Nine Bodies Turned Up at a Green Beret Outpost. What Really Happened?

In 2012, after a team member was nearly killed, a Special Forces unit went on a rampage that might have been one of the worst war crimes in recent U.S. history.

Sept. 30, 2025


Naimatullah at the site in Afghanistan where the remains of his brothers were found.

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.’”

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A site near the former Special Forces base in Nerkh where human remains were found.

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