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UN Warns Services for Women in Afghanistan at Risk as Funding Dries Up

November 30, 2025
Khaama Press

The UN says organisations supporting women in Afghanistan have lost major funding this year, leaving essential protection services strained as restrictions and violence intensify.

UN Women warned that Afghanistan women’s organisations are facing a sharp funding shortfall even as gender-based violence rises under Taliban restrictions.

The warning came on Saturday as the agency marked the global 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence campaign.

The agency said women’s groups have received less than 60% of the money needed this year, forcing shelters and service providers to reduce operations despite higher demand for support.

Reports of violence against women have climbed by 40% in the past two years, while access to legal protection remains limited due to Taliban rules on movement, work and education.

UN Women urged donors to restore financial support, warning that further cuts could shut down life-saving services for women across Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Humanitarian agencies caution that without swift donor support, vital shelters, legal aid systems and psychosocial services could collapse, leaving vulnerable women with no safe options.

UN Warns Services for Women in Afghanistan at Risk as Funding Dries Up
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UN Rights Envoy Richard Bennett Travels to Doha for Talks on Afghanistan’s Human Rights Crisis

November 30, 2025
Khaama Press

UN special rapporteur Richard Bennett will travel to Doha for meetings with Afghanistan representatives and regional officials as part of efforts to address Afghanistan’s worsening human rights situation.

The UN has announced that Richard Bennett, the Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur on Afghanistan, will travel to Doha from December 1 to 4 for meetings with Afghanistan representatives and regional and international partners.

According to a UN statement issued on Sunday, Bennett will hold talks with Qatari officials, Afghanistan civil society members, and diplomats based in Doha to assess the human-rights situation and explore coordinated approaches to supporting Afghanistan civilians.

The UN said Bennett’s mission is aimed at strengthening regional dialogue and using “all available tools” to improve the rights environment in Afghanistan, where restrictions on women, minorities and civil society have sharply escalated since the Taliban takeover.

Bennett’s mandate, which the Human Rights Council extended earlier this year, requires him to report on rights violations and engage governments on policy responses to Afghanistan’s worsening humanitarian and human-rights landscape.

Despite the ongoing international engagement, the Taliban have barred Bennett from entering Afghanistan, accusing him of issuing politically motivated reports. As a result, he continues to meet Afghanistan activists, refugees and diaspora groups outside the country.

Human-rights organisations have urged the UN to intensify diplomatic pressure on the Taliban, warning that rights protections are collapsing and regional coordination remains weak.

Bennett’s consultations in Doha are expected to shape his next formal assessment to the Human Rights Council, outlining recommendations for an international strategy toward Afghanistan in 2025.

UN Rights Envoy Richard Bennett Travels to Doha for Talks on Afghanistan’s Human Rights Crisis
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Fed Up With the Taliban, Pakistan Expels Masses of Afghans

November 30, 2025
By Elian Peltier and Zia ur-Rehman

The New York Times

As Pakistan and Afghanistan have escalated military clashes and closed their borders, the Pakistani authorities have intensified mass expulsions of Afghans, saying they can no longer accommodate the decades-old refugee community.

So far this year, about one million of the three million Afghans living in Pakistan have been deported or forced to return to Afghanistan, a country where many have never lived and where jobs and affordable housing are scarce amid a worsening humanitarian crisis. Many have lived their whole lives in Pakistan, which had served as a haven during Afghanistan’s successive wars since the Soviet Union’s invasion in 1979.

It no longer is.

On a recent evening on the outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, four families with children, including an infant just 7 days old, were loading a truck with their lifelong possessions: bed frames, chickens, water jerrycans and a few pieces of luggage.

Saifuddin, who goes by one name, said they had decided to leave before the crackdown on Afghans got worse. They had heard calls to go back to Afghanistan both at the mosque where they prayed and from the loudspeakers on police cars patrolling their slum.

Large numbers of Afghans have moved back and forth for decades, especially in the countries’ border areas that share linguistic and cultural ties. Expulsions are not new, but the indiscriminate nature of the current drive is. Pakistan has vowed to expel all Afghans, no matter what their immigration status is or if they face danger upon their return to Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s push overlaps with moves by Western nations to restrict or prohibit Afghans from entering. The Trump administration said that it had stopped processing immigration applications from Afghanistan, and that it would review the status of Afghan asylum seekers already in the United States, including those who worked for American or NATO forces during the U.S.-led war, after the shooting on Wednesday of two National Guard members in Washington. The main suspect is Afghan.

Iran, another of Afghanistan’s neighbors, has also deported or forced out more than 1.5 million Afghans this year. The large Afghan refugee communities abroad have served as a lifeline for Afghanistan, sending money back home and driving cross-border trade that has helped keep a battered Afghan economy afloat.

But as Pakistan and Iran have faced their own economic crises, their governments have amped up the xenophobic rhetoric in recent months and accelerated large-scale expulsions that they initiated in 2023. Since then, the two nations have expelled or forcibly returned more than 4.5 million Afghans. More than half of those — 2.5 million — were driven out this year.

The Pakistani authorities have urged landlords to kick Afghan families out of apartments and encouraged citizens in at least one province to help them deport Afghans through a whistle-blower system. They have already arrested 12 times as many Afghans this year as in all of last year, according to the United Nations’ refugee agency.

Those leaving before they get arrested, like Saifuddin’s family, have become a common sight on Pakistan’s roads, loaded aboard colorful trucks that carry entire families and their possessions to the border.

They are being driven out of the slums of Karachi, where many lived by collecting metal scraps or other garbage. Others have left the city of Lahore, where they worked as day laborers and mechanics, and the onion fields and coal mines of Balochistan, where they served as a cheap, hard-working labor force.

“We’re at the mercy of the Pakistani authorities,” said Mehrafzon Jalili, 24, a former Afghan dentistry student who for months lived in a tent encampment in a park in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. She shared the park with hundreds of other Afghan families who were evicted from their homes this year.

Early on Tuesday, Pakistani police officers swept in to arrest the stranded Afghans and take them to a deportation facility, according to Ms. Jalili and another Afghan woman in the encampment, who shared videos of the raid with The New York Times.

The mass migrations of Afghans into Pakistan began after the Soviet invasion, when Islamabad welcomed them as “holy warriors” and “Islamic brethren.” But the official messaging has shifted over the decades, increasingly portraying them as “criminals,” “drug peddlers” and, most recently, “terrorists.”

“We have been welcoming and hosting them with open arms for decades,” Gen. Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, the spokesman for Pakistan’s armed forces, said in an interview this year. “But a large number of Afghans are involved in criminal activities.”

Pakistani officials now argue that all Afghans in the country are a threat to national security. They have said that the attacker behind the bombing of a courthouse in Islamabad that killed 12 people this month was Afghan.

A faction of the Pakistani Taliban, which is independent but has pledged allegiance to the Taliban government in Afghanistan, claimed responsibility for the attack.

The tensions between the two countries escalated this past week, when a suicide attack on the headquarters of paramilitary forces in the western Pakistani city of Peshawar, near the border with Afghanistan, killed three officers and wounded 11 others. President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan blamed the Pakistani Taliban for the attack.

Afghan refugees this month in a makeshift shelter in Argentina Park in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Pakistan has retaliated in recent months by launching airstrikes on Afghanistan’s two largest cities and in the border areas that have long been a hotbed of insurgent activities. On Tuesday, the Taliban government spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, accused Pakistan of killing 10 people in air raids overnight. The Pakistani military denied responsibility.

Afghan security forces have struck back by attacking Pakistani military posts, in a sharp spiral of violence this fall that has killed dozens and has pushed regional powers like Qatar, Turkey, Iran and Russia to try to mediate between the two belligerents, to little success so far.

The authorities have refused to renew the visas of Afghans who have lived in Pakistan for their entire lives, including children born there. Some 620,000 of the Afghans living in Pakistan are under the age of 15. “Expelled young Afghans will remember it for generations,” said Saba Gul Khattak, an independent Pakistani researcher who has campaigned for better treatment of Afghans.

While many wealthier Afghans have avoided deportation so far through connections or bribes to renew their visas, the expulsion drive has fallen hardest on the poor.

Ms. Jalili and the families who were arrested in the park are among those who face expulsion.

She worked for years as a hospital receptionist, serving as the main breadwinner for her mother and three of her siblings, until her family’s Pakistani landlord kicked them out of their apartment. Her father was an Afghan Army colonel who was arrested and killed by the Taliban while in hiding in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, she said.

At night, when a shivering cold fell on the park, Afghan men and teenage boys took turns standing at entries to protect the community. But they could do little when the police cleared the park and forced the Afghan families onto buses.

Ms. Jalili has a valid visa and said in text messages from the detention facility that she hopes she and her family will not be sent back to Afghanistan.

“But what about others?” she wrote. “They will deport them. Who will ask?”

Safiullah Padshah contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.

Elian Peltier is an international correspondent for The Times, covering Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Fed Up With the Taliban, Pakistan Expels Masses of Afghans
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Indian outreach to Taliban is ratcheting up Afghan-Pakistani tensions

November 30, 2025

The Washington Post

November 30, 2025

Afghanistan and Pakistan appear headed toward a new military escalation.

Afghanistan and Pakistan appear headed toward a new military escalation amid deadly attacks on both sides of the border and mounting frustration in Islamabad over Indian outreach to the Taliban.

Kabul accused Pakistan of launching airstrikes on eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday that killed at least 10 people, including nine children, and vowed to retaliate. Pakistan denied responsibility for the attack.The Taliban-run Afghan government believes the strikes were retribution for an attack on the headquarters of a Pakistani paramilitary force in Peshawar on Monday that killed at least three personnel. Pakistan blamed Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, a militant group that has pledged allegiance to the Afghan Taliban leader.

Similar tensions last month led to a week of cross-border clashes.

Pakistan has accused both its archrival, India, and the Taliban of supporting the TTP. New Delhi and Kabul reject the claim. But their deepening ties have prompted fears in Islamabad that its neighbors are plotting against it.

“We are deeply concerned about this alignment,” a senior Pakistani Foreign Ministry official said. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

India has courted the isolated Taliban regime publicly with gestures that have included hosting Afghan Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi for a week in October.

New Delhi has stopped short of officially recognizing the Taliban-run government, a step only Russia has taken. But it has upgraded its mission in Kabul to an embassy, launched a joint chamber of commerce, and agreed to establish airfreight corridors between Afghanistan and India.

“Afghanistan has long been a battleground for India and Pakistan influence,” said Michael Kugelman, a senior fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. “With Pakistan now on the defensive, given its crisis in ties with the Taliban, India sees an opportunity.”

For India, analysts say, the Taliban could become a useful partner. New Delhi’s outreach to the repressive regime, condemned internationally for its draconian restrictions on women and others, stems from the recognition that it “has few other friends” in the region, said Happymon Jacob, founder of the Council for Strategic and Defense Research, based in the Indian capital.

“If we can have a relationship with North Korea, I see no reason why there should be no relationship with the Taliban,” Jacob said.

The Taliban have welcomed the warming ties as a much-needed economic boost. After months of disruption on the border with Pakistan, long Afghanistan’s primary trading partner, the regime is urging merchants to explore new routes.

The Taliban have expanded trade with their western neighbor, Iran, and with the Central Asian nations to their north.

Officials in Pakistan say the Taliban’s economic dilemma is of their own making. Defense Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif called the regime “a ragtag group” that Islamabad is “completely writing off.”

“There will be no greater idiocy than trusting them,” he told Geo televisions last week.

A suicide bombing in Islamabad this month killed 12 people, the deadliest attack in the country’s heartland in almost a decade. Pakistani officials blamed the TTP but also implicated the Afghan Taliban and India. They did not produce evidence for the two governments’ involvement.

For many Pakistani officials, the TTP’s expanding insurgency in northwestern Pakistan might feel personal. Pakistan helped to create the Taliban in the aftermath of the Afghan-Soviet War in the 1990s by arming and sheltering the militants. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the United States pressured Islamabad to distance itself from the regime and led a coalition to oust it.

But when U.S. forces left Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban retook power, then-Prime Minister Imran Khan welcomed their return. The Afghans, he said, had removed the “shackles of slavery.”

But the Taliban have not met Pakistan’s hopes. TTP attacks surged, and the Afghan Taliban refrained from stepping in, Pakistani officials say. Islamabad accuses the Taliban of sheltering TTP and allowing the group to launch attacks on Pakistan from Afghan territory.

The brunt of the estrangement has been borne by ordinary Afghans. Pakistan has ordered more than 1 million Afghans to leave the country over the past three years to pressure the Taliban to rein in the TTP.

After the recent harvest season in Afghanistan, farmers’ vegetables, fruits and other perishables rotted at closed border crossings.

“It hurts both sides,” said Khan Jan Alokozai, an Afghan trader.

Cement exports from Pakistan to Afghanistan have also ground to a halt, he said, imperiling Pakistani jobs, as well. But traders in Pakistan believe that Afghanistan stands to lose much more and will have little choice than to begin cracking down on the TPP. Afghan merchants rely on Pakistan’s deepwater ports on the Arabian Sea for exports and imports. Circumventing the country can add weeks of transit time, said Shahid Hussain, a Pakistani trader.

“There is no or only very little impact on the Pakistani industries,” Hussain said.

Afghan officials view Iran’s Persian Gulf ports as possible alternatives, but Hussain cautioned that similar efforts under the former U.S.-backed Afghan government were not economically viable.

Meanwhile, a switch to airfreight with India could hinge on the Taliban regime’s ability to expand the country’s aging fleet of planes.

In an incident that might bode ill for the Taliban’s aspirations, the national carrier Ariana Afghan Airlines only narrowly escaped disaster in Delhi this past weekend when one of its planes landed on the wrong runway, several Indian newspapers reported, citing Indian officials.

India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation and the Afghan Transportation and Aviation Ministry did not respond to requests for comment. The Afghan carrier is banned from many countries’ airspaces over safety concerns.

Haq Nawaz Khan, Supriya Kumar and Shaiq Hussain contributed to this report.

Indian outreach to Taliban is ratcheting up Afghan-Pakistani tensions
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Kabul Says It Is Ready to Respond to Any Violation of Afghanistan’s Territory

November 30, 2025
Khaama Press

Kabul says its forces stand fully prepared to respond to any violation of Afghanistan’s territory, warning neighbours that recent cross-border tensions will be met with decisive action.

Taliban authorities showcased hundreds of newly graduated commandos this week as tensions with Pakistan rose sharply along the border. At a ceremony attended by senior officials, Taliban deputy prime minister Abdul Ghani Baradar said Afghanistan would not tolerate any violation of its territory and was prepared to respond to any aggression.

The Taliban Defence Ministry said the new commando units had received full ideological and military training and were ready to defend Afghanistan’s borders. Baradar warned neighbouring countries not to “test the patience” of Afghans and not to view Afghanistan territory “with ill intent.”

During the ceremony, Taliban forces carried out helicopter manoeuvres and ground tactics to demonstrate operational readiness. The ministry said any foreign force seeking to breach Afghanistan soil would face a decisive response.

The escalation follows Taliban claims that recent Pakistani airstrikes in three eastern provinces killed nine children and one woman. Taliban officials have vowed to respond “at the right time.” Pakistan has denied responsibility for the strikes.

Tensions intensified after Pakistan’s military announced that its counterterror operations this year had killed more than 1,800 militants, including 136 Afghan nationals, a figure the Taliban rejects and describes as politically motivated.

Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry and military leadership have recently warned that their forces remain fully prepared to respond to any threat from Afghanistan. Islamabad says repeated border clashes and failed rounds of talks have heightened its concerns.

Three rounds of discussions between the two sides after heavy border fighting in October ended without progress, leaving tensions unresolved as both governments harden their positions along the frontier.

Kabul Says It Is Ready to Respond to Any Violation of Afghanistan’s Territory
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Pakistan Doubts Ceasefire with Afghanistan Amid Ongoing Tensions

November 30, 2025
TOLOnews
TV Network
29 Nov  2025

The ceasefire was first agreed upon during the initial round of defense ministerial talks between the two countries.

Pakistan has expressed pessimism about the continuation of the ceasefire agreement with Afghanistan.

The ceasefire was first agreed upon during the initial round of defense ministerial talks between the two countries, and both sides reaffirmed it in the second round.

However, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson claims that despite the agreement, terrorist attacks from Afghan territory have continued, thereby invalidating the ceasefire.

Tahir Andrabi, spokesperson for Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry, stated: “Let me clarify that the ceasefire between Pakistan and Afghanistan does not imply a traditional ceasefire implemented after two belligerent states in a war or a conflict situation. Pakistan-Afghanistan ceasefire implied that there would be no terrorist attack by Afghan sponsored terrorist proxies into Pakistan. There have been major terrorist attacks after this ceasefire. So, interpreting in that sense, the ceasefire is not holding.”

In response to a journalist’s question regarding the possibility of retaliatory strikes by the Islamic Emirate following Pakistani drone attacks in Afghanistan’s eastern provinces, Andrabi added that Pakistan’s military is prepared for any potential threat from Afghanistan.

The Islamic Emirate has not officially commented, but has previously accused Pakistan of carrying out the recent attacks in eastern Afghanistan, saying it would respond at an appropriate time.

Political analyst Mohammad Aslam Danishmal commented: “If attacks on Pakistani posts or drone operations were being conducted from Afghan soil, such claims might hold weight. But this is an internal issue of Pakistan, and they should resolve it themselves rather than escalating tensions with Afghanistan.”

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s military spokesperson also said that during the discussions between Kabul and Islamabad, Pakistan proposed a formal agreement that would include a verifiable monitoring mechanism potentially overseen by a third-party mediator.

Ahmad Sharif Chaudhry, Pakistan military spokesman, stated: “Our request was to draft an agreement with a verifiable framework. If necessary, we are open to third-party monitoring of this mechanism.”

Omar Samad, Afghanistan’s former ambassador to France, said: “Both sides should take this opportunity not only to uphold the ceasefire but also to call on mediators to actively step in and urgently help develop a mechanism to ensure it.”

These remarks come as a Turkish delegation is expected to visit Islamabad soon to help mediate between the two sides, and a regional summit hosted by Iran is also planned for mid-next month to address tensions between Kabul and Islamabad.

Pakistan Doubts Ceasefire with Afghanistan Amid Ongoing Tensions
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U.S. Suspends Visas for Afghan Citizens, Thousands Left in Limbo

November 30, 2025
Bibi Amina Hakimi
TOLOnews’ Reporter
29 Nov 2025

Migrant rights activists say that this visa suspension has left thousands of immigration cases in limbo in Pakistan, the UAE, and Qatar.

Following a new U.S. decision to permanently halt immigration from all third-world countries, many Afghan families in Pakistan who were awaiting processing of their immigration cases now face deep uncertainty.

Ahmad Samim Naeemi, an Afghan living in Pakistan with his family, said: “On one hand, Pakistan is increasing pressure on Afghan refugees, and on the other, the lack of progress on our immigration cases is causing serious concern. While we respect the U.S. decision, we hope the process will resume. People are in a very poor mental state. Those with P1, SIV, and P2 cases are living in complete uncertainty.”

The U.S. Department of State announced that all types of visa issuance for Afghan passport holders have been suspended, stating: “The United States has no higher priority than its national security.”

An organization advocating for the relocation of Afghans to the U.S. responded by urging Congress to exercise its constitutional authority to protect the SIV program and called on petitioners to be prepared for legal action.

A statement from the organization read: “They are using a single violent individual as cover for a policy they have long planned, turning their own intelligence failures into an excuse to punish an entire community and the veterans who served alongside them.”

Migrant rights activists say that this visa suspension has left thousands of immigration cases in limbo in Pakistan, the UAE, and Qatar.

Jamal Muslim, a migrant rights activist, said: “The disruption of people’s peace and stability through targeted policies by powerful countries has exposed thousands of innocent people in neighboring countries and even inside the United States to days of tension and hardship.”

Previously, following an attack on National Guard soldiers in Washington, former U.S. President Donald Trump had suspended refugee admissions from 19 countries, including Afghanistan, and ordered a review of their immigration files.

U.S. Suspends Visas for Afghan Citizens, Thousands Left in Limbo
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Afghans Who Assisted U.S. During the War Underwent Rigorous Vetting

November 30, 2025

The New York Times

Reporting from Washington

Former officials said the C.I.A. diligently assessed those who partnered with its forces, like the man accused of shooting two National Guard members in Washington.

The C.I.A. diligently helped Afghans who had served in agency-sponsored units, like the man accused of shooting two National Guard members in Washington, navigate the U.S. immigration system, according to former American officials familiar with the process.

The C.I.A. has not commented on the vetting process that brought the man, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, to the United States, and the former U.S. officials spoke on condition of anonymity given classified nature of C.I.A. partner units. But the agency’s director, John Ratcliffe, has faulted the Biden administration’s vetting of Mr. Lakanwal and said he “should have never been allowed to come here.” Mr. Lakanwal is accused of killing one of the National Guard members and critically wounding the other in the attack on Wednesday, just blocks from the White House.

Mr. Lakanwal was granted asylum in April, during the Trump administration, but it is not clear when the C.I.A. might have offered its endorsement of him.

The C.I.A. routinely wrote classified letters to add to immigration files to help members of their partner forces in Afghanistan win approval for asylum or parole claims, one of the officials said. American officials believed that the Afghans who had worked with the agency would be in particular danger if they remained behind under a Taliban-run government. The C.I.A.-backed units were responsible for the deaths and detention of Taliban leaders and fighters.

One former American official said the agency was diligent in advocating the immigration cases of all the people it worked with, and had a dedicated team to help them settle in the United States.

The agency also kept extensive biometric data, including retinal scans, on Afghans who served in their units, information that helped identify their partners among the thousands of Afghans who fled the country, according to former officials.

To join the partner forces, at first called Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams and later Zero Units, Afghans needed to get current force members to vouch for them, putting the reputation of their tribe or family on the line. As Afghans moved up in rank, they continued to be vetted regularly.

During the Afghanistan war, the C.I.A. also conducted polygraphs on members of its partner units to identify potential Taliban allies or those with anti-American sentiments, former officials said.

That intense vetting process in Afghanistan — and the work the units did evacuating people to the Kabul International Airport after the regular army collapsed in the face of the Taliban takeover — gave the agency confidence that people who had fought in their units posed no danger to Americans.

Afghans Who Assisted U.S. During the War Underwent Rigorous Vetting
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Taliban used discarded UK kit to track down Afghans who worked with west, inquiry hears

November 30, 2025

The UK left behind sensitive technology allowing the Taliban to track down Afghans who worked with western forces, a whistleblower has told the Afghan leak inquiry.

The woman, known as Person A, said Afghans affected by the data leak were told to move homes and change their phone numbers to protect themselves from the Taliban because it had the resources to track them down.

MPs are looking into the Conservative government’s handling of a catastrophic leak of the personal details of almost 19,000 Afghans who had asked to come to the UK to flee the Taliban.

A spreadsheet containing their personal data, including names, contact details and in some cases family information, was accidentally leaked by an official working at UK special forces headquarters in February 2022.

The leak came to light only in August 2023, when the names of nine people who had applied to move to the UK appeared on Facebook. Person A, an independent volunteer caseworker who was working with targeted Afghans, was alerted to this and notified the Ministry of Defence.

“There seems to be this misconception that the Taliban do not have the same sort of facilities that we have,” she told MPs on the defence select committee at a private hearing on 18 November, the transcript from which was published on Friday.

“We left it all behind in Afghanistan; they have it. If they have your phone number, they can trace you down to within metres. That is what the [redacted] unit did.”

Asked by Jesse Norman, the Tory MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire, if the Taliban possessed the necessary encryption and de-encryption technologies, Person A said: “They’ve got everything.”

Asked by Norman whether “we left them sensitive material and kit which they were then using against us?” she responded: “Yes.”

Preliminary research submitted to the inquiry last month estimated that at least 49 family members and colleagues of Afghans affected by the leak had been killed.

A superinjunction about the leak was put in force in August 2023 and prevented any information about it from being made public until July 2025.

Person A told MPs that she was served the injunction on 18 September 2023 during a Teams call with the government, without being offered any legal advice.

She had alerted James Heappey, then the armed forces minister, and Luke Pollard, his Labour counterpart, about the leak by email on 13 August 2023. She received no reply from Heappey until 28 August 2023, when she tagged him in a post on X.

Because she was restricted by the injunction, Person A and the non-governmental organisation she was working with told Afghan families they were dealing with that they had “concerns that somebody’s phone had been compromised”.

“We recommended that they moved if they could and changed their phone numbers. Those were the two main details that, if the Taliban had access to this information, would lead to them being traced,” she said.

Person A argued that Paul Rimmer, a retired civil servant who carried out a review of the breach, had been wrong to conclude that the acquisition of the dataset by the Taliban was “unlikely to substantially change an individual’s existing exposure given the volume of data already available”, and that it was unlikely “merely being on the dataset would be grounds for targeting”.

“The thing to remember is that these Afghans are not standing up to the Taliban; they are in hiding. Everything boils down to their previous employment. They do not just target the principal applicant; they target the families,” she said.

“We have people who have been electrocuted. We have people who have been waterboarded. We have people who have been whipped with the big outdoor electrical cables that are around the thickness of your fist … we have had four-year-old children who have had their arms broken to try to get the family to say where someone is.”

An MoD spokesperson said: “The independent Rimmer review, conducted based on existing assessments, expertise and reflections from current Afghanistan work, focused on those most able to provide a high level of insight into the current situation as of spring 2025, concluded that it is highly unlikely that merely being on the spreadsheet would be grounds for an individual to be targeted.”

Taliban used discarded UK kit to track down Afghans who worked with west, inquiry hears
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US pauses visas for all Afghan passport holders, halts asylum requests

November 30, 2025
By Alastair McCready
and News Agencies
Al Jazeera
Published On 29 Nov 2025

The US State Department has announced it is “immediately” pausing issuing visas for individuals travelling on Afghan passports to protect “public safety”, as President Donald Trump administration’s immigration crackdown intensifies in the wake of a deadly attack on two National Guard members.

The announcement on Friday came as United States immigration authorities said they are also halting decisions on all asylum applications for the foreseeable future.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed in a post on X on Friday that the State Department had “paused visa issuance for ALL individuals traveling on Afghan passports”.

The move comes after authorities named Afghan national Rahmanaullah Lakanwal as the main suspect in Wednesday’s shooting in Washington, DC, which killed one National Guard member and left another in critical condition.

“The United States has no higher priority than protecting our nation and our people,” Rubio said.

Lakanwal is alleged to have ambushed West Virginia National Guard members Sarah Beckstrom and Andrew Wolfe in an unprovoked attack as they patrolled near the White House.

On Thursday evening, the Trump administration confirmed that 20-year-old Beckstrom had died from her injuries, while 24-year-old Wolfe remains in critical condition.

The CIA confirmed this week that Lakanwal had worked for the spy agency in Afghanistan before emigrating to the US shortly after the withdrawal of Western forces from the country in 2021.

The office of US Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, announced on Friday that the charges against Lakanwal had been upgraded to first-degree murder, along with two counts of assault with intent to kill while armed.

In a separate announcement on Friday, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) director Joseph Edlow said the agency had also paused all asylum decisions in the interest of the “safety of the American people”.

“USCIS has halted all asylum decisions until we can ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible,” Edlow said in a post on X.

A day earlier, Edlow said he had ordered “a full-scale, rigorous re-examination of every green card for every alien from every country of concern” at the direction of Trump.

The moves are the latest in a series of escalating restrictions imposed on immigration into the US at Trump’s urging.

Trump, who called the deadly Washington, DC, shooting a “terrorist attack”, has on several occasions over recent days attacked former President Joe Biden’s administration’s immigration policies, including the granting of visas to Afghan nationals who worked with US forces in Afghanistan.

Lakanwal came to the US under a Biden-era programme known as “Operation Allies Welcome”, following the US withdrawal in 2021.

In a post on his Truth Social platform on Thursday, Trump ordered authorities to re-examine all green card applications from 19 “countries of concern”, before saying he planned to suspend immigration from “all Third World countries”.

He did not define the term “Third World”, but the phrase is often used as a shorthand for developing countries in the Global South.

Trump also said that he would “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country”.

“[I will] denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquillity, and deport any foreign national who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western civilization,” he said.

Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has already taken aggressive measures to restrict immigration, announcing in October his administration would accept only 7,500 refugees in 2026 – the lowest number since 1980.

US pauses visas for all Afghan passport holders, halts asylum requests
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