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

Those who risked their lives helping British government face a ‘toxic combination of incompetence and indifference’

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 European investigations 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.