International
February 14, 2022

More than half a million Afghan migrants have crossed the border since the fall of Kabul last year and are heading for Europe and the Channel coast, intelligence experts have warned Ministers. UK Home Secretary Priti Patel last week held an emergency summit with her counterparts in the international Five Eyes intelligence alliance to discuss how to track the exodus.
According to the reports, the Home Secretary is also seeking to toughen the UK’s response to migrants who cross the Channel, with Border Force teams moving between hotels in Britain to round up migrants and move them to hold centres on military bases. The Five Eyes group comprising the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, combines the resources of MI6, GCHQ, the CIA and the other nations’ domestic intelligence agencies, and can be traced back to the informal meetings between American and British code-breakers during the Second World War.
Further, the 500,000 migrants displaced by political turmoil arising from the Taliban takeover and famine in Afghanistan this winter is in addition to the 2.6 million existing Afghan refugees around the world. Of those, around 2.2 million are in Iran and Pakistan with a further 3.5 million people displaced within Afghanistan itself.
243