Inside the scramble to save Afghans from Taliban peril

In February 2022, sitting in an office not far from the Ministry of Defence's Whitehall HQ, a member of the armed forces pressed "send" on two emails. Two emails that would spark one of the most extraordinary secret government operations in modern history over fears that 100,000 lives were in danger.

- HOLLY BANCROFT SOCIAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT

They would lead to an unprecedented gagging order on the British press through a superinjunction; claims that parliament was being misled; and the largest covert evacuation in UK peacetime, projected to cost the taxpayer billions.

In the wake of the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August 2021, tens of thousands of Afghans at risk of reprisals for fighting alongside British troops had asked the UK to bring them and their families to safety. Six months on, an 80-strong MoD team was working through the difficult task of assessing these applications, deciding if they should be approved or denied on the strength of each applicant’s ties to UK forces.

The British serviceman, in his office in Whitehall, thought his Afghan contacts might be able to help establish who was eligible for help and who was not. He decided to email the database, which he believed contained 150 names, to trusted sources. But the document in fact contained 33,000 records, and the details of more than 18,000 Afghan applicants and their loved ones.

He pressed send twice, apparently unaware of the extent of the data he was sending because of hidden rows within the spreadsheet. Only now, after a nearly two-year legal battle involving the country’s most prominent judges and media organisations – including The Independent - can the astonishing story of what happened next finally be told.

Scramble

It was on 14 August 2023, 16 months after the spreadsheet was shared, that the crisis began for the government.

On that day, an anonymous member of a Facebook group, set up for people applying to resettlement schemes created by the UK government, wrote a post in which they claimed to be in possession of a database containing 33,000 records. “What do you think?” the person posted, asking the 1,300 members whether they should share the details.