Resettled Afghan immigrant calls for help for those who helped U.S.
NEW HAVEN — Hewad Hamat worked with the U.S. military for years in his native Afghanistan until the day he received an anonymous text.
It said: “We know you are working with US troops. Be ready for assassination.”
He knew it was time to leave.
Hamat applied for resettlement in the United States for himself and his immediate family. After two years of being interviewed and vetted, he arrived in Connecticut with his wife and several young children in 2014. They worked with IRIS, Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services, to get established in their new home.
Now, as Hamat, 39, watches the horrific scenes of Afghanistan
falling to the Taliban — and the crush of people scrambling to get out at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport — he worries that the many relatives and friends he left behind could die and all the progress of the last 20 years will be lost.
“I am saddened. I am angry. I am feeling helpless because I am receiving a lot of calls from family,” Hamat said.
Ashley Gaudiano, director of external affairs for the Connecticut Institute for Refugees and Immigrants, Inc., said Monday that according to the organization’s Washington headquarters at the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, only about 2,000 Afghans have been evacuated so far to the United States.
“That’s nowhere near the dent needed to save lives,” Gaudiano said.
Max Reiss, director of communications for Gov. Ned Lamont, said Afghans who are fleeing the country are under the full authority of the United States government. Currently, the state has no role in the potential resettlement.
Gaudiano said that since most refugees will be landing in Virginia or
San Diego, she is not expecting an immediate influx to the Northeast. And many of the 80,000 Afghans with ties to the United States and who have special immigrant visas remain in Afghanistan after the sudden takeover of the embattled country by the Taliban.
“There is complete chaos,” said Hamat, whose immediate family now includes five children. “Those people really need help” and “as long as help as help is delayed, the humanitarian crisis is growing — and the United States has all the tools to help.”
“So I hope President Biden and all those responsible for the decision, they have to change their minds,” he said, as he drove back to New Haven from Washington, D.C.
Hamat, who now runs a media company, Hewad Press, that publishes Afghanistan news in English, Pasto and Dari, wants the U.S. government to do more — and he said it has the capacity to do more.
“We still have a chance. Six thousand troops are there,” he said. “They need to send more troops there. I’m not saying we need to stay there. But we have a moral obligation, because those people helped America...
“First of all, I’m worried about my family, my friends ... all those left behind, those we worked with ... local security forces,” he said. “Their lives are in danger right now.”
His second concern is that “the government collapsed,” Hamat said. “We lost all the gains that we had in 20 years.”
Looking back on it now, “nothing is gained” from the U.S.’s presence all this time, “all gone with the wind,” he said. “There will be no women’s rights, there will be no human rights...”
He said that a friend had just called him from Kabul.
“People are very scared,” Hamat said. “They have to send more troops and they have to take control of the whole Kabul airport ... and then they have to pick up people” because “some people cannot travel to Kabul” because right now the Taliban controls all the roads.
Hamat pointed out that at this point, “the American Embassy is shut down — and the Russian embassy is open.”
While the Taliban has said it won’t go into people’s houses and is looking for a peaceful transition, “I cannot trust it,” Hamat said on a day when a CNN commentator said the Taliban already was going door-todoor looking for journalists and others who helped the U.S. government over the past 20 years.
“Because if you check the human rights reports ... they killed people, civilian people, they killed pro-government people,” he said. “Right now they’re busy, to take control. But afterward, they will kill every person” who helped the former Afghan government and U.S. troops.
“First of all they will kill the translators ... journalists, engineers,” said Hamat, who worked with military journalists in Afghanistan as the project manager for a “Radio In A Box” program created to counter Taliban propaganda.
Among other things, they put out positive information “about the Afghan government and real Islam that the Taliban soldiers were abusing,” he said. “I hired two religious scholars who taught people the real Islam, the peaceful Islam.”
IRIS spokeswoman Ann O’Brien said the organization was put on 24-hour notice a week and a half ago “because of the evacuation flights that were scheduled. Three days later, we got two families and tonight we’re receiving three more families that we got notice of yesterday,” she said.
“Usually we have five or 10 days to prepare for a family,” O’Brien said. “...These are part of the evacuation, which means their paperwork was done very quickly oversees.”
Those new arrivals had the same kind of “Special Immigrant Visas,” or SIVs, that Hamat had when he arrived, issued to help who have helped the U.S. military.
She said she expects many more to follow.
“The sad part now is the challenges getting them out,” she said. “It’s a nightmare and it’s just a continuation of the nightmare that is this 20-year war.”
One family that arrived “has five children under age 12 and we have them in a hotel,” O’Brien said.
IRIS has settled more than 500 Afghan SIV people in the New Haven and Hartford areas over the past five years.
Generally speaking, “They’re just amazing,” she said. “They’re former educators, former finance people, logistics, engineers” who are smart and big-hearted, “and they’re family people ... So we will help as many as we can help.”
Gaudiano, of the Institute
for Refugees and Immigrants, said in an interview, “We have let it be known that we are able and look forward to them (refugees) being directly resettled.”
“We’ve been of the opinion that the number should be as high as possible,” Gaudiano said.
Based in Bridgeport, with offices also in Hartford, Waterbury and Stamford, the institute arranges furnished housing for families, enrolls them in schools and other state programs, while staying in regular communications with new arrivals. She said that the public is asked to get in touch with the institute if there are landlords available to work with refugee families.
Unlike the families that fled war-torn Syria five years ago, when thenGov. Dannel P. Malloy welcomed families and got into a war of words with then-Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, there is no immigrant pipeline, and with the lightning takeover by the Taliban, there might not be an extensive migration of Afghans.
Malloy won a Profile in Courage Award for his stance.