Prince Harry says he didn’t brag about killing 25 people in Afghanistan

Prince Harry says he did not boast in his newly-released memoir, “Spare,” about the number of Taliban fighters he killed in Afghanistan, saying his comments were given a dangerous spin.

Speaking to CBS’s late-night show host Stephen Colbert on Tuesday, Harry called it a “dangerous lie” that he had “somehow boasted about the number of people that I killed in Afghanistan.”

“If I heard anyone boasting about that kind of thing, I would be angry,” Harry said. “But it’s a lie, and hopefully now the book is out, people will be able to see the context.”

Harry added that having his writing taken out of context and having a “spin” put on his words was “very dangerous” and made the people around him targets.

Colbert said he read the passage in the book that Harry was referring to. Colbert called the excerpt a “thoughtful description” of being a soldier, and said that in his opinion, “there’s nothing boastful about it.”

In an excerpt from “Spare” viewed by Insider, the prince writes that he knows “precisely how many enemy combatants” he’s killed — pegging the number at 25.

“And I felt it vital never to shy away from that number. Among the many things I learned in the Army, accountability was near the top of the list,” Harry wrote in his book. “So, my number: Twenty-five. It wasn’t a number that gave me any satisfaction. But neither was it a number that made me feel ashamed.”

“Naturally, I’d have preferred not to have that number on my military CV, on my mind, but by the same token I’d have preferred to live in a world in which there was no Taliban, a world without war,” he added in his book.

The prince also described not being able to “think of those twenty-five as people.” Harry wrote that this was a mindset and “learned detachment” — a way of thinking that he says he later realized was “problematic.”

“You can’t kill people if you think of them as people. You can’t really harm people if you think of them as people,” Harry wrote. “They were chess pieces removed from the board, Bads taken away before they could kill Goods. I’d been trained to ‘other-ize’ them, trained well.”

Harry served two tours in Afghanistan — once as an air controller from 2007 to 2008 and again as an attack helicopter pilot between 2012 and 2013.

His comments drew criticism from military men like Richard Kemp, a retired colonel, who told the BBC on Friday that Harry sharing information about his time in Afghanistan was “an error of judgment.” Meanwhile, retired Royal Navy officer Rear Adm. Chris Parry told the Associated Press he thought Harry’s claim to have killed 25 people was “distasteful.”

Last week, Anas Haqqani, a senior member of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA), condemned Harry’s statement on killing people during his mission in Afghanistan, and said those who were killed were not “chess pieces” but were humans.

In a series of tweets on Friday, Haqqani said that those killed had families who were waiting for their return.

He called Prince Harry a killer of Afghans.

“Among the killers of Afghans, not many have your decency to reveal their conscience and confess to their war crimes,” Haqqani said.

Haqqani said: “The truth is what you’ve said; Our innocent people were chess pieces to your soldiers, military and political leaders. Still, you were defeated in that ‘game’ of white & black ‘square’”.

Haqqani, also raised the issue of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and human rights activists, and called them “deaf and blind.”

“I don’t expect that the ICC will summon you or the human rights activists will condemn you, because they are deaf and blind for you. But hopefully these atrocities will be remembered in the history of humanity,” Haqqani said.