‘PLEASE kindly support me and my family for a safe life,” he said. “The Taliban will behead me if they catch me.
“I fled my house to an unknown location inside Kabul with my three sons, the Taliban are very close to capturing Kabul.
“The situation in Afghanistan is getting so worse.”
These are the words of a former interpreter who is looking to Scotland for a way out of Afghanistan.
READ MORE: Former British Army chief calls for Afghan aid mission to avoid refugee crisis
The 32-year-old was accepted into the UK’s 7000-place Afghan Relocation and Assistance Programme (Arap) for former support staff in May and told to prepare to leave within four weeks.
Earlier this week, the Home Office said they weren’t bringing him at all due to national security concerns.
They won’t say any more and, having already quit his job and sold his things, he’s not entitled to an appeal.
We’ve not used his name over safety concerns, and we’ve also been unable to verify the full facts of the situation.
But we know UK authorities took him and his family through the full paperwork and biometrics process before issuing the refusal.
The case is an illustration of just how confused the UK response to the Afghan situation has become in the short time since the UK and US withdrew their forces after long years of bloody war.
The Taliban have swept through regions and taken control with little resistance. Thousands of civilians are still arriving in Kabul in search of safety, with UN estimates putting the total number of displaced people at 390,000 since January.
The the number of people in need of humanitarian assistance has nearly doubled since last year.
In Kabul, Ram Krishan of Mercy Corps, which operates a base in Edinburgh, says the country “is on the brink of a massive humanitarian catastrophe”.
“Afghans are in their most critical hour of need,” Krishan said, “and the world must not abandon them”.
Last week Sabir Zazai, the chief executive of the Scottish Refugee Council, called for a show of solidarity from Scotland to bolster the beleaguered Afghan diaspora and support calls for a ceasefire.
This week, the SNP’s Bob Doris MSP has brought a motion to Holyrood expressing “grave concerns” and doing just that.
It “calls on the international community and governments at all levels, with any degree of influence, to urge all involved in the conflict, and currently involved in peace talks, to agree a ceasefire urgently, and for the Taliban to end immediately the reported revenge killings and summary executions and ensure that civil liberties, particularly for women and girls, are protected”.
That comes amid continued pressure on Boris Johnson to take decisive action.
The Prime Minister has ruled out a “military solution”, pointing instead to political and diplomatic levers such as overseas aid.
A former head of the British Army, Lord Dannatt, wants an urgent humanitarian aid operation, saying there is still time to show Afghans they were not being completely abandoned.
READ MORE: MPs in call for UK Parliament to be recalled in bid over Afghanistan situation
Labour leader Keir Starmer says Johnson should seek emergency meetings of Nato and the UN Security Council to develop a “joined-up” international response to the crisis.
Stewart McDonald, the SNP’s shadow defence spokesperson, told the Sunday National: “Despite weeks of warnings and increasingly desperate pleas for help from Afghan interpreters, the Home Office was telling Afghan asylum seekers just days ago that they could move to Kabul to escape the Taliban. As the UK Government now deploys soldiers to evacuate UK diplomats from the capital, it is clear that the Home Office’s asylum policies are as ill-informed as they are inhumane.
“The UK Government also slashed aid to Afghanistan by 78% at the same time as it announced the troop withdrawal, leaving the country’s fragile democracy to crumble.”
The news comes as Mazar-e-Sharif, the fourth-largest city in Afghanistan, fell to the Taliban yesterday after a multipronged assault launched by insurgents, according to a lawmaker.
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