A security guard who worked for the British embassy in Kabul for almost two decades is calling on the Home Office to help him reunite his family after he was evacuated during the Taliban takeover, but his two eldest sons were forced to stay.
Hamidullah Fahim and his wife Zaghona were brought to the UK with two young children in December 2023, on a dedicated scheme for employees of the British Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.
However he couldn’t bring his two eldest sons, who are now 21 and 22, because they are over the age of 18. Mr Fahim is now pleading with the Home Office to be reunited with them in the UK.
Though the family applied for Najibullah and Hasibullah to be evacuated to the UK from Afghanistan, where they currently live with their grandmother, their applications have been rejected twice by officials.
Mr Fahim said that while the family tries to speak to the two eldest sons regularly on the phone, it has been hard to be apart.
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“It has affected them and us both. We want to do whatever we can to be reunited with them and to let the Home Office know of the injustice that has been carried out in our case.
“It is especially difficult for our young children who get upset whenever we speak to them, and for my wife who is struggling a lot”, he explained.
His wife Zaghona is struggling to sleep, and suffers from nightmares where she sees her son being harmed, a report from a social worker found. She can be withdrawn from the family and is often tearful, according to the assessment.
Before the Taliban takeover, Hasibullah and Najibullah never lived independently and were dependent on their parents. Their parents and two young siblings, aged 13 and 15, were evacuated to Pakistan in early 2023 and left the eldest sons behind in the hope that when they got to the UK they would be able to apply for reunification.
The family of six, including the eldest sons, were told to come to Kabul airport during the chaos of the 2021 evacuation, along with hundreds of other GardaWorld staff who had worked at the British embassy, with the view that they would all be brought to the UK. However, they were told to leave the airport after a suicide bomb blast prevented their evacuation.
They were then moved on to the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme (ACRS), which didn’t include Najibullah and Hasibullah. Mr Fahim worked as a security guard at the British embassy in Kabul from 2004 to 2021 and therefore qualified for pathway three of this scheme.
Under the terms of the scheme, an eligible person can only bring children under 18 with them to the UK. The Foreign Office, who run pathway three of this scheme, offered the family the chance to submit a separate application for their two eldest sons but Mr Fahim’s attempts to take advantage of this have not been successful, compounded by the fact that the family don’t speak English.
Nick Beales, from charity Ramfel who are supporting the family, said that the father had “persistently sought to communicate with the FCDO about sponsoring his children to relocate to the UK, but when these avenues hit a brick wall they had to proceed with making an application to the Home Office”.
In the UK, the family do not have refugee status and therefore are not normally eligible to sponsor family members under the Refugee Family Reunion policy. Their applications have so far been rejected twice by the Home Office.
One of the older sons, Najibullah, said: “Before our parents left we had a good life, we used to study and go to school… but currently we are not studying and we don’t have money to do that. When they left, I was extremely upset, I became very unwell and they gave me IV fluids, but I have hope that in future things will get better and we will be able to reunite with our parents.”
Masuda, who is 15, said that she dreams that she will be reunited with her brothers one day. She explained to a social worker: “In Afghanistan we used to make a slide out of the snow – we used to play together, it was so fun.
“It’s not good being separated especially when I see my mum crying. It affects her quite a lot.”
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Mr Beales, from Ramfel, added: “The Fahim family were promised safety in the UK after their 18 years of service to the British Embassy, but the British government have instead abandoned them. At Ramfel, we see time and again how families on the Arap and Acrs schemes are denied family reunification, despite successive governments repeatedly falsely claiming that Afghans can safely reach the UK. The government’s new Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill does nothing to address these failures, and focuses exclusively on yet more so-called deterrence measures. New immigration legislation should instead look at expanding safe routes so that families can swiftly reunite and rebuild their lives in the UK.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: “It is our longstanding policy not to comment on individual cases.”
