Afghan nationals who were promised UK resettlement almost a year ago are facing torture and death as they await a response from the British government, the Observer can reveal.
No people have been accepted and evacuated from Afghanistan under the Home Office’s Afghan National Resettlement Scheme (ACRS), launched in January, prompting ministers to display a “toxic combination of incompetence and indifference”. The scheme was intended to help Afghans working for or affiliated with the British government, including embassy staff and British Council teachers, who face serious harm at the hands of the Taliban.
Meanwhile, figures show there are only five to eight staff working on the plan at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the department that administers the ACRS, compared with 540 who worked on the plans of Ukraine earlier this year. The sources said it “didn’t make any sense for Afghanistan to be any kind of priority.”
The UK’s efforts to evacuate at-risk Afghans in the days after the fall of Kabul in August 2021 came under heavy criticism as many of those working for or alongside the UK were left behind. Under Taliban rule, poverty levels in Afghanistan have since risen, women’s rights have been reduced and the UN has recorded at least 160 extrajudicial killings.
Through open-source intelligence, medical examiner insights and interviews with more than a dozen Afghans waiting to be transferred, a joint investigation by the Observer and Lighthouse Reports, a dispassionate newsroom of profit based in the Netherlands, has verified that people the UK pledged to help under the ACRS have been severely beaten and tortured by the Taliban.
In other cases, family members have been kidnapped or killed because Taliban fighters have blocked access to medical care.
Batoor, 32, a former university professor, started working at the British Council in 2019. During the Taliban’s takeover last year, he began receiving death threats and went into hiding, separated from his wife and his two children. When Batoor’s two-year-old daughter Najwa fell ill, his wife was forced to treat her at home, as Taliban law forbade her from traveling without a male companion.
Batoor’s two-year-old daughter died after Taliban laws prevented the British Council employee from taking her to hospital without a male companion until it was too late.
Najwa’s condition worsened considerably. By the time Batoor managed to get her daughter to a pediatric hospital, it was too late. Najwa’s medical records indicate that she was suffering from acute hepatitis, septicemia and liver failure. The cause of death was later confirmed to be cardiac arrest. “Those were dark days,” Batoor said. “I couldn’t even go to the funeral. I couldn’t do anything. My wife still blames me that it happened because of who I worked for. I wasn’t there in those difficult days with her. If I hadn’t been hidden, I would have been able to ‘help… I was to blame.’
Six months after Najwa’s death, the British Council told Batoor that his application for another resettlement scheme, the Afghan Assistance and Relocation Policy (Arap), would be “formally rejected” by the Afghan government. United Kingdom and that, instead, he should apply to the ACRS. . He has not yet known the outcome of his case. Batoor said he feels “betrayed” by the UK government.
“We helped them. We are honored to do this work,” he said, speaking from a safe house. “But now, even though there were promises, they have been broken. We didn’t expect this from the UK. We have been let down. We don’t understand what to do, where to go. There is no hope of staying alive in this situation. There is only hopelessness for us.”
Another former contractor, Aziz, 32, worked as an interpreter at the British Embassy for GardaWorld, the security contractor guarding the embassy, in 2021. His younger brother, Nazir, was arrested out of his home in May 2022 and held for two weeks. during this time he was subjected to shocks and electric shocks to intimate parts of his body.
CCTV footage from outside the family home, obtained by Lighthouse Reports, shows the Taliban approaching the house and knocking on the door, Nazir opening it and a verbal exchange taking place between them. Within a minute, Taliban fighters begin beating him and forcing him into his car before driving away. Aziz said they mistook Nazir for him.
One photograph shows Nazir’s upper thigh with deep lash marks. Medical examiner Dr Juliet Cohen said the image showed “patches of bruises and crisscrossing lines of red and pink [weals] attributed to a whiplash,” adding that it was “difficult to see what else could cause this.”
Aziz applied for ACRS in June, and in October received a reply saying he was ineligible because it had been decided he “did not meet the definition of a GardaWorld contractor”.
He is on a list of 175 GardaWorld embassy staff seen by this investigation, which was handed over to the UK government. Only five of those on the list have been transferred from Afghanistan to the UK through the Arap scheme.
“They look at British embassy staff as spies. If they capture me, I will never make it out alive,” he said. “I’m going mad. I’m like a prisoner in my own house. I can’t go outside. I’m scared all the time. Why won’t the British government help me?
Four days after the fall of Kabul, the Ministry of Interior announced the ACRS, which pledged to resettle 5,000 Afghans in its first year.
The Foreign Office is the lead department for the programme, working alongside the Home Office, which is responsible for processing visas, carrying out security checks and arranging accommodation in the UK.
Sources working in the Foreign Office’s Afghanistan directorate have said consultations on who will be evacuated under the ACRS began in August and are still ongoing, although the department confirmed it would begin to relocate eligible Afghans to the UK in the autumn.
One staffer who worked on the crisis response last year said: “There is no sense that Afghanistan is any kind of priority.”
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Another source said: “There has been a lot of criticism of the ACRS, and my problem with it is the unfairness of the difference in approach to the Ukrainian schemes, which are much more generous. There has been a lot of ping-pong with each other [the Foreign Office and the Home Office] about whose responsibility it is, and discussions about the budget: who pays for it? – but that’s mostly resolved now.”
The Home Office drew criticism when it emerged in February that around a third of the places available under ACRS had been given to Afghans who had already been transferred to Britain during Operation Pitting, the effort by ‘UK evacuation in August 2021.
Zaid, 47, worked for GardaWorld as a driver at the British Embassy for 11 years until last spring. In October 2021, there was a knock on the door of the house he shared with his wife and six children. He answered and three Taliban fighters immediately began questioning him.
“They said, ‘You are still working for the British embassy, for the infidels, you are still being paid,'” Zaid said. “There they tortured me in the street. They started beating me so much that I lost consciousness. I fall to the ground. When I woke up, they were gone, but my body was damaged.”
Photographs of Zaid after the attack show dark bruises on his shoulder and arms, and his hand and head tightly bound in plaster.
Zaid, a British embassy driver, was badly beaten outside his home by regime fighters.
Cohen said the bruises indicated “blunt force trauma” that “could be from kicking” or other means such as “a hard object,” and concluded that the injuries were “typical of an assault.”
Zaid applied for ACRS in June 2022, but has yet to receive a response. “They told me to prepare passports and everything. No one is contacting us. We are desperate,” he said.
Shadow immigration minister Stephen Kinnock called on the UK government to act “with a matter of urgency” to get vulnerable Afghans to safety, adding that some of those waiting for answers were had contacted his office with “tragic stories”.
In response to this inquiry, Kinnock said: “These important new findings show how Operation Warm Welcome has turned into Operation Cold Shoulder due to the toxic combination of incompetence and indifference of the Tory government. Britain he owes a debt of gratitude to these brave Afghans and it is a debt that must be honored.”
Sarah Magill, director of the Afghan evacuation and resettlement organization Azadi Charity, described the UK’s effort to evacuate people at risk as a “fiasco”. He added: “Britain claims to be a world power, but we have embarrassed ourselves internationally by showing that we cannot locate and extract three fixed lists of known individuals.
“The price these people pay is that they live in poverty, deprived of their rights, and many have been arrested and beaten by the Taliban. This is how we show our gratitude for serving the UK and keeping our diplomats safe.”
The Home Office insisted that 6,300 Afghans had been taken to safety under the ACRS, but the Observer and Lighthouse reports understand that none of these individuals have been accepted and resettled since January 2022, when put the plan into motion.
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