The media focus on spectacle turns statistically minor events, such as the “small boats” in the English channel or horrific shipwrecks in the Central Mediterranean into the main story. But away from the polarised politics the richest bloc of countries in the world is ageing fast and its economies have critical skills shortages that migrants have a key role in filling, potentially preventing imminent economic decline.

It was in this context that one of our reporting fellows, Halima Salat Barre, a journalist who migrated from Kenya to the Netherlands shared her experience with the Lighthouse team. She was told by Dutch job centres that she would never find a job in journalism and should instead look for work in the care sector. After speaking to many migrants across Europe, she knew she wasn’t the only one facing this discrimination. So why, she asked, were EU countries making it so hard for non-natives with college degrees, like herself, to work in fields they were qualified for? Or, in fact, to find any job at all? What was the scale and cost of this neglected migrant talent, known as brain waste?

To answer this question properly we needed data. To get that data we had to persuade Eurostat, the EU’s statistical agency, to treat Lighthouse as a research entity, which would be a first for a journalism organisation. Doing so unlocked access to millions of data points of what actually happens inside Europe’s labour market. That data helped us to compare outcomes for college-educated migrants against the native population; to isolate the countries, regions and professions where brain waste was most acute.

Among the headline findings are that almost half of college-educated migrants in Europe are overqualified for the jobs they are working and nearly twice as likely as natives to be unemployed; that there is near parity in education levels between natives and new arrivals; and that educated migrant women face higher rates of unemployment.

The cost of this structural discrimination is enormous. If migrants worked the same jobs and earned the same wages as comparable natives, the European economy could grow by €33.8 billion. Moreover, after a decade of accelerated degree recognition programs, touted as quick fixes to this enormous waste, these policies have had little impact.

While brain waste is a grim reality across Europe, the root causes, severity and potential barriers to solutions differ drastically depending on the political will and economic reality of each country.

This series will dig into the data to measure the quantifiable reality of brain waste. We will report in depth on the countries and regions where lower prevalence of brain waste suggests possible solutions. And we will document the experiences of college-educated migrants whose path to success has been blocked by structural racism in countries including Spain, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, Ireland, France and the Netherlands.

STORYLINES

In many places, the economic plight of migrants is a self-fulfilling prophecy: they are locked out of the professional classes and forced into low level positions where they struggle to make a living. They are then blamed for their situation by politicians who point to their cases as failed integration. Often these migrants hold degrees in fields where there are labour shortages in the countries they live in. The victims of these labor shortages, especially in areas like health and education, can mean the next generation of Europeans suffer the consequences of Europe’s inability to tap into migrant talent, a problem only expected to get worse as Europe’s population ages.

The post Brain waste appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

In collaboration with The Independent and Sky News, we found that dozens of these former commandos – who are prime targets for the Taliban whom they spent years fighting against in joint missions with the British – had been tortured, beaten or murdered as a result of being left behind by the UK.

In light of our findings and wider campaigning, the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD), which is responsible for the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP) scheme, admitted earlier this month that there had been a “failure of process” and that it would individually review all rejected cases of these commandos – known as the ‘Triples’.

But questions remain about how such erroneous and in some cases life-threatening decisions were made – including whether the rejections were in any way linked to an ongoing public inquiry into alleged war crimes committed by UK Special Forces (UKSF) in Afghanistan.

In collaboration with BBC Panorama, we can now reveal that it was UKSF – the very forces that founded, trained, and relied on the Triples for operational support – that had been behind the decisions to reject the Triples since at least the start of last year.

An internal document we obtained reveals that UKSF had veto power over Triples applications since at least January 2023. That year there was a wave of rejections of the Triples, with many refusal letters claiming they did not serve “in partnership or alongside” the British despite many providing clear evidence to show that they did.

Former members of UKSF unit the SAS said that this decision-making power over resettlement applications created a conflict of interest, because it gave UKSF a veto over applications at a time when the forces were under investigation by the public inquiry for alleged war crimes during operations where the Afghan units were present. The public inquiry has the power to call witnesses who are in the UK, but not non-UK citizens who are overseas.

We discovered that members of the Triples who complained about and/or say they witnessed war crimes allegedly committed by UKSF have had their applications refused, despite providing reams of evidence to prove their eligibility.

METHODS

We obtained an internal government policy document which reveals that UKSF was granted veto power over Triples applications from at least January 2023. The document stipulates that if the UKSF does not approve a Triples applicant, a rejection letter should be directly sent out to the individual in question.

We’ve also seen internal MoD email correspondence in which civil servants administering the relocation scheme describe being unable to challenge UKSF rejections, even where they believed there was a strong case for resettlement.

By speaking to both current and former members of UKSF and the wider military, as well as UK government sources, we were able to build up an understanding of the role UKSF played in Triples’ relocation decisions. Sources also provided us with information about records kept by the MoD of the Triples’ service.

We spoke with former members of the Triples who provided us with the reams of documentation they had submitted to support their ARAP applications which were later rejected. We analysed their rejection emails to assess the reasons given, and spoke with lawyers who informed us that the rejection decisions appeared at odds with the ARAP eligibility criteria.

STORYLINES

Two former Triples officers we spoke to who had their applications rejected worked on operations in Afghanistan that are now under scrutiny by the public inquiry.

One made a number of complaints to the British military at the time of those operations. He alleged that the SAS had committed war crimes, and even withdrew his men from their supporting role in SAS operations in protest at what he alleged were extrajudicial killings of Afghan civilians.

Alongside their ARAP applications, the officers submitted among other evidence a printed invitation to the SAS headquarters in the UK to talk about the Triples, letters from the British embassy regarding pay and photographs with senior members of UKSF.

Both officers are now in hiding, moving from house to house. “I have been left alone in the midst of hell,” one said. “I was sure that my British colleagues and friends, who we worked for several years alongside, would help me to evacuate to safety. Now I feel that the sacrifices I made have been forgotten.”

One former UKSF officer described the force’s role in approving or denying applications as a “clear conflict of interest”.

“At a time when certain actions by UKSF are under investigation by a public inquiry, their headquarters also had the power to prevent former Afghan special forces colleagues and potential witnesses to these actions from getting safely to the UK,” they said.

Another former UKSF officer said: “At best it’s not appropriate, at worst it looks like they’re trying to cover their tracks.”

Our reporting also raises questions about the MoD’s defence of decisions to reject the Triples. Armed Forces Minister James Heappey told the House of Commons in December that it was not possible to verify members of the units because the MoD does “not hold employment records of Afghan special forces” and that there would be “simply no way to determine who did or did not serve with those units”.

However, former members of the SAS who served alongside the Triples dismissed the minister’s account, saying that the Triples were in fact paid directly by the British and that records were kept for every payment.

“I’ve seen spreadsheets where it’s very clear we paid them, not just for their service but for their skills, rank, and number of operations,” said one former officer.

If you have information about this story that you want to share, contact may@lighthousereports.com

The post Great British Betrayal appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

They had been ordered by the British military to do so and, as their unit had been doing for two decades, they followed their orders. Having worked closely alongside the British, receiving UK salaries and embarking on joint missions in the fight against the Taliban, they were confident that they would be saved once they had fulfilled these duties.

Little did they know that they would be abandoned and over the following two years many would be tortured, and some killed, by vengeful Taliban members.

In the latest in our Left Behind series, in collaboration with The Independent and Sky News, we verified dozens of cases in which the Taliban has beaten, tortured or killed former commandos who served in two special forces units trained and funded by the UK.

The men were part of Commando Force 333 (CF333), a counter-narcotics unit set up by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Ministry of Defence (MoD) in 2002, which later developed sophisticated counterterrorism and counterinsurgency capabilities. In 2007, the British expanded this work by forming a reconnaissance force called Afghan Territorial Force 444 (ATF444). These units became known as the “Triples”.

We found documentary evidence that members of CF333 and ATF444 received a salary from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The ATF444s received this until 2014, when Polish forces took charge of the unit. The CF333s were paid by the British right up until August 2021.

The units worked in what one British veteran who served alongside ATF444 for five years describes as a “completely symbiotic partnership” with the UK forces. “We ate together, fought together, died together. We were completely embedded. We were one unit. You couldn’t work more hand in glove with the British than they did,” he said.

Yet the majority of the Triples were not evacuated in August 2021, and have subsequently been rejected under the UK’s scheme for relocating Afghans who worked with the UK – known as the Afghan Relocation and Assistance programme (Arap). Most have been told this is because they did not work “alongside, in partnership with or closely supporting […] a UK government department” – despite reams of evidence to the contrary.

METHODS

We obtained a list of members of CF333 and ATF444 compiled by a former CF333 member who had previously fled to the UK. We started reaching out to them one by one, contacting more than 100 people overall. Many were able to provide photos, certificates and other documents to show that they served in the units. One had what appears to be a British pay slip with a salary amount and a signature approving it. Some of the former Triples reported that they had been arrested and tortured by the Taliban since August 2021.

Verifying alleged cases of torture or murder was challenging, given the absence of police reports or death certificates in Afghanistan and the lack of visual evidence. Multiple former commandos told us the Taliban would intentionally keep them in custody until their wounds healed, as they do not want to leave any evidence that could be reported in the media. Families were also threatened not to speak out about harms to their loved ones.

Nonetheless, we were able to gather a considerable amount of evidence supporting accounts of torture or murder. Through visual evidence of injuries including lashes to the back and beatings to the face, and in some cases dead bodies, as well as corroborating testimony gathered from the victims, family members and witnesses, we were able to verify 24 cases of harm. Of these, six were murders.

To build up a picture of the close partnership between the Triples and the UK military, we spoke to a number of British veterans who served alongside the units, including former members of UK Special Forces (UKSF). They confirmed that the Triples were paid a salary by the British government, and that for years they shared a base with British military personnel and regularly went on patrol with and took orders from them. We also used Osint techniques to dig out British Army manuals, US military and Nato/Isaf documents and other materials which describe the work of the Triples and their partnership with the UK.

To understand the reasons given by the MoD for denying the Triples relocation, we analysed dozens of rejection emails, the vast majority of which said they didn’t meet the criteria of having worked “alongside or in partnership with” the British.

Crucially, to find out why so many Triples have been rejected under Arap, we spoke to current and former MoD insiders. They informed us that it was UKSF that was effectively “blocking” the Triples from being accepted under Arap, by refusing to approve any of them. We obtained an internal government document on the Arap decision-making process, which confirmed that Triples’ cases must be approved by UKSF before they can be accepted. When approached the MoD did not deny that UKSF was refusing to approve the cases.

STORYLINES

Ahmad* was part of the CF333 squadron ordered by the British to provide security at Kabul airport during the West’s chaotic withdrawal. He had served in the unit for 13 years, during which time he had been seriously wounded twice while on missions with UKSF.

He remained in Kabul for a month, hiding from the Taliban, but it became too risky and he moved to his home village with his family. He managed to avoid any trouble for six months, but in February 2022 his home was raided by Taliban special forces and he was arrested. They questioned him about CF333 and demanded he hand over weapons that he didn’t have.

“One of them said ‘he has nothing to give us’, and said they should kill me. Then they started beating me with rifles,” recalls Ahmad. “They beat me a lot. I lost my teeth, my nose was broken. They thought I’d died. They threw me into a canal nearby.”

Ahmad’s limp body was found by locals who took him to a nearby medical clinic, where he regained consciousness. Photos from the clinic show the former sergeant with a large and bloody gash across his nose and missing front teeth.
The father-of-four received an email from the MoD in July of this year stating that he wasn’t eligible under Arap, claiming he had not “worked in Afghanistan alongside a UK government department, in partnership with or closely supporting it”.

He strongly rejects this claim. “Brits were leading our military operations, living with us in the same military camps […] It’s the famous scenario between Afghans and foreigners: we always think we have become friends, but when we need them they’re not there.”
Initially it seemed as though Ahmad’s friend and colleague, Riaz Ahmadzai, who was also in CF333 and provided security at Kabul airport during the withdrawal, would be okay.

He surrendered his weapons to the Taliban after the West’s withdrawal and they handed him a receipt stating that he would be safe. He nonetheless tried to be careful, rarely leaving the house. But in April 2023, on a rare outing to buy groceries for the family’s Eid celebrations, 24 year-old Ahmadzai was shot dead in front of his home in Jalalabad.

“There were two of them on a motorcycle. They shot him in the head, despite their general amnesty and the promise that he won’t be harmed,” says his father, who asked not to be named. “He died on the spot.”

“Riaz got killed because of his previous work with British forces. He risked his life for five years for the British, but they left him in the airport to the Taliban to be killed. They betrayed him. For trusting British forces, he paid the price with his life.”

*Name has been changed to protect identity

The post Abandoned Afghan Commandos appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

Amir’s hope of a way out increased when a few days after the fall of Kabul, the Dutch parliament voted to expand the protection policy for local personnel in Afghanistan. While previously it applied only to interpreters, now it would also include other threatened groups such as human rights defenders, journalists, fixers and “employees of Dutch development projects”, such as Amir.

However, it was not to be. Just over a week after expanding the policy, the Netherlands stopped evacuations from Afghanistan following warnings from the US military of an imminent terrorist attack on Kabul’s airport which later came to bear, killing about 180 people. Only a small number of NGO workers had managed to escape – and most of those who didn’t make it onto a flight never would. The Dutch government narrowed down the eligibility criteria considerably. It would now only apply to employees who had been working for at least a year from 2018 and held a “public, visible position”.

Amir was among those left behind and excluded from the criteria. Just over a year later he would be abducted in his own home by masked men his family say were undoubtedly members of the Taliban – and killed.

METHODS

There have been countless reported cases of abductions and deaths at the hands of the Taliban since they took power, but the security risks make them difficult to investigate and verify.

After we obtained Amir’s identity documents, as well as the correspondence showing he had tried to get onto the Dutch evacuation list, we had to do more research to understand what happened to him between his abduction and his death.

We were able to obtain information on the hospital and doctor who treated Amir, as well as a death certificate with a date and cause of death. We also got independent confirmation that Amir was not on the normal registry for patients, and was checked in “outside hospital hours”.

We also obtained internal emails corroborating claims made by Afghan employees of another Dutch NGO, Cordaid, that there was a lack of transparency and consistency in the evacuation process.

STORYLINES

It was already dark when the four men appeared at the door. Amir and his wife Zahra were still awake, sitting in the front room of their Kabul home with some of their daughters, when they were startled by the loud banging on the front door. “It was a nasty sound,” Zahra recalls the incident on the phone a few months later. “Very penetrating.”

When she opened the door, the men – dressed in black and with their faces covered – rushed in and dragged Amir outside. They told him to shut up when he asked why and said they were taking him to the Police District, then drove away

Amir had feared that this day would come for some time, says Zahra. Given his work for a women’s rights charity, funded by the Netherlands, he knew he was a target. Relatives and friends from his home region constantly warned him not to return because Taliban fighters had said they would kill him.

Sayed, Amir’s brother, remembers how previously a local Taliban leader had shown up at his door to announce that he knew his brother worked for an NGO in Kabul. “He said there were rumours going around that he was an infidel, a Christian and a spy for the foreigners.”

Hours after Amir’s abduction, Zahra received a phone call asking her to go to the hospital. She arrived and was taken to a room. There lay Amir’s lifeless body.

When she looked at him, she saw dark spots on his chest and noticed that his nose was strangely crooked on one side. She didn’t know whether they were traces of torture, but she didn’t dare to ask, afraid that the Taliban would do something to her and her children.

The four men did not say they were from the Taliban, but Zahra is certain they were behind it. “He had been threatened by the Taliban for some time because of his work,” she says. “He was a good man, he had no personal enemies. I am 100 per cent sure that they are responsible.”

Hundreds of employees of Dutch-funded charity organisations in Afghanistan feel they are in danger because of the roles they occupied. They report being regularly arrested and their homes repeatedly searched by authorities.

Several employees of Dutch NGO Cordaid told us they felt abandoned by their management, who refused to put them on the list for evacuation even though they claim they met the Dutch eligibility criteria.

They were not put on the evacuation list by their management on the grounds that their position was not “visible”. One employee said: “We were outside all day and introduced ourselves to people as Cordaid employees. In a year we met hundreds, perhaps a thousand new people. Just calculate how ‘visible’ we were.”

Anne Kwakkenbos, who was involved in the evacuations for Cordaid, is aware that some staff feel abandoned. She admits there were internal shortcomings: “I get it, if I were them I would be furious too. And believe me, some things have angered me too. But in the end we didn’t make up those rules.”

Meanwhile Amir’s family has received no support from the Dutch government. His wife Zahra is still hiding in Afghanistan: “I hope that an evacuation will be possible for us one day. I have lost my husband, my children have lost their joy.

“I don’t have the money to take care of them. I tell my children – especially my daughters – to stay indoors, as if they were prisoners. I don’t want the Taliban to do anything to them”

* Names have been changed to protect identities

The post Left for Dead appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

Germany supported a vast number of development projects in Afghanistan and employed thousands of Afghan men and women to implement them. A few months after Kabul fell, a new German government took office with a pledge to ensure that endangered Afghan local staff could be “brought to safety through unbureaucratic procedures… We will not abandon our allies.”

But two years later, in the latest instalment of our Left Behind series, an investigation by Lighthouse Reports, Süddeutsche Zeitung, WDR and NDR reveals that Germany is overlooking internal risk assessments carried out by its own development agency GIZ in order to turn away Afghan workers, some of whom have been beaten and tortured by the Taliban.

Around 6,600 Afghans have applied to Germany’s relocation program for government workers now at risk in Afghanistan, known as Ortskräfteverfahren (OKV). Some 2,500 have been rejected and 700 are still awaiting a decision. The vast majority worked for GIZ, which directly employed around 1,000 Afghan local staff in 2021 and is estimated to have employed thousands more on temporary contracts.

We verified the stories of 20 former GIZ contractors still in Afghanistan who have been threatened and in some cases physically harmed by the Taliban, who label them as “infidels” for having worked with Germany.

We also found two cases of GIZ workers who were murdered by the Taliban in the year prior to the fall of Kabul. GIZ says there is no evidence that they were killed due to their work for the organisation, but their relatives and colleagues say they’re certain that they were killed because of their jobs.

METHODS

We spoke with dozens of Afghan men and women who worked in public-facing roles for GIZ in the years before the Taliban takeover. The vast majority of them remain in Afghanistan and have either been rejected or are still awaiting a response from OKV. We interviewed relatives and colleagues of those who were killed, and former GIZ staff now in Germany who spoke in detail about the risks they and their colleagues faced.

We analysed these testimonies alongside reams of documents including GIZ contracts, photographs of injuries, medical notes and Taliban threat letters, in order to establish the extent to which former GIZ workers are at risk due to their work with the organisation.

Crucially, we obtained internal government documents that showed risk assessments carried out by GIZ deemed former workers to be at risk because of their work with the organisation. We identified a clear contradiction in the dangers GIZ concluded that its employees face and the ultimate decisions made by the German government – which reviewed the GIZ assessments as part of the OKV process.

By obtaining thousands of pages of internal correspondence between various German ministries involved in the OKV decisions, we were also able to piece together how the process for evaluating which Afghan local staff qualify for evacuation was kept intentionally narrow from the beginning.

“Things seem to be getting out of hand,” German development minister Martin Jäger wrote to high-ranking employees in his ministry in August 2021. “We run the risk that in the end too many and the wrong people will come to Germany.” Another internal government document ordered “restrictive handling” of cases of Afghan contractors.

STORYLINES

The majority of former GIZ workers we spoke to had been working for one of GIZ’s largest projects in Afghanistan, the Police Cooperation Project (PCP), which trained Afghan police officers in basic literacy skills and democratic values. It was rolled out across the country, even in remote areas which German national GIZ staff avoided for security reasons. An internal GIZ document states: “PCP employees are considered to be particularly at risk due to their visibility in public and their cooperation with the police.”

Despite working full-time for the project, often for many years, most Afghans who worked for the PCP were not considered regular employees but contractors. The German government states that OKV applications from contractors are processed in the same way as permanent employees, assessed on an “individual basis”. However, the vast majority of PCP applicants have been rejected — 1,045 out of 1,318, with only 56 so far accepted.

Gulab Ahmadi*, in his thirties, worked for over five years in a senior role for PCP up until the fall of Kabul. Now in hiding, Ahmadi lives in perpetual fear of being arrested by the Taliban. His father was arrested and questioned about his son’s whereabouts earlier this year.

After Ahmadi applied for relocation to Germany in 2022, a GIZ risk assessment concluded that he is “publicly perceived in his role, both in his activities and through the many trips to different places of work, and thus worked in a clearly exposed position,” and lives in “great fear.”

The assessment concludes: “Since [the individual] is part of the PCP as part of its work for the police, its situation must be classified as particularly endangered.”

Yet the German government rejected Ahmadi, stating that – in clear contradiction to GIZ’s risk assessment – his situation does not constitute an “individual risk that goes beyond the general risk currently prevailing in Afghanistan”.

“I made myself an enemy of the Taliban, an enemy of the people who don’t believe in democracy,” he told us. “A great injustice has been done to me here.”

Nawandish Khaliqi*, who worked for PCP for nine years, was brutally tortured by the Taliban in July 2021 after the militant group recaptured his hometown. We verified his story through photos and witness accounts and obtained an official assessment concluding that he was “exposed to a particular danger” due to his work for PCP. Yet Khaliqi is still waiting for a response to his OKV application, made over a year ago, in constant fear that he’ll be captured again.

“I had the expectation that at least the German government would evacuate me, but they left me behind with a lot of problems,” he said. “They say they respect human rights, but clearly they don’t think we deserve basic human rights.”

*Names have been changed to protect identities

The post Germany’s Afghan Betrayal appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

In May 2012, French president François Hollande stated clearly that his country should have no combat troops in Afghanistan by the end of 2012. His declaration marked the end of 11 years of war for French soldiers. The last one had left Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

Starting in May 2021, three months before the fall of Kabul, France relocated 5,500 Afghans who either worked for the French in Afghanistan (including for the military), or would face harm under the new Taliban regime for other reasons. Two operations, called “ADL” and “Apagan”, were dedicated to this evacuation effort. Both were presented as great successes by President Emmanuel Macron. “You received hundreds of calls of people asking for help and you answered those without sparing your efforts,” he said in October 2021 during a speech in front of the public servants who worked on both operations.

But a new investigation led by Lighthouse Reports, as part of our Left Behind series, indicates that neither of these stances were entirely true. France did in fact have an operation up and running on Afghan soil after 2014. Named “Shamshad”, its goal was to gather intelligence that could be used to protect France’s interests in Afghanistan, including safeguarding French territory from terrorist groups. The operation existed up until 2020 and was run by the French secret service, known as DGSE (General Direction for External Security), which reports to the French ministry of army and ministry of foreign affairs, in partnership with its Afghan counterpart, the National Directorate for Security (NDS). Former Afghan members of the division claim that the French DGSE was even paying their wages – up to $1000 per month.

For months after the Taliban takeover, former members of Shamshad were left behind in Kabul without any support. Most of them faced direct threats and went into hiding. Lighthouse Reports and partners spoke to eight of these former intelligence officers. Some have since been evacuated to France; others have managed to flee to nearby countries such as Iran and India. A number are still hiding in Afghanistan, living in constant fear of retaliation by the Taliban. Their testimony has shed new light on the French military intervention in Afghanistan – but also on France’s flawed evacuation process.

METHODS

Thanks to advocacy groups, lawyers and members of the Afghan community in Europe, we were able to contact some former members of the Shamshad division. We spent hours interviewing former officers to verify their accounts in Afghanistan, Iran, the UAE, India and France. Some of them were also able to share concrete proof of the work they did with the DGSE, from letters of mission to photographs – which we haven’t published in order to protect their security – as well as the numerous emails they sent to the French ministry of foreign affairs requesting their evacuation.

Since the existence of Shamshad was unknown prior to our work, we investigated and reached out to high-end sources, both in the French army and the Afghan forces, to confirm its existence. According to sources, it was the biggest operation of the DGSE at one point after 2014.

We also investigated the evacuation process itself. According to Afghan sources, only 30 members of Shamshad were evacuated to France. We tried to understand how and why this happened. We discovered that the French ministry of army did hold a list of more than 90 former members of the division before the fall of Kabul, which they sent to the ministry of foreign affairs. But the latter did not act until Spring 2022, six months after the Taliban takeover, despite early notice from lawyers and Shamshad members who warned them of the harms they were facing due to their previous work – and only a small number from the list were evacuated.

An email we have seen shows that on 19 August 2021, four days after the fall of Kabul, one of the agents wrote to the French ambassador in Afghanistan requesting for help. Two weeks later, French lawyers wrote to the French head of DGSE, Bernard Emié, about members of Shamshad who were requesting their help. They received no answer.

STORYLINES

For the former Shamshad officers, France did not honour its promises. Abdullah*, like two other officers now living in France, had to wait nearly six months before being evacuated. Others, nearly 30, according to several of their comrades, are still waiting to be evacuated.

Lighthouse Reports, in collaboration with Le Monde and Radio France Internationale (RFI), was able to speak to five officers in this situation, two of whom are still hiding on Afghan territory. “Emmanuel Macron said that we should not let down any colleague who has worked with the French authorities. I hope he will honour his promises,” said Zubeir*, speaking from India. “All my friends are gone, I’m the only one left who is stuck here,” grumbles Noor*, who reached the UAE with his family “on his own” when Kabul fell and is still waiting for his visa.

The risks faced by those former Shamshad agents still in Afghanistan are indisputable. In a report published in November 2021, the NGO Human Rights Watch recounted numerous reprisals already carried out by the new masters of Kabul against former intelligence agents, particularly those who – like former Shamshad agents – collaborated with the West.

*Names have been changed to protect identities

This investigation is the second instalment of our Left Behind series. The first revealed how Afghans promised relocation by the UK were facing torture and death after waiting more than a year to be evacuated.

The post France’s forgotten Afghan spies appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

In the days after the fall of Kabul, the Western country that had the second largest presence in Afghanistan after the US, the UK, pledged to launch a resettlement programme that would bring 5,000 at-risk people out of the country in its first year. The Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme (ACRS) was officially launched four months later in January 2022.

When the scheme opened, Home Office ministers pledged that it would prioritise Afghans who worked for, or were affiliated with, the UK government – specifically British embassy staff and British Council teachers and alumni of a prestigious scholarship known as Chevening – and their families.

An investigation by Lighthouse Reports has found that none of these people have been relocated under the scheme nearly a year after its launch – and that many of those left behind have faced torture and death waiting for a response from the British government.

Meanwhile, figures show that there are only between five and eight members of staff working on the ACRS, compared with 540 who were working on the Ukraine schemes earlier this year. Sources working on or close to the scheme have told us there was “unfairness” in the difference of approach to the ACRS and the Ukraine programmes, as well as “a lot of ping pong” over which government department it falls under.

METHODS

With help from advocacy groups, politicians and others, we spent three months tracing more than a dozen Afghans who fit into the three categories the ACRS pledged to relocate. We have followed them as they navigate a new world under Taliban rule, in which they are suddenly viewed as the enemy and, some told us, they are being “hunted down”. We have obtained and verified documents showing they previously roles working for or associated with the UK.

Through in-depth interviews, we gathered witness testimonies from these individuals about the physical harm they and their family members have suffered at the hands of the Taliban. We obtained photographic evidence of injuries sustained by them and their relatives after being beaten or tortured, and had a forensic physician analyse these to help establish the cause, which was consistent with what our interviewees reported. We obtained medical reports and death records in cases where people have died due to being unable to access healthcare because the Taliban was guarding hospitals.

Through open source intelligence analysis of CCTV footage, we were able to verify the moment a former British embassy interpreter’s brother was apprehended by the Taliban outside his home, beaten and forced into their car before being driven away. Forensic analysis of photographs of his subsequent injuries found that the “patches of bruising and criss-crossing red-pink weals” he sustained were “attributed to whipping”.

STORYLINES

Najwa, two, died of what should have been a curable illness last December. Her father Batoor, a former British Council teacher, was away from his family in hiding. Her mother was unable to leave the house with a mahram, a male chaperone.

Batoor eventually got in contact with the Afghanistan Medical Corps who were able to help, but by the time they got Najwa to the paediatric hospital it was too late. A medical document confirms her death and states that she was suffering from acute hepatitis, septicemia and liver failure.

In another case, Zaid, who worked at the British embassy in Kabul for 11 years before the fall of Kabul, answered a knock on the door in October 2021 to find three Taliban fighters questioning him. They accused him of working for “the infidels”, he said, before “torturing” him on the street, during which he lost consciousness.

Photographs of Zaid after the attack show dark bruising across his shoulder and arms, and his hand and head tightly bound with plaster. Forensic physician Dr Cohen said the bruising indicated “blunt force trauma” which “could be from kicking” or “other blunt force means such as a hard object”, concluding that the injuries were “typical of an assault”.

These were just a few of the accounts of torture and suffering we have verified of families who fit into the resettlement categories under the ACRS. The shortcomings in this scheme are only a snapshot of the West’s failed efforts to evacuate Afghans whom they promised to protect.

This investigation marks the start of a wider, deeper dive Lighthouse Reports will be launching into the harms being suffered by Afghans European countries have left behind.

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The post The Left Behind appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

This double standard was not an accident. The first draft of the legislation implementing the Temporary Protection Directive (TPD), a measure designed to provide protection for at least one year, contained a clause stating that all foreigners residing in Ukraine on a long-term basis – regardless of their country of origin – would be granted the same rights as Ukrainians. When the text came out of the EU council meeting this clause was gone.

This decision has had very direct consequences on the lives of many of the nearly half a million third-country nationals who were living in Ukraine before the war. The data we collected reveals that only 54,443 of these people were offered temporary protection in the EU. While some 5 million Ukrainians got refuge and rights, many non-Ukrainians were given time limits on how long they could stay, while others were refused any form of protection, rendering them undocumented.

The tens of thousands of African and South Asian students enrolled in Ukrainian universities on student visas fell outside the scope of the TPD. We spoke to more than 30 students who spent months applying to European universities, only to be told they do not meet visa conditions and language requirements. Some, already traumatised during the invasion, found themselves homeless, while others are facing imminent deportation. While native Ukrainians were met with open arms, many of their non-white classmates met with discrimination and xenophobia.

METHODS

In tandem with diaspora groups, activists and lawyers, we spent the past eight months following students who fled Ukraine. Through phone calls, voice-notes and text messages, people shared updates of their attempts to settle in EU countries as they struggled to navigate visa bureaucracies and access accommodation. Students shared email exchanges with European universities and rejection letters from the same institutions that accepted several of their Ukrainian peers.

We obtained internal documents written by German diplomats on 4 March ahead of the implementation of the TPD revealing that Poland, Austria and Slovakia were among the countries that objected to including third-country nationals in the directive.

Our partner publications reached out to their individual governments and university authorities to find out what protection measures had been implemented for third-country nationals. This revealed that a myriad of often contradictory rules were being applied. A non-bureaucratic solution was found for Ukrainians, while pragmatic reception and recognition for non-Ukrainians was denied.

We analysed and collected available data from the European Commission, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and national governments, revealing that – despite 325,000 third-country nationals fleeing Ukraine to neighbouring countries since the onset of the war, only 54,443 of them were offered temporary protection in Europe. Of those, we found that nearly a quarter were granted TPD in Portugal, the only country to give the same rights to non-Ukrainians, including international students who were in Ukraine on short-term (one year) visas.

STORYLINES

According to NIDO, the Nigerians in diaspora organisation, many international students who fled Ukraine have found themselves homeless, while others are facing imminent removal. Many have been stripped of the rights they previously had in Europe and can no longer access higher education. “We receive dozens of calls from desperate students every day asking for help with accommodation and food, as well as from depressed parents who spent all their money on their children’s tuition in Ukraine. It is so bad that some have told us they were considering suicide”, says Chibuzor Onwugbonu, a volunteer at NIDO.

In Germany, rights granted to third-country nationals fleeing the conflict vary between federal states. While some cities granted six-month non renewable visas to international students who could prove they were enrolled in Ukrainian universities, others failed to put in place adequate permits. In one instance, a student moved between six different cities and spent months struggling to find accommodation before she ended up sleeping for weeks in Berlin Central train station.

In the Netherlands, immigration authorities announced that from 19 July onwards they would stop processing applications from non-Ukrainians with safe countries to return to and that those who had obtained the status would not be allowed to apply for renewal. The Dutch government has described the act of these individuals applying to stay in the country after fleeing Ukraine as an “abuse” of the system.

In France, only 200 international students have been accepted into university. The requirements for entry include demands for a bank account with at least €3,750 and proof that accommodation has been secured (or €7,500 for those who are yet to find housing). These are the regular requirements for international students in France, but they have been waived for Ukrainian students fleeing the war. At least 10 non-Ukrainian students received “obligations to leave the French territory”, a letter threatening them with deportation.

Dutch MEP Thijs Reuten told us that omitting international students from the protection directive was not an oversight, but a decision aimed at excluding non-Europeans, suggesting an element of racism: “It seems almost certain to me that the countries of origin of the international students played a role”. Cornelia Ernst, German MEP, said the restriction was “solely a political decision”, which was “strongly criticised at the time”, adding: “In practice, this led to first- and second-class protection seekers fleeing Ukraine – an unacceptable discrimination.”

We also reported on the difficulties facing third-country nationals attempting to join their families in the UK. Deborah, a 19-year old Nigerian medical student who was studying in Kharkiv, has spent months trying to join her parents and siblings in the North of England. Despite fleeing war, and her family being settled in the UK, the British government’s scheme for people fleeing the Russian invasion does not accept applicants who are not Ukrainian or related to a Ukrainian national. UK government data shows that even those who are related to Ukrainians – indicating that they should be eligible – have a far higher refusal rate under the scheme than Ukrainian nationals, at 14 per cent compared with 0.4 per cent.

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The post Fate of Ukraine’s Foreign Students appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

METHODS

Lighthouse’s Migration Newsroom team has responded by addressing the important, underreported aspects of a crisis and finding ways to illuminate what might otherwise go unreported. This was the genesis of our decision to point our open source investigative capacity away from the fighting (where partners such as Bellingcat are doing valuable work) to follow the fortunes of Ukraine’s large number of foreign students and non-Western residents as they tried to escape the war.

This reporting continues in a widely-shared Twitter thread that began in the days immediately following the Russian invasion. The thread coordinator Maud Jullien discussed the work with Deutsche Welle’s Inside Europe series.

Our desk-based team has been monitoring social media sources from Telegram to Twitter to verify reports and visual evidence and making contact with people involved to provide potentially absent context and nuance. The team has also monitored disinformation narratives and amplification from Russian-state propaganda outlets.

We have also had experienced reporters in the field in the countries bordering Ukraine to capture the opening phase of this monumental forced displacement, paying attention to the asylum crisis at Poland’s less-reported border with Belarus where we previously investigated the deaths of at least 19 people, providing the backstory to those who lost their lives.

STORYLINES

In the early days of the flight from Ukraine we were able to verify videos showing discrimination against Africans trying to board evacuation trains. Similar scenes played out at a number of border posts where brown and black people were segregated and made to wait sometimes days longer than Ukrainians to exit the country.

We have reported on terrified students trapped in the northeastern Ukraine city of Sumy and members of minority communities fleeing Ukraine. We have found some of the large contingent of international students put into immigration custody in Poland, while their Ukrainian counterparts are offered places at international universities.

We also explored the impact of these double standards on Polish families where the act of sheltering refugees is received in starkly different fashion at the Belarus border than it is at the border with Ukraine.

Much of what we found was disturbing and hard for many to look at dispassionately when so many of us are moved by the courage and fortitude on display in response to Russia’s war of aggression.

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The post Ukraine Exodus appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

The pandemic has demonstrated the need to separate access to healthcare (and vaccines) from political positions on immigration. But how can we assess whether governments are taking this onboard?

Our policy scorecard attempts to count those who governments have decided not to count, by reading between the lines of vaccination strategies, implementation plans, policies and statements to determine, at least on paper, how easy or difficult it is for undocumented migrants to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

METHODS

The scorecard is Lighthouse’s first collaborative data journalism project and the absence of meaningful data on almost all aspects of the undocumented, from population estimates to countries of origin, ruled out a direct approach like counting vaccination numbers. There has been no meaningful Europe-wide effort to count the undocumented since 2009 as we explained in a previous investigation into the Shadow Population.

The most effective avenue open to us was to construct a survey which would provide ground for a useful comparison between the performance of different European countries. To design this we consulted with PICUM, the leading European association of groups working for undocumented rights, to design a survey to capture the policy reality of European countries’ strategies to vaccinate undocumented people.

We reached out to expert researchers, community groups and journalism students to help us track down publicly available documents related to those vaccination strategies and implementation plans for every country. Lighthouse’s data team then converted the responses into numbers, and those numbers into a scorecard.

The final results cover 18 European countries, spanning 14 languages. The data collected offers a snapshot of policies regarding undocumented access to vaccination against COVID-19, across five categories: Policy Transparency, Access for the Undocumented, Identification and Residency Requirements, Access for the Marginalised and Privacy Guarantees.

Find a more detailed description of the methodology here.

STORYLINES

To complement the scorecard, which illuminates some of the big questions and trends across Europe, we are working with media partners on a series of feature stories that provide ground reporting to bring the topic alive. The first in this series comes from Greece where a mixed ranking on the scorecard reflects a genuine effort to vaccinate the more visible undocumented communities — such as asylum seekers in publicly-managed reception facilities — but neglect of undocumented workers who are doing some of the hardest jobs in some of the country’s biggest companies.

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The post Vaccinating Europe’s Undocumented appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.