Riddled with bullet holes and grief, Sangin has no choice but to remember the British

'Kill or capture' raids and 'call-out procedures' that ended in unexplained deaths in Afghanistan are at the heart of the hearing into war crimes. Oliver Marsden tours a still traumatised land

- Oliver Marsden

Mahib Ullah’s four children had been dead a day before he found out. His son Waris, seven, and his girls Pekay, five, Spina, four, and Naziya, two, were killed instantly when a British airstrike hit the family home in Sangin, southern Afghanistan, in 2009.

His wife, Bibi Ayesha, was told months later that her children were dead, after she had come out of a coma. The explosion when the missile tore into the family’s mud and straw house sent her flying across the compound.

“We don’t know why the British bombed us. The Taliban were not in the fields opposite our home,” Ullah says, sweeping his hand over the parched fields of Helmand province. “They were over a mile away.”

Thin and quiet, Ullah wipes away a tear with his scarf as he recounts how he had been driving a taxi 60 miles away in Kandahar at the time of the strike. His neighbours rushed to the southern city to tell him what had happened. Meanwhile, British troops arrived at the site of the strike and took Ayesha to hospital.

“How can you describe your feelings when you hear all your children have been killed and your house destroyed? Years later and I still don’t have the words,” he cries. “The British forces didn’t offer us anything. No compensation, no apologies.”

It is almost 25 years since the US and UK invaded Afghanistan, 16 years since Ullah’s children were killed and four years since the west’s chaotic withdrawal. Outside Afghanistan the war is long forgotten. But for those like Ullah who suffered at the hands of the UK there is finally a glimmer of hope that there will be some accountability for these crimes.