How an email error sparked a secret scramble to bring thousands of Afghans to Britain,

Key information was also kept from the Afghans themselves, who had assisted U.K. forces and whose personal details had been disclosed in a huge data leak. Many plan to sue the British government for putting them in danger from the Taliban. Some are left in Afghanistan as the current British government says the resettlement program will end.

Here’s what happened in an extraordinary chain of events.
An email error with huge consequences

The saga was triggered by the chaotic #Western exit from #Afghanistan in August 2021 as the Taliban, ousted from power 20 years earlier, swept across the country, seized Kabul and reimposed their strict version of Islamic law.

Afghans who had worked with Western forces — as fixers, translators and in other roles — or who had served in the internationally backed Afghan army were at risk of retribution. Britain set up a program, known as the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy, or #ARAP, to bring some to the U.K.

In February 2022, a defense official emailed a spreadsheet containing the personal information of nearly 19,000 ARAP applicants to someone outside the Ministry of Defense. The government says the individual thought they were sending a list of about 150 names, not the whole set.

The British government only became aware of the leak when a portion of the data was posted on Facebook 18 months later by someone who threatened to publish the whole list.
The government sought secrecy

The leak sparked alarm among British officials who feared as many as 100,000 people were in danger when family numbers of the named individuals were added. The then-Conservative government sought a court order barring publication of the list.

A judge granted a sweeping order known as a super injunction, which barred anyone from revealing not only information about the leak but the existence of the injunction itself.

Super injunctions are relatively rare and their use is controversial. Most of the handful of cases in which they have come to light involved celebrities trying to prevent disclosures about their private lives. This is the first known case of a super injunction being granted to the government.

Former Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said Wednesday that he sought the legal order to gain “time and space to deal with this leak, find out whether the Taliban had it” and protect those at risk.

Wallace said he asked for an ordinary injunction — not a super injunction — for a period of four months. The gag order remained in place for almost two years.
A secret program sparked a legal battle

The government began bringing to Britain the Afghans on the leaked list who were judged to be most at risk. To date, some 4,500 people — 900 applicants and approximately 3,600 family members — have been brought to Britain under the program. About 6,900 people are expected to be relocated by the time it closes, at a cost of 850 million pounds (US$1.1 billion).

In all, about 36,000 Afghans have been resettled in the U.K. since 2021.

Meanwhile, several news organizations had learned of the leaked list but were barred from publishing stories about it. They challenged the super injunction in court, and a judge ordered it lifted in May 2024 — but it remained in place after the government appealed.
The government finally came clean

Britain held an election in July 2024 that brought the center-left Labour Party to power. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Cabinet learned of the injunction soon after taking office and grappled with how to proceed.

In January, the government ordered a review by a former senior civil servant. They found little evidence that the leaked data would expose Afghans to a greater risk of retribution from the Taliban. The review said the Taliban had other sources of information on those who had worked with the previous Afghan government and international forces and is more concerned with current threats to its authority.

Given those findings, the government dropped its support for the super injunction. The injunction was lifted in court Tuesday, and minutes later Defense Secretary John Healey stood in the House of Commons to make the saga public for the first time.
Many questions remain unanswered

Healey said the secret settlement route was being closed, but acknowledged Wednesday that “the story is just beginning,” and many questions remain unanswered.

Immigration critics including Reform UK leader Nigel Farage are demanding to know what screening was done on the people who came under the secret program.

Lawyers for Afghans on the leaked list want to know why the information was kept from them. Adnan Malik, head of data privacy at U.K. legal firm Barings Law, said he was assembling a class-action lawsuit by hundreds of former translators, soldiers and others.

Lawmakers and free speech advocates say the use of a super injunction is deeply worrying. They ask how Parliament and the media can hold the government to account if there is such stringent secrecy.

Judge Martin Chamberlain, who ruled that the injunction should be lifted, said Tuesday at the High Court that the super injunction “had the effect of completely shutting down the ordinary mechanisms of accountability.”

Healey acknowledged that “you cannot have democracy with super injunctions in place,” and said the government had acted as quickly and safely as it could.

“Accountability starts now,” he told the BBC.

Jill Lawless, The Associated Press

The #US Senate approved early Thursday a package of spending cuts proposed by President Donald Trump that would cancel more than $9 billion in funding for foreign aid programs and public #broadcasting.

#Iran ready to respond to any new attack, supreme leader says.
Iran is ready to respond to any renewed military attack, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Wednesday, adding that Tehran was capable of delivering a bigger blow to adversaries than the one it gave during the 12-day Iran-Israel war.

“The fact that our nation is ready to face the power of the United States and its dog on a leash, the Zionist regime (Israel), is very praiseworthy,” Khamenei said in comments carried by state TV.

Israel and the U.S. launched strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities last month, saying that they were part of a program geared towards developing nuclear weapons. Tehran maintains that its nuclear program is purely for civilian purposes.

“The base attacked by Iran was an extremely sensitive American regional base,” Khamenei said in reference to an Iranian missile barrage on Al Udeid base in Qatar, adding “an even bigger blow could be inflicted on the U.S. and others.”

Iran is under pressure to resume nuclear talks with the U.S. as Washington and three major European countries have agreed to set the end of August as the deadline for a deal.

If no progress is reached by then, France’s foreign minister warned international sanctions would be reapplied via the United Nations snapback mechanism.

“In both the diplomatic and military fields, whenever we enter the stage we do so with our hands full and not from a position of weakness,” Khamenei said.

He urged diplomats to heed “guidelines” and vigorously continue their work, without elaborating.

Iran’s parliament shared a statement on Wednesday saying the country should not resume nuclear talks with the U.S. as long as preconditions are unmet.

(Reporting by Parisa Hafezi, Dubai newsroom; Editing by Alex Richardson and Andrew Cawthorne)

#Cuban minister under pressure for saying country has no beggars. Cuba’s labour minister denied there are beggars in the poor, Communist-run country in official testimony, prompting rare criticism by Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel of one of his own ministers on Tuesday.

“We have seen people who appear to be beggars, but when you look at their hands, when you look at the clothes those people wear, they are disguised as beggars ... In Cuba, there are no beggars,” Labor and Social Security Minister Marta Elena Feito said on Monday, while testifying before a commission of parliament.

“They have found an easy way of life, to make money and not to work as is appropriate,” she said in a statement broadcast live on state television.

Her words struck a nerve in Cuba, where years of crisis marked by runaway inflation and scarcity of basic goods have left large swaths of the population living day-to-day and a small, but increasing number of visibly impoverished people on the street,

“These people, who we sometimes describe as homeless or linked to begging, are actually concrete expressions of the social inequalities and the accumulated problems we face,” Diaz-Canel told the same commission on Tuesday.

“I do not share some of the criteria expressed in the commission on this issue,” he said.

Feito characterized people wiping windshields on street corners as possibly looking for money to get drunk, and those picking through garbage as unlicensed self-employed recyclers dodging taxes.

“The economic crisis has exacerbated social problems … the vulnerable are not our enemies,” Diaz-Canel said.

The minister was not seen during broadcasts of Tuesday’s parliament session.

Reporting by Marc Frank, additional reporting by Nelson Acosta; Editing by Rod Nickel

#Israel’s military said it was striking targets belonging to Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force in eastern Lebanon on Tuesday, the latest attack despite a ceasefire between Israel and the Iran-backed militant group.

Three members of #UN commission on Israel resign. The three members of a United Nations commission charged with investigating human rights abuses in Israel and the Palestinian territories have resigned, saying it is time to renew the body, a UN spokesperson said Monday.

The three-person commission was created in 2021 and has been sharply criticized by Israel.

South Africa’s Navi Pillay, 83, who once headed the international tribunal for Rwanda, cited her age in a letter announcing her resignation.

Australia’s Chris Sidoti, 74, said in his letter it was an “appropriate time” to renew the commission, while India’s Miloon Kothari, in his late 60s, just said it had been “an honour” to serve.

Jurg Lauber, the head of the UN’s Human Rights Council, asked the council’s member states to propose new members by August 31.

Iranian leader suffered minor leg injury in Israeli air strike last month — Fars
Masoud Pezeshkian and other senior officials were forced to flee the building where a meeting of the Supreme National Security Council was being held through an emergency hatch, the news agency revealed

#Ukraine’s security agency says it killed Russian agents suspected of gunning down its officer.

The Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, said in a statement that the suspected Russian agents were killed in the Kyiv region after they offered resistance to arrest. A video released by the agency showed two bodies lying on the ground.

The agency said earlier that a man and a woman were suspected to be involved in Thursday’s assassination of Ivan Voronych, an SBU colonel, in a bold daylight attack that was caught on surveillance cameras.

Media reports claimed that Voronych was involved in covert operations in Russia-occupied territories of Ukraine and reportedly helped organize Ukraine’s surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk region last year.

After a series of massive attacks across Ukraine involving hundreds of exploding drones, Russia launched 60 drones overnight, Ukraine’s air force said. It said 20 of them were shot down and 20 others were jammed.

The Ukrainian authorities reported that four civilians were killed and 13 others injured in Russian attacks on the Donetsk and Kherson regions since Saturday.

The Associated Press