BONUS: Operation Warm Welcome: the hotel that became home to 100 refugees
The New Statesman | UK politics and culture
The New Statesman
4.4 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 16 April 2022
⏱️ 35 minutes
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Summary
When the Taliban took control of Kabul in August 2021, the Koofi family were among 8,000 Afghans airlifted to safety in the UK, as part of the government’s Operation Warm Welcome. The New Statesman’s Sophie McBain met them in a hotel in the north of England soon afterwards, where they were waiting to be resettled. As the months passed, she followed their new life, as well as that of the hotel staff and its other residents: an uncertain limbo of bureaucracy and confinement.
Written and read by Sophie McBain.
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| 0:57.8 | New Statement, the best of our reported features and essays read aloud. In this episode, |
| 1:06.1 | Operation Warm Welcome and the hotel that became home to 150 Afghan refugees, written and read by me |
| 1:13.7 | Sophie McBain. I'm Sophie McBain, Associate Editor at the New Statement and the author of |
| 1:23.5 | the piece you're about to hear. This article was originally published in the New Statement on |
| 1:28.2 | the 9th of December 2021. In late August, around 8,000 Afghans were airlifted to safety in the UK |
| 1:36.2 | as Kabul fell to the Taliban. Many were placed in outer town hotels. This was supposed to be a |
| 1:42.9 | temporary measure, one more permanent housing was found for them. I wanted to understand what it |
| 1:48.9 | was like for those families, who'd been forced to leave everything behind and make a new life for |
| 1:53.9 | themselves in the UK. I first got in touch with Marbuakufi in September, a few weeks after she arrived, |
| 2:00.8 | when she was living in a motorway hotel in Northern England. I spent months following her family |
| 2:06.0 | story, as well as those of the hotel workers, who'd also found their lives were changed overnight. |
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