Foreign Afghan War contractors stranded in Dubai

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Some of the foreign contractors who powered the logistics of America’s “forever war” in Afghanistan now find themselves stranded on an unending layover in Dubai without a way to get home.

After nearly two decades, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has upended the lives of thousands of private security contractors from some of the world’s poorest countries — not the hired guns but the hired hands who serviced the American war effort. For years, they toiled in the shadows as cleaners, cooks, construction workers, servers and technicians on sprawling American bases.

In the rushed evacuation, scores of these foreign workers trying to get home to the Philippines and other countries that restricted international travel because of the pandemic have become stuck in limbo at hotels across Dubai.

As the U.S. brings home its remaining troops and abandons its bases, experts say the chaotic departure of the Pentagon’s logistics army lays bare an uncomfortable truth about a privatized system long susceptible to mismanagement — one largely funded by American taxpayers but outside the purview of U.S. law.

“It’s the same situation that affects foreign contractors all over the world, people who have little understanding of where they’re going and very uncertain relationships once they arrive determining their legal status and movements,” said Anthony Cordesman, a national security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“The terms of contracts in war can really absolve the employer of major responsibility … even the right of return can be uncertain.”

While it’s unclear just how many people remain stuck abroad, an Associated Press journalist saw at least a dozen Filipino contractors for engineering and construction company Fluor stranded at the Movenpick hotel in Bur Dubai, an older neighborhood of the city-state along the Dubai Creek.

The hotel management declined to comment for privacy reasons. The U.S. military’s Central Command declined to comment on private security contractors, referring questions to their companies. The military’s contracting office and the Philippines Consulate in Dubai did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

“Everyone has been so focused on the U.S. troops, and also the Afghans, interpreters and others” who could face revenge killings by a resurgent Taliban, said John Sifton, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “About the stranded foreign workers, the Biden administration can say, well, their companies and their governments should have moved heaven and earth to get them home.”

As of early June, 2,491 foreign contract workers remained on American bases across Afghanistan, down from 6,399 in April, according to the latest figures from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

With the U.S. set to end its military mission at month’s end, most of these workers have since made it home on flights arranged by their employers — the private military behemoths that over years of war won Pentagon logistics contracts in Afghanistan worth billions of dollars.

But other employees, brought first to Dubai on their way home after an abrupt departure June 15, weren’t so lucky. The Philippines, along with Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, halted flights to the United Arab Emirates in mid-May over fears of the fast-spreading delta variant of the coronavirus and repeatedly renewed the travel ban.

Thus began a seemingly interminable layover that some Filipino workers described as one of anxiety and unrelenting boredom. With their cash dwindling over the twomonth layover, most said they couldn’t afford to do anything but wait. They while away their time watching TV and video-calling with family in the Philippines from the hotel, where Fluor provides daily meals.

Construction giant Fluor, the Irving, Texas-based company that was the biggest defense contractor in Afghanistan, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The Defense Department has spent $3.8 billion for Fluor’s work in Afghanistan since 2015, federal records show, most of it for logistics services.