On Nov. 21, 2012, Zikria, an Afghan working for U.S. Special Forces in Nerkh, dragged a suspect out of the office of the local intelligence service. The suspect’s name was Sayid Mohammad, and the Afghan forces had detained him earlier in the evening after finding bombmaking components in his possession. Zikria had gotten word and went to take the suspect into custody.
The team of Green Berets that Zikria was working for had been deployed for nearly three months in Nerkh, a farming district in Wardak Province that was a little over an hour’s drive from Kabul, the capital. They were from Bravo Company, of the Third Special Forces Group’s First Battalion, the same unit as Mathew Golsteyn, an acclaimed war hero who was then under investigation for the death of a prisoner.
Almost a month earlier, the team’s most experienced soldier had been seriously wounded in a firefight. Since then, the Green Berets had been aggressively rounding up local insurgents. They didn’t trust the Afghan authorities, who they feared would release their enemies. “There was no trust in the courts,” Zikria told me, “so we were doing everything in the mountains.”
According to Zikria and two other Afghans who worked for the Green Berets, he took Mohammad to the U.S. base across the road.
“I told him, ‘Look, you’re not in the N.D.S. office now,’” Zikria said, referring to the Afghan intelligence service. “‘This is a Special Forces camp.’”
Zikria said he took Mohammad to a tent, where he laid into him with his fists and boots. As Zikria recalled, two Americans at the base came to observe the interrogation of their latest captive, whom an informant had also identified as a Taliban operative. One was the Green Beret who had taken on his wounded teammate’s leadership role, Sgt. First Class Jaison Eggleston. Eggleston trusted Zikria, who also went by the nickname Jacob, but he was worried because Mohammad had already been in N.D.S. custody.
“He was like, ‘Jacob, release this guy,’” Zikria said. But Zikria argued that the man had American and Afghan blood on his hands. How could they hand him back to corrupt local officials? Finally, he said, Eggleston shrugged and left the tent.
According to Zikria, whose account is published here for the first time, Sgt. First Class David Kaiser, a newcomer to the team who had taken over intelligence duties from Eggleston, seemed eager to kill the man. “He was like, ‘Hey, Jacob, get done.’” (Eggleston and Kaiser did not respond to requests for comment.)
When he was finished with the interrogation, Zikria stepped back. He said he watched as Kaiser and several Afghans beat Mohammad to death with wooden clubs, leaving the floor spattered with blood. (He made a similar accusation to U.S. investigators.)
Zikria and the other Afghans zipped up the corpse in a black body bag, hauled it out into the darkness and buried it in a shallow trench not far from the base’s walls. It was not the first grave they dug near the base, and it would not be the last.
Over the course of America’s longest war, special operators like the ones Zikria worked for in Nerkh came to redefine the nation’s military culture. Often stationed deep in hostile territory, these Green Berets were celebrated as heroes in their fight against the Taliban in a difficult and unconventional war. But they were also dogged by accusations of lawless behavior and extrajudicial killings.
The details of some of these incidents are well known. Golsteyn’s case would become infamous when the Army’s investigation of him became public and he was pardoned by President Trump. But the full extent of what happened in Nerkh has never been publicly revealed. Mohammad’s killing was just one in a series of disappearances and executions that Nerkh residents accused the Special Forces of committing. Some villagers were rounded up in large-scale sweeps and taken to the American base, never to be seen alive again; others were detained individually on missions. A group of the missing would come to be known as the Nerkh Nine, and according to witnesses, photo and video evidence and Afghan police and autopsy records, their remains were later found buried outside the former Special Forces base.
Yet the U.S. military was adamant that the Green Berets were innocent of wrongdoing. “All I can say is that we had absolutely nothing to do with that man’s death,” a U.S. military spokesman told The Times shortly after Mohammad’s body was unearthed inside a black body bag in May 2013. Three investigations by the Special Forces exonerated the team while it was still stationed in Nerkh. The files of these inquiries, which The Times obtained through a lawsuit, suggest that the Green Berets’ commanders overlooked evidence of misconduct. After they were cleared, members of the team and their superiors were decorated and promoted. A separate criminal inquiry lasted nine years before being closed by command without charges in 2022. In their statements to investigators, the team’s leaders denied any wrongdoing.
The accusations were dismissed as insurgent propaganda; the military insisted that the people of Nerkh were liars. But a wealth of previously unreported evidence suggests that they were the ones telling the truth.
After years of denied requests for the military’s investigations, The Times sued to obtain nearly 2,000 pages of documents, including interview transcripts, photos and detainee files. They reveal that locals were not the only ones who accused the Green Berets of crimes. Army criminal investigators also recorded accusations against members of the team by other U.S. service members.
In response to detailed queries about Nerkh, a spokeswoman for Army Special Operations Command confirmed that the soldiers involved were cleared of misconduct. “We have fully investigated and adjudicated the cases you cover,” Lt. Col. Allie Scott wrote. “We are confident our actions stand up to the strictest scrutiny.”
I first reported on the Nerkh case in 2013 for Rolling Stone when I was living in Kabul as a freelance journalist, but the end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan brought a new opportunity to understand the truth. Over the past four years, I interviewed two dozen former members of Special Operations, including a retired Green Beret general who accused his leadership of covering for the team. Over several visits to Nerkh in 2022, I interviewed scores of witnesses in order to reconstruct a detailed account of how the disappearances and killings took place. I also spoke with several of the Special Forces’ translators, including Zikria, who provided evidence that they had been part of a secret proxy force that helped carry out the killings of the Nerkh Nine and others.
What happened in Nerkh was most likely one of the largest known cases of unlawful killing by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, ranking behind only the 2005 massacre in Haditha, where Marines allegedly killed around two dozen civilians, and a rampage in Kandahar in 2012 by Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, an infantryman who sneaked out of a Special Forces base at night and murdered 16 people.
Unlike those episodes, the killings in Nerkh were not the work of young troops reacting wildly to a sudden enemy attack, nor of an individual who snapped while intoxicated. They were part of a methodical campaign carried out over months by an elite, experienced force, one that grew out of rule-breaking practices that were long tolerated by Special Forces commanders. What happened at Nerkh might have been exceptional, but it was not isolated. And like the massacre at My Lai during the Vietnam War, the critical lesson of Nerkh is that similar crimes of lesser magnitude could have been committed without the American public ever knowing.
Back in the United States, the nine-year criminal investigation would ultimately become entangled with Golsteyn’s murder case; the two cases form part of a much larger story about misconduct among elite units. Their starkly different treatments by commanders illustrate a culture of rule-breaking on the battlefield and impunity after the fact. Today, the implications of this vigilantism among special operators have reverberated in the United States.
In September 2012, Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha 3124 deployed to Nerkh, a strategic area for militant attacks on the provincial capital of Wardak and, beyond it, Kabul. They set up at Combat Outpost Nerkh, a compound of plywood cabins, metal sheds and shipping containers surrounded by concertina wire and earth-filled barriers. During the troop surge in 2009, Army engineers built the base, which commanded a view of the valley that stretched east to the provincial capital and west up into the narrow passes that remained insurgent country.
Bearded, burly and wearing a combination of uniforms and civilian clothes, the operators from O.D.A. 3124 were very different from the conventional troops who occupied the base for the previous three years. They favored speed and firepower; instead of lumbering, mine-resistant vehicles, they drove nimbler Humvees and four-wheelers fitted with machine guns and grenade launchers. Although they were new to Nerkh, they were from one of the most experienced and storied Green Beret units that fought in Afghanistan: Bravo Company, part of First Battalion, of the Third Special Forces Group.
For most of the war’s first decade, Third Group had a lead role in the Special Forces mission in Afghanistan. Its decorated soldiers rose to positions of influence within Special Operations and the Army. First Battalion, known as the Desert Eagles, had been sent year after year to the Taliban’s stronghold in the south, where it faced fierce fighting. Its Bravo Company was assigned to the remote and mountainous Uruzgan Province, called the Wild West by the Green Berets.
In Uruzgan, the Special Forces deliberately placed some firebases deep in hostile territory; often a single team, usually composed of 12 operators specializing in roles like engineering, intelligence and communications, would live there, accompanied by mechanics, infantry members and cooks. Before the Nerkh mission, O.D.A. 3124 had regularly deployed to Firebase Cobra in Uruzgan, which could take two days to reach by road from the provincial capital through terrain controlled by the Taliban, meaning it could often be supplied only by helicopter.
What happened in Nerkh was an escalation of practices that the Special Forces developed in response to fighting a guerrilla war in remote terrain. Although they bent or even broke Army rules, they were often tacitly authorized to do so by their commanders, who understood that it was for the sake of the mission. “That’s the nature of who we are,” said Paul Toolan, a retired Third Group lieutenant colonel who served six deployments in Afghanistan. “We are the guys who figure out how to get the mission done.”
The danger was that if not constrained by strong leadership, these practices could slide into outright lawlessness or corruption. “You’re always on that razor’s edge,” said Toolan, a decorated veteran who was not present in Nerkh or involved in any other case of alleged misconduct. “Any rule that I broke, I broke in such a way that I was like, I have righteousness on my side.”
According to many of the operators I spoke to, faced with increasingly restrictive rules around combat and detainees, some Green Beret units developed a variety of workarounds, like holding prisoners under the ostensible control of partner Afghan forces so they could be questioned. Some operators carried “drop guns” or “throwdowns,” Kalashnikov-type rifles they could plant on a body to avoid questions after a killing
No other big organization in the Army is as egalitarian or dominated by its enlisted ranks as the Special Forces. Authority within a team had to be earned through experience and force of personality. Every O.D.A. struck a balance between the senior enlisted team sergeant and the captain who was nominally in charge. In 3124, it was weighted far in favor of the “team daddy,” Jeff Batson, a widely respected veteran who had been with the unit since 2001 and was on his ninth deployment, according to his service records.
Some of what I learned about 3124’s internal dynamics came from Becca Hinds, who was a civil affairs staff sergeant and Special Operations medic with Bravo Company during its 2012 deployment (she later married and changed her last name to Erickson). “It was Jeff’s team,” she recalled. By contrast, the team’s newly arrived captain was Timothy Egan, a former military police officer in his late 20s, fresh out of Special Forces training and anxious, it seemed to Hinds, to get the approval of Batson and the team. (Neither Batson nor Egan responded to requests for comment; Egan denied wrongdoing to investigators, while Batson invoked his right to legal counsel in declining to speak to them, according to the case file.)
“Tim was brand-new,” Hinds recalled. “He was not yet in the trusted circle.” David Kaiser, an engineer who had also done some intelligence training, was also new. “The team,” Hinds said, “was very much divided between the guys who’d been there for those previous deployments and the guys who had not.”
Hinds, who had trained with 3124 in the United States, was in a romantic relationship with the second-most-experienced member of the team, Jaison Eggleston, a stocky, auburn-haired Green Beret who had taken over Batson’s old role as the intelligence sergeant, charged with tracking the enemy and questioning prisoners. Eggleston had been deploying with the Desert Eagles since 2004. During training, he and Hinds, who was 33 at the time, got into intense discussions about military intelligence: She planned to try out for an elite Army unit when she got back. A spark kindled between them. “I was young,” she said. “I thought this was love.”
Hinds was impressed with Batson’s maturity and how he was able to unite the team, but during the training, she sensed that he was worried about their mission. “He knew his guys had been deployed too much,” she said. The years of combat had taken their toll; Hinds noticed that Eggleston would explode over minor incidents. “There was a lot of rage.”
Over the course of their mission, Hinds would be confronted with evidence of misconduct by the team and would later tell military investigators that she thought the accusations of killings could be true. But at the time, she trusted 3124. Many were veteran operators. And Batson and Eggleston seemed reassured by the fact that they would be joined again by a group of loyal Afghans who worked for them before. Hinds recalled them telling the team about it.
“They said: ‘Don’t worry about it. We’re getting those guys. They’re going to handle business.’”
Although working “by, with and through” foreign allies is a basic part of the Green Beret doctrine, proxies like the ones that worked for 3124 in Nerkh were not part of the Afghan government forces. Proxy forces were instead paid for by the U.S. government; within the U.S. military, the Special Forces engaged in the longest and most widespread use of them in Afghanistan.
The legal authority under which they fought was complicated. The Special Forces hired hundreds of Afghan security guards to defend outposts like Firebase Cobra. But I found in my reporting that, in violation of U.S. rules, they were often used to provide firepower on offensive missions. Translators like Zikria were also used the same way — the companies that supplied them even charged a higher rate for “combat interpreters” — and in contrast to conventional forces, the Special Forces allowed teams to arm their “terps” with assault rifles.
While these proxy forces had essential local knowledge and were more trusted than the Afghan Army or police force by the Green Berets, they could entangle the U.S. military in vendettas and corruption schemes. Because of the secrecy that shrouded their use, much of their involvement in offensive operations and intelligence collection has never been reported. I spoke to more than two dozen former guards and translators, including the two who led 3124’s proxy force at Nerkh: Zikria and another who, out of fear of retaliation, asked to be identified as Kazem, the name he was given in a book about the U.S. withdrawal in 2021 by Scott Mann, a retired Special Forces lieutenant colonel who served in Uruzgan. (Mann told me he was unaware of Kazem’s connection to the killings in Nerkh.)
I first met Zikria when I reported my article in 2013, and we have spoken repeatedly in the years since. Kazem got in touch through Facebook in 2017, and we first met in person in Kabul in 2021. They provided me with extensive information about the Green Berets’ use of proxies at Firebase Cobra and in Nerkh and how practices of workarounds and rule-breaking escalated into a spree of killings and other abuses. I corroborated their accounts through conversations with American and Afghan sources, with details from military investigations and with photos and videos given to me by Kazem.
Zikria, who has used the surnames Noorzai and Kandahari, is a tall, gaunt native of Kandahar, part of the city’s Shia minority. He was recruited as a teenager in 2004 at Camp Gecko, the base the Special Forces occupied alongside the C.I.A., and served as a driver and an interpreter. “Third Group made me Zikria Kandahari,” he said. “I was nothing. I was a kid.”
In 2009, he was sent to Firebase Cobra just as 3124 was arriving on its latest six-month rotation. He quickly bonded with Batson, whose son shared Zikria’s nickname, Jacob. Batson, Zikria told me, was like a father to him and cultivated his aptitude for working sources.
Kazem, a former Afghan Army officer, arrived the year after Zikria. He had also been working with the Americans in Kandahar, where he became part of a secretive proxy force the Special Forces were creating. “We were like mercenaries, going and smoking the bad guys,” Kazem said.
The proxy-force program force was called the Civil Mine Reduction Group, but its name obscured its dual nature: Locals were trained to defuse the improvised explosive devices that were the guerrillas’ most effective weapon, but they also served as a clandestine strike force and intelligence asset. The C.M.R.G.’s wages were paid through a classified military program now known as 127e, which provides for direct payments to foreign armed groups around the world, allowing for surreptitious U.S. command and control.
Ray Lake, a retired Green Beret who helped train the C.M.R.G. as a contractor, said that it often operated as a “nonattributable force.” Members used local clothes and “deniable” vehicles and learned to carry out pseudo-operations, a tactic in which counterinsurgents mimic guerrillas; they were also trained as intelligence operatives. “There were a lot of very smart C.M.R.G. operators who were more than capable of conducting the full myriad of intelligence missions, photography and targeting, you name it,” Lake said.
At Firebase Cobra, Kazem worked closely with its force of Afghan guards, and soon a subset of them were trained to form a C.M.R.G. Out on missions with the C.M.R.G., Kazem said, he routinely beat information out of suspects and had killed some he believed to be guilty. Firebase Cobra’s guard force was feared by many locals, and from time to time, vague allegations of abuses reached Kabul. During the war, few foreign journalists were able to access the remote areas where Special Forces had bases like Cobra.
But in more than a dozen interviews carried out by The Times in 2022 in the villages surrounding Firebase Cobra, witnesses and former government officials accused the Special Forces and their proxies of battlefield executions and the killing or disappearing of detainees, smaller in scale but similar to what happened in Nerkh — including a raid in a village called Gorgin on Nov. 14, 2008, in which, according to the results of an Afghan government investigation that I obtained, five captives were executed during an operation and a sixth later died in custody.
“Human rights people never came — the road wasn’t safe,” said Naeem Khan, who served as a local police chief. “The foreigners had guards who did their work for them, killing people.”
Before O.D.A. 3124 arrived in Nerkh in the fall of 2012, former interpreters were in touch through Facebook with a warrant officer named Michael Woods, another Firebase Cobra veteran who was the team’s deputy leader, a role focused on administration and logistics. Bravo Company was a small world. Golsteyn told me that Woods had been assigned to his team as a deputy when he arrived as a new Special Forces officer in 2008. Golsteyn said that he took issue with Woods’s performance and that Woods responded by trying to blackmail him, claiming that he would make his own complaint to Golsteyn’s boss. “I was a new captain, and he just thought he could run me,” Golsteyn said; instead, he fired him from his team. (Despite multiple attempts, Woods could not be reached for comment. A letter sent by courier to a house he owns was refused delivery.)
Because it was Woods’s first assignment as a warrant officer, a bad job evaluation might have ended his career. But Golsteyn said the Desert Eagles commander at the time, Lt. Col. Mark Miller, pressured him to change his decision. “S.F. doesn’t really get rid of its trash,” Golsteyn told me. “It just keeps flushing and recycling, moving around.” He said Woods was quietly shuffled to another job. “I said, ‘Sir, this decision is going to come back to haunt you.’” (Miller declined to comment.)
After being contacted by the team, Kazem and Zikria arrived in Nerkh in September. The Desert Eagles’ deployment in 2012 brought them into less isolated territory. With the U.S. troop surge winding down, the Green Berets had been assigned to assist the withdrawal by building local forces while fighting the enemy, and the Desert Eagles’ deployment in 2012 took them to less isolated territory. They were sent to the east of the country; their headquarters was at the main U.S. base at Bagram Air Field, while the battalion’s Bravo Company, responsible for provinces close to the capital, was headquartered in Logar Province and spread some of its teams across individual districts like Nerkh in neighboring Wardak Province.
Zikria told me that because 3124 hadn’t gotten authorization yet to form a C.M.R.G. force in its area, he and Batson hatched a plan: They would sell some of its fuel-tanker deliveries on the black market to fund their proxy force and its intelligence operations. “I was taking money from fuel for myself, for my boys, for my sources,” Zikria said.
While breaking the rules around operational funds for the sake of the mission had become common practice in Third Group during the war, the alleged plan to embezzle fuel to fund an off-the-books strike force showed just how far it had escalated. Zikria and Kazem claimed that both the team’s captain, Egan, and his deputy, Woods, were aware of the scheme. (To investigators, Egan and Woods denied improperly using funds and said that Zikria volunteered to work in exchange for food and shelter.) “They knew we were not selling the fuel to keep the money in our pockets,” Kazem told me.
The C.M.R.G. force in Nerkh grew to include around two dozen locals, recruited by Zikria and Kazem. Photos I obtained show them armed with a mix of local and American weapons, including M4 rifles. They seized motorcycles from locals they suspected to be insurgents. When 3124 rolled out on missions, the C.M.R.G. rode ahead of it, sweeping for mines and ambushes. The proxy force also conducted missions on its own, and members came and went from Combat Outpost Nerkh at all hours as they pleased, to the surprise of some of the conventional Army personnel assisting 3124, according to later interviews with investigators.
Although the start of the deployment in Nerkh was relatively quiet, fighting was fierce in the next valley over in Chak district. A Green Beret from Bravo Company was killed there at the end of September, and two more were killed a week later. In late October, the United States began Operation Triple Action, and some of 3124’s operators and their Afghan proxies were flown in to Chak to set up a blocking position. On Oct. 23, another Green Beret from their company was killed. The next day, when 3124’s position came under attack, Batson led a counterassault. Backed by helicopter gunships, Batson — who would be awarded the Silver Star for valor for his actions in Chak — led his force on four-wheelers and motorcycles into the valley’s dense forest, accompanied by Zikria, Kazem and a third C.M.R.G. fighter.
In the ensuing gunfight, Batson was shot in both legs, shattering his femur and puncturing an artery. Kazem got off his bike to help him, and soon the two were pinned down by enemy fire. Zikria charged to their position on foot, spraying gunfire to cover them. “I got both of them out from the Taliban and saved their lives,” Zikria told me.
A chopper flew Batson to a base in Logar Province, where Hinds and the medical staff were waiting. As Bravo Company’s senior medic, Hinds had dealt with casualty after casualty: By the end of the deployment, seven soldiers with Bravo Company would be dead and more wounded and maimed. “It was the nightmare trip from hell,” she said. The staff operated on Batson, and then he was flown to Bagram. After he was evacuated to a U.S. military hospital in Germany, Batson survived and returned to the United States, but 3124 had lost its center of gravity.
Rather than send in someone more senior from outside the team, its commanders tapped Eggleston as Batson’s successor. Hinds, who was based in Logar but kept in touch with her boyfriend over chats on Facebook and by phone, said he seemed eager to go after the enemy.
“You could tell he was angry,” Hinds recalled. “Like, ‘We’ve got to avenge Jeff.’”
According to military documents and interviews with members of 3124’s Special Operations task force, the team’s behavior changed after Batson was injured. They seemed more suspicious, even toward fellow Americans. “They were very insular and closed off,” said a Special Operations officer deployed in Wardak, who requested anonymity because he was still in the military. When he visited the base, he got the impression that Woods had taken charge rather than Egan, the inexperienced young captain.
As the acting team sergeant, Eggleston was now leading operations, and he clashed with a regular Army intelligence officer at Combat Outpost Nerkh who was advising Afghan forces. Eggleston had him kicked off the base, claiming that he had compromised their security, but the officer would later tell investigators that they had argued over 3124’s practice of detaining suspects without authorization. (The intelligence officer, who was not accused of wrongdoing, did not respond to requests for comment.)
O.D.A.s like 3124 were supposed to hold people for only a day or two, at which point they either had to hand them over to the Afghan government or transfer them to the U.S. base at Bagram. But according to former operators I spoke to, some Special Forces teams would circumvent this rule by having their partner forces hang on to the prisoners for them. Once again, a common rule-breaking workaround would escalate into much worse.
Although 3124 would claim that detainees were being held by a partner Afghan National Army company that occupied a corner of Combat Outpost Nerkh, according to Zikria, Kazem, former detainees and other witnesses, that was itself a smoke screen for unauthorized detention on the American side. There was plenty of space on the base, which had been built for a much larger infantry unit. The detainees were typically kept off the books in a plywood-walled room across from the tent where the unofficial C.M.R.G. force slept, and they were shuttled around the base in an S.U.V. with tinted windows.
Several former detainees I spoke to claimed that Americans took part in their questioning. Zikria and Kazem said the team’s leadership — Egan, Woods and Eggleston — all participated in interrogations, as did Kaiser. Kaiser had limited field experience with the Special Forces, and Zikria and Kazem said he seemed eager to prove how tough he was.
“Dave was beating up people; I was beating them up with him together,” Kazem said. “If you’re loyal to your team or country, sometimes you have to do something against the law.”
If the Afghan Army was really in control of the detainees, as 3124 later claimed, it would have been required to hand them over to the local authorities within 48 hours, and they would then have been transferred to the provincial capital. The fact that this did not happen suggests that the detainees were effectively in the custody of 3124 and perhaps indicates the reason: By that point in the war, many of the Green Berets and their proxies had lost faith in the Afghan judicial system, which was susceptible to threats and bribery.
Kazem argued that vigilante action was necessary to save his country and that the Taliban had committed worse crimes. “Mercy to the wolf is oppression to the sheep,” he said, citing an Afghan proverb. “The enemy doesn’t observe the law.”
It was true that insurgents who were sent to the courts were sometimes released, as shown by the case of Mohammad Qasim, the first of the Nerkh Nine to go missing. Qasim was stopped by a joint U.S. and Afghan Army patrol while leaving a wedding in Nerkh on Nov. 6, 2012, according to his family and a U.N. investigation I obtained. A former insurgent, he might have been identified by 3124 through a U.S. biometric database, which would have shown that he had previously been detained and sentenced to prison for a bombing against American forces. Qasim’s brother confirmed that he had been in the Taliban and told me that the family had paid a bribe for his release.
Zikria, who recognized a photo of Qasim and said he was held in detention on 3124’s side of the base, recalled Eggleston saying that the man had American blood on his hands and had been released by a corrupt court. “He got killed,” Zikria said. When I pressed him about Qasim and several other cases, Zikria was vague about who actually committed each of the murders; he insisted that it didn’t matter and that the Green Berets knew about everything that happened. “They got killed by the team,” Zikria said. “Not by a person.”
Zikria told me that he still felt loyal to members of the team and never accused anyone but Kaiser of actually killing someone, an allegation he also made to investigators. Kazem, too, professed his loyalty to 3124 and refused to specify who had committed each killing. Regardless of who was personally involved, according to the legal principle of command responsibility, military leaders are responsible for war crimes carried out by their subordinates, and a proxy force like the C.M.R.G. would have been under the Green Berets’ command and control. And if, as a wealth of evidence from witnesses and military documents suggest, the Nerkh Nine were taken into 3124’s custody and never released, then the team’s leadership would bear responsibility for their fate.
After those who were judged to be guilty at Combat Outpost Nerkh were killed, Zikria told me, he and the C.M.R.G. disposed of the bodies in a zone outside the camp walls that locals were forbidden to enter — an activity that would have been visible on the base’s high-powered cameras. He said they often used irrigation ditches and other features of the terrain. “The earth was too hard,” he said. “You could just dig a little bit and just bury and go.”
The team’s distrust in their Afghan allies also came from intercepted phone data, and they came to believe that many of Nerkh’s government officials were in league with the insurgents. As the weeks went on, the team’s sense of being surrounded by enemies grew.
In early November, around the same time that Qasim was killed, a white-bearded village malik, or headman, named Mohammad Qandi was arrested at his home. The Special Forces team told investigators that Qandi was detained and held by the Afghan Army. But according to Qandi, as well as Zikria and other witnesses, he was taken by Zikria and the C.M.R.G. and held on the U.S. side of the base by the O.D.A., which suspected that he was a weapons trafficker for the insurgents. Qandi was well connected in the area, and that night, several local security commanders, including the district police chief, arrived to ask for his release.
The chief, Abdul Hadi Nangylai, told me that the meeting quickly went sour. The team accused the commanders of colluding with the enemy and said that insurgents had fired on them with ammunition that the United States had supplied to local government forces. The officials left without Qandi.
According to military records, Qandi would spend six weeks in detention before being transferred to Bagram, where he would make claims of being tortured. Zikria scoffed at that. “I beat him, but just normally,” Zikria said. “He was an old man. I didn’t want him to die.” Zikria said Qandi was held that long because he had promised to reveal some weapons caches in the area. But Zikria would come to regret not killing him when he had the chance. “Qandi made a lot of problems for us.”
On Nov. 10, O.D.A. 3124 was asked to go to a meeting with officials in the provincial capital to discuss complaints made by residents of assaults and thefts. As the O.D.A. and C.M.R.G. convoy went around a bend in the road, someone detonated a command-wire I.E.D., wounding a translator and a Green Beret, who was hit in the face by a piece of shrapnel.
The team charged from their vehicles into the surrounding village, a cluster of mud houses called Deh Afghanan. They would later claim that they got into a firefight and killed an enemy combatant, but Zikria said the C.M.R.G. caught someone with the wire and executed him — a shopkeeper named Gul Rahim, who locals said was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and wasn’t involved in the bombing. “I told my guys, Kill anyone suspicious in the area,” Zikria said.
My interviews with locals, including members of the Taliban in Nerkh, showed how blurry the line between fighter and civilian in a civil war could be. At the time, insurgents in the lower valley had to operate underground — there was too much pressure from government forces and their American allies. To assist them in carrying out I.E.D. attacks and assassinations, their primary methods, experienced cadres might informally recruit friends and relatives. Teenage boys served as scouts and runners for their older brothers and cousins. As a result, Taliban membership was nebulous.
To track down the enemy, 3124 and its Afghan counterparts relied on paid informants, data from cellphones and biometric evidence. “Sometimes we found fingerprints on pressure plates” of the I.E.D.s, Kazem said. “We would round the villagers up and check them.”
Ten days after being hit by the I.E.D. in Deh Afghanan, 3124 returned to the area. Early that morning, several dozen villagers, including a man named Naimatullah and his three brothers, were loaded into Afghan Army vehicles and driven to the district center, where they were lined up in a yard. The O.D.A. later told investigators that it was merely assisting the Afghans and didn’t take any detainees into custody, but to Naimatullah and the villagers, it seemed obvious that the Americans were running things.
According to military records, the O.D.A. was able to check the villagers’ phone records over a satellite link with the Desert Eagles’ headquarters at Bagram. Naimatullah’s neighbor, a young man named Sherzai, was also detained that morning. His father worked for the Afghan intelligence service, but Sherzai was sympathetic to the local insurgents, some of whom had been his classmates or part of his martial-arts club. The team later reported that he had 200 phone conversations with an insurgent commander it had been searching for.
Most of the villagers were released, including Naimatullah. But his three brothers — two middle brothers, Sadiqullah and Ismatullah, and his youngest brother, Hikmatullah — as well as Sherzai were among those taken to Combat Outpost Nerkh. According to several of the detainees I spoke to, they were loaded into the back of an Afghan Army pickup truck, driven through the serpentine concrete barricades that led to the base’s main gate and dropped off with the sentries at the Afghan entrance. Over the next two days and nights, they were shuttled between there and the American side of the base, where they encountered Qandi. Eventually, Hikmatullah and several others were let go. But Sherzai and Qandi told me that the two remaining brothers, Sadiqullah and Ismatullah, were taken back to the U.S. side.
To reconstruct what happened to people on the American side of the base, I interviewed almost a dozen former captives and cross-referenced their testimony with military documents, including maps of Combat Outpost Nerkh. Because Sherzai and Qandi were eventually transferred to Bagram, I was able to request copies of their detainee files, which includes their photographs and results of exams conducted by 3124’s team medic. Sherzai said that about six days after Naimatullah’s two brothers were detained, they were removed from their cell one at a time and never returned. Zikria told me that after the brothers confessed to being insurgents, they were executed and buried outside the base.
In their protests on behalf of the Nerkh Nine, relatives would claim that the men detained by 3124 were innocent; to admit otherwise would be to lose any chance of redress. But when I visited after the fall of the Afghan government, I found it was possible to have more frank conversations. Some, like Qasim’s brother, proudly admitted that their dead relatives had fought the Americans; for others, the local Taliban confirmed it. Often in such cases, the family members had come to accept the deaths as a tragic but understandable outcome of the war, in which the Taliban had also carried out widespread extrajudicial killings.
But relatives who maintained that their loved ones were not insurgents were still bitterly angry. “They unfairly called us Taliban and took my brothers from me,” Naimatullah said. “We were neither Taliban then nor are we now.”
Proving someone’s innocence was harder, but no one I spoke to in Nerkh believed that Naimatullah’s brothers had been insurgents. Given the sloppiness of 3124 and the C.M.R.G.’s tactics, their limited local knowledge and their reliance on paid informants, it seems plausible that some of the people who were killed had no significant involvement with the insurgency.
By late November 2012, complaints from locals about 3124 had reached American military officials in both Special Operations and the regular Army. The Special Operations officer in Wardak told me that he had included them in his daily reports to the Desert Eagles’ headquarters: allegations of beatings, property damage and theft. He said that at the time he thought it was most likely an attempt by insurgents to “politically defeat” the Special Forces team. “We always get stuff like this that will come from the civilian route,” he told me. “It’s a very effective tactic.”
This commonly held view within the military — that Afghans would lie about abuses — was not entirely unfounded, but it was also self-serving and meant that genuine complaints often fell on deaf ears. Then came a report on Nov. 22 that 3124’s commanders couldn’t ignore. Provincial officials told American officers in Wardak that they had a video of Zikria beating up a detainee who they claimed was murdered: Sayid Mohammad, the man later found in the black body bag.
According to Afghan police reports, Mohammad had been detained a day earlier by local forces. Zikria had stormed into the office of the Afghan intelligence service and demanded to know where the detainee was. Mohammad, Zikria told me, was sitting there like a guest, having tea, and when he answered rudely, Zikria became enraged and started punching and kicking him as, unknown to him, one of the intelligence officers recorded a video, which would later be provided to military investigators.
Alerts of a potential war crime by the Special Forces went up the chain of command. At Bravo Company’s headquarters in neighboring Logar, Hinds told me that their commander, Maj. Reid Furman, had already been concerned about 3124’s conduct in Nerkh. She said there were questions about whether the team was getting proper approval for its missions. “He would say things like, ‘What the hell is going on out there?’” Hinds said. (Furman, who was not accused of misconduct, referred a request for comment to Army Special Operations Command.)
Now the team was accused of a serious crime. Yet rather than seek to initiate a criminal or command investigation, Furman and his senior noncommissioned officer, Sgt. Maj. Haldon Huber, flew to Nerkh in early December to meet with the team. According to a log of their Facebook chats, Eggleston told Hinds that his command wanted to bring in a higher-ranking soldier to replace him as team sergeant but that both Egan and Woods had fought against it. He was being left in place for now. The team was briefly put on operational hold, meaning it couldn’t conduct missions.
But the hold didn’t last. On Dec. 5, the team was driving to the provincial capital on a resupply mission when it was hit by an I.E.D., in almost the same spot where the Green Beret was wounded by the blast a month earlier. The following morning, the team raided the area along with the Afghan Army and police force and went house to house to round up locals, taking 67 male villagers to the district center, some aboard a commandeered dump truck.
Snow had fallen, and the men shivered on their haunches in the cold yard for hours, waiting for the Americans to scan their fingerprints and check their phones. Once again, while the team would later claim that it was just supporting an operation by Afghan forces, several witnesses told me the Americans were in charge. Ten men were selected for further scrutiny at the base. Sherzai said the new detainees were brought together briefly in the wooden room with him and Qandi on the American side before being separated again. Through the thin plywood, he said, he could hear harrowing noises: people yelling and what sounded like they were being beaten and dunked in water. He and other witnesses told me that four men from the missing Nerkh Nine were detained by O.D.A. 3124 on Dec. 6: Mohammad Mansoor, Mehrab Khan, Mohammad Atiq and Mohammad Hassan.
Three days after the raid on Dec. 6, Qandi and Sherzai were blindfolded, taken out of their rooms and driven a short distance inside a vehicle. Both wondered if they were about to be killed. Then they heard the sound of a helicopter approaching. The team was sending them to Bagram. Zikria told me they had become worried because provincial officials were asking about the men’s whereabouts. “Captain Egan came to me many times,” Zikria said. “He was like, ‘Jacob, I’m getting phone calls from the higher-ups.’”
During the detainees’ intake at Bagram, U.S. medical staff noticed lacerations on Qandi’s wrists and Sherzai’s head. When each claimed that he was abused by American soldiers in Nerkh, mandatory reports were sent up the chain of command all the way to the Pentagon. Only now did the Special Forces begin an official investigation. Shortly after the detainee-abuse reports were filed, Eggleston was pulled off the team by Bravo Company and sent to the Desert Eagles’ headquarters at Bagram. (Huber, Bravo’s senior enlisted soldier, told me it was because of Eggleston’s poor performance and had nothing to do with the allegations.) On Dec. 15, the Special Operations headquarters assigned a major to go to Nerkh to look into claims of detainee abuse.
Around the same time, Zikria left Combat Outpost Nerkh. The U.S. military had sent out the equivalent of a wanted poster for him. When Hinds asked Eggleston where Zikria was, he replied: “Doing exactly what he should do. I have it all under control.” When the investigating officer arrived on Dec. 16, Zikria was nowhere to be found.
The major’s investigation was one of three carried out by the Special Forces chain of command that December, all of which exonerated the team. The matter was important enough that 3124’s chain of command in Afghanistan, including two Special Operations commanders who would later rise to three- and four-star generals, Col. Antonio Fletcher and Maj. Gen. Tony Thomas, participated in a video conference with the team on Dec. 17, according to one report. (Thomas declined a request for comment; Fletcher could not be reached.)
According to the reports and former military personnel I interviewed, officers at the Desert Eagles’ headquarters had seen members of the armed proxy force operating with 3124 in Nerkh, heard reports of misused funds and knew that detainees were being held at the base for far longer than permitted. How could the allegations have been entirely dismissed as lies?
The files show that the investigators accepted explanations that seemed to defy common sense, including that Zikria wasn’t being paid for his work, with the implication that the U.S. military wasn’t responsible for his actions. The team claimed that it had been trying to hire him, either as an interpreter or on the C.M.R.G. that the team “was starting up.” Egan and Woods told the investigator that, in the meantime, Zikria had volunteered his services in exchange for food and shelter.
“No further investigation is required,” wrote the investigator, whose findings were approved by the Desert Eagles’ commander, Lt. Col. Christopher Fox. (Fox declined to comment.)
In response to the allegations of detainee abuse, the team claimed that Qandi and Sherzai were captured earlier in November by the Afghan Army and that 3124 had taken them into custody only on Dec. 7 and sent them to Bagram two days later. The major, however, wrote that the two men “were held in the custody of ANA forces until 26 November,” the day they received their first medical screenings from the team. That apparently meant that, in the military’s own account, they had spent almost two weeks with 3124, during which time they were interrogated by the team and Sherzai received a head wound. Yet the major dismissed the detainees’ claims of abuse as “an established enemy tactic.” The third investigation also assessed that the accusations by locals in Wardak Province were insurgent propaganda and recommended a “robust Information Operation” campaign in response.
After I obtained the files from these early investigations, I discussed their contents with Thomas’s deputy commander, Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc. He said that Thomas had excluded him from the investigations and that he had never read the documents. A former Desert Eagles commander who retired in 2017, Bolduc was shocked by how the team had apparently violated regulations by having armed volunteers and holding detainees for so long without being punished or further investigated. “I would have taken exception with those findings. I would have said, ‘Hey, listen, you can’t do that.’” Bolduc said. “Shame on us.”
But by the beginning of 2013, the Special Forces had cleared themselves of wrongdoing. For their “exceptionally meritorious service,” Egan, Woods, Eggleston, Kaiser and other members of the O.D.A. were recommended for Bronze Stars by Bravo Company, which were approved by their chain of command and awarded by Thomas in February, while the team was still in Nerkh.
In May 2022, I traveled to Nerkh. The roadside orchards were in full bloom, and uniformed schoolchildren walked past ruined outposts where the Afghan republic’s forces had fought their last stand the previous summer. Over several visits, I interviewed dozens of locals. Among them was Naimatullah, the eldest brother of Sadiqullah and Ismatullah, two of the Nerkh Nine. Naimatullah met me at the gate of his farmhouse that, in November 2012, had been raided by the Special Forces.
“My mother would often say she thought she heard the voices of her sons, thinking maybe they were coming home,” he said. “Whenever someone knocked on our door after dark, she would say: ‘Hurry, open the door. It might be them.’”
Far from being passive victims, the families of the missing in Nerkh ultimately forced the Special Forces to leave through their activism, which included demonstrations in early 2013 in Wardak and Kabul. At the time, President Hamid Karzai was involved in a bitter power struggle with the United States over the coming election. On Feb. 24, he demanded a halt to Special Forces operations in Wardak, and 3124 left Combat Outpost Nerkh in March.
Over the next two months, human remains were discovered in six sites around the base, some by feral dogs, others by villagers clearing out irrigation canals. The discoveries are well documented by photos and videos I obtained from the local authorities, as well as contemporaneous police reports and autopsies conducted in Kabul that were translated by U.S. military investigators. I also visited each of the sites with witnesses. Although all of the Nerkh Nine were accounted for among the remains, in some cases the identification was based only on bones and scraps of clothing. For others, like Sayid Mohammad, it was much clearer: His remains had been preserved nearly intact inside the black body bag.
Naimatullah and I drove to the site of the former Special Forces base, now crumbling and abandoned in the foothills overlooking the valley. The locals had stripped its earth-filled outer barriers of their metal housing, and now they were melting back to the ground. It was here that Naimatullah’s brothers were found in a shallow pit behind the base.
“We recognized them by their clothes,” he said, squatting by a shallow trench a stone’s throw from the walls. He picked up a handful of earth. “This was the place. Both of my brothers were buried together.”
Even as the bodies were unearthed around Combat Outpost Nerkh, the U.S. military continued to deny responsibility. In May 2013, Zikria was arrested by the Afghan government; he pinned the blame on the Green Berets. Zikria was taken to Kabul, where some of the villagers had been called to pick him out of a lineup. Finally, in July, Joseph Dunford, a four-star Marine general who had recently become the top commander in Afghanistan, called in Army criminal investigators.
On my visits to Nerkh in 2022, the family members of the victims, many of whom had been interviewed by the military, asked me if I had news of the investigation. They hadn’t been told anything. Naimatullah said that while it had been satisfying to see one of their former tormentors locked up, he felt it was the Americans who were really responsible. “They talk about human rights, but they didn’t observe any,” he said. “We want justice to be done.”
Attention to the allegations had faded, and the results of the investigation were never publicly announced. Far from being punished, many of the Green Berets in Nerkh and their superiors would be promoted and serve in combat again. Army Special Operations, meanwhile, would pursue another Bravo Company soldier accused of murder: Golsteyn, whose case would become a national controversy even as the vigilante ethos of the operators would be embraced by American leaders at home.
Victor J. Blue, Zabihullah Padshah and Camille Baker contributed reporting.
Matthieu Aikins is a contributing writer for the magazine and a fellow at Type Media Center.
Victor J. Blue is a photographer and a 2024 New America Future Security fellow.
Read by Malcolm Hillgartner
Narration produced by Tanya Pérez
Engineered by Zak Mouton
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