Refugees at the Torkham camp in Afghanistan near the Pakistan border, November 4, 2023 (Ebrahim Noroozi/AP)
Originally published by The Guardian:
How Europe Failed Afghanistan’s Women
In 2022 an accidential data breach by a UK official put up to 100,000 Afghans at risk of arrest, torture, and killing at the hands of hte Taliban.
The data surfaced in 2023 in a Facebook post, but the UK Government obtained a court super-injunction to keep the information secret. The High Court lifted the injunction on Tuesday.
The UK relocated 16,156 people affected by the data leak. More than 56,000 have not yet travelled.
These are five of their stories:
Azizullah
I worked with UK and coalition forces as an interpreter in Helmand and Kandahar for more than a decade.
When I read the email on the morning of July 15, I froze. It felt like my blood had turned to ice. Finding that the UK Government had accidentally leaked the names and details of people like me – Afghans who had worked with British forces, who had trusted them, and who are now living in fear because of that trust.
The first thing that flashed through my mind wasn’t myself. It was my family. My mother, my brother, my sister, they’re in Turkey right now, waiting. We’ve been waiting for four years under the Afghan Relocation and Assistance Policy, sending e-mail after e-mail, holding on to the promise that the UK would not abandon us. And now this. This breach. This betrayal.
I am the one handling their paperwork and the only one aware until now about this leak. I still haven’t told them. How can I? My family has already lived through enough trauma. If I tell them what’s happened, I’m terrified of what it will do to them, not just emotionally, but physically. They will break. I know it.
And it’s not just them. My aunt and her children are still in Afghanistan. They’ve worked extensively with ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) earlier and later, the coalition forces – UK and US troops both. They are in hiding now. If they are found, they will die. There is no question. We are not talking about hypothetical risk. We are talking about people being hunted, arrested, tortured, killed. And it’s happening now.
They are going to die in that hell unless someone acts. And let me be clear: it is only the UK government’s responsibility to save them. This is their mistake. They owe us our lives.
