[h=1]So young, so brave and still in their teens... Faces of the heroes who never saw 20 - and memorial we couldn't leave behind[/h]
- Lives of young Britons killed fighting the Taliban had been commemorated on memorial walls in Camp Bastion
- As UK's campaign in Afghanistan ended it was confirmed walls had been dismantled
- Army insisted it was not because of fears memorials would be defaced or destroyed
- Top-ranking soldiers and relatives of those killed said there was an obvious risk they would be 'desecrated'
- Defence Secretary admits Afghanistan still plagued by insurgency, and failure to leave a memorial seen by some as a symbol of the West’s failure to secure the country, despite hundreds of lives lost
- Of the 453 British troops who have died in the conflict, 35 were teenagers. 20,000 Afghan civilians also killed