Aug 29, 2021: According to a report by the Observer,thousands of emails to the UK Foreign Office from MPs and charities detailing urgent cases of Afghans trying to escape from Kabul have not been read, including cases flagged by government ministers.

UK’s withdrawal from Afghanistan ended Saturday night with the departure of the last British military and diplomatic personnel, ending a 20-year deployment.

More than 15,000 people have been evacuated in the last fortnight, with ministers calling UK’s largest military withdrawal since World War II.

However, amid allegations of government incompetence over elements of the evacuation efforts, the observer has seen evidence that an official e-mail address used by members of parliament and others to collate potential Afghan cases saw up to 5,000 unread emails.

The revelation calls into question the suggestion from ministers that the number of Afghans left behind would be up to 1,100 in total.

A whistleblower with access to the UK Foreign Office email accounts in question said most cases covered more than one person, meaning ministers could have no clear idea of the real numbers left behind. “It’s not just that MPs weren’t getting replies, their emails weren’t being read,” said the source.

“The inbox currently has a 5,000-email backlog. It’s not that they are the emails which haven’t been actioned. It’s not even that they are emails which haven’t been processed and put into a spreadsheet. It’s that no one has actually opened the email.

The claims will heap further pressure on the Foreign Office’s handling of the evacuation process and the UK foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, who has been criticised for initially remaining on holiday when the Afghanistan crisis began.

As the final evacuations took place on Saturday, Kabul’s Hamid Karzai airport remained under a high security alert, with the US telling any citizens still queuing at the gates to leave immediately. The Taliban also began efforts to seal off the whole area around the airport.

Extra Taliban forces, were deployed to set up new checkpoints and blocked all routes to the airport gates, bringing some order to a place of chaos.

With other western nations also halting evacuations on Saturday, and just three more days until 31 August, the deadline for complete US withdrawal, the desperation of many stuck in Kabul was palpable. Among those who fear they will be left behind once all evacuation efforts end on Tuesday, are dozens of local Afghan staff working for the UN.

Earlier, multiple international aid organizations and NGOs were accused of failing to rescue their local Afghan staff. Afghan workers accuse their employers of evacuating international staff immediately, but abandoning local staff until it was “too late”.

An Afghan woman who worked for a UN agency in Kabul for several years, and had previously worked for EU humanitarian agencies, said: “The UN evacuated the expats safely in convoys to the airport in the first and second week after the Taliban took over. But they literally did nothing for local staff.”

Meanwhile, during the next 36 hours, the US is on high alert for another possible terrorist attack on Kabul airport and has warned citizens to leave the area immediately, as troops have entered the final stages of withdrawing from Afghanistan and the Taliban have seized control.

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