Keagan Bizzell is a military veteran with a taste for adventure, Instagram posts and showing off his abs.

On Saturday the disability-industry manager posted an emotional video from the site of an infamous moment in Australian military history: the former army base in Afghanistan where soldiers Robert Poate, Stjepan Milosevic and James Martin were shot by a rogue Afghan Army colleague.

There is no record of any Australian veterans visiting what was Patrol Base Wahab in the Baluchi Valley since the war ended in 2021. The Department of Foreign Affairs advises travellers to avoid Afghanistan altogether, on safety grounds, and Bizzell said it took him 16 hours to reach the site, which is now little more than a mound of dirt.

The video, in which Bizzell struggles to maintain his composure, triggered an angry online debate about the war, including one particularly mean comment. “may those 3 never rest,” wrote an account with the handle shah_nikzad and the name Shah Ahmad.

When a reader asked “How many civilians did the Taliban kill?” the Shah account called him a “terrori$t”.

On Instagram, shah_nikzad identified itself as a director of Melbourne Simple Insulation Systems, a Sunshine-based business in the city’s western suburbs. Corporate records identify one of the owners as Ahmad Nikzad, a common Afghan name.

When The Nightly contacted a mobile phone number listed for the business to ask about the post, the man who answered became aggressive and demanded the caller’s date of birth. He denied making the post, but said: “Of course I feel bad for Australians to be killed but what did they kill for? Poor soldiers dying in Afghanistan where they have no business to be.”

When told The Nightly would not answer his questions, he said: “I don’t give a f--- whether you answer it or not.”

The shah_nikzad account was deleted shortly after the conversation.

One of the ironies of the comments is that Hugh Poate, the father of Private Poate, argued in a 2021 book, Failures Of Command, that Australian forces should not have remained in Afghanistan beyond the initial invasion in 2001. He said Australia participated in the war, at a cost of 41 soldiers, to avoid upsetting the US.

On Monday, told about the posts, Mr Poate said he didn’t respond to online abuse about his late son. Mr Poate’s wife, Janny, is scheduled to speak on behalf of family members of the dead soldiers at a commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the start of the war at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra on October 11.

Mr Poate has frequently complained that the death sentence handed to his son’s killer was not carried out and that he is now treated as a hero by the Taliban government in Kabul.

There were 88,730 Afghan-born people living in Australia in 2024, according to the Australian government, double the figure a decade earlier. Almost all were granted humanitarian visas or were partners of refugees.

Travelling through Afghanistan by horse and nausea-inducing long-distance taxi rides, Mr Bizzell wrote that he had to be hooked up to an intravenous drip on the trip to the Baluchi Valley “after I nearly passed out from four days of intense diarrhoea and no food”.

“The map said PB Wahab was just ahead,” he wrote. He added that a local man jumped inside the car Mr Bizzell was travelling in after being asked for directions. “We went off road and climbed a rocky hill and a few minutes later we arrived at a small flat piece of arid land. Nothing was left but piles of dirt that had been dumped from the sandbag walls.”

Mr Bizzell, who said he met Robert Poate several times, joined the army after high school and trained as a sniper, according to his online bio.