The CIA essentially controls it all.
For the local people they're just a bunch of killers.
The CIA trained death squads also operate there.
The child was killed here.
These look to me like war crimes.
What's the difference between the Taliban and them?
If this is democracy, we don't want democracy.
My name is Joe Glenton, a journalist and army veteran.
15 years ago I came to Afghanistan to fight for the British Army
in the US-led war and occupation.
Today, media coverage is focused on
peace talks between the Taliban and Afghan government
but the feeling on the ground is that the conflict is as bad as ever.
So I'm back in Afghanistan
to find out the story behind the headlines: war crimes,
record levels of civilian deaths, and the story of the Zero Units
- shadowy, CIA-backed death squads, killing people in their homes.
The death squads raided a house in Jalalabad
on 5th September last year.
Early that morning, Ibrahim was woken
by a call from his nephew's neighbour.
It was at about two o'clock when a neighbour called me.
The women were taken to another house
and all the children were crying and screaming.
As Ibrahim walked up the stairs,
he found his nephews in the bedrooms.
I thought they were asleep.
This was Qadir's room.
They shot him in here.
They come to come crashing into your house pointing guns.
Sometimes there's dogs, there's always weapons
and you're separating people.
You don't really know what's happening to the women.
They either kill you or they take you.
Ali Latifi is one of the few independent Afghan journalists
covering night raids and civilian casualties.
These targeted killings and these raids - they're not rare
and they have been around for a while,
since essentially since the start of the war.
My fellow citizens. The United States' military has begun strikes
against Al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations
of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is the CIA's war.
Records show American spies were in Afghanistan
just eight days after 9/11, and weeks before
the land invasion in October 2001.
The warlords they had been funding
since the Soviet occupation in the 1980s were set to work,
and the Taliban government was defeated within months.
When I joined the war in 2006,
the Taliban insurgency was in full swing
and the US developed a strategy of targeted assassinations
on Taliban leaders.
These raids took place in civilian areas
and many were killed as a result.
But in 2014, the US started to transfer these responsibilities
to Afghan forces, shortly before NATO
officially declared the war to be over.
No the war is not over.
In fact it's actually worse than 2001, 2002, 2006 or 2010.
Rahmatullah Amiri is a researcher and writer based in Kabul
whose work has focused on civilian casualties
and the role of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Because if you see the civilian casualties, it's higher,
look at the airstrikes by the international community
it's way more higher, than any other time in the history of this war.
So I don't know why people think it's over.
Actually, in fact, it got worse.
In 2019, the US dropped 20 bombs every day on Afghanistan,
more than any other year since I was here in 2006;
civilian deaths from airstrikes were at their highest for a decade;
and, in July 2019, the UN recorded the bloodiest month for civilians
since records began in 2007.
And in Kabul, the threat of violence can be felt all over the city.
So we're at a checkpoint in Deh Mazang in Kabul,
and it's been very, very difficult, even to find security personnel
willing to let us film.
And this really speaks to the level of securitisation
that Kabulis have to face every day.
The first time I ever got on a plane I was 22
and I was heading to Afghanistan to take part in my first war.
I remember being impressed
by the rugged snow-capped mountain landscape,
as we made our descent.
And as we did, we got the order
to don our body armour and helmets.
Today, the security situation in the capital
is more tense than it was back then.
Someone who understands this better than most
is Malalai Joya, a dissident and former MP who now lives in hiding.
Unfortunately they will not leave Afghanistan voluntarily or soon.
They want Afghan people to be hungry,
they want Afghan people to be uneducated,
they want Afghan people to suffer.
They are happy for this because then they have a good reason
for justification of their criminal war and occupation in Afghanistan.
We're on our way to Jalalabad and the reason we're going there
to Nangarhar province, it has, until very recently when it was cleared,
a presence of Daesh, or the so-called Islamic State.
Because of that CIA trained death squads the Zero Units
also operate there and they have a base there.
In Jalalabad, we go to speak to the Nangarhar Chief of Police
to ask for his help in getting to the site of a recent raid
in Khogyani district.
We're going to go with some of your officers to Khogyani,
what can we expect?
Now, going to Khogyani is not a problem at all.
You can go to Khogyani.
When we go out, you will see there is no problem there
and there are no Daesh bases around.
The raid took place in a small town called Nemla,
a 40 minute drive from Jalalabad towards the border with Pakistan.
Parts of Nangarhar are controlled by the Taliban
who, after nearly 20 years of war with the US,
still control or contest more than half the country.
This became clear when our convoy made a sudden u-turn,
realising they'd accidentally driven us
three miles into Taliban territory.
The colonel has assured us that Nemla is safe.
However, he's sent us along with a group of his best men
in three armoured Humvees,
I'm currently sitting behind the sniper.
They're taking no shit off anyone
in terms of pushing people off the road.
We left the police and traveled the short distance to Nemla village,
where six civilians were killed in a night raid
by the death squads in July 2018.
Here is a shop which was destroyed by bombs that night,
and here is the Mosque.
Do you see the Mosque's shape?
The child was killed here and thrown to the back of the Mosque.
You see these pumps and this car? It was all on fire.
Still the bullets holes are visible.
This was the grocery shop.
The bombs that night tore it down.
That night, we were given a tour
of Jalalabad's security checkpoints by the Afghan National Police.
Back when I was last here,
the NATO trained ANP had a dubious reputation
for being mostly stoned, corrupt
and unlikely even to turn up for work.
We look for illegal items such as unregistered guns,
weapons, bombs but also suicide attackers and terrorists.
So we've come to a checkpoint here which is much more serious.
And if you pan around if you look over in this direction
you can see there's some fortifications,
you can see the guys checking vehicles,
you can see these guys also have better equipment,
although still the ubiquitous AK47 you see around here.
It was around this time at night,
11pm on the 4th September last year,
that the Zero Units arrived at the house of Ibrahim
and Haji's nephews.
They interrogated them for several hours.
Then they shot them.
Qadir Bahar.
Very stylish.
Yes, they were stylish - this is Jehanzib.
Saboor Zakhilwal...
The agents accused the second youngest Jehanzib
of being a financier for ISIS.
The two eldest Bahar and Siddiq worked for the government,
as Bahar tried to explain to the intruders that night.
He also introduced himself to them
as a legal advisor in the House of Senate,
and showed them his documents.
He also showed them his ID.
They did not say that these are four brothers.
They said Jehanzib is the Daesh finance officer
and the other three are his colleagues.
They were all ordinary people.
For the local people they're just a bunch of killers
that are going there and killing innocent people.
I'm not saying that they don’t...
there are no Taliban among those.
But a big portion of those that are being killed or targeted
are civilians.
Who do you think did this?
A unit named 'Zero-Two'. They carry out night raids. They did it.
They just came at night, helicopters also came,
and it was them that burned the car and the pump station.
Zero-Two Unit, which belongs to the NDS, are very well trained.
When there is an operation, elders are warned in advance.
I was not informed, you were not, the governor wasn't,
and actually nobody was informed in advance.
Zero-Two, named by both the police and Nemla residents,
is one of four paramilitaries that, according to the UN,
operate largely in the southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan.
These Zero Units
all bear the name of Afghanistan's intelligence agency
the National Directorate of Security or NDS
and the official line is that they are under Afghan control.
The CIA essentially controls it all right.
They fund it but they also control it,
they also hand out the operations.
And the feeling amongst the people,
and even amongst people you talk to in the government
- they may not say to you directly
- is that they don't really have much control over it.
Our special operations are controlled by us.
Jawed Faisal is spokesperson for the National Security Council,
the government department charged with security
and reducing civilian deaths.
98% of our special operations
are controlled by us and we are...
But not the Zero Units, they are controlled by someone else?
The Zero Units, we will have to have coordination with them,
we have had discussions with our partners.
What were the discussions with the CIA who control these units?
It's something you have to ask our NDS,
some of the details could not be disclosed.
How are you, Mr. Commander?
I am fine.
We want to have an interview with you
regarding night operations, will you have an interview with us?
No, we are not allowed to do interviews,
but you can go to NDS and get the required information from there.
We also tried the NDS's regional director in Nangarhar,
and the director in Kabul, but both told us
they're not allowed to do interviews,
and passed us on to a different department.
And so it went on.
We did, however, manage to find what appeared to be
a Twitter account for Zero-One.
No blue tick, but it had extensive documentation
of their operations: weapons caches, kills and arrests.
NDS operations seem to be some kind of combined operations,
and it's very much in line with the US and the UK model.
And the first type look like regular Afghan infantrymen,
more or less.
And then there are operators, who are recognisable by their M4s,
by their more advanced night vision equipment.
They have a more paramilitary look,
it'll be a mix of kind of civilian clothing with military clothing.
They'll be carrying out the house raids, kicking the doors in,
separating out the men and women and it seems likely that
they will be the ones carrying out the extrajudicial killings,
the executions that we've seen.
US military field reports released by Wikileaks show that
CIA-backed night operations have been killing civilians
since at least 2007.
And in 2010, a book by Watergate journalist Bob Woodward
uncovered the existence of elite CIA trained forces
known as Counter-terrorism Pursuit Teams.
Paid directly by the CIA to 'kill or capture' Taliban
and Al-Qaeda insurgents.
We will also expand authority for American armed forces
to target the terrorist and criminal networks
throughout Afghanistan.
These killers need to know they have nowhere to hide.
Unnamed US officials revealed in 2017,
that the Trump administration gave expanded powers
to these 'kill teams' to go after the Taliban,
and this created what are now called the Zero Units.
They've changed the rules of operation,
which is not to say that it wasn't bad under Obama
or under Bush it was very bad, especially under Obama.
But with the Trump mentality
and with the current mentality of this government,
I think it just reached a pinnacle.
Fundamentally I came back to Afghanistan
to tell the story of the Zero Units.
But it was also about a personal reckoning.
I wanted to come back as a civilian,
to walk the same streets as these people,
to drive the same roads and to come back,
not with malicious intent, but to tell their story.
I first met Malalai Joya in London in 2009.
It was one of my first ever political meetings.
I hope that in the future more soldiers who are in Afghanistan
and also Iraq stand up against war
and most importantly they must expose
those crimes that are happening there.
What does it mean that these raids are now carried out
with an Afghan face?
No nation can donate liberation to another nation,
and values like democracy, justice, peace, woman rights
is not bunch of beautiful flowers that the foreigner gifts us.
With these blind bombardments in different parts of Afghanistan
in the name of democracy.
Now, people say if this is democracy, we don't want democracy.
So, yesterday we spent time in a Humvee, effectively on a patrol,
that would look very much like the ones my former colleagues,
to whom I was supplying ammunition, would have carried out.
Armed to the teeth, going through villages,
and it made me think about the alienating effect
that would have had, of all these soldiers
turning up in these rural communities.
My time here was almost exclusively in a large US air base
in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan.
And although I wanted to see what was on the other side of the wire,
my job kept me inside.
At the time, Rahmatullah lived just a few miles away
from me in Kandahar City.
Can you tell me what it was like to be the occupied
rather than the occupier?
The first thing was the "hey, stop!" The yell, the scream,
you know they wanted to intimidate you.
And then the second they would search you,
they would ask you to show, to pull up your...
your man dress, one of the most disrespected things
you could do to an Afghan.
But remember, you can intimidate them right then and there -
but the hate remains in his heart forever.
Afghans have long memories.
Many remember the previous occupations
by the British in the colonial period,
and the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
Many will also remember that the CIA trained and armed
a large militia in the 80s, known as the Mujahideen.
The Mujahideen took power after the Soviet withdrawal,
and, within a few years,
a dominant faction called the Taliban emerged
and took control of the country.
Today, the Taliban's strength
has again been aided by the US,
because for many they are seen as the only opposition to
occupation, drone strikes and night raids.
This is unfair, we are killed both by the Taliban
without any investigation, and also by these forces.
So what is the difference between them and the Taliban?
As of yet we haven't had incident as such,
that would make people turn to Taliban.
You haven't had incidents?
We haven't had incidents.
I’m just interested in how you make this assessment,
how you know their minds?
It's not about knowing their minds, we don't read minds.
I've been around people who literally say
"if they kill my children why wouldn't I pick up a gun?"
Meaning, why wouldn't I pick up a gun against the government?
One of those that lost their children was Sabir,
whose son Nasir was killed by the Zero Units
in their attack on Nemla.
Heavy firing started
and it sounded like children playing with fire crackers.
Sabir had been with Basir shortly before the Zero Units arrived,
and had arranged to meet him by the Mosque.
I was asking everyone about my son, whether he was in the Mosque.
But no one knew anything about him.
Village people came and helped us.
People were finding and starting taking limbs,
his arms and his legs, out of the dust.
The British Army would consider a killing such as this as a war crime,
but the only mention of this incident in the media
was a few grainy images on a local news channel.
In Jalalabad, Ibrahim had collected further evidence
that war crimes may have been committed by Zero-Two.
He was shot here, in the head. You can see here.
One shot in his leg, then his arm and then his head.
That is his brain. His brain is there.
The uncles also believe the photos are evidence
that the Zero Units planted weapons on their dead bodies.
He was Qadir. They put the gun on him.
The gun is very clean.
If there was a fight, there must have been blood on the gun.
He was shot in the head, leg, and arm.
The bullets made holes in his arms and legs
and we found him here.
He was still a boy...
When I was a young soldier coming to Afghanistan,
we spent a lot of time talking about the Geneva Convention.
When we look at some of the testimony that we've had,
over this week, we're talking about: weapon drops,
wherein weapons would be placed on bodies
to frame them as terrorists;
extrajudicial killings;
the use of pictures of dead bodies for propaganda.
When will you be referring the Zero Units
to the International Criminal Court,
because these look to me like war crimes?
Transitional justice is something that we are keen to have.
I sympathise to some degree
because the units we're talking about are not an Afghan initiative,
and not controlled by the Afghan government.
They are funded by a different power.
That's true.
Trained by a different power.
It must change, in one word if I could say it - it must change.
The current situation is not acceptable for us
and neither for our people.
Another tacit admission that the Zero Units
are not in government control came from the President Ashraf Ghani,
when he publicly apologised to the family of the Jalalabad brothers.
US control of the Zero Units
seems to be Afghanistan's worst kept secret.
They were contacting the airfield.
The Zero-Two Unit is related to the foreign troops.
They perform whatever they are ordered.
More proof of American participation has only come to light
after a number of CIA officers were killed
following the expansion of Zero Unit operations in 2017.
This is a persistent pattern in reports on night raids:
that US agents are never far away, waiting in the wings,
giving out orders and calling in air support.
The key lesson I've learned on my return to Afghanistan
after 15 years is that this war is less accountable than ever.
What was once the job of UK and US special forces
is now being carried out by these so-called Zero Units.
And the fact that they're funded by the CIA means
they have no accountability to either the US
or Afghan governments.
And, as long as groups like these are controlled by the CIA,
who are immune to scrutiny from politicians,
families of the victims will struggle to get justice,
even if a peace deal is reached.
On behalf of my people I want to say
peace without justice is meaningless.
Those who committed crimes, whether be Afghan or foreigner,
anyone, they must be questioned and prosecuted -
not only to their national court but also
to the international criminal court.
This is the only demand of Afghan people.
In March 2020 the US and Taliban reached an agreement
that would see the Americans withdraw more troops,
if the Taliban entered talks with the government.
Progress has been slow, and the Taliban
has already threatened to withdraw,
as attacks on both sides continue.
Regardless, the CIA have shown throughout history
that they have little regard for democracy
and political processes like these.
And history has also shown that powerful militias -
like in the case of the Mujahideen -
don't stay loyal to their paymasters forever.
What do you do with the reformed Taliban?
Like the Taliban that hand themselves over?
Legit question but Zero-One, Zero-Two, Zero-Three,
Khost Protection Force, all of these,
what do you do with them - when peace has been achieved?
If history is anything, they'll probably just be moved
to something else and they'll reformulate their brutality...
My final night here as a soldier was spent drinking sangria
in an airfield just outside Kabul.
I spent large parts of my seven month tour
questioning why we were fighting this war but, as I flew out,
my overriding feeling was relief,
as I caught a final glimpse of the city.
Many fighters across Afghanistan might soon be able to reflect,
as I have, on their role in the war.
But, as long as the intelligence agencies of the western world
continue to use armed groups to serve their narrow interests,
meaningful peace in Afghanistan is a long way away.