Three years after the fall of the previous regime, the UK has announced that it will allow elite Afghan soldiers who have fought in Afghanistan alongside the country’s soldiers and are eligible to settle in the UK.
Kabul 24: Luke Pollard; The Parliamentary Deputy of the Ministry of Defense of the United Kingdom has announced to the members of the House of Commons on Monday, 23, that he will allow some elite Afghan soldiers who have fought in Afghanistan alongside the British soldiers and are eligible to settle in the United Kingdom.
The previous British government had rejected the residency requests of nearly 2,000 elite Afghan forces, known as the “three numbers”.
These forces are members of the CF 333 and ATF 444 units of the Afghan special forces, which were known as the “three-number” units and were known for fighting alongside the British forces in the war.
The story of these soldiers came to the fore in February 2024 after the BBC’s Panorama investigative program exposed the rejection of Afghan commandos’ request to enter British soil.
These Afghan commandos had fought shoulder to shoulder with the British special forces inside Afghanistan against security threats, and the rejection of their visa application after the re-establishment of power in Kabul was considered a betrayal by the British army.
Luke Pollard; The UK’s Parliamentary Under-Secretary-General for Defense told MPs that reviews show that some applications for residency have been wrongly refused.
Mr. Pollard, who previously followed the situation of these Afghan forces as a member of parliament, emphasized on Monday that no evidence based on “Sunni” was found in these investigations, and that only mistakes in document storage were the reason for rejecting their request.
The three-number Afghan Special Forces had been launched with financial and training support from the UK.
According to Mr. Pollard, so far 25% of rejected applications have been reviewed and accepted.
This British official has said that new evidence shows that some Afghan soldiers were receiving salaries directly from the British government, which means they were entitled to be settled in the UK, and the neglect of this issue during the review of applications had led to their rejection.
According to him, this problem occurred due to “failure to access and share relevant and correct digital documents and the challenges of information flow throughout the Ministry of Defense”.
Luke Pollard, meanwhile, criticized the previous British government for seriously failing to track down the right documents.
In February, the previous British Conservative government announced a review of the fate of 2,000 of these applications.
The review comes after James Hippie, the undersecretary of defense for the armed forces, admitted that the decision-making process for some of the requests was “not robust”.
Mr. Pollard emphasized that the review does not mean that all three-number applicants are eligible, and the officials of the Ministry of Defense are still reviewing some of these applications.
