Even for Afghans like me, the details of what some of Australia’s SAS soldiers had been accused of in Afghanistan came to light very late. They only began to surface after a handful of journalists chose to listen to Afghans who had been ignored for years and gave space to families who had long been silenced.

For a long time, these claims – of unlawful killings, or war crimes – had lived quietly in Afghan villages. They were shared between families, in grief and disbelief, but rarely went beyond that. People didn’t have the language, the media access or the financial means to make themselves heard. Outside those small, dusty villages, almost no one knew what had really happened. By the time these allegations made headlines in Australia, soldiers had long left Afghanistan. What stayed behind was a pain and a silence that felt endless.

Living in Melbourne, I got a glimpse into this pain while helping translate interviews for an SBS program about alleged war crimes. During this process, I listened to interviews with the people of Uruzgan province that have stayed with me ever since. They spoke about night raids, about loved ones taken away, about children watching things they could not understand. These were not distant or abstract........

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