Those Joe Left Behind

“In Afghanistan, nothing is guaranteed; not my life,” Rohullah Sadat, 28, told The Post’s Kirsten Fleming from Doha. “The Taliban — not all, but most — are really cruel. They are uneducated. They shot people like birds. In Western countries, you don’t even treat birds the way they treat people. We live by chance.”

Sadat, who helped America as a translator, is one of the lucky ones who got out, managing to board a Kam Air flight to Qatar, all the while praying he was truly free. But up to 100,000 others remain, including US citizens and green-card holders.

It took him multiple tries to get out, turned away once by the Taliban and once by a US soldier. And he narrowly missed the Kabul airport bombing.

As of last week, the State Department confirmed that at least 85 US citizens and 79 permanent residents have evacuated since President Biden’s botched withdrawal in August, mostly on flights pulled off by Qatar Airways, which so far has managed to do what Biden promised he’d do: get hostages out of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

“We are thankful to Qatari authorities, who continue to coordinate these flights with the Taliban,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said, adding that Biden is still working on getting US citizens and allies out.

But Sadat is only one of those getting out without the help of Uncle Sam. Mohammad Wali, a US citizen and a New Yorker, successfully got his wife and three children out of Kabul with the help of Allied Airlift 21, a group of veterans working to evacuate Americans and those with US family ties.

Mohammad Afzal Afzali, an Afghan interpreter, managed to not just escape himself but also to help four young siblings reunite with their mother in Albany; the mother had been trying to bring her kids to America since her 2018 move.

Tens of thousands of Afghans are still stranded behind enemy lines. The US government keeps insisting that only 100 Americans are left, even as it’s now claiming to have gotten nearly that many out. And the State Department is only now noting that while it doesn’t track US green-card holders, several thousand of them are still trapped. The horrors they all face are atrocious. Mullah Nooruddin Turabi, one of the founders of the Taliban and the chief enforcer of its harsh interpretation of Islamic law, told The Associated Press that executions and amputations of hands will once again be carried out: “No one will tell us what our laws should be. We will follow Islam and we will make our laws on the Quran.”

Despite all this, Biden still insists his pullout was a success. What a slap in the face of those still stuck under the Taliban’s bloody and tyrannical rule.