1800-1859 | Afghanistan | Burning towns and cities | Civilians slaughtered | Demolishing urban areas | Looting and plunder | Massacres | Punitive operations

Kabul sacked in an orgy of fire, looting and ‘wholesale butchery’

ByAlisdare Hickson

[ 10 October 1842 ] On 10 October 1842, British troops used explosives and fire to destroy much of the Afghan capital of Kabul, including the Great Bazar and an adjacent mosque. They also burned down an unknown number of domestic dwellings, slaughtering their owners. Only two neighbourhoods, deemed ‘friendly’, were left untouched and the…

2000-2009 | Afghanistan | Civilians slaughtered

EIGHT AFGHAN CIVILIANS KILLED BY UK AIR STRIKE – REPORT KEPT SECRET

ByAlisdare Hickson

19 May 2009 On the morning of 19 May, a patrol of local police and Royal Gurkha Rifles in the southern Afghan province of Helmand came under small arms fire from insurgents. The ambush occurred not in remote mountain or desert terrain, but on densely populated rich agricultural land, distinguished by its many villages, farms,…

1500-1799 | Battlefield butchery | Burning towns and cities | Massacres | Prisoners murdered | United States

NEW LONDON BURNED AND THE GARRISON SLAUGHTERED

ByAlisdare Hickson

6 September 1781 In the late eighteenth century, New London was a small port at the mouth of the river Thames on the Connecticut coast connecting American agricultural communities with the outside world. During the American Revolutionary War, the rebels used it as a base to attack British naval vessels and their supply ships, but…

1500-1799 | Battlefield butchery | Burning towns and cities | Massacres | Prisoners murdered | United States | Wounded killed

REDCOATS SLAUGHTER AMERICAN TROOPS AFTER THEY SURRENDER

ByAlisdare Hickson

28 September 1778 During the American Revolutionary War, many British officers did not consider those ‘damn’d American rebels’, as they called recruits of George Washington’s Continental Army, to be entitled to the rights normally accorded to combatants in conflict. Major General Charles Grey was among those more committed to unforgiving cutthroat tactics, leading operations in…

1500-1799 | Civilians slaughtered | United States

Redcoats shoot dead five Bostonians who had been hurling snowballs

ByAlisdare Hickson

5 March 1770 The anniversary is commemorated every year with an annual reenactment in Boston, Massachusetts, but is virtually forgotten in Britain. During the early evening of Monday 5 March 1770, several Redcoats had been seen ‘parading the streets (of the colonial port) with their drawn cutlasses and bayonets, abusing and wounding numbers of the…

2010-2019 | Afghanistan | Assassinations | Civilians slaughtered

Three Afghan boys shot in the head by an SAS soldier

ByAlisdare Hickson

18 October 2012 During the autumn of 2012, the SAS conducted numerous armed raids against suspect Taliban members’ homes across the Afghan province of Helmand. Seven years later, the Sunday Times, reporting the suspected cover-up of a man and three boys who had been shot dead in their home, noted that individuals were often targeted ‘as a…

1500-1799 | Civilians slaughtered | Massacres | Prisoners murdered

HUNDREDS OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN SLAUGHTERED ON RATHLIN ISLAND

ByAlisdare Hickson

26 July 1575 Rathlin Island forms a rugged rocky L-shape six miles long, lying just off the Antrim coast of Northern Ireland. By the mid 1570s, Walter Devereux, the first Earl of Essex and a rising star in the Elizbethan court, was increasingly frustrated by Scottish sailors and soldiers using Rathlin as a base from…

1920-1939 | Bombing villages | Civilians slaughtered | Collective punishments | Iraq | Looting and plunder | Punitive operations | RAF crimes

R.A.F. DROP 8,600 INCENDIARY BOMBS ON TWO IRAQI VILLAGES FOR ‘DISOBEDIENCE’

ByAlisdare Hickson

30 November 1923 On 30 November 1923, forty aircraft from five R.A.F. squadrons began round the clock bombing sorties against two villages near the town of Samawah in southern Iraq. The air strikes continued for two days, resulting in the almost total destruction of the villages and a death toll officially estimated at 144 men,…

1500-1799 | Battlefield butchery | Civilians slaughtered | Looting and plunder

Cromwell’s troops massacre all but ‘a very few’ of the inhabitants of Wexford

ByAlisdare Hickson

11 October 1649 Today in 1649, the inhabitants of Wexford were massacred by British troops. One month earlier [ 11 September 1649 ] Oliver Cromwell, commanding British parliamentary forces in Ireland, had ordered his soldiers to offer no quarter to the royalist garrison at Drogheda, and had slaughtered almost all those who had surrendered, along…

1500-1799 | Battlefield butchery | Burning villages | Civilians slaughtered | Collective punishments | Prisoners murdered | Punitive operations | Scotland | Wounded killed

‘PERFIDIOUS’ HIGHLANDERS ‘MUST PERISH BY SWORD OR FAMINE’

ByAlisdare Hickson

16 APRIL 1746 During the autumn of 1745, Jacobite rebels, led by ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie,’ and desiring to replace the Hanoverian king George II with the prince’s catholic father, James Stuart, marched on London, reaching as far south as Derby before they retreated to Scotland. The rebellion was motivated by a range of complex issues,…