Desperate evacuees plead for action
WASHINGTON – Americans trying to evacuate hundreds of Afghans and American citizens – including one Afghan who worked as a U.S. military translator and says he is anticipating his beheading by the Taliban – pleaded for action from the Biden administration to get the would-be evacuees aboard charter flights that are standing by to fly them from Afghanistan.
“Unfortunately, we are left behind now,” the former translator said. “No one heard our voice.”
The man, whose identity is being withheld for his security, said he is running out of money to keep his family housed in a hotel in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif, after waiting a week for Taliban permission for the chartered evacuation flights to leave the airport there.
U.S. Army veterans working to help the man, an interpreter for U.S. forces for 15 years, called the effort more grinding than their months of deployment in Afghanistan. They tried and failed to get their old interpreter on the earlier airlifts that ended with the U.S. military withdrawal on Aug. 30.
“I hope we can help them out, and get them out of this mess,” said Thomas McGrath, a retired Army colonel and
one of the veterans trying to help his former interpreter.
Hundreds of vulnerable Afghans are waiting for permission from Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers to board prearranged charter flights standing by at the airport in Mazar-e-Sharif.
The group includes dozens of American citizens and green card holders and their families, the Afghans and their American advocates say.
“We think we are in some kind of jail,” said one Afghan woman among the would-be evacuees gathered at a large hotel in Mazar-e-Sharif.
She described the Americans and green-card holders in their group as elderly parents of Afghan-American citizens in the U.S.
Taliban leaders, who named a new Cabinet on Tuesday after their lightning-fast takeover of most of the country last month, say they will allow people with proper documents to leave the country. Taliban officials insist they are currently going through the manifests and passenger documents.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday the U.S. is working with the Taliban to resolve the standoff over the charter flights.
Blinken rejected an assertion from a Republican lawmaker, Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, that the standoff at Mazar-e-Sharif is a “hostage situation” for American citizens in the group.
“We’ve been assured all American citizens and Afghan citizens with valid travel documents will be allowed to leave,” Blinken said in Doha, Qatar.
Blinken said the Taliban had told U.S. officials that the problem in Mazar-e-Sharif was that passengers with valid travel documents were mixed in with those without the right papers.
The former U.S. military interpreter said he would expect beheading by the Taliban given his work with the U.S. military, and based on what rights groups say are past Taliban attacks on Afghan civilians who have worked with U.S. forces.