When the Taliban took control of Kabul in August 2021, the Koofi family were among 8,000 Afghans airlifted to 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 waited to be resettled.
As the months passed she followed their new lives, as well as those of the hotel staff and its other residents: an uncertain limbo of bureaucracy and confinement.
In this podcast, Sophie McBain reads her feature with a new introduction. The original article was first published in December 2021.
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