UK Evacuates Afghan Staff After Leaving Documents for Taliban to Find

The UK had to scramble to evacuate Afghans who worked for them after British embassy staff in Kabul left behind sensitive documents revealing their identities in the former diplomatic compound, leaving them in danger of retribution from the Taliban.

The discovery of the documents by a journalist sparked urgent efforts by UK Foreign Office officials to rescue the named individuals, resulting in three Afghan staff and their family members being flown out on evacuation flights this week. But the fates of some of the others whose names were left behind are unknown.

Anthony Lloyd, a journalist for the The Times of London, found the documents scattered near the ashes of a barbecue in the backyard of a British embassy residence, as he visited Kabul’s abandoned diplomatic quarter while accompanied by a Taliban patrol on Tuesday.

The documents included the names and contact details of seven Afghans, both embassy staff members and people who had applied for jobs as interpreters.

The abandoned documents should have been destroyed under the embassy’s evacuation protocols, indicating that staff were caught off guard by the sudden Taliban advance. 

They represented an obvious security risk to those named, amid reports that the Taliban have been going door-to-door, rounding up individuals on a “blacklist” of those who worked alongside Western forces in the country. Last week, the Taliban reportedly killed a relative of an Afghan journalist who had been working for the German state broadcaster DW.

The Times called the numbers and found that while some of the named people had been evacuated, others had been left behind – including three embassy staff and eight family members, five of them children, who were stranded in crowds at Kabul airport, unable to reach the section under British control. The newspaper passed on their details to the Foreign Office, which said it then coordinated their evacuation.

The Foreign Office said in a statement it had attempted to destroy the documents and other sensitive material.

“During the drawdown of our Embassy every effort was made to destroy sensitive material,” it said.

“We have worked tirelessly to secure the safety of those who worked for us, including getting three families to safety.

The Foreign Office was grateful to the Times for sharing the information and working with officials to enable the evacuation of the stranded Afghan employees, a source said.

British MP Tom Tugendhat, chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee chairman, said that a Parliamentary inquiry would be conducted into the incident.

"How @FCDOGovUK handled this crisis will be the subject of a coming @CommonsForeign inquiry. The evidence is already coming in,” he tweeted Wednesday night.