After more than a decade of secrecy and silence surrounding the conduct of Australian forces in Afghanistan, in November 2020 the Brereton report shone a damning spotlight on allegations of horrific war crimes. Credible evidence pointed to Australian forces unlawfully killing 39 Afghan non-combatants, including innocent civilians. In exhaustive and sometimes redacted detail, the inquiry chronicled incident after incident of unthinkable wrongdoing – including one described as “possibly the most disgraceful episode in Australia’s military history”.
It took more than a decade for these alleged war crimes to come to light due to a pervasive culture of silence and cover-ups, including falsified reports and the planting of weapons on dead bodies. Operational reporting was “routinely embellished, and sometimes outright fabricated”, Brereton found.
