As war in Ukraine creates millions of new refugees, many people airlifted to safety from Kabul last summer are still stuck in UK hotels. We spent six months following three families as they adjust to life in their new home
In late September 2021, Firas, his wife and four-month-old son have been checked in to a smart Hilton business hotel in London. With green velvet sofas in the lobby and pink orchids at reception, it seems designed to bathe visitors in an atmosphere of corporate calm; in sharp contrast, Firas, 32, a former guard at the British embassy in Kabul, exudes a jangling, nervous sense of distress. Six weeks after a dramatic evacuation from Afghanistan, he remains so shaken that he is waking most nights at 3am and pacing the hotel corridors in tears. “I can’t enjoy the hotel. I can’t concentrate on my new life. I’m too worried about the people I’ve left behind,” he says, bent over a table in the lobby, head in his hands.
A few miles away in another part of south London, Ali, 35, who spent eight years working as a programme and finance manager with the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID) in Afghanistan, is isolating inside one room of a quarantine hotel with his wife Zohrab, his nine-year-old daughter and his two sons, aged six and five. A Taliban death threat forced Ali to flee to London a year before his wife and children were evacuated in August 2021, and their recent reunion in this small, sixth-floor room overlooking the Thames was incredibly emotional. “My kids were jumping all over me. I was just so relieved that they were safe,” Ali says. He found them dehydrated and hungry, still wearing the clothes they had left home in. The room is crowded, and the children are sleeping on the floor. They spend their days examining their new home out of the hotel window, trying to spot police boats on the river and finding enormous enjoyment in mimicking the unfamiliar words their father uses when he calls down to reception. “They find it so funny. They tease me, copying my voice, saying, ‘Good morning’ to each other.”
