The US administration has been implored by hundreds of Afghans and American citizens for evacuation who once worked or didn’t with the NATO and US forces during the two decades and one of the potential evacuees said he was anticipating his beheading by the Taliban.
“Unfortunately we are left behind now,” the former translator said quietly in the pre-dawn darkness Wednesday in Afghanistan. “No one heard our voice.”
The man’s identity has been withheld his security but now he is running short on funds to keep his family sheltered in a hotel in Mazar-e-Sharif after waiting a week for Taliban permission for the chartered evacuation flights to leave the airport there.
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 one 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 United States.
Taliban leaders, who named a new Cabinet Tuesday in the wake of their lightning takeover of most of the country last month, say they will allow people with proper documents to leave the country.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday the U.S. was working with the Taliban to resolve the standoff over the charter flights.
“We’ve been assured all American citizens and Afghan citizens with valid travel documents will be allowed to leave,” Blinken said in Doha, Qatar, a major transit point for last month’s frantic U.S. military-led evacuations from Afghanistan.
“Our staff have been working around the clock responding to urgent pleas from constituents whose families and colleagues are seeking to flee Afghanistan, and they urgently require timely, post-withdrawal guidance to best assist those in need,” Reps. Jerrold Nadler, Zoe Lofgren, Gerald Connolly and nine other lawmakers from President Joe Biden’s party wrote.
The former U.S. military interpreter, at the hotel with his family of eight children and wife, 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.
An array of Americans – many of them with some past experience in Afghanistan, or other ties – have been working for weeks to try to help evacuate at-risk Afghans. Much of that effort is focused now on the planes in Mazar-e-Sharif.
Some of those Americans pushing for U.S. action said Tuesday they fear the Biden administration will help out American citizens and leave behind green card holders, Afghans who used to work with Americans, and others whose work has left them vulnerable, including journalists, women’s advocates and rights workers.
On Monday, the State Department said it had helped a family of four U.S. citizens escape Afghanistan via a land route.
Alex Plitsas, a representative of a group called Digital Dunkirk, which is serving as an umbrella group for several organizations arranging the private evacuation efforts since the completion of the U.S. military withdrawal, welcomed Blinken’s words.