Afghan guards who worked for the Dutch government face being tortured and killed by the Taliban if they are left behind in the country, former members of the military mission have told MPs.

“Many of these people live in fear, in hiding and change their address frequently because they receive threats,” Nesar Naeemi, who worked with the Dutch armed forces in Uruzgan, told members of the foreign affairs committee.

“Last year one of them was murdered 100 metres away from his house.”

Ministers last month reversed a decision to grant asylum to 145 security guards who worked for agencies serving the Dutch army rather than directly for the government.

Foreign affairs minister Casper Veldkamp, defence minister Ruben Brekelmans and asylum minister Marjolein Faber warned that the group could swell to around 4,500 people, comprising 900 guards and their families, if the rules were not tightened.

But experts who attended the meeting disputed the figures. Jean Debie, chair of the military staff union VBM, said around 160 guards and 30 embassy staff had applied for asylum since the end of last year.

“Stuck in Afghanistan”

The number is unlikely to grow because many guards and their families had either disappeared, fled to other countries or been killed, Naeemi said.

Afghans who worked with other countries such as the United States or Australia had received assistance following the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan and the evacuation of Kabul in 2021, he said. “But those who worked for the Netherlands are stuck.”

“I am ashamed of it,” Naeemi, who worked for the Dutch mission from 2006 to 2010 and now lives in the Netherlands, said. “These people need our protection.

“But I have to tell them they won’t get it, because the Netherlands doesn’t have enough houses or enough money.”

Hein van Rijckevorsel, who commanded one of the Dutch bases in Uruzgan in 2007, said he saw it as his “moral duty, as a leader, a human being and a Dutchman” to ensure the guards were given asylum in the Netherlands.

“They risked their lives for us and for our mission and it is time we gave them the protection they deserve,” he said.

Coalition parties absent

Opposition MPs criticised the fact that three of the four coalition parties stayed away from the roundtable meeting, which was convened by GroenLinks-PvdA MP Kati Piri.

The far-right PVV, right-wing liberal VVD and farmers’ party BBB did not send representatives, leaving NSC’s Isa Kahraman as the only MP defending the cabinet’s position.

Kahraman said there was “no evidence” that the Taliban would not honour an agreement with the United Nations not to target Afghans who served with the US-led military operation.

But Sara de Jong, professor of politics and international relations at York University, said the amnesty only applied to former soldiers in the Afghan army, not people who worked with foreign missions.