Operation Warm Welcome is the cosy name for the British effort to help thousands of terrified Afghans after they won sanctuary in the UK following the Taliban takeover of their country five years ago.
We were told that those rescued during a dramatic airlift included interpreters and other loyal Afghans who, for 20 years, had worked for British forces first dispatched to fight the ‘War on Terror’ after the 9/11 attacks.
By 2021 that mission was over. The West’s battle against the Taliban was lost when the Americans abruptly pulled out. In Britain, people from all walks of life prepared to do their bit for the newly arrived Afghans who were hosted over two years in 82 hotels as they waited for free houses.
Many volunteers would have read about their plight through the Daily Mail’s award-winning Betrayal Of The Brave campaign, which focused exclusively on those courageous Afghans who had helped British forces.
Yet now a shocking picture is emerging about Operation Warm Welcome. It is a dismal portrait of gross Whitehall profligacy, naivety, carelessness and even blatant cheating, which has not only cost the British taxpayer billions of pounds and will continue to burden us financially for decades to come, but has also made it more difficult for those Afghans who helped Britain in Kabul to claim asylum legitimately.
Our investigation has revealed that many of the incoming Afghans were not vetted properly during the hectic evacuation from their country or upon their arrival in the UK.
The Daily Mail has learned that, far from all being loyal interpreters, countless numbers had no connection to the British Armed Forces but invented a back-story or paid local officials a going rate of $5,000 (£3,700) to get a place on the flights. Then, courtesy of the Government’s Operation Warm Welcome, an umbrella title for the various Afghan resettlement schemes, they were allowed to start a new life here.
Astonishingly, some of the rescued Afghans, presumed to be arriving for the first time, already had homes in Britain. They were resettled (and given second houses) after cannily rushing to Afghanistan before the capital Kabul fell to the Taliban. There, we are told by our sources, they coolly collected up family members before the entire clan was flown to Britain in the airlift.
The Daily Mail has been told that some Afghan families routinely rejected offers of a free house from the Home Office because they ‘didn’t fancy’ the area it was in
A hotel manager, Jamie Rossiter, has sensationally estimated that just two families among the 160 he got to know personally over two years at his Buckinghamshire hotel had ‘provable’ links to British forces. He made it his job to befriend and talk to his Afghan guests after they arrived in 2021.
‘That low number is based on what they told me. They said they were painters and decorators . . . photocopier repair men, or in random jobs [unconnected to the British operation in Afghanistan],’ he has revealed in an explosive video interview with social commentator and former charity worker Nick Buckley, which is now online and has been watched by thousands.
Jamie, 48, who reported his concerns to the Home Office at the time, adds: ‘We were told [by the Government] they were translators, guides, people that had worked with the British forces . . . so we were quite happy to welcome them. It took a little time for my staff to come to terms with the idea that most of these people didn’t need help and were often richer than them.’
During our own investigation, we have spoken to members of the British Afghan community and those who worked in hotels scattered across the Midlands and southern Britain that took in the newcomers. They have pointed to gaping holes in Operation Warm Welcome, which one hotel manager described ‘like a gold rush from start to finish’.
Everyone involved seemed to be thinking ‘how can we make money out of this’, from taxi drivers taking Afghans to appointments who were then reimbursed by the Government to local councils that received special grants to settle the new arrivals, and the guests themselves.
We have been given a window into the ugly side of Operation Warm Welcome. One whistleblower revealed that some Afghan wives were kept in purdah by their husbands from the moment they arrived.
‘They stayed in their rooms, were not allowed to share communal areas or eat in the hotel restaurant with their menfolk in line with customs they imported from their homeland. Some of the women I never saw at all during their entire stay. They even took their meals in the bedrooms,’ an informant told us. Racism reared its head, too. We have learned that Indian heritage cleaners were upset when Afghans at one hotel told the management that they only wanted a ‘white woman’ tending their rooms. In another case, Afghans demanded the sacking of the entire hotel security team because they were Pakistani – ‘an ethnicity they looked down on,’ said a whistleblower.
Police were called to some hotels to investigate incidents of sickening domestic abuse against wives by husbands, while ‘feral’ teenagers ran amok as their Afghan fathers shrugged their shoulders, telling staff, police and child social workers: ‘There is nothing we can do to control them because we cannot hit our children in your country.’
We have heard reports of bored Afghan men whiling away time by buying porn videos, alcohol and gambling scratch cards in breach of their Islamic faith. Others used free taxi rides to the JobCentre, where they were meant to be searching for work, to peel off to the nearby shopping mall.
Social commentator and former charity worker Nick Buckley revealed in an interview that many Afghans were unconnected to the operation in Afghanistan
‘They abused British generosity. After a while, the penny dropped at the Home Office and free taxi rides for guests were restricted in most hotels,’ said an Afghan interpreter whom we contacted after being told he had regularly visited the guests to help them with English. Upon arrival, all the Afghans were granted indefinite leave to remain, which allowed them from day one to claim benefits and to work. Local JobCentre staff were sent into the hotels to help them seek tax-paying employment.
‘They preferred the black market, taking shifts as taxi drivers or for food delivery firms. At my hotel, a black van would pick them up in the morning and return them in the evening,’ said one manager, who was surprised to open his front door and find one of his guests, working as a food courier, handing him the takeaway meal that he had just ordered.
To add insult to injury, the Daily Mail has been told that some Afghan families routinely rejected offers of a free house from the Home Office because they ‘didn’t fancy’ the area it was in or because they could save up benefit payments by staying put in the hotel for as long as possible.
One family is believed to have squirrelled away £30,000 in one year from the benefits on offer, which included Universal Credit, Pension Credit and Personal Independence Payment for any resettled Afghans suffering from mental health issues.
‘They also turned down rural homes, hoping to get a house in a city centre near the mosque, the halal shops, their own communities. Some gamed the system by flatly refusing private houses and choosing social housing in the hope they would get the “right to buy” the property at a subsidised price further down the line,’ said our informants.
An extraordinary story told by Jamie Rossiter on the video concerns an Afghan man who is thought to have lived in Britain before the airlift.
He turned his nose up at a free Home Office house in Manchester for himself, his wife and children who were with him at Jamie’s hotel in Buckinghamshire. It transpired he already had a first wife with children living on the south coast. ‘This man didn’t want to shuttle between his two families because of the long journey.’
It is all a far cry from the image portrayed by the Government of the time. It described those ‘called forward’ for evacuation as ‘the Afghans who stood side by side with us in conflict’.
The then Prime Minister Boris Johnson added later, with a flourish: ‘We will never forget the brave sacrifices made by Afghans who chose to work with us, at great risk to themselves. We owe them a huge debt.’
A Home Office factsheet called ‘Warm Welcome in Action’ was released in late 2021, which said £200million had already been committed to help Afghans rebuild their lives, find work, pursue education and integrate in local areas. This money included extra funding for the NHS, schools and local councils during what the Government described as ‘one of the UK’s most ambitious resettlement schemes ever’.
The vexing question of how many rescued Afghans really had links to our British forces remains shrouded in mystery
It all seemed to be running like clockwork. Yet it was the charity volunteers, who had sprang into action when the Afghans first arrived, running fundraisers and cricket matches, whom Mr Rossiter says became disillusioned first.
‘It warmed my heart that so many neighbours living close to my hotel turned up with bags of toiletries and new kids’ toys for our guests,’ he says in the video.
‘Our local charity got frustrated when the Afghans were taken to special warehouses to choose clothes and things. They took all the bundles of clothes and then threw them around my hotel and out of the windows. I had to call the charity, which ended up having to get someone with a van to come to pick up what had been given to them.’
The vexing question of how many rescued Afghans really had links to our British forces remains shrouded in mystery. At the peak of military operations, between 2011 and 2012, there were, according to the Ministry of Defence (MoD), ‘roughly’ 630 local interpreters employed to assist 9,500 servicemen based in the country.
During the entire two-decade conflict, 7,000 local citizens were hired by the British, half as front-line interpreters and the rest as drivers, cooks or administrative staff who were at risk when the Taliban took over.
However, last year, Luke Pollard, Labour’s Minister for the Armed Forces, admitted to the House of Commons that it was ‘not possible’ to provide a tally of those who had been employed by the British during their Afghanistan operations.
This provoked a rebuke from Conservative MP Ben Obese-Jecty, now shadow minister for Defence Procurement, who said that the Afghan resettlement schemes were open to exploitation by ‘criminal, terrorist or hostile’ state actors.
He remarked that if the MoD was uncertain which of the thousands of rescued people worked for the British then it ‘presumably also does not know who they are or what they were doing in Afghanistan [before their arrival here]’.
There was a further bombshell when the Daily Mail successfully exposed a High Court super-injunction hiding a further – this time secret – airlift of Afghans to Britain. This followed an accidental leak in 2022 of a MoD email containing the names of those still applying to come here to escape the Taliban.
A year later, when part of the list appeared on the internet, the then Conservative government was granted the ban, which barred anyone from revealing even its existence or face imprisonment.
The super-injunction was lifted under pressure from the media in July 2025 by which time 900 principal applicants with 3,600 family members on the list had been brought into the UK undercover, at an extra cost of £850million.
This means the total number of resettled Afghans is now approaching 36,000, with the vast majority able to claim state benefits and free or subsidised housing for the rest of their lives.
Some were even given a leg up by a senior figure inside the civil service. The Daily Mail has discovered that two families put on the resettlement flights and given houses worth £850,000 combined in East Sussex were helped by a relative who works for the Home Office in Scotland.
Little wonder that the suspicions linger. ‘One older couple came in and immediately got a state pension and were given a bungalow,’ a hotel whistleblower told us this week. ‘It is very unlikely the husband, given his age, worked for the British forces. They are never going to give anything back to Britain.’
With that, he gave a desperate sigh about Operation Warm Welcome. ‘I think that the trusting British public have been played like a fiddle,’ he said.
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