Cardiff Teenager Faces Fight to Avoid Being Sent Back to Afghanistan

Sunday November 13, 2016
Kabul (BNA) Thousands of people, politicians, celebrities and refugee charities have backed a campaign to stop a teenager who fled to Britain from Afghanistan as a 10-year-old after his father was murdered from being forcibly removed to the country of his birth. Bashir Naderi’s sole memory of Afghanistan is his father being shot by the Taliban and he has no contacts with family or friends, cannot speak any of the Afghan languages and claims he will not survive if he is sent back. Naderi, 19, was detained by immigration officials in Cardiff – where he was brought up by a loving foster family – taken to Gatwick airport and came within minutes of being forced on to a plane bound for Kabul when his long-term girlfriend and her family managed to win him a temporary reprieve. Naderi said he was terrified that any day now he might be detained again and sent back to a country he fears and has no connections with. “I am really, really scared,” Naderi told the Guardian. “I was in the middle of my college exams when all this happened. My life and my family is here. I feel as if I was born in Cardiff, not Afghanistan. I couldn’t cope there.”
His foster mother, Dawn Jackson, who took Naderi in, said she was frightened for the teenager. “I love him to death. I’ve had him for 10 years. I’ve nurtured him, looked after him. He’s part of my family. He’s a Cardiff boy. The Home Office seem to think it’s safe for him to go back. We know it’s not. It’s a very cruel society that can do this to a young man.” After his father was shot, Naderi’s mother sold the family’s land to send her son to the UK. He does not know what has happened to her. It took him a year to reach Britain, where he was placed with Jackson in the Welsh capital. He flourished, attending a Catholic high school, gaining nine GCSEs and going on to study at Cardiff and Vale College. Naderi was detained after attending what he thought was going to be a routine immigration appointment and spent 11 days behind bars at a police station in Wales and a detention center. “I’ve never been in trouble but it felt as if I had been put in prison,” said Naderi. When it became clear that he was going to be taken to Gatwick to be put on a plane, he resisted, was restrained with some sort of belt and suffered a wrist injury, meaning his lower arm is now in a cast. “The guards just laughed,” he said.
Meanwhile Naderi’s girlfriend, Nicole Cooper, 24, the daughter of a retired policeman, was at the Royal Courts of Justice in London trying to halt the process. At the last moment, Naderi’s lawyer managed to obtain a stay of removal, arguing Afghanistan was not safe for him because he was so westernized. Naderi, nursing his injured arm, was freed and left outside in the cold for two and a half hours as he waited for Cooper’s family to pick him up. It is now up to the Home Office to make the case again for Naderi’s removal. It could lead to a judicial review that may have implications for many other unaccompanied youngsters who have made a life in the UK and become westernized. Naderi is on tenterhooks. “I’m not myself. I can’t sleep. Life is on hold,” he said. The response to the case has been extraordinary. By Thursday around 12,000 people had signed a petition calling for Naderi to be allowed to stay. The Welsh singers Charlotte Church and Cerys Matthews were among those to voice support.