UK government makes U-turn on Afghan embassy guards

The government has made a dramatic U-turn on its refusal to offer support to a team of 125 Afghan guards who protected the British embassy in Kabul, and has promised they will all be granted the right to enter the UK.

The decision followed growing criticism of the government’s rejection of applications for help for all the Afghan national members of the embassy security team, because they had been hired through an outsourced contractor.

The Guardian reported on Thursday that most of the 125-member security team had been informed they were ineligible for the UK’s emergency evacuation scheme because they had been employed by the international security firm GardaWorld, rather than being “directly employed by her majesty’s government”.

The guards, many of whom have worked at the embassy for more than 10 years, had also been given informal notice that they no longer had jobs now that the Kabul embassy has closed.

On Friday evening, a UK government spokesperson said that decision had been overruled.

“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,” the spokesperson said.

Earlier in the day the armed forces minister, James Heappey, had preemptively suggested that the guards had already been brought to Kabul airport on Friday morning to be evacuated.

“My understanding is that the GardaWorld convoy, which is the contractors you are referring to, arrived at Kabul airport and they are indeed in the process of being evacuated,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. Asked why was their passage was ever in doubt, he replied: “I don’t know.”

Heappey may have been referring to a GardaWorld operation to evacuate several hundred expat staff, some British employees and some Indian and Nepalese ex-Gurkhas.

Several guards expressed dismay that it was being reported on the BBC that they had been taken by convoy to the airport for an evacuation flight.

“That is not true. We have had no news of an evacuation,” the team’s Kabul-based manager said. One of the guards said he remained in hiding in Kabul and had had no contact either from British officials or from GardaWorld, the company which employed the guards on contract to the embassy. “No one has been sent to escort us to the airport,” he said.

The guards said they were concerned that their highly-visible work for the British embassy would make them easily identifiable targets for the Taliban, and said they had no faith in the Taliban promises of an amnesty for people who had worked for foreign organisations.

The announcement that they would be helped to leave Afghanistan came late on Friday night, and it was not clear whether the guards had been informed that they were now eligible for assistance in leaving the country.

The process of how to get them to the airport where a small team of British officials is still issuing visas is not likely to be straightforward – and there is not much time before the evacuation flights are set to be suspended. Armed forces minister Heappey said earlier that it might not be possible to evacuate everyone, warning that flights could end as soon as Sunday.

A local GardaWorld manager was asked at midnight on Thursday night by London-based colleagues to put together the names and passport details of all the Afghan-national staff who have worked on the British embassy contract. “I’ve shared many lists, many times. This should all have been done weeks ago. We’re waiting for a response,” he said.

Oliver Westmacott, the president of GardaWorld’s Middle East operations, said staff were “working round the clock now with the FCDO to get all our local staff processed and hopefully out”.