Please save us from this hell
Afghan military translator trapped in refugee camp begs to come to Britain
A FORMER British military translator and his sick wife have pleaded to come to the UK after being trapped in the ‘worst refugee camp on Earth’ on a Greek island.
Nesar, who served alongside UK troops for almost two years in Helmand in Afghanistan, fled for Britain with his wife after facing Taliban threats.
But he is now ‘stuck in hell’ with 19,000 migrants in the squalid Moria camp on Lesbos and is facing deportation back to Afghanistan. Nesar, 29, and his wife Nazarine, 28, have been there for six months. Speaking from the camp, he said: ‘I had no choice but to leave [Afghanistan] if I wanted to stay alive – and to keep my wife alive.
‘But now we are stranded in a camp which resembles hell and told we face being returned to Afghanistan where the Taliban will hunt me down and kill me.’ Nesar worked with the British in Helmand from September 2009 until 2011. He then spent three years with US special forces.
The couple reached Europe’s largest migrant camp on Lesbos after crossing the Aegean in a dingy of 49 migrants, meant to carry ten. Nesar said: ‘We hoped to come to Britain where so many soldiers have told me I would be welcome after my work with them. They knew of the risks I took and the death threats I received.’
The overcrowded Moria migrant camp has previously been branded the ‘worst refugee camp on Earth’ and is notorious for robberies, stabbings and food shortages.
Nesar said: ‘Every night we wonder if we will be the next victims of an attack.’
There is no electricity and little sanitation – there are 210 people per toilet and 630 per shower in the camp. Nesar’s asylum application to Greece was rejected and he now faces deportation to Afghanistan – a move he believes would be his ‘death sentence’. He is appealing against the decision.
Ex-Lieutenant Peter GordonFinlayson, who survived an explosion in Helmand in 2011, said: ‘There is a howling hole in our duty of care to the interpreters whose lives, and those of their families, are threatened by what they did for us.’
The Daily Mail’s award-winning Betrayal of the Brave campaign has highlighted the cases of translators who say they have been ‘abandoned’ to the Taliban by the British.
A Ministry of Defence spokesman said it was identifying which Afghan interpreters were eligible for relocation.
BETRAYAL OF THE BRAVE