‘I risked my life for the British army in Afghanistan, now the UK will not respond to my requests for asylum’

Mohammad Nabi is stranded, homeless and jobless after serving with the British army as an interpreter in Afghanistan, writes Anastasia Miari in Athens

Mohammad Nabi in army fatigues when he served with the British army in Afghanistan (Mohammad Nabi)

“When I made eye contact with that man in the cotton field, I knew he was Taliban. Something always told me. I didn’t finish my drink. I just went back into the tank and closed the door. A half second later, half of the tank exploded, and the British gunner above me was in flames. If we had been in the last half of the tank, we would all have been in pieces across those fields,” says Mohammad Nabi, recalling an ambush he experienced while serving as an interpreter for the British army in Afghanistan.

He is one of an estimated 8,000 Afghan personnel that worked for the British army over the 20-year campaign in Afghanistan. As the last of the troops withdraw, and the Taliban regains territory and clout in the region, Nabi fears his time is running out.

“Did you know they have taken fifty districts in 24 hours? Not fifteen. Fifty,” he says. The looming threat of the Taliban has been ever present in his life. Growing up on the front line, he was subjected to torture at the hands of the Taliban, aged just 14. Now 36, a refugee living in Athens, he worries about the future of the four young children he had to leave behind.

“They sent me letters telling me I was working for the ‘infidels’ and that for this, my family and I would pay,” says Nabi. Having received death threats from the Taliban and an attempted abduction following his role as an interpreter for the British army, he fled Afghanistan five years ago and has since been living in limbo in a Greek refugee camp, waiting on an answer from the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office. After serving the United Kingdom in Afghanistan, when will he and his family be granted asylum?

“It did not matter. I was just an interpreter, and I had no military training. I was always the second in line on patrol after my commander because they needed an Afghan interpreter to listen to the Taliban’s radio signals,” says Nabi, who served between 2008-2011 in Helmand.

“We worked alongside each other like brothers, the [British] soldiers and me. They needed me, and I needed them. When a blast would happen with an IUD or when the Taliban had shot at us with the PKMs, the first thing they would do was check my limbs to see if they were all intact. First mine, then their own,” says Nabi, who was ambushed by the Taliban on a daily basis during his tenure.

On one occasion, he recalls being asked by a soldier to run for a round of ammunition and hold its weight to avoid it sticking in the barrel as shots were fired between British soldiers and the surrounding Taliban.

“I held it for him, and he pushed my head down so I would not be shot,” says Nabi, who insists that he accepted the dangers of the job because of the hope he had for Afghanistan.

Thousands of Afghans now find themselves internally displaced after fleeing the Taliban (AP)

“Every time when I walked into the front line, I knew that I could die, but they told me it was for my future – for the future of my country – and I believed that, at the time.”

Nabi received his first death threat from the Taliban in 2008. The second came in 2010, followed by subsequent attempts to abduct him from his home. “I felt safer on the front line with the soldiers next to me than in my own home,” says Nabi.

He was given training and advice by the British army to prevent abductions. “You don’t show you have more money than others. You don’t go to the same place frequently. I was using different ways to return home, never taking the same route twice. It was a constant thing on my mind. I was not sleeping,” he recalls of the three years following his time as an interpreter.

After reporting an attempted abduction, resulting in a serious head injury, to the British embassy in Afghanistan, he was not offered protection, asylum or assistance. “I lost hope then. I asked them what I should do if they cut my head off? Will my father have to take my head to them to show that we needed protection? It was for them I was in the mess,” says Nabi.

This week, after five years in a refugee camp in Athens waiting to be granted asylum in the UK, he has been forcibly removed from the camp and is facing homelessness.

“They’ve told nobody what they’re going to do and how they’re going to do it. It actually tells us they haven’t even started the process, and they’re leaving in a month. They could leave him and his family in the lurch, and it could take months,” says Fiyaz Mughal, the founder of UK charity Faith Matters.

Mughal has been appealing to the UK government on behalf of Nabi for four years now.

“They’re using these poor guys as PR at the moment, and it’s so unfair,” says Mughal of the announcement in June that Afghan interpreters will be granted asylum.

Nabi has still to hear back from the Ministry of Defence following correspondence in March, telling him he and his family are eligible for “relocation to the UK under the Ex-Gratia Scheme”.

“It’s so outrageous. It’s black and white. You just feel this government really doesn’t care. If they can do that for people that fight for them, they could do that to any of us,” says Mughal.

A government spokesperson said: “The Afghan Relocation and Assistance Policy for locally engaged staff requires applicants to be in Afghanistan where they are likely to face the greatest risk.” They refuse to comment on individual cases.

For Nabi, the situation is increasingly desperate.

“I am here in a strange country, homeless, jobless, with my children at risk because I did this job for the British army.

“I went myself on the front line, before any of the British soldiers, to pat down locals and check they were not suicide bombers. I am not a soldier, but I risked my life every day. Now the British are not even responding to my messages,” he says.

The UK is expected to bring home the last remaining of its 9,500 troops in Afghanistan by August.