Former UK diplomat reveals government's 'failure' in evacuation from Afghanistan

A former UK diplomat has claimed on Tuesday said that the United Kingdom government's chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan led to people being left to die at the hands of the Taliban.

In a 40-page report presented to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Raphael Marshall, who was a desk officer at the Foreign Ministry at the time, wrote that "fewer than 5 per cent" of the 75,000 to 150,000 Afghans who applied for evacuation before the Taliban takeover in August received help from the UK government, Sputnik reported.

"It is clear that some of those left behind have since been murdered by the Taliban," he claimed.

Sputnik quoting Marshall reported that no member of the team working on these cases had "studied Afghanistan, worked on Afghanistan previously, or had a detailed knowledge of Afghanistan."

"At the height of the crisis on the afternoon of Saturday 21 August, I was the only person monitoring and processing emails in the Afghan special cases inbox," he added.

Marshall, who quit the department on September 21, also said that junior officials were "scared by being asked to make hundreds of life and death decisions about which they knew nothing," as per Sputnik.

Another claim made by the whistleblower refers to the Foreign Office receiving an instruction from Prime Minister Boris Johnson to use "considerable capacity" to help animals that were being cared for by the Nowzad Dog charity run by a former Royal Marine commando leave Afghanistan.

"There was a direct trade-off between transporting Nowzad's animals and evacuating British nationals and Afghans evacuees, including Afghans who had served with British soldiers," he said.

He also accused the then foreign minister, Dominic Raab, of showing a misunderstanding of the haphazard process and desperate position at Kabul airport by delaying several emergency evacuation referrals.

( With inputs from ANI )