London: UK’s Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said that his country was considering sheltering the Afghan journalists who had cooperated with UK media, the Independent reported on Saturday.
On Wednesday, it was reported on a joint letter of 23 UK media to the foreign secretary and the prime minister, Boris Johnson, urging the authorities to protect Afghanistan’s media representatives amid the rise of the Taliban’s violence in the central Asian country.
“Under existing schemes, we are able to consider individual cases for relocation on an exceptional basis, where there is evidence they are under imminent threat due to the nature of their engagement with the UK,” Raab said in the reply letter, as quoted by the Independent.
The foreign secretary called the Afghan media “vibrant” institutions and said they were a real success in the past 20 years, therefore, the media should be “protected.”
“Journalists (and those supporting them) can be eligible for our support, depending on the individual circumstances that apply,” Raab noted in the letter.
The spike in the Taliban (banned as a terrorist organization in Russia) aggression is observed in Afghanistan now amid the international troops’ withdrawal. The pullout was a part of the US-Taliban peace deal concluded in Doha in 2020. The troops are scheduled to leave the country by September 11.
