We need to talk about Afghan sex offenders

For many years, it has been tantamount to racism to draw any connection between foreign nationals and criminal offending in the UK. But case after case shows that there is a connection, and that it is becoming stronger. This is particularly true when it comes to male immigrants from Afghanistan committing sexual offences.

On Tuesday, Abdul Nabizada was sentenced to seven years in prison for raping a 19-year-old woman in Edinburgh in 2021. Nabizada had formerly worked as translator for the British Army in his native Afghanistan, before arriving in the UK in 2016 and beginning work as a private driver in Scotland. It was at work when Nabizada carried out the attack. His 19-year-old victim was intoxicated and had been expecting to be driven home, only to be subjected to a brutal sexual assault.

Afghan nationals have carried out sex attacks in Scotland before. In Falkirk, a town in Scotland’s central lowlands, Afghan national and illegal immigrant Sadeq Nikzad raped a 15-year-old schoolgirl in 2023. Before being jailed for nine years, Nikzad sought to defend himself by citing language barriers and cultural differences – such as the custom of child marriage in his homeland of Afghanistan.

England has experienced a string of similarly harrowing cases. One of the most high-profile examples involved two Afghan 17-year-olds, Jan Jahanzeb and Israr Niazal. They were jailed in December last year, after being found guilty of raping a 15-year-old girl in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire.

Then there was the case of Ahmad Mulakhil. In March, the 23-year-old was jailed for 16 years after he was convicted of abducting and raping a 12-year-old girl in the market town of Nuneaton in July 2025. Mulakhil arrived in the UK without permission, on a small boat, just months before carrying out the attack.

More recently, seven Afghan nationals – all of whom arrived in the UK illegally – have been charged for effectively establishing their own rape gang in Norwich. The men have been accused of 40 offences, including rape and human trafficking. The alleged victims were two girls who were in their early to mid-teens when the offences are alleged to have taken place.

The statistics clearly show that Afghan nationals pose a disproportionate threat when it comes to sex offences. Last year, Sky News’s data and forensics unit – using annual population survey data from 2021 and Met Police figures – found that, for Afghan nationals, there were 59.2 sexual offence charges per 10,000 across England and Wales. The corresponding figure for UK nationals was 2.7 offences per 10,000 people.

Other stats also show a distinct correlation. When using figures for ‘country of birth’ based on the 2021 England and Wales Census, there were nine sexual-offence charges per 10,000 Afghan-born people. This drops to 2.9 sexual-offence charges per 10,000 UK-born people. Afghan nationals remain three times more likely to commit a sex offence than a British-born citizen.

These findings shouldn’t surprise us. After all, Afghanistan ranks rock bottom out of 181 countries on Georgetown University’s Women, Peace and Security Index. It is a country were child marriage is common, where women are treated as the property of their husbands or fathers. And when those men come to the UK, many of them carry these attitudes with them.

The evidence is clear – Britain’s lax border security and dysfunctional asylum system has made society less safe for its female citizens. Nowhere is this more obvious than the rising number of sexual offences perpetrated by Afghan men. It’s high time we were honest about it.

Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities, which is available to order on Amazon.