UK Government Got Media Gagging Order to Secretly Fly 24,000 Afghan Migrants Into Country

The British government earmarked £7 billion to secretly import and house tens of thousands of Afghans under the cover of a remarkable ‘superinjunction’ that could have meant prison for anyone revealing the covert operation.

Nearly 24,000 Afghans were secretly flown to the United Kingdom over the past two years and have been housed on military bases or in hotels at vast expense to the British taxpayer, the government finally admitted on Tuesday. Called Operation Rubific, it was covered up by a unique injunction that would hold any public discussion of the mission as contempt of court.

Even discussing the fact the injunction existed and protected otherwise unknown secret information was made a contempt matter too, potentially inviting jail time for transgressions, in what is called a ‘superinjunction’. While by their nature these are deeply secretive, this is the first time a superinjunction is known to have been taken out by the British government against the media.

The thousands were secretly flown to Britain because their identities as collaborators with Western forces were revealed in a massive data leak that was thought to have potentially handed the Taliban — who took over Afghanistan after the botched withdrawal during the President Joe Biden era — a “kill list”.

The leak is reported by The Times to have started with a British soldier working at a London special forces headquarters vetting Afghan applications to travel to Britain, who emailed a spreadsheet. The document contained some 100,000 names and details of Afghan citizens who had worked with Western militaries during the Afghan war, their families, and those who had applied for asylum.

It is said the unidentified soldier emailed the document to people in Afghanistan several times, and that this happened despite orders in place to prevent new leaks after an earlier, smaller release of Afghan names from the Ministry of Defence.

The leak wasn’t discovered until over a year later when the government became aware of an Afghan who had his own application to relocate to Britain rejected attempting to blackmail the UK government by posting parts of the spreadsheet online. Believing the complete dataset was in the wild, the government decided it had no choice but to fly everyone involved out of the country. The blackmailer was one of those relocated.

Simultaneously, the British state asked social media companies to remove posts containing the data and British intelligence agency hackers worked to delete the Excel spreadsheet off foreign computers where they could find it.

Now, 18,500 Afghans have been flown to the UK and are now living on military bases or in hotels, and a further 5,400 are flying in the coming weeks, for a total of 23,900 in all.

Exactly how many of these near-24,000 are essentially additional migration to the UK — many Afghan interpreters and collaborators were already being relocated to the UK by the government — is unclear. The Daily Telegraph reports in some cases, people flown on the programme would have ended up in the United Kingdom anyway and the total excess number is 6,900 people.

The Daily Mail, on the other hand, claims sight of internal government documents created this year which stated the relocation was of “25,000 Afghans who had previously been found ineligible”, and therefore wouldn’t have been brought otherwise. The Times states of £7 billion initially earmarked by the treasury for the secret flights and housing the extra Afghans, £2.7 billion has already been spent.

The Mail states the migrants were brought on a steady stream of unmarked planes flying from Pakistan to RAF Brize Norton, and London Stansted airport, where the passenger jets would be taken to a private hangar to disembark their passengers away from public eyes. There, Home Office staff processed the Afghan arrivals before bussing them to Ministry of Defence property and hotels to live.

Remarkably, the paper states, at one point this year a full fifth of Ministry of Defence property was being used to house Afghans.

At the time the breach was discovered and the plan put in place, the now-defacto leader of the Conservative Party Robert Jenrick was Immigration minister, Ben Wallace was Defence Minister, and Rishi Sunak was Prime Minister. Now-Minister of Defence John Healey was not in government in 2023 but as shadow minister he was read into the situation at the time, he said today.

Otherwise Members of Parliament, except for the Speakers of both Houses so they could use their powers to prevent any discussion of the matter in Parliament, have been kept in the dark until today. The intense secrecy over the mission has been criticised as it totally prevented Parliament and the public from debating the merits of dedicating large sums of money to directly import Afghan migrants until it was already a fait accompli.

How this news may be taken by the public has already been considered by the state, The Mail notes, stating it already has plans in place to “mitigate any risk of public disorder following the discharge of the injunction”. The paper notes last summer’s anti-migration riots that struck several British towns overwhelmingly took place in areas which had seen high numbers of Afghan migrant arrivals.

The briefing paper is reported to have said:

The recent far-right disorder targeting asylum seekers and Muslim communities was the worst outbreak of racial violence in the UK for decades.

We know that 15 out of the 20 primary disorder hotspots are in the top 20 per cent of local authorities with the highest numbers of supported asylum seekers and Afghan resettlement arrivals.

It also claimed on British military bases where Afghans were housed, after military wives living in service accommodation complained the arrivals were taking pictures of their children, they were threatened with disciplinary action if they tried to go public with this information.

Brexit leader Nigel Farage said the superinjunction was a coverup of “incompetence, dishonesty, and a threat to our own national security”. He said: “among the number who have come are convicted sex offenders… of those who came, none of them were included in the immigration figures. There’s been a total veil of secrecy put upon this by the last Conservative government and carried on until now by the present Labour government”.

Farage warned of an “incalculable” risk to women in Britain by the presence of so many Afghans — given, as widely discussed, the sex crime rate of Afghan migrants to Western nations — surreptitiously planted into the country.