The damning evidence of inhumane treatment meted out to innocent civilians by British soldiers lies in two thick files kept under lock and key behind the barbed-wire security fences of the Trenchard Lines military base overlooking Salisbury Plain.
The dossiers were painstakingly put together following years of investigation by detectives from the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (Ihat) as part of one of the biggest war crimes inquiries in UK history.
The Ihat investigation would later be cast as an “unmitigated failure” by members of parliament. They claimed it had found no real evidence and had harassed innocent former British soldiers based on flimsy allegations provided by ambulance-chasing lawyers seeking compensation for their clients.
However, the dossiers paint a different, chilling story. In more than 300
