WASHINGTON – For more than a week, Samiullah Naderi, a legal permanent resident of the United States, waited days and nights with his wife and son outside the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, hoping to be let in so they could join one of the dozen of daily flights to America.
“It’s 15 meters away,” said Mr. Naderi, 23, known as Sammy, in a short telephone interview in halting English on Sunday evening while gunfire crackled in the background. “Maybe the Taliban will let me in – maybe.”
But on Monday, after he was told that no more people would be allowed to enter the airport gate, Mr. Naderi and his family returned to their apartment in Kabul with no clear route back to Philadelphia, where he has lived since last year.
“All flights are closed,” he said with an incredulous laugh. “I’m afraid.”
Mr Naderi is among at least hundreds of U.S. citizens, and possibly thousands of green card holders, stranded in Afghanistan at the end of a 20-year war that culminated not in a reliable peace but in a two-week military airlift that has been evacuated more than 123,000 people.
The evacuations continued during the last US military flight from Kabul, which departed Monday evening, when the Biden government pledged to aid up to 200 Americans who remain to flee a brutal life under Taliban rule.
“The bottom line: Ninety percent of Americans in Afghanistan who wanted to leave could leave,” said President Biden on Tuesday. He said the US government had alerted Americans 19 times since March to leave Afghanistan.
“And there is no deadline for the remaining Americans,” he said. “We remain determined to get them out if they want to come out.”
About 6,000 Americans, the vast majority of them dual Afghan citizens, were evacuated after August 14, Foreign Secretary Antony J. Blinken said Monday. The State Department has not released any figures on how many permanent legal US citizens have also been evacuated or, as in the case of Mr Naderi, have not got a flight. Immigration and refugee organizations estimated that thousands were left.
Mr. Blinken described “an extraordinary effort to give Americans every opportunity to leave the country” when diplomats made 55,000 calls and sent 33,000 emails to US citizens in Afghanistan, and in some cases took them to Kabul airport.
“We have no illusion that all of this will be easy or quick,” Blinken said at the State Department headquarters in Washington. “This will be a very different phase from the evacuation that has just been completed. It will take time to deal with new challenges. “
“But we’ll stick with it,” he said.
Several members of Congress had called for the US military to remain in Afghanistan until American citizens, permanent residents and an estimated tens of thousands of Afghans eligible for special immigrant visas can be evacuated. But that weekend, lawmakers sounded resigned when they admitted that many would be left behind.
“Our team will continue to work to safely evacuate American citizens and Afghan allies and reunite families and loved ones,” said Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, on Twitter late Sunday evening. “I urge the State Department and the rest of our government to continue using every possible tool to get people to safety, deadline or not.”
Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, condemned the Biden government’s departure from Afghanistan as “insane” in an interview with ABC News “This Week” on Sunday.
“We have American citizens who are being left behind,” said Mr Sasse. “We have American green card holders who are being left behind. We have Afghan allies who are SIV owners, people who fought by our side, drivers, translators – people who actually fought with us. These people are people to whom we have made commitments. “
Updated
Aug. 31, 2021, 4:53 p.m. ET
The chaotic efforts to locate, contact and then bring American citizens to safety in Afghanistan are due to a lack of coordination within the US government, frustrated attempts at contact by the State Department and increasingly frequent warnings of possible attacks, the closings of airport gates and the Forced relocation of meeting places.
Aid groups in the United States helping American citizens and Afghans working with the U.S. government described a heartbreaking and dizzying process in which people trying to flee were diverted to pickup points across Kabul where they board buses or to join caravans drove to the airport, but were blocked on the way.
Some people reported that Taliban fighters took their American passports at checkpoints, the aides said. Others said they were harassed or beaten on the way to the meeting points and did not want to put themselves or their families in danger again. And some said they were turned back by American troops standing guard at the airport gate.
“Why can’t we get people out?” said Freshta Taeb, the US-born daughter of an Afghan refugee, who provides emotional counseling and translation services to Afghan immigrants in the United States, including those who have worked with the US military.
Ms. Taeb blamed the Biden administration for a military withdrawal, which she said “was carried out arbitrarily, carried out negligently”.
“It was time to make a plan and do what needed to be done to get these people out,” she said. “But it doesn’t look like there’s a strategy behind it.”
Understanding the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan
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Who are the Taliban? The Taliban emerged in 1994 amid the unrest following the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989. They used brutal public punishments, including flogging, amputation and mass executions, to enforce their rules. Here is more about their genesis and track record as rulers.
Who are the Taliban leaders? These are the top leaders of the Taliban, men who for years have been on the run, in hiding, in prison and dodging American drones. Little is known about them or how they plan to govern, including whether they will be as tolerant as they say they are.
What is happening to the women of Afghanistan? When the Taliban was last in power, they banned women and girls from most jobs or from going to school. Afghan women have gained a lot since the Taliban was overthrown, but now they fear that they are losing ground. Taliban officials are trying to reassure women that things will be different, but there are indications that they have begun to reintroduce the old order in at least some areas.
Ross Wilson, who was the top US diplomat in Afghanistan and was on the last military flight to take off, said on Twitter Monday that “alleges that American citizens have been denied access to Kabul airport by embassy staff or Americans was refused ”. Forces are wrong. “
In Washington, officials are struggling to keep up.
Military officials had privately accused the State Department of moving too slowly to handle a crowd begging for evacuation. State Department officials, who faced a backlog of visa applications from Afghans during the Trump administration, initially focused on finding Americans and verifying their citizenship.
Officials said a small but unspecified number of U.S. citizens have signaled that they do not want to flee Afghanistan, give up their home, work or education, or refuse to leave relatives behind, including elderly parents who do not Americans were and otherwise no way out.
Foreign-born spouses of American citizens and their unmarried children under the age of 21 can immigrate to the United States after obtaining certain permits, a process that was accelerated for some Afghans during the evacuation. Extended family members such as parents, siblings and other relatives must go through an immigration process that could take “an extraordinarily long time”, according to Jenna Gilbert, director of the refugee agency at Human Rights First.
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However, there are no plans to change visa requirements for extended family members who “need to travel to the US in a different way,” said Ned Price, the ministry spokesman, on Friday.
Kabul Airport is expected to be fully operational for some time without the American military, although the Biden government is relying on allies, including Turkey and Qatar, to take over some of the operations to facilitate small charter flights for people who are want to leave, said Mr Blinken. The State Department is also considering how to protect American citizens and high-risk Afghans from Taliban reprisals heading to one of several neighboring states and then seeking safe passage to the United States.
Mr Naderi said Tuesday he was not sure what to do but was considering leaving Afghanistan across the border with Pakistan or Tajikistan. As proof of his American residency, he presented a picture of his green card received last year and said he lived with his father in Philadelphia in hopes of relocating his wife and son to the United States. (The State Department declined to comment on his case, citing privacy concerns.)
He returned to Afghanistan on August 10 to get immigration documents for his wife and son, said his father Esmail Naderi, who worked for several American military companies in construction and other fields from 2004 to 2015.
Five days later, the Taliban took power and the US embassy in Kabul was closed when diplomats were evacuated to the airport.
It was not possible to get the right visas for the family in time. “My situation is really bad at the moment,” said Samiullah Naderi on Tuesday.
