The loyal soldiers left behind in Afghanistan

Hi Sparkies,

Before we dive in to the main newsletter, I wanted to let you know about an event my colleague Grace is running this week – and how you can get FREE tickets!

A large part of our work as impact producers at TBIJ is building networks around our stories and listening to the communities most affected by the issues we uncover. That’s why Grace in the environment team is co-hosting an event during London Climate Action Week this Friday called Voices from the Amazon: Our Stories, Our Solutions. It’s a full day of talks, Q&As and a film screening about the Amazon.

The next climate negotiations will be held in the Amazon region, in Brazil, and so it’s crucial to hear from civil society, activists, artists and academics who are actually from the region about what their challenges, demands and solutions are. The event is ticketed, but we have exclusively free tickets for TBIJ supporters and subscribers. Just enter TBIJKAYEB at checkout when you register.

Now, on with the newsletter! This week I’ve got a special guest edition for you from Tessa Pang, an impact editor at Lighthouse Reports. 

Lighthouse is an investigative newsroom that publishes deeply reported stories in the public interest in collaboration with media around the world. Last year, Ariadne Papgapitos told us about a remarkable investigation they did into biometric ID cards and the deals behind them. This time, Tessa’s got the latest on how the newsroom held the UK government to account over its treatment of Afghan soldiers.

When Kabul fell in 2021, a group of elite Afghan soldiers known as the Triples scrambled to help Afghans and Brits escape. They were ordered by the British military to secure the airport, providing safe passage for thousands of evacuees. For two decades, the Triples had been training and fighting alongside UK Special Forces, receiving British wages and risking their lives on joint UK military-led operations.

The British government pledged in 2021 to relocate Afghans who served alongside the UK military in Afghanistan to safety in Britain – yet the Triples were abandoned.

Despite overwhelming evidence of their service to the UK, their relocation applications were rejected. Our investigation with The Independent and Sky News found that dozens of Triples were tortured, disappeared or killed by the Taliban in the two years since the fall of Kabul. 

Nearly a year after we exposed this abandonment, the British government admitted it was wrong, reversed its position and began relocating members of the Triples to the UK.

Alongside campaigners, politicians, veterans and legal advocates, here’s how we helped force a dramatic U-turn and a path to safety for those left behind.

When we began reporting, many of the Triples’ supporters – campaigners, lawyers and veterans – doubted the government could be moved. The first breakthrough was finding hard evidence of the close relationship between the Triples and the UK Special Forces: internal documents showing the Triples were on a British payroll and military sources who described their relationship as “completely symbiotic”.

Our first story prompted extensive debate in the UK parliament about the plight of the Triples, with shadow ministers writing to the government repeatedly to highlight the findings of our reporting. Two defence ministers, the immigration minister and the foreign secretary faced questions about the Triples from the dispatch box in the weeks following publication.

In a significant moment, on 1 February 2024, the armed forces minister James Heappey admitted in the Commons that there had been a “failure of process” in deciding on Triples’ applications for relocation. He announced that all rejected cases of Triples would be independently reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This was a major policy U-turn and a huge win for the safety of Triples members left behind in Afghanistan. 

This change wasn’t achieved only through hard evidence. It was about strategy. At Lighthouse we know that journalism alone cannot move the needle on an issue. We see ourselves as part of a diverse community pushing for accountability for wrongdoing. We treat sources not just as informants, but as agents of change. We kept lines open with campaigners so they could time campaigns to coincide with publication, and gave legal advocates advance notice of our findings so they could use them as evidence in court proceedings. We also prompted key ministers and veterans to raise the issue in parliament. The government felt the heat from all sides.

Later, in collaboration with BBC Panorama, we uncovered internal Ministry of Defence documents showing that UK Special Forces had been quietly vetoing Triples’ applications, including those from Afghan soldiers who said they’d witnessed alleged war crimes by British troops. At a time when UK Special Forces were being scrutinised by a public inquiry for alleged civilian killings in Afghanistan, the conflict of interest was glaring.

“When I look back, I love my country more than myself, my family. I was optimistic for my country. I worked from the core of my heart for my country.

I’m Mo, I worked with the military and security sector for 19 years in Afghanistan. I’m a military guy. When the war broke out and the UK Special Forces came, from day one we were like family members, brothers. No difference between my blood and British blood. No disrespect, no distrust. We were eating together, exercising together, like family.

It was because of this that they promised us safety in the UK after the fall of Kabul. So I applied.

I was refused twice. After once, you lose hope. But I was rejected twice.

While I was waiting I had no job, no money. I’m grateful for the support of British human rights campaigners who supported me during this time and the lawyers and journalists who kept pushing for the government to stick to their promise.

When the law was finally changed, to get out of Afghanistan we had to go the long way around. We took a bus ten hours to get out of Afghanistan to the border of Pakistan. Every minute of that ten-hour journey I was in fear. It wasn’t until we crossed the border to Pakistan that I felt finally safe. After three long years of waiting.

I’m happy to be safe now. I’ve started language classes and I’ve had meetings with the local authorities on how to transfer all my previous skills to another life.

But I still think about those for whom it’s too late. I think about my former colleague who was recently captured by the Taliban. I think about a guy I fought alongside who lost both of his legs. I think about my parents who are still in Afghanistan, my two brothers who also fought in the war.”

Telling powerful stories is just the beginning. It’s thanks to our partnerships with civil society, affected communities, policymakers, lawyers, content creators and more that our stories lift off the newspages to light new paths to impact. 

Since it’s summertime and many of us are looking for something a bit lighter, I’ll leave you with a slightly offbeat recommendation. I recently watched season two of The Rehearsal and couldn’t help but see it as one giant impact experiment. It poses a wild question: what if you had a multimillion-dollar HBO budget to improve aviation safety? It’s funny, strange and oddly relevant to impact-driven work. 

Thank you, Tessa!

See you next week!