‘They’d come to kill me’: The Afghan tax reformer hunted by the Taliban and abandoned by the Britain he served

A year after the fall of Kabul, Abdullah Sayyid is in hiding, his wife has been murdered and the Home Office seems to have lost his case file

Abdullah Sayyid often thinks about the moment the Taliban broke down his door, burst inside and shot his wife. The gunmen left, but would soon redouble their efforts to kill him because of his work for the British government.

Sayyid's wife was murdered during the chaotic aftermath of Operation Pitting, the UK's emergency mass airlift from Kabul that began on 13 August last year.