Latest news with #UKSF
The Independent
24-05-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Government ‘must speed up relocation of Afghan heroes after blunder'
The British government faces pressure to expedite the relocation of hundreds of Afghan commandos to the UK after failures by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) left them vulnerable to the Taliban. Thousands of sanctuary applications from Afghans with credible links to UK special forces (UKSF) were initially rejected, with one UKSF officer overseeing the blanket rejection of 1,585 cases in the summer of 2023. Ministers initially denied that the Afghan commandos, known as the Triples, were paid by the UK government but later backtracked and announced a review of 2,000 applications, with approximately 600 Afghans approved to come to the UK. Government lawyers have identified an additional 2,500 applications for review after the MoD rediscovered payroll data, potentially paving the way for more Afghans to be brought to safety. A High Court case revealed that there was a "blanket practice of automatic refusal" of applications, with a UK special forces officer's decision-making approach described as "lax and unprofessional" by the MoD.
The Independent
24-05-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
UK urged to bring hundreds of Afghan heroes to safety after major blunder saw them wrongly rejected
The British government has been urged to hasten the relocation of hundreds of Afghan heroes to the UK after Ministry of Defence (MoD) failures saw them left at the mercy of the Taliban. Thousands of applications for sanctuary from Afghans who worked with British troops were rejected despite them having credible links to the UK special forces (UKSF). The High Court heard this week that one UK special forces officer oversaw the blanket rejection of 1,585 cases during the summer of 2023. Ministers had initially denied that Afghan commandos, known as the Triples, had been paid by the UK government, but were forced to backtrack and announce a review into 2,000 applications. Around 600 Afghan allies, whose applications were among the initial 2,000 re-examined, have been granted approval to come to the UK. Now government lawyers have said that a further estimated 2,500 applications have been identified for review after the MoD realised the significance of rediscovered payroll data, paving the way for hundreds more to be brought to sanctuary. Former veterans minister Johnny Mercer has said that he is "shocked and appalled" by the failings in the MoD's initial handling of the applications. Campaigners and former military chiefs called on the government to speed up the relocation of these brave soldiers to the UK. Colonel Simon Diggins, former defence attache in Afghanistan, said that poor records had been kept by the UKSF, impacting the lives of the Triples soldiers. He said: 'We know that these individuals' lives are in danger. There is a real imperative to do something about it and to do it quickly. The accusation of poor data keeping is fair but now we have some records there is also an imperative to come up with a quicker way of dealing with this [Triples' evacuation].' Sarah Fenby-Dixon, Afghanistan consultant at the Refugee Aid Network, said: 'It is vital that the review process for all cases is speeded up, as even after being granted eligibility some people are waiting many months or even years before being transferred to safety.' A former senior member of the Triples, who is now in the UK, has brought the legal challenge against the government's processing of applications, with the case reaching the High Court this week. Thomas de la Mare KC, for the claimant, argued that guidance on how resettlement decisions were made should be made public and likened the failings to 'a crime scene'. In a witness statement to court, a senior civil servant said a new 'phase two' of the Triples review would re-examine 'at least several hundred although this may be as many as c2,500 applications'. The MoD said this would likely bring in soldiers who had served in the later years of the conflict in Afghanistan. Around 130 cases from the initial review will be moved into phase two, lawyers told the court. The High Court heard how the initial review was prompted after senior civil servants became concerned about how resettlement applications were being decided. It has since emerged that there was an effective 'blanket practice of automatic refusal', which left these highly trained Afghan soldiers at the mercy of the Taliban. A particular UK special forces officer was overseeing hundreds of rejections during a 'sprint' in the summer of 2023 to rush through decisions, the court heard. The MoD said that the officer's approach to decision-making was 'lax and unprofessional' and reached 'decisions far too quickly'. MoD caseworkers were also 'overly reliant' on UKSF personnel, and were 'not consistently exercising their own independent judgement', the government found. MPs have previously raised concerns about the potential bias of UKSF personnel having power over resettlement of Afghan allies amid an ongoing inquiry into alleged crimes by the UKSF in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013. Some of the Afghan commandos who applied for UK sanctuary could be witnesses to the events being examined by the independent inquiry. Mr Mercer, who raised concerns about decision-making with senior civil servants in early 2024, said: 'When I raised what was happening with the most senior officers and civil servants in the UK government, one in particular from UKSF claimed he was offended that I had and it was offensive to the UKSF. He was either lying to my face as a cabinet minister which is serious enough, or is so deeply incompetent he didn't know.' The MoD estimates that around 5,000 people were members of the Triples, working alongside the UKSF, during the Afghan war. General Sir John McColl, the UK's former special envoy to Afghanistan, said he believed the MoD had 'worked really hard to do the right thing for the Triples'. He said it was good that the MoD is re-examining up to 2,500 more cases and pressed for resources to be given to the team in charge of dealing with Afghan cases. He added that the delay in help was 'a combination of the record-keeping not being particularly good and that the withdrawal was as chaotic and fractured as we all recall'. 'We are now nearly four years on since the withdrawal and in that time these people have been in great danger, some of them will have been in harms way as a consequence of the delay, which is very unfortunate', he said. Col Diggins added: 'If there are potentially 2,000 more people, who with their family members could equal up to 10,000 people, that's a big number. We have an obligation to them for their service but we need to think differently about how we do the evacuations. 'We also need to ensure that if we are going to bring people from Afghanistan to this country, there are supported by a proper programme of integration when they get here.'
Arab News
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Arab News
Single UK Special Forces officer rejected 1,585 Afghan resettlement applications
LONDON: A court has been told a UK Special Forces officer personally rejected 1,585 applications from Afghans for resettlement in Britain. The applications were all from people with credible links to UKSF personnel, the Ministry of Defense told the court, amid an ongoing investigation into alleged war crimes by the Special Air Service in Afghanistan. The BBC revealed last week that the individual in question may have rejected applications from people with eye-witness testimony relating to the allegations. Numerous former Afghan special forces soldiers, known as Triples due to their regiment numbers, served alongside UK forces until the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban in 2021. Thousands of them and their relatives have subsequently struggled to obtain permission to travel to the UK. The public inquiry into the conduct of UKSF soldiers in Afghanistan, meanwhile, lacks the power to compel former Triples soldiers to testify unless they are in the UK. In October 2022 Natalie Moore, the head of the Ministry of Defense's Afghan resettlement team, voiced concern that UKSF involved in applications for resettlement were giving the 'appearance of an unpublished mass rejection policy.' In January last year, former Veterans Minister Johnny Mercer told senior government officials there was a 'significant conflict of interest that should be obvious to all' in the processing of resettlement applications by UKSF personnel. 'Decision-making power,' Mercer claimed, over 'potential witnesses to the inquiry,' was 'deeply inappropriate.' Mercer also noted that a number of former Triples soldiers had been killed by the Taliban after being left to wait in Afghanistan, including one whose application was rejected having 'previously confronted UKSF leadership about EJKs (extrajudicial killings) in Afghanistan.' The MoD initially denied UKSF personnel had a veto over the applications of former Triples soldiers, who having been armed, trained and funded by the UK, were deemed at risk of reprisals if left in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of coalition forces. However, more than 2,000 applications deemed credible by caseworkers have been rejected by the UKSF. The MoD subsequently announced a review of the applications over fears the process was not 'robust.' An additional 2,500 rejected applications were placed under review this week by the government. So far, more than 600 of the 1,585 rejections attributed to the single UKSF officer have been overturned. The revelations about the UKSF member who rejected the 1,585 applications were made at a judicial review hearing brought by former Triples soldiers over the conflict of interest in resettlement decision-making, which also heard the MoD had launched two investigations into UKSF practices. One investigation, known as Operation X, said that it 'did not obtain any evidence of hidden motives on the part of the UKSF liaison officer.' It added it found 'no evidence of automatic/instant/mass rejections,' but failed to provide evidence in its conclusion, instead suggesting the decisions were made as a result of 'slack and unprofessional verification processes' by the UKSF officer and 'lax procedures followed by the officer in not following up on all lines of enquiry before issuing rejections.' Tom de la Mare KC, representing the Afghan Triple soldier who brought the case, accused the MoD of failing to disclose evidence of blanket application rejections, and of 'providing misleading responses to requests for information,' the BBC said. Cathryn McGahey KC, acting for the MoD, said 'there might have been a better way of doing (the applications process), but that doesn't make it unlawful.' Daniel Carey, partner at law firm DPG, acting for the former Triples soldier, told the BBC: 'My client spent years asking the MoD to rectify the blanket refusals of Triples personnel and has seen many killed and harmed by the Taliban in that time. 'He is pleased that the MoD have agreed to inform everyone of the decisions in their cases and to tell the persons affected whether their cases are under review or not, but it should not have required litigation to achieve basic fairness.'
BBC News
23-05-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
One Special Forces officer blocked 1,585 Afghans from settling in UK
A UK Special Forces officer personally rejected 1,585 resettlement applications from Afghans with credible links to British commandos, newly released documents files, disclosed by the Ministry of Defence in court on Thursday, show the unnamed UKSF officer rejected every application referred to him in the summer of 2023, in what was described as a "sprint".The MoD told the court that the officer may have been connected to the ongoing inquiry into alleged war crimes committed by the admission comes after the BBC revealed last week that the UKSF officer – who previously served in Afghanistan rejected the applications from Afghans who may have witnessed the alleged war crimes. Afghan commandos, known as the Triples, supported the SAS and SBS for years in Afghanistan and were in danger of reprisal after the Taliban seized back the country in thousands of UK resettlement applications containing credible links to the Triples were rejections came at a time when a public inquiry in the UK had begun investigating allegations that British special forces had committed war crimes on operations in Afghanistan where the Triples were the Afghan commandos were in the UK, they could be called as witnesses - but the inquiry has no power to compel testimony from foreign nationals who are officials raised concerns as early as October 2022 about the role of the UKSF in rejecting applications with links to the Triples units, the new documents a witness statement submitted to court, Natalie Moore, the head of the UK's Afghan resettlement team, wrote that she became concerned the UKSF was applying a practice of "automatic rejections" with regard to Triples, giving rise to the "appearance of an unpublished mass rejection policy".In January 2024, following the BBC's revelation of the existence of a UKSF veto over applications, then-Veterans Minister Johnny Mercer warned senior cabinet ministers in writing of a "significant conflict of interest that should be obvious to all".The veto gave the UKSF "decision-making power over... potential witnesses to the inquiry", Mercer said, calling the arrangement "deeply inappropriate".In the same letter, Mercer said that he had seen evidence that five former Triples had been killed by the Taliban after their resettlement applications were rejected. And in a meeting with Ms Moore, he highlighted a case in which an applicant was rejected having "previously confronted UKSF leadership about EJKs [extrajudicial killings] in Afghanistan".Despite concerns first being raised internally in October 2022 - and again between October 2023 and January 2024 - in March 2024 the MoD denied to both the BBC and Parliament that UKSF had had a veto over the former commandos' applications. The Triples - so-called because their designations were CF 333 and ATF 444 - were set up, trained, and paid by the UKSF. When Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, they were judged to be in grave danger of reprisal and were entitled to apply for resettlement to the more than 2,000 applications judged by resettlement caseworkers to have credible evidence were subsequently rejected by the MoD later announced a review of more than 2,000 rejected applications after finding that the decisions were "not robust". Earlier this week, Armed Forces Minster Luke Pollard announced a new phase of the review to take into account up to 2,500 further cases which may have been improperly of the former Triples who were denied visas have since been tortured and killed by the Taliban, according to testimony from former colleagues, family members and documents disclosed in court on Thursday, as part of a judicial review case brought by a former member of the Triples, reveal that the government launched two investigations that examined the actions of the UKSF and the allegations of a conflict of interest at the heart of the Triples rejections.A summary of one of those investigations, known as Operation X, said it "did not obtain any evidence of hidden motives on the part of the UKSF liaison officer" and found "no evidence of automatic/instant/mass rejections" of the Triples by the UKSF - but provided no evidence to back up those instead concluded that the more than 2,000 rejections of Triples were down to "slack and unprofessional verification processes" by the UKSF liaison officer and "lax procedures followed by the officer in not following up on all lines of enquiry before issuing rejections". More than 600 of those rejections have since been Panorama reported recently that the rejection of the Triples applications had been overseen by Gen Jenkins, who was head of the UKSF at the time and was promoted last week to be the head of the Royal the court documents, the MoD said that Gen Jenkins had no involvement with the applications and that he had not appointed the UKSF officer who rejected de la Mare KC, representing the former Triple who brought the case, accused the MoD of breaching its duty of candour in the case by failing to disclose evidence of a blanket practice of rejection of the Triples further accused the MoD of providing misleading responses to requests for information. Cathryn McGahey KC, representing the MoD, told the court she did "not seek to excuse or underplay in any way the provision of inaccurate answers", and she apologised for the fact that the MoD had previously told the court that no veto case is examining whether the review of the rejected Triples applications was conducted in a lawful manner. Ms McGahey told the court that "there might have been a better way of doing it, but that doesn't make it unlawful".Daniel Carey, partner at DPG, the law firm acting on behalf of the former Triples, said: "My client spent years asking the MoD to rectify the blanket refusals of Triples personnel and has seen many killed and harmed by the Taliban in that time."He is pleased that the MoD have agreed to inform everyone of the decisions in their cases and to tell the persons affected whether their cases are under review or not, but it should not have required litigation to achieve basic fairness."
The Independent
22-05-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Process for allowing Afghan troops to UK ‘a disaster area' that could be likened to ‘a crime scene', court hears
The process for determining whether former members of Afghan special forces who served alongside British troops in Afghanistan can be resettled to the UK was a 'disaster area' so terrible it could be likened to a 'crime scene', the High Court has heard. Thousands of applications for sanctuary from Afghans with credible links to special forces units CF333 and ATF444, known as the Triples, were rejected by the Ministry of Defence (MoD). Their pleas for help were rebuffed by the government despite these units being paid and trained by the British and the soldiers fighting alongside UK special forces (UKSF) in Afghanistan. The MoD is undertaking a review of some 2,000 applications of Afghans linked to the units, after The Independent, along with Lighthouse Reports, Sky News and the BBC exposed how they were being denied help. The court heard that the review of some 2,000 applications is only looking at cases that were referred by MoD caseworkers to UK special forces for input. UK special forces had power over the UK sanctuary applications of Afghan allies amid an ongoing inquiry into potential war crimes in Afghanistan. Concerns have been raised by MPs about the potential conflict of interest of allowing UKSF a role in the resettlement process. The inquiry has been investigating alleged war crimes committed on raised by UKSF between 2010 and 2013. Members of the UKSF have been accused of killing unarmed Afghans, planting weapons on them, falsifying reports and then covering up the crimes. The High Court also heard that the MoD rejected the resettlement application of one senior commander from the Triples units, who was in the units at the time of a key incident being examined in the Afghan war inquiry. A former senior member of the Triples, who is now in the UK, is bringing the legal challenge on behalf of commandos still in Afghanistan - challenging how the review has been carried out. The case is an application for judicial review which, if granted, would see the scheme further challenged in the courts. Thomas de la Mare KC, for the claimant, told the court on Wednesday that there had been an effective blanket ban on approvals for these ex-servicemen who fought side-by-side with the British forces. He told the court that decisions on whether to help these Afghans were 'life and death decisions', with Triples members or their families being murdered or tortured because of their support for UK forces. Speaking about the decision-making within the MoD, he said: 'The decision-making process prior to the review is almost a crime scene, it's a disaster area.' He added: 'It's almost as disastrous an area of decision-making as it's possible to conceive.' He argued that information about how the approvals were made should be made public 'to restore public confidence and trust in the decision-making process'. Mr de la Mare continued: 'There is a widespread perception that there is an issue of conflict of interest or bias in this process. Those conflicts of interest were vented very clearly in January 2024, and they were a key part in the decision-making process.' The court also heard that political pressure was put on MoD decision-makers to 'sprint' through resettlement cases. This prompted concerns about the quality of decision-making, which resulted in an internal review where 'a pattern of blanket refusal of Triples claims referred to UKSF became obvious', the court was told. Flaws in the decision-making process included people being 'inappropriately reliant on UKSF personnel', particularly 'during the 'sprints' that took place through the summer of 2023', the court heard. Caseworkers before the review lacked access to relevant records and were insufficiently experienced. The court heard that then-minister for veterans affairs, Johnny Mercer, wrote to Oliver Dowden in January 2024 to raise concerns about how the process was being carried out. He highlighted that the role of UKSF personnel in the decision-making process was 'deeply inappropriate' and represented a 'significant conflict of interest'. Mr de la Mare added that until the Triples review was announced in February 2024, a 'vanishingly small' number of the special forces commandos had been approved for relocation to the UK. He told the court that senior ministers had decided to conduct a review 'on the basis that all credible claims of Triples membership were in scope'. However, Mr de la Mare said this had been narrowed to just re-examine cases where the Afghan applicant's case had been referred to UK special forces. The hearing is due to conclude on Friday, with a decision expected in writing at a later date.
