Just one of the team of 125 British embassy guards who were promised help to leave Afghanistan by the Foreign Office has made it to the UK.
Faiz is in quarantine in a London hotel, relieved to be safe but worried about the situation faced by former colleagues left behind in Kabul.
He, his wife and two-month-old son managed to get on to one of the last UK military evacuation flights last week, after queueing outside the airport on four consecutive days and waiting in queues inside the airport for two more days.
The family are in a room overlooking Heathrow airport, eating their meals inside their bedroom because of the quarantine rules, uncertain about where they will be housed next once the 10 days of Covid-enforced isolation ends.
British officials have been welcoming, Faiz says, and his first fleeting impressions of this “calm and peaceful” new country have been positive. But his acute concern for his family and colleagues left behind make it impossible to celebrate his own arrival in a place of safety.
“I’m worried about each and every one of them and their families. Some have been receiving threatening messages and warnings,” he said, by email from the hotel room. “I can’t sleep. I feel mentally disturbed.”
In the past fortnight, life for the British embassy guards who remain in Kabul has become extremely difficult. They have been sacked from their jobs by the international security company GardaWorld, which employed them under an outsourced contract; they have not received their August salaries nor have they received promised severance pay. Buoyed by UK promises of assistance, and hopeful they would be evacuated to the UK last Thursday, many sold their possessions – cars, televisions, carpets, furniture – and handed their homes to relatives. When the evacuation attempt failed, some returned to homes stripped of furniture. Others have been forced into hiding, after visits from Taliban representatives.
The fate of the contracted workers, some of whom spent years providing security for the British embassy, has become one of the starkest symbols of Britain’s chaotic evacuation process.
When the guards first applied for help in May they were rejected from the Ministry of Defence’s emergency assistance scheme for those who had worked closely with the UK government (the Afghan relocations and assistance policy, Arap). They were sent letters explaining they were ineligible because they were contracted workers rather than direct employees of the government.
They pointed out the Taliban were unlikely to distinguish between guards employed under an outsourced contract and staff members. After media coverage, MPs in London began to put pressure on the government.
Two weeks ago, the armed forces minister, James Heappey, announced that the GardaWorld guards had been taken to Kabul airport and were in the process of being evacuated. In fact none of them had been rescued, although that morning the company had mounted a successful extraction operation for all its expatriate staff.
A few hours later there was an unexpected government U-turn and the Foreign Office issued a statement promising: “We will help all those Afghan security guards contracted through GardaWorld to protect the embassy. They will be granted the right to enter the UK and we are now working through the challenging logistics of getting them out of Kabul.”
However, this clear and firm commitment is increasingly looking like a hollow promise for the GardaWorld staff who remain in Kabul. A dangerous last-minute attempt to evacuate all the guards and their families on 10 buses, mounted by GardaWorld last week, was called off after the explosion outside the airport on Thursday, which killed more than 100 people.
Asked about the embassy guards this week, during questioning at the foreign affairs select committee, the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, said: “We wanted to get some of those embassy guards out. The buses arranged to collect them to take them to the airport weren’t given permission to enter, and that is I’m afraid a reflection of the conditions on the ground.”
But sources close to the evacuation attempt said British officials inside the airport had not been inclined to expedite the removal of the guards, who had been waiting in buses by the airport gates for around 11 hours by the time of the explosion. Only around eight of the 185 guards – including 60 sacked in May when the British embassy began to downsize – taken for evacuation have been sent emails by the Foreign Office formally accepting them on to emergency resettlement programmes. The rest are waiting, checking their email inboxes hourly, concerned that they may have been forgotten.
Those who were formally accepted on to the scheme had an email last Friday asking them to return to the airport to be evacuated, but they were unable to get anywhere close. A final email was sent, stating: “You were authorised for evacuation by the British military. The evacuation has now ended. We are sorry if, as we think, you were not able to reach the evacuation point.” The email continued: “If you were approved for evacuation, you will be supported if you wish to relocate to the United Kingdom.” Since then they have heard nothing.
Although the guards appreciate the rapid arrival of the Taliban created chaos, they point out that the US embassy successfully evacuated around 500 of its embassy guards, who were also employed under a parallel contract by GardaWorld, along with their families. “They took them much earlier, in the first days of the evacuation flight,” the British embassy guards’ Afghan supervisor said. He said he had been “surprised” to hear about the Ministry of Defence’s assistance with the evacuation of cats and dogs.
The guards are getting used to a new life under the Taliban. Many of them are staying away from their own homes to avoid the attention of Taliban house-to-house searches. They are worried about how they are going to support their families with no salary.
Because all GardaWorld’s UK management team left Kabul days before the Taliban arrived, there is no one to sign off the payroll to authorise the banks to pay staff their last salaries. Managers say that the company wants to make the payments, but has not yet worked out how to give remote digital clearance to the bank in Afghanistan to allow the final salaries to be paid.
The guards’ situation reflects the wider picture in Afghanistan, where many of those people earning regular salaries were working for organisations with international links, such as embassies, UN bodies and development organisations. Many of those jobs were abruptly terminated last month, as international groups wound up their work. The situation faced by the guards is one also being confronted by aid workers, judges, academics, film-makers, BBC reporters working for the Afghanistan service, interpreters – a long list of people who worked with or promoted the former regime, now looking for new work or a way to leave the country.
Thousands of people recognised as having a likely claim for resettlement in the UK were stranded in Afghanistan when the airlift ended.
“We have rice and peanuts and some other things at home, but after that goes, it will be very hard for us,” said one guard. He was the main breadwinner for his parents, and siblings who are still studying. “We’re not eating too much of anything … just a little to stay alive.”
He was despondent at the absence of clear guidance on what to do now from GardaWorld and British officials. “We risked our lives for them,” he said. “We did everything to make them safe.”
He was particularly concerned at reports that British staff may have left databases with their contact details behind when they closed the embassy building. “Have they left our names, our fingerprints?”
Some have considered the possibility of travelling by road to a neighbouring country, but this is not feasible for most. Aside from the cost and uncertainty involved, many of the guards say their children do not have passports, and they are unclear about whether they would be allowed to travel using only their Afghan identity cards.
The embassy’s former site manager is one of the few who has received official clearance to come to Britain, but he was unable to make his way to the airport with his wife and four children before the evacuation flights were suspended. “We don’t know what to do now. We don’t know how we’re going to feed our children or how we can get out of Kabul. We cannot live in these conditions,” he said.
After the UK government’s promise that they would be helped, he worked with two colleagues last week to create a database of all the former GardaWorld staff and their families to send in one spreadsheet to the Foreign Office. Then they worked to arrange for all of the 185 guards, and their spouses and children, to meet at different locations in Kabul before dawn last Thursday, to board 10 buses, to head to the airport for evacuation.
He sold his car for half its value the day before the attempted departure. “We took a huge risk to gather everyone – 185 families – and get them to the airport, but we managed to get them there and then we weren’t allowed inside. It was the hardest day of my life – trying to take care of my children and my colleagues. The Taliban were firing around the bus, and hitting the people who were trying to get into the airport. The children were very scared, everyone was scared.” One woman who went into labour during the evacuation attempt was taken to hospital by her husband, gave birth to a son, and returned to the bus with the newborn baby two hours later, hoping to get on the flight.
GardaWorld staff have been emailing media in the UK in a desperate attempt to make sure they are not forgotten. One member of staff emailed copies of numerous certificates praising his “outstanding contribution” and his “exemplary service” over the 13 years with the embassy.
A reference letter, signed by Anthony Cooper MBE, country security manager, British embassy Kabul, said: “The guards are all very disciplined, polite and extremely courteous … All guards are trained to the highest of standards and despite some very dangerous situations when attacks have taken place … the local guard force stood resolutely by their stations … I cannot stress enough how loyal and dedicated these men are.”
The guard’s teenage son said in a text message: “We’re in a very bad financial situation. My father is the only breadwinner.” He added that his father was now in hiding. “We are living in fear, in a desperate situation. We beg desperately and humbly, please don’t leave us behind.”
The Foreign Office said: “Our staff worked tirelessly to facilitate the swift evacuation of British nationals, Afghan staff and others at risk. We continue to make every effort to ensure their safe passage.”
GardaWorld did not want to make a comment.