So, minister, do you STILL think Afghan translators are safe?
After interpreter is targeted in rocket attack...
AN Afghan translator told last night how he escaped a Taliban rocket attack in the latest bid to kill those who worked with UK troops.
The attack – in an area where two other interpreters have been murdered by insurgents – comes despite claims by the Armed Forces minister Penny Mordaunt that there is ‘no major problem’.
The linguist, known as Ahmad, joins a string of others in claiming he has been ‘abandoned’ by the British – highlighted by the Daily Mail’s Betrayal of the Brave campaign. Last night, the 24-year-old and his family were in hiding and say they have been left to ‘live in fear’.
Ahmad said they were lucky to escape after the attack – the third since he was branded an ‘infidel spy’ and told he would be hunted down.
The father- of-two – who worked with frontline troops including the Queens Dragoon Guards, 1 Scots and the Yorkshire Regiment between 2009 and 2011 – was injured when a rocket-propelled grenade was fired through a window.
His mother, Zahua, 45, spent six days in hospital with a broken leg when a ceiling partially collapsed, while his wife, one-year-old son and baby daughter were unharmed.
Hours afterwards, the translator received a telephone threat saying he had ‘ survived this time but will die the next’.
Two of his friends – Jawad Wafa and Nasser Jan, who worked as interpreters for Coalition forces – have already been executed by the Taliban because of their work, one of them kidnapped and beheaded.
Ahmad said: ‘This is the fate that awaits me. The Taliban is patient and will hunt me down. The British do not seem to care.’
Details of the attack – confirmed by Afghan officials – come a day after the Mail revealed how a translator narrowly escaped Taliban assassins. But Miss Mordaunt has appeared to dismiss the intimidation faced by those who stood ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with British forces in Helmand.
During a meeting with Lord Dannatt, head of the Army when UK troops were in Afghanistan, she is said to have insisted the UK’s controversial policy towards Afghan translators was working and suggested there is ‘no major problem’ for those left behind. She reportedly said she was not aware of a single interpreter killed by the Taliban.
Ahmad said his own story illustrated the problems faced by men who believed they had been ‘abandoned’ by the British.
The Afghan authorities have apparently confirmed Ahmad was on an insurgent ‘death list’. But after contacting both military specialists and the British Embassy in Kabul, Ahmad said ‘nobody wanted to listen’.
He cited a letter from Lieutenant Colonel Lord Hamish Hay – who he worked with at a military medical facility – who last year called for him to be given asylum in the UK ‘given the current threat to his life and the service that he had given the Crown for an extended period of time at great and sustained personal risk’.