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resettlement team, voiced concern that UKSF involved in applications for resettlement were giving the “appearance of an unpublished mass rejection policy.”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.”
