Former Royal Marine Paul ‘Pen’ Farthing described his ‘mixed emotions’ after landing at Heathrow this morning with around 170 cats and dogs on one of the last evacuation flights out of Kabul.
The mission to rescue the cats and dogs from the Nowzad animal shelter he ran, as well as all the staff and their dependents, from Afghanistan after the country fell to the Taliban has been controversial.
Mr Farthing initially vowed to return with all of his staff, but had to leave without them after they were turned away when the Taliban claimed they did not have the right paperwork.
He landed at 7.30am this morning and is thought to have then flown to Oslo in Norway to reunite with his wife, who left Afghanistan last week.
He tweeted this afternoon: ‘Arrived Heathrow with partial success of #OpArk Mixed emotions & true deep feeling of sadness for Afghan today.’
Mr Farthing praised the support at the airport, adding: ‘Witnessed 1st hand the compassion Heathrow is showing Afghan refugees.’
He has received a huge amount of public support over the mission, including funding from a charter plane.
However, he also faced a backlash from those who said the priority should have been to evacuate people, and that dealing with the paperwork for his flight took up valuable administrative time.
He accused aide Peter Quentin of ‘blocking’ his flight, saying: ‘So here’s the deal buddy.
‘You either get me that f*****g Isaf number and you get me permission to get on to that f*****g airfield, or tomorrow morning I’m going to turn on you and the whole f*****g country, and everybody else who’s invested in this rescue, is going to know it’s you, you, blocking this f*****g move. Alright?’
Dominic Dyer, an animal welfare campaigner and supporter of Mr Farthing, said the former marine was forced to travel back alone after being told it was not possible to find people to fill the plane’s seats.
He said: ‘Tragic and not the ending we wanted, but we fell victim to the chaos and the difficulties of getting through those gates.’
All of the almost 100 dogs and 70 cats on the flight were ‘healthy’, with the dogs placed in kennels, Mr Dyer said.
He said armed forces personnel ‘willingly and voluntarily’ helped Mr Farthing load the animals’ crates on to the aircraft in Kabul, but extra passengers were not found.
Mr Dyer claimed an appeal was put in to the British Government ‘to see if we could fill seats with refugees within the airport’.
‘They told us there was no one they could find that could actually fill that aircraft.
‘In fact, they had more air capacity than they had people, which probably tells you an awful lot about the final days of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.’
He added that ‘all efforts were made to do what we could’ but it was ‘not possible to find anyone’, with Mr Farthing loading the animals and leaving ‘on his own’.
Foreign Affairs Select Committee chair Tom Tugendhat told LBC yesterday: ‘The difficulty is getting people into and out of the airport and we’ve just used a lot of troops to bring in 200 dogs, meanwhile my interpreter’s family are likely to be killed.
‘As one interpreter asked me a few days ago “why is my five-year-old worth less than your dog?'”‘
Nowzad animal shelter was set up by Mr Farthing in 2007 after he served with the military in Afghanistan.
He tweeted yesterday: ‘The whole team & dogs/cats were safely 300m inside the airport perimeter. We were turned away as @JoeBiden @POTUS had changed paperwork rules just 2 hours earlier.
‘Went through hell to get there & we were turned away into the chaos of those devastating explosions.’
He described how his vehicle was targeted by a gunman amid the chaos.
‘Had our driver not turned around he would have been shot in the head by a man with an AK-47,’ he said.
‘We’ve been in the airport, and back out of the airport; the whole thing’s a mess.
‘There’s not much more I can say at the moment, I need to make sure the animals and everyone is safe.’
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