Revealed: UK has failed to resettle Afghans facing torture and death despite promise

Afghan nationals who were promised resettlement to the UK nearly a year ago are facing torture and death while they wait for a response from the British government, the Observer can reveal.

Not one person has been accepted and evacuated from Afghanistan under the Home Office’s Afghan citizens’ resettlement scheme (ACRS), launched in January, prompting claims that ministers are showing a “toxic combination of incompetence and indifference”. The scheme was intended to help Afghans who worked for, or were affiliated with, the British government – including its embassy staff and British Council teachers – and all of whom face severe harm at the hands of the Taliban.

Meanwhile, figures show that there are only between five and eight members of staff working on the scheme in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office – the department administering the ACRS – compared with 540 who were working on the Ukraine schemes earlier this year. Sources said there was “no sense that Afghanistan is any kind of priority”.

Britain’s efforts to evacuate at-risk Afghans in the days after the fall of Kabul in August 2021 were heavily criticised when it emerged that many of those who worked for or alongside the UK were left behind. Under Taliban rule, poverty levels in Afghanistan have since surged, the rights of women have been rolled back and the UN has recorded at least 160 extrajudicial killings.

Through open-source intelligence, insights from forensic physicians and interviews with more than a dozen Afghans waiting to be relocated, a joint investigation by the Observer and Lighthouse Reports, a Netherlands-based, non-profit newsroom, has verified that people whom 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 have died because of Taliban fighters blocking access to medical care.

Batoor, 32, a former university professor, started working for the British Council in 2019. During the Taliban takeover last year, he began to receive death threats and went into hiding, separated from his wife and two children. When Batoor’s two-year-old daughter, Najwa, became ill, his wife was forced to treat her at home as she was banned under Taliban law from travelling without a man accompanying her.
Child in hospital bed with monitors and feeds
Batoor’s two-year-old daughter died after Taliban laws prevented the British Council employee 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 his daughter to a paediatric hospital, it was too late. Najwa’s medical records state that she was suffering from acute hepatitis, septicaemia and liver failure. It was later confirmed that the cause of death was a cardiac arrest. “They were dark days,” said Batoor. “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 hard days with her. If I had not been in hiding, I would have been able to help ... I was to blame.”

Six months after Najwa’s death, Batoor was told by the British Council that his application for another resettlement scheme, the Afghan relocations and assistance policy (Arap), would be “formally rejected” by the UK government and that he must instead apply to the ACRS. He has yet to hear the outcome of his case. Batoor said he feels “betrayed” by the UK government.

“We helped them. We were honoured in doing that work,” he said, speaking from a safe house. “But now, even though there were promises, they’ve been broken. We didn’t expect that from the UK. They have let us down. We don’t understand what to do, where to go. There’s no hope for staying alive in this situation. There’s just hopelessness for us.”