Racist hotel protests terrified families of Afghan translators who saved the lives of British troops

Martin Shipton

Far-right protests falsely alleging that paedophile illegal migrants were being housed in a hotel near Cardiff Airport terrified the families of the real refugees who had saved the lives of British troops in Afghanistan.

The truth has been revealed in a BBC Radio Wales documentary narrated by Cardiff journalist Amy Derrick.

In the programme, Derrick interviews a local organiser of the protests and people from Afghanistan who were subjected to hateful abuse by racist groups who quickly latched onto the issue.

In the summer of 2025, far-right protests were organised across Britain close to hotels where migrants were housed. Counter-protests were mounted by anti-fascist groups.

At Rhoose, close to Cardiff in the Vale of Glamorgan, the focus of protest was the Holiday Inn Express, which was temporarily housing the Afghan families.

A local woman who has joined the anti-migrant protests tells Derrick: “I’ve been coming out to most of them. I’m being called racist, but yet I’m here, you know, to support our local town and my children as well. I just want it all to be really resolved – the concerns [about] the immigrants flooding the town. It’s evident that the abuse of young girls and they think they could do what they want is, you know … and that’s the anger about paedophiles and things like that. This is how worried I am about what is going to happen in the future. And I’m really scared about it. The anger is massively growing where nobody’s being listened to. I don’t even know where we go from here – we are all banging our heads against the wall and I’m hoping and praying that something will be done.”

Derrick says: “ I left the protest, but the noise continues to ring in my ears. At the protest, someone complained there were only men inside the hotel – no women or children. Meanwhile the counter-protestors were chanting that refugees are welcome here.

“But exactly who are the people inside the hotel and what do they make of all these noisy protesters? It is very rare for the media to get access to these hotels, but I begin by asking the Vale of Glamorgan council for useful contacts. After several weeks, I received an invitation to the hotel and permission to attend an ESL [English as a second language] class. I want to meet the residents and find out more about their former lives in Afghanistan and the new lives they’re building here in Wales, just feet away from the barricades and the protesters.”

Norman Gettings organises the ESL classes through local charity Oasis Cardiff, who support thousands of asylum seekers and refugees in Wales every year. Derrick speaks to a men’s class and later a class for women, who prefer not to be interviewed for the programme.

Catherine Partridge, one of the resettlement coordinators for Vale of Glamorgan,states: “The hotel is very basic. They are given three meals a day. They’re unable to do any of their own cooking in the rooms. And that’s a big thing because every event, every celebration [they have in Afghanistan], it’s all about food. So you find the women in particular very much miss that and miss their own cooking and being able to share food with people. So what they look forward to most when they move on is being able to cook for themselves.”

Rejecting the view pushed by the far right that the refugees were living in luxury accommodation paid for by British taxpayers, Partridge shows Derrick one of the rooms and says: “This is one of the standard rooms in the hotel. There’s a double bed. There’s a very small area to hang your clothes. And there’s a bathroom with a shower cubicle, toilet, sink. But there’s no room to store things. They are small rooms and, of course, they’re living in those conditions for up to nine months. It’s not an ideal living situation for a family, especially with young children.”

Derrick asks about concerns heard at the protests regarding the potential for criminal offences committed by people staying at the hotel, to which Partridge responds: “We have not been made aware of any families [involved in that]. We’ve not had the police contact us about the behaviour of any of the families here.”

Children

Responding to false rumours that the hotel was housing only men, Partridge says: “It’s been more children than anything. So you tend to find you’ll have a family. Mum and dad and children of the original families are 250 people who arrived. We had 47 families. Looking at the figures, it was always about 25% men, 25% women and 50% children.”

Derrick spoke with a man who had to leave his parents behind in Afghanistan. He came to the UK in 2022 and now works for the council as a translator. He said: “I was working with British forces in Afghanistan for a couple of years in Helmand Province. I was a translator. We worked in the front line fighting against the Taliban. It was very hard. It was dangerous. I helped the British forces. I saved their lives in Afghanistan. It happened many times.

“The Taliban are always thinking: ‘The translators. They are the eyes of the British forces.’ They are looking for them. If they find them, they’re going to kill them.”

Invited

Gettings tells the programme: “One of the confusions in the public realm is that these people are asylum seekers. They are seeking sanctuary. There’s a difference. They don’t go through the same process as people who come in small boats or come in under expired visas, or any other way of coming to the UK. They have been invited and evacuated from Afghanistan because of the service they gave to the UK and US military there when the Taliban took power the second time.

“It was quickly realised that there would be some element of retribution and violence that would be visited on them, so they chose to take the option offered by the UK Government to come to the UK. The phrase I always use when people ask me about this is that they are here because we were there and we counted on their support while we were there, and the British government offered them places because Afghanistan was no longer safe for them.”

Numb

Former Welsh guard Stephen Peters says: “During my time in Afghanistan, I was a sergeant and operated in Afghanistan in 2009, 2012 and 2016. When we were on the ground, we had Afghan interpreters with us, and they were a massive asset on the ground. I remember the day when it came up on the news that the troops were going to be pulled out of Afghanistan, and then the fall of Kabul happened.

“My whole body went numb because I knew that it was just going to go back to exactly how it was. And I thought straight away, I just felt, you know, the danger that they’re going to be in. The Taliban were hunting down people who helped the British Army or the American army. I shed a tear and it has affected me. We fought alongside the Afghan interpreters or workers, and they were part of the team. So I think it’s the right thing to do by supporting them and ensuring that they’ve got a safe, stable future. I think it’s our responsibility to get them away from that danger and get them set for the next chapter of their lives.”

An Afghan teenager known as Bibi told the programme how she and her family had been worried when they first arrived at the hotel : “While the kids are kids and they can’t fully understand everything, they were afraid. For example, they would say: ‘Why are these people gathered here? Can they come inside the hotel? Will they send us back to Afghanistan? Is this our future?’

“At the beginning, I was a bit worried and I kept thinking, why don’t these people want us here? We didn’t have a comfortable life in Afghanistan. Have they really become so insensitive that they don’t even want Afghan girls, at least some of us, to have access to education and basic freedom?”

The programme, Operation Warm Welcome, can be accessed via this link

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