By The Telegraph Staff
An investigation by The Daily Telegraph has found that more than 200 former Afghan soldiers and police officers have been identified and killed by the Taliban since a list of Afghans who worked with British forces leaked online in February 2022.
On Wednesday, the newspaper reported that it remains unclear whether those killed were specifically named on the leaked list. The British government has refused to confirm which Afghans were included.
Two Taliban officials told The Telegraph that the group accessed a list of 19,000 former British collaborators in Afghanistan via the internet and formed a special unit to track them down. According to the report, a Taliban special forces unit known as Yarmouk 60 has been tasked with locating and detaining individuals on the list.
The investigation documented how the Taliban hunted down former security personnel across several provinces. The newspaper published the names and photographs of six former soldiers and police officers who were killed.
Among them was Colonel Tor Jan, a police commander in Helmand, who was shot dead by Taliban fighters outside a mosque in July 2024.
One month later, another former army officer was gunned down in Khost province. Helmand, a major base for British troops during NATO’s mission in Afghanistan, witnessed some of the bloodiest clashes of the war.
Although the Taliban’s leadership initially declared a general amnesty for former Afghan security forces, Taliban officials told The Telegraph that “British spies” were excluded — referring to those identified on the leaked list of former UK allies.
Another victim, Army officer Mazammil Najarabi, was killed in February 2023 in Kapisa province after being shot and dying en route to hospital. That same month, the body of former police commander Hayatullah Nezami was found outside an Afghan army base in Takhar province; he had disappeared the previous night while driving his car. Nezami had been working for a municipal contractor in Taloqan following the collapse of the Afghan government.
Previously, the Taliban have denied reports of targeted arrests and killings of former security personnel. However, credible investigations contradict these claims.
A New York Times investigation earlier revealed that at least 500 former military and government personnel were killed or disappeared in the first six months of Taliban rule — some of them lured into surrendering by promises of safety before being detained, tortured, or executed.
While Taliban officials have at times blamed such violence on rogue fighters, The Times found evidence that these killings were systematic and intentional.
Human Rights Watch has also documented killings and disappearances of former Afghan security forces since the Taliban takeover, reporting over 100 such cases in just four of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.
On Wednesday, UK Defence Secretary John Healey acknowledged that the leak may have had deadly consequences for Britain’s former Afghan partners.
The British government has described the leak as the result of an “inadvertent error” by a Ministry of Defence employee and has allocated nearly £7 billion to mitigate the fallout and resettle thousands of Afghans on the list to the UK.
