Tens of thousands of Afghans in Britain and Ireland live in fear of losing vital support as the Afghan embassy is to close its doors in London. Staff will be told to either apply for asylum or return to Afghanistan. The closure, at the request of the British government, is because the Taliban has dismissed staff from the embassy who do not represent them.
A pregnant Afghan refugee, eight months pregnant, worries about what kind of future her baby will have, citing that the Dublin embassy has been closed; she fears her documents will no longer be valid and the baby’s nationality is in jeopardy. My passport has already expired, and I cannot renew it. I cannot go back to Afghanistan, where they are disapproving of any working woman,” she said.
The embassy is staffed by servants of Afghanistan’s former regime, to which the West lent military and diplomatic support before the Taliban resumed control in 2021. She had been invited abroad to work on conferences in Spain, she said, but she could not travel without a passport.
“I cannot go back home until the Taliban is there, and now I am not allowed to leave Ireland,” she said, adding that her family was scattered in Afghanistan and other countries. The Taliban’s foreign ministry said in July it would no longer recognize papers issued by Afghan embassies in the UK and several other European countries due to a lack of “coordination”.
With the US and 13 other largely European countries not recognizing the Taliban, the UK is also unlikely to let it reopen the embassy anytime soon. “The embassy of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in London is to close officially, and its activities will terminate on 27 September 2024 at the official request of the host country,” Zalmai Rassoul, who represented the previous regime as ambassador to the UK and Ireland, said.
The Afghan embassy in London shut down due to failure to cooperate. This is not the first time the embassy has shut its doors. It was earlier closed down after the communist coup in Kabul in 1978 as it had “a marked anti-West bias and intimate relations with the former Soviet Union,” according to the Afghan embassy’s website. The embassy was closed down once again between 1996 and 2001 as the Taliban first took power over Afghanistan.
During the last three years since the Taliban took power by toppling the Nato-backed regime of Kabul, they have successfully preserved diplomatic relations with several main countries, including China, Russia, and Pakistan.
