Britain’s then-foreign secretary Dominic Raab took several hours to respond to urgent requests, while Prime Minister Boris Johnson insisted that vital resources were used to evacuate animals rather than people, according to the UK Foreign Office. An ex-employee made the allegation in written testimony in Parliament. Tuesday.
“Many of these emails were not read,” Marshall wrote, estimating that 75,000 to 150,000 people had requested help and only 5% received it. “It is clear that some of those left behind have been murdered by the Taliban,” he said.
Marshall also criticized the organization of the Foreign Office, claiming that at some point he was the only person monitoring the email inboxes of evacuation requests.
The employee turnover resulted in “many hours of chaos while people attempted to work,” he said, while a colleague “was clearly intimidated by being asked to make hundreds of life-and-death decisions about which he was made.” Didn’t know anything.”
Marshall also said that despite limited capacity at the airport and countless incomplete evacuation requests, significant resources were used to evacuate dogs and workers from the animal rights NGO Naujad at Johnson’s request.
“There was a direct trade-off between carrying Naujad’s animals and evacuating British civilians and Afghans, including Afghans serving with British troops,” he said.
On Tuesday, Johnson refused to order the Naujad evacuation, calling the claim “absolute nonsense.”
“I think Operation Pitting, the way we did over the summer to airlift 15,000 people out of Kabul, was one of the outstanding military achievements of the last 50 years or so,” Johnson said.
Marshall wrote that “by 21 August, it was inevitable that most Afghans appealing for evacuation from Britain would be left behind and some would be killed by the Taliban.” He recalled a particular senior Afghan soldier who wanted to leave the country with his family and whose case was exposed to the department by a conservative lawmaker.
“I believe this family did not succeed in entering the airport. Bureaucratic delays may have been a factor,” Marshall wrote.
Raab’s response to the Afghanistan crisis had already drawn heavy criticism. He was dropped from his role weeks later.
When personal evacuation cases were submitted to Raab for approval, “it took several hours for the Foreign Secretary to engage,” Marshall wrote. And when the minister responded, he asked for some requests to be reformatted, suggesting that “he doesn’t fully understand the situation.”
“There was little time left for anyone to enter the airport, so (v) the reason for the foreign secretary’s delay suggests that he did not understand the hopeless situation at Kabul airport,” Marshall said.
Raab first received a flurry of criticism when it emerged that he was on holiday in Greece as the Taliban took control of Afghanistan. It later emerged that, shortly before the fall of Kabul, faced with demands for his resignation, he called a deputy to the Afghan Foreign Minister regarding the evacuation of interpreters working with the British Armed Forces. asked to handle; The call never happened.
Johnson demoted Raab to Justice Secretary during the September reshuffle.
CNN has contacted Raab’s office for a response to the claims. In an interview with the BBC on Tuesday, he said Marshall was a “relatively junior desk officer” and defended his then-department’s response. “We did the best we could in very difficult circumstances… only America, with a large group of citizens and people working for them, pulled more (people) out,” Raab said.
A UK government spokesman told CNN in a statement: “Staff worked tirelessly to evacuate more than 15,000 people from Afghanistan within a fortnight. It was the largest mission of its kind in generations and undertaken by any country.” Gaya was the second biggest evacuation. We are still working to help others leave.
“The scale of the evacuation and the challenging circumstances meant that priority decisions had to be made quickly to ensure that we could help as many people as possible … sadly, we were not able to evacuate them all.” We were the ones we wanted, but our commitment to them is lasting.”
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