Former Afghan commando who served with British forces deported from Pakistan with family after UK fail to relocate him
A.While Ziz’s family was sitting down for dinner in their cramped hotel room in Islamabad, there was a knock on the door. When her nine-year-old daughter opened the door, she was met with a group of uniformed Pakistani police officers wearing helmets and carrying rifles.
Outside the hotel window, police cars lined the street. About 50 police officers were going door to door at the hotel, looking for people whose visas had expired or who could not prove they would leave the country soon.
Aziz knew what this meant. A former Afghan commando who fought “shoulder to shoulder” with UK forces, he and his family had been given permission to start a new life in Britain, away from the Taliban. Months later, they were still in a temporary hotel in Pakistan awaiting transfer elsewhere, and the threat of deportation was growing.
Within 48 hours, most of the family members, including a four-year-old child and a newborn baby, were rounded up with only the clothes on their backs and sent back to their native Afghanistan, the country from which they had been liberated by British troops less than a year earlier.
Independent and Lighthouse Reports has now pieced together how this family, whose lives were considered at risk in Afghanistan, were deported despite being in the custody of the British government. Through interviews with the family and the correspondence and documents they shared, we discovered that this deportation took place at a time when the UK authorities were aware of what was happening.
Ministers are accused of “virtually abandoning” Aziz and his family, who were approved to relocate under Arab, the Ministry of Defense’s (MoD) flagship relocation scheme for those supporting UK forces.
The family is currently hiding in Afghanistan, fearing for their lives. Through voice notes he shared with one of his sons, Aziz said: “If I am not evacuated from Afghanistan, I will face certain death. My entire focus is on securing my family to prevent them from being killed by the Taliban.”
But it seems the UK government isn’t even trying to save the family. Aziz was informed that the British High Commission wanted to return their passports and luggage left in the hotel room in Afghanistan.
The shocking story raises questions about how long it will take for the British government to make Afghans eligible for resettlement in the UK. Concerns about the safety of those awaiting asylum intensified this year after it was revealed that a major data breach by the Ministry of Defense had led to the personal data of 18,700 applicants for the UK’s Afghan resettlement schemes being leaked, following the lifting of an unprecedented injunction. Aziz’s family was among those caught in this breach and as a result they had to be given priority.
We reveal that more than 100 former Afghan security forces have been killed fighting alongside British and US soldiers in Afghanistan in the last two years, one of them killed in front of his wife and children.
‘Will they take action when my family dies?’
Aziz, who was wearing only tracksuit bottoms, a thin T-shirt and slippers, appeared before the police and asked if he could change his clothes, but he was refused.
Instead, in chaotic and terrifying scenes, the pajama-clad children, along with other family members, were loaded into police trucks and taken away without being given the opportunity to retrieve anything from their rooms.
Three family members, along with Aziz’s son Rayan, his wife and young child, managed to avoid deportation by hiding in a hotel toilet. Instead, while his family was being removed, Rayan sent panicked WhatsApp messages to British High Commission caseworkers, asking for help.
Rayan’s brother, one of the family members who was taken to the deportation camp, called him from the site and said that their 8-month-old baby was in a bad condition. His wife had stopped breastfeeding and they had no access to baby food or clean water.
“They’re taking my family to the border. They’re on their way,” he wrote to the social worker. He then continued: “They are already in the car and have left the camp.”
Rayan wrote again: “Will they take action when my parents die?”
The response said, “There is no update from London or the Pakistani government. We will update if this position changes.”
In the days before the family’s detention, Rayan said he feared the family would be sent back to Afghanistan as Pakistan increased deportations and police raids became more frequent. “No matter how hard we try to endure these nightmares, it gets harder every day,” he said.
He wrote of the delay while waiting to move to the UK: “I don’t even know what to worry about first – the difficult living conditions, the fear of being arrested by the police or the uncertainty about what decision will be made on our case”.
‘England neglected us’
Aziz served with elite commando force 444, known as the Triad, one of two Afghan special forces units trained and funded by the British.
Independent and Lighthouse Reports first contacted the family in 2023; When we revealed that Aziz and hundreds of other former Threes had been wrongly refused to move to the UK and many had been harmed by the Taliban as a result.
Following this investigation, the Ministry of Defense admitted that faulty decision-making had led to Triples’ asylum application in Britain being wrongly rejected, and that the government would re-examine hundreds of Triples’s rejected cases. Aziz’s rejection was overturned and the family was approved.
Following this, the British government moved the family to a safe house in Afghanistan and then transferred them to a hotel in Islamabad to await relocation.
The family moved into the hotel in the fall of 2024 with two young babies born while they waited to be taken to safety.
The family was awaiting deportation. In January this year, Pakistani police detained them and took them to a camp. They were released, but the UK government’s subsequent failure to resettle them left them further damaged. “They clearly stated [in January] Next time we catch you, we will deport you,” Rayan said.
The family is now desperately worried about their safety in Afghanistan. They managed to avoid the worst fear of arrest at the border, as they were sent back without any documents. Since they still had passports from the British High Commission in Islamabad, border officials stamped their hands in place of the passports.
“I lost my entire life and property in Afghanistan before being transferred to Pakistan. Now that I and my family have been deported, my problems have quadrupled,” Aziz said in voice notes.
“I think the British government has neglected the situation of my family and me. I want the British government and relevant organizations to help us get out of this situation.”
In September, Armed Forces Minister Al Carns confirmed, in response to a parliamentary question, that 13 Afghans in the custody of the British High Commission in Islamabad had been deported. The response stated that there were approximately 30 more Afghans in Pakistan under British custody in Islamabad at the beginning of September.
Rayan explained: “Before coming to Pakistan, we were living in safe houses in Afghanistan for two months as the threats against my father, who served in 444, were high.
“The whole time we’ve been living in Pakistan has been a pretty uncertain situation. We’ve checked with the Ministry of Defense and the British High Commission in Islamabad to see if there are any problems with our documents, but we haven’t been notified of any problems.”
“My family spent 48 hours at the deportation centre, and during this time I tried very hard to reach Arab, the British Council and the British embassy, but it was no use. They said they couldn’t help us,” he said.
‘All except abandoned’
Wendy Chamberlain, Liberal Democrat MP and Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Afghan Women, said: “The British government has grossly botched the Afghan Resettlement Plans.
“It is shocking that almost a third of Afghans in the custody of the British High Commission in Islamabad have been deported. This ex-Triple’s case shows how much the British government has failed.”
“He was trained and worked with British Special Forces. Waiting for the support we promised for years has now been almost completely abandoned. What happens to him and his family rests on our shoulders.”
“The government cannot pretend to have fulfilled its obligations to the Afghan forces and translators who sided with our soldiers, or to the minorities, women and girls it abandoned. Four years on from the fall of Kabul, Britain must do much more.”
The Ministry of Defense said it did not comment on individual cases but would honor commitments to eligible Afghans who completed all relevant relocation checks.
A spokesman added: “As the public rightly expect, anyone arriving in the UK must undergo stringent security and entry checks before relocating, which can take a significant amount of time.”
Names have been changed to protect identities.
