministry of Defence has engaged cooperatively with the inquiry but has not conceded the systemic allegation. A reader looking for a definitive verdict on whether the SAS committed war crimes will need to wait for Haddon-Cave's final report, expected in 2027.

What the record does support, on the basis of what has been disclosed so far, is that British special forces in Iraq operated in conditions in which the restraint expected of UK doctrine was at times absent; that the chain of command has so far escaped the kind of accountability that would settle the question; and that the inquiry process, slow and partial as it is, remains the only mechanism by which that question will be addressed at all.

How Monexus framed this: British wire reporting has covered the inquiry in procedural terms, with a focus on the chair's scheduling decisions and on MoD responses. This piece foregrounds the institutional and legal stakes: who knew, who answers, and what an adverse finding would mean for the country's claim to a rules-based military conduct.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/TheCanaryUK