Taliban
US soldier wins long fight to get Afghan translator asylum
Army combat veteran Spencer Sullivan has never felt more victorious.
Sullivan spent years fighting to get his Afghan translator asylum after his former platoon’s other interpreter was denied a U.S. visa before being killed by the Taliban in 2017.
On Wednesday, Abdulhaq Sodais was finally granted asylum by a court in Germany, where he was forced to flee after being denied a U.S. visa repeatedly despite facing death threats for aiding U.S. troops during its 20-year war in Afghanistan.
Read: US soldier loses 1 Afghan translator; fights to save another
Sullivan, who now lives in Virginia, said he dropped his phone when he saw the text message from Sodais.
“I just started crying,” Sullivan said.
The decision marked the end of an eight-year journey between the two men who risked their lives together trying to eliminate the Taliban, bonding in a way that can only be forged in war.
Sullivan dedicated himself to helping Sodais after losing another translator, Sayed Masoud, who was killed by the Taliban in 2017 while waiting for a U.S. visa. The former soldier is among scores of U.S. combat veterans who have been working on their own to rescue the Afghans who served alongside them.
Read:Afghanistan girls soccer team given asylum in Portugal
“It’s ultimately just cathartic relief,” said Sullivan, adding that he was overwhelmed with emotion Wednesday in part because it also opened the war wound that he couldn’t help Masoud. “This long journey is over but Sayed didn’t make it.”
Thousands of Afghans who aided U.S. troops have spent years stuck in a backlogged and beleaguered U.S. Special Immigrant Visa program, and countless others were denied because of minor inconsistencies in their work records, such as showing up late to their jobs, according to veterans who worked with them.
Sodais first applied for a U.S. visa in 2013 but was denied. He appealed four times before ultimately fleeing to Germany after his uncle was beheaded and his neighbor who worked for the U.S. military was gunned down by the Taliban.
Sodais traveled for seven months going through nearly a half dozen countries. He was beaten and abandoned by smugglers and jailed and beaten by police before reaching Germany, where his first asylum request was denied.
Sullivan wrote letters of recommendation, provided photos of his time with his platoon and obtained records from the U.S. government that showed his denial was based on a vague review by a civilian contractor who Sodais said falsely accused him of checking social media on the job.
Read:Afghanistan’s Taliban want to address General Assembly: UN
On Aug. 11, Germany temporarily halted the deportation of all Afghans due to the upheaval but did not specify how long the order would last. Sodais said he believes Sullivan’s letters of recommendation made the difference in finally being granted asylum. His case will be reviewed in three years when he can then apply to become a German citizen.
Sodais said he looks forward to getting his German passport so he can someday visit Sullivan and they can travel together so Sodais can finally see the United States.
“I’m feeling right now that I will have an amazing future,” he said.
Afghanistan’s Taliban want to address General Assembly: UN
Who should represent Afghanistan at the United Nations this month? It’s a complex question with plenty of political implications.
The Taliban, the country’s new rulers for a matter of weeks, are challenging the credentials of their country’s former U.N. ambassador and want to speak at the General Assembly’s high-level meeting of world leaders this week, the international body says.
The question now facing U.N. officials comes just over a month after the Taliban, ejected from Afghanistan by the United States and its allies after 9/11, swept back into power as U.S. forces prepared to withdraw from the country at the end of August. The Taliban stunned the world by taking territory with surprising speed and little resistance from the U.S.-trained Afghan military. The Western-backed government collapsed on Aug. 15.
Read:Taliban replace ministry for women with ‘virtue’ authorities
U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Secretary-General Antonio Guterres received a communication on Sept. 15 from the currently accredited Afghan Ambassador, Ghulam Isaczai, with the list of Afghanistan’s delegation for the assembly’s 76th annual session.
Five days later, Guterres received another communication with the letterhead “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” signed by “Ameer Khan Muttaqi” as “Minister of Foreign Affairs,” requesting to participate in the U.N. gathering of world leaders.
Muttaqi said in the letter that former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani was “ousted” as of Aug. 15 and that countries across the world “no longer recognize him as president,” and therefore Isaczai no longer represents Afghanistan, Dujarric said.
The Taliban said it was nominating a new U.N. permanent representative, Mohammad Suhail Shaheen, the U.N. spokesman said. He has been a spokesman for the Taliban during peace negotiations in Qatar.
Senior U.S. State Department officials said they were aware of the Taliban’s request — the United States is a member of the U.N. credentials committee — but they would not predict how that panel might rule. However, one of the officials said the committee “would take some time to deliberate,” suggesting the Taliban’s envoy would not be able to speak at the General Assembly at this session at least during the high-level leaders’ week.
In cases of disputes over seats at the United Nations, the General Assembly’s nine-member credentials committee must meet to make a decision. Both letters have been sent to the committee after consultations with General Assembly President Abdulla Shahid’s office. The committee’s members are the United States, Russia, China, Bahama, Bhutan, Chile, Namibia, Sierra Leone and Sweden.
Read:Friction among Taliban pragmatists, hard-liners intensifies
Afghanistan is scheduled to give the last speech on the final day of the high-level meeting on Sept. 27. It wasn’t clear who would speak if the committee met and the Taliban were given Afghanistan’s seat.
When the Taliban last ruled from 1996 to 2001, the U.N. refused to recognize their government and instead gave Afghanistan’s seat to the previous, warlord-dominated government of President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who eventually was killed by a suicide bomber in 2011. It was Rabbani’s government that brought Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of 9/11, to Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996.
The Taliban have said they want international recognition and financial help to rebuild the war-battered country. But the makeup of the new Taliban government poses a dilemma for the United Nations. Several of the interim ministers are on the U.N.’s so-called blacklist of international terrorists and funders of terrorism.
Credentials committee members could also use Taliban recognition as leverage to press for a more inclusive government that guarantees human rights, especially for girls who were barred from going to school during their previous rule, and women who weren’t able to work.
Taliban : Old wine in old bottles?
The Taliban is doing what it used to do 20 years back and thinks it can get away with it. It has had several identity markers but none are more prominent than it being anti-women. It is hell bent on denying access to all facilities including education to women and girls. The Taliban does so, on the grounds that it’s forbidden by Islam. This is done when most Muslim majority countries are forging ahead in all the sectors which the Taliban is now intending to deny women.
Significantly, this comes after promising that they would not be so harsh like in its first edition. But every day, news comes of one anti-women decision or another. This shows more than anything else that the Taliban’s capacity to govern or read international politics is still stuck 20 years back when they lost power to the US. On top of that they are far weaker than in their first round.
Various conflicts in Afghanistan show that the tribal identity dominates the supra Afghan identity. This is not just exemplified by the IS attack, the fighting in Panjshir but the more recent brawling inside the ruling Palace among themselves. Clearly, there is no such political construct as a Taliban but it’s more of a coalition of tribal forces in the country who are hardly showing signs of coping.
Panjshir is a good example of the internal fissures and weaknesses of the Taliban. Its military capacity is not worth writing about and it's largely a ragtag band of partisans, able to mount hit and run operations or other guerilla attacks but has no ability to fight a conventional army.
Its money is held up in US banks and given its humiliating departure, the US will use this to the hilt to create pressure. Obviously the Taliban is not its target but the backers- China and Russia- are. That means if the Taliban fails to govern properly, there is a huge power cost.
Read:Friction among Taliban pragmatists, hard-liners intensifies
Wrong priorities
Many Afghans are fleeing the country including the professionals wherever they can, whether the US or Pakistan. This will create a vacuum that has to be filled if they have to survive. Going by what is seen till date, the competence of the Taliban is limited at best so a new crisis looms over them. However, the Taliban has decided that preventing women from working and shutting down specialized departments established to assist women are its priority.
The scenario is not a pleasant one to behold for the Afghans However, the gaps will have to be plugged and that means just like Panjshir, where Pakistani troops did the job, they may be doing the same in the administrative departments. Neither Russia nor China will commit large scale human resources if needed.
Essentially, Afghanistan is becoming the space where a proxy war between the West and the Sino-Russian alliance is shaping up. Although Europe now has more differences with the US than ever before, the NATO spirit may still prevail. But it's neither Afghanistan’s nor Taliban’s war and thus their fate won’t matter.
If the Taliban can’t figure out that times have changed and so must they, the price will have to be paid and its backers won't buy it but them. That is why it sits on a bench made of fragile threads. It doesn't understand the good old days that died 20 years ago.
Islamic State militants claim attacks on Taliban
The extremist Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for a series of deadly bombings targeting Taliban vehicles in eastern Afghanistan.
The claim, published late Sunday on the militant group's media arm, the Aamaq news agency, signals a growing threat to the Taliban by their long-time rivals.
At least eight people, including several Taliban fighters, were killed in the attacks on Sunday and Saturday in the provincial city of Jalalabad, an IS stronghold.
Read:Afghan survivors of US drone strike: Sorry ‘is not enough’
The Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in a blitz campaign last month, overrunning the capital of Kabul while U.S. and NATO were in the final phase of withdrawing their troops. The last foreign soldiers left Aug. 30.
The Taliban now face major economic and security challenges in trying to govern Afghanistan, and an accelerated campaign of IS attacks will further complicate those efforts. The Taliban and IS extremists were enemies before foreign troops left Afghanistan.
Both groups subscribe to a harsh interpretation of Islam, but the Taliban have focused on taking control of Afghanistan, while IS affiliates in Afghanistan and elsewhere call for global jihad.
Taliban replace ministry for women with ‘virtue’ authorities
Afghanistan’s new Taliban rulers set up a ministry for the “propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice” in the building that once housed the Women’s Affairs Ministry, escorting out World Bank staffers on Saturday as part of the forced move.
It was the latest troubling sign that the Taliban are restricting women’s rights as they settle into government, just a month since they overran the capital of Kabul. During their previous rule of Afghanistan in the 1990s, the Taliban had denied girls and women the right to education and barred them from public life.
Separately, three explosions targeted Taliban vehicles in the eastern provincial capital of Jalalabad on Saturday, killing three people and wounding 20, witnesses said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but Islamic State group’s militants, headquartered in the area, are enemies of the Taliban.
The Taliban are facing major economic and security problems as they attempt to govern, and a growing challenge by IS militants would further stretch their resources.
In Kabul, a new sign was up outside the women’s affairs ministry, announcing it was now the “Ministry for Preaching and Guidance and the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.”
Read: Fearful US residents in Afghanistan hiding out from Taliban
Staff of the World Bank’s $100 million Women’s Economic Empowerment and Rural Development Program, which was run out of the Women’s Affairs Ministry, were escorted off the grounds, said program member Sharif Akhtar, who was among those being removed.
Mabouba Suraj, who heads the Afghan Women’s Network, said she was astounded by the flurry of orders released by the Taliban-run government restricting women and girls.
On Friday, the Taliban-run education ministry asked boys from grades six to 12 back to school, starting on Saturday, along with their male teachers. There was no mention of girls in those grades returning to school. Previously, the Taliban’s minister of higher education minister, had said girls would be given equal access to education, albeit in gender-segregated settings.
“It is becoming really, really troublesome. ... Is this the stage where the girls are going to be forgotten?” Suraj said. “I know they don’t believe in giving explanations, but explanations are very important.”
Suraj speculated that the contradictory statements perhaps reflect divisions within the Taliban as they seek to consolidate their power, with the more pragmatic within the movement losing out to hard-liners among them, at least for now.
Statements from the Taliban leadership often reflect a willingness to engage with the world, talk of open public spaces for women and girls and protecting Afghanistan’s minorities. But orders to its rank and file on the ground are contradictory. Instead of what was promised, restrictions, particularly on women, have been implemented.
Suraj, an Afghan American who returned to Afghanistan in 2003 to promote women’s rights and education, said many of her fellow activists have left the country.
Read: Friction among Taliban pragmatists, hard-liners intensifies
She said she stayed in an effort to engage with the Taliban and find a middle ground, but until now has not been able to get the hard-line Islamic group’s leadership to meet with activists who have remained in the country, to talk with women about the way forward.
“We have to talk. We have to find a middle ground,” she said.
UNESCO’s Director General Audrey Azoulay on Saturday added her voice to the growing concern over the Taliban’s limitations on girls after only boys were told to go back to school.
“Should this ban be maintained, it would constitute an important violation of the fundamental right to education for girls and women,” Azoulay said in a statement upon her arrival in New York for the opening of the U.N. General Assembly.
A former advisor to the women’s ministry under the previous Afghan government sent a video message to The Associated Press from her home in Kabul, slamming the Taliban’s move to close the ministry.
It is “the right of women to work, learn and participate in politics on the national and international stage,” said Sara Seerat. ”Unfortunately, in the current Taliban Islamic Emirate government there is no space in the Cabinet. By closing the women’s ministry it shows they have no plans in the future to give women their rights or a chance to serve in the government and participate in other affairs.”
Earlier this month the Taliban announced an all-male exclusively Taliban Cabinet but said it was an interim setup, offering some hope that a future government would be more inclusive as several of their leaders had promised.
Also on Saturday, an international flight by Pakistan’s national carrier left Kabul’s airport with 322 passengers on board and a flight by Iran’s Mahan Air departed with 187 passengers on board, an airport official said.
Read: Women in Afghanistan: Taliban Government to Ban Women's Sports in Afghanistan
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the media, said the two international flights departed in the morning. The identities and nationalities of those on board were not immediately known.
The flights were the latest to depart Kabul in the past week as technical teams from Qatar and Turkey have worked to get the airport up to standard for international commercial aircraft.
A Qatar Airways flight on Friday took more Americans out of Afghanistan, the third such airlift by the Mideast carrier since the Taliban takeover and the frantic U.S. troop pullout from the country last month. The State Department said Saturday that there were 28 U.S. citizens and seven permanent residents on board the flight from Kabul, and thanked Qatari authorities for their help.
Also Friday night, a flight by Kam Air, Afghanistan’s largest private carrier, took off from Mazar-e-Sharif, the capital of northern Balkh province, with 350 passengers on board, according to two employees there.
The flight was headed to Dubai, said the two, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media. They said the plane carried foreigners but it was not clear if and how many Americans were on board.
Fearful US residents in Afghanistan hiding out from Taliban
Every night in yet another house in Afghanistan’s capital, a U.S. green card-holding couple from California take turns sleeping, with one always awake to watch over their three young children so they can flee if they hear the footsteps of the Taliban.
They’ve moved seven times in two weeks, relying on relatives to take them in and feed them. Their days are an uncomfortable mix of fear and boredom, restricted to a couple of rooms where they read, watch TV and play “The Telephone Game” in which they whisper secrets and pass them on, a diversion for the children that has the added benefit of keeping them quiet.
All of it goes on during the agonizing wait for a call from anybody who can help them get out. A U.S. State Department official contacted them several days ago to tell them they were being assigned a case worker, but they haven’t heard a word since. They tried and failed to get on a flight and now are talking to an international rescue organization.
“We are scared and keep hiding ourselves more and more,” the mother said in a text message to The Associated Press. “Whenever we feel breathless, I pray.”
Through messages, emails and phone conversations with loved ones and rescue groups, AP has pieced together what day-to-day life has been like for some of those left behind after the U.S. military’s chaotic withdrawal -- that includes U.S. citizens, permanent U.S. resident green-card holders and visa applicants who aided U.S. troops during the 20-year war.
Read: Afghan killed by drone praised by co-workers in US aid group
Those contacted by AP -- who are not being identified for their own safety -- described a fearful, furtive existence of hiding in houses for weeks, keeping the lights off at night, moving from place to place, and donning baggy clothing and burqas to avoid detection if they absolutely must venture out.
All say they are scared the ruling Taliban will find them, throw them in jail, perhaps even kill them because they are Americans or had worked for the U.S. government. And they are concerned that the Biden administration’s promised efforts to get them out have stalled.
When the phone rang in an apartment in Kabul a few weeks ago, the U.S. green card holder who answered -- a truck driver from Texas visiting family -- was hopeful it was the U.S. State Department finally responding to his pleas to get him and his parents on a flight out.
Instead, it was the Taliban.
“We won’t hurt you. Let’s meet. Nothing will happen,” the caller said, according to the truck driver’s brother, who lives with him in Texas and spoke to him afterwards. The call included a few ominous words: “We know where you are.”
That was enough to send the man fleeing from the Kabul apartment where he had been staying with his mother, his two teenage brothers and his father, who was in particular danger because he had worked for years for a U.S. contractor overseeing security guards.
“They are hopeless,” said the brother in Texas. “They think, ’We’re stuck in the apartment and no one is here to help us.′ They’ve been left behind.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken testified to Congress this past week that the U.S. government had urged U.S. citizens and green cards holders to leave Afghanistan since March, even offering to pay for their flights.
Blinken said the U.S. government does not track U.S. green card holders in Afghanistan but he estimated several thousand remain in the country, along with about 100 U.S. citizens. He said the U.S. government was still working to get them out.
As of Friday, at least 64 American citizens and 31 green card holders have been evacuated since the U.S. military left last month, according to the State Department. More were possibly aboard a flight from Mazar-e-Sharif on Friday, but the administration did not release figures.
Read: Trump aides aim to build GOP opposition to Afghan refugees
Neither the U.S. nor the Taliban have offered a clear explanation why so few have been evacuated.
That is hardly encouraging to another green card holder from Texas, a grandmother who recently watched from a rooftop as militants pulled up in a half-dozen police cars and Humvees to take over the house across the street.
“The Taliban. The Taliban,” she whispered into the phone to her American son in a Dallas suburb, a conversation the woman recounted to the AP. “The women and kids are screaming. They’re dragging the men to the cars.”
She and her husband, who came to Kabul several months ago to visit relatives, are now terrified that the Taliban will not only uncover their American ties but those of their son back in Texas, who had worked for a U.S. military contractor for years.
Her son, who is also not being named, says he called U.S. embassy officials in Kabul several times before it shut down, filled out all the necessary paperwork, and even enlisted the help of a veteran’s group and members of Congress.
He doesn’t know what more he can do.
“What will we do if they knock on the door?” the 57-year-old mother asked on one of her daily calls. “What will we do?”
“Nothing is going to happen,” replied the son.
Asked in a recent interview if he believed that, the son shot back, exasperated, “What else am I supposed to tell her?”
The Taliban government has promised to let Americans and Afghans with proper travel documents leave the country and to not retaliate against those who helped the United States. But U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet said there is evidence they are not keeping their word. She warned Monday that the country had entered a “new and perilous phase,” and cited credible reports of reprisal killings of Afghan military members and allegations of the Taliban hunting house-to-house for former government officials and people who cooperated with U.S. military and U.S. companies.
AP reporters in Afghanistan are not aware of any U.S. citizens or green card holders being picked up or arrested by the Taliban. But they have confirmed that several Afghans who worked for the previous government and military were taken in for questioning recently and released.
The California family, which includes a 9-year-old girl and two boys, ages 8 and 6, say they have been on the run for the past two weeks after the Taliban knocked on the door of their relative’s apartment asking about the Americans staying there.
The family moved to Sacramento four years ago after the mother got a special immigrant visa because she worked for U.S.-funded projects in Kabul promoting women’s rights. Now, the mother says both she and her daughter have been wearing burqas each time they move to their next “prison-home.”
The father, who worked as an Uber driver, has been having panic attacks as they wait for help.
“I don’t see the U.S. government stepping in and getting them out anytime soon,” said the children’s elementary school principal, Nate McGill, who has been exchanging daily texts with the family.
Read: UN officials says rural Afghans have critical need for aid
Distraction has become the mother’s go-to tool to shield her children from the stress. She quizzes them on what they want to do when they get back to California and what they want to be when they grow up.
Their daughter hopes to become a doctor someday, while their sons say they want to become teachers.
But distraction is not always enough. After a relative told the daughter that the Taliban were taking away small girls, she hid in a room and refused to come out until her dad puffed himself up and said he could beat the Taliban, making her laugh.
The mother smiled, hiding her fear from her daughter, but later texted her principal.
“This life is almost half-death.”
Friction among Taliban pragmatists, hard-liners intensifies
Friction between pragmatists and ideologues in the Taliban leadership has intensified since the group formed a hard-line Cabinet last week that is more in line with their harsh rule in the 1990s than their recent promises of inclusiveness, said two Afghans familiar with the power struggle.
The wrangling has taken place behind the scenes, but rumors quickly began circulating about a recent violent confrontation between the two camps at the presidential palace, including claims that the leader of the pragmatic faction, Abdul Ghani Baradar, was killed.
The rumors reached such intensity that an audio recording and handwritten statement, both purportedly by Baradar himself, denied that he had been killed. Then on Wednesday, Baradar appeared in an interview with the country’s national TV.
“I was traveling from Kabul so had no access to media in order to reject this news” Baradar said of the rumor.
Baradar served as the chief negotiator during talks between the Taliban and the United States that paved the way for the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was completed in late August, two weeks after the Taliban overran the capital of Kabul.
Read: UN seeks $606 million for Afghanistan after Taliban takeover
Shortly after the Kabul takeover, Baradar had been the first senior Taliban official to hold out the possibility of an inclusive government, but such hopes were disappointed with the formation of an all-male, all-Taliban lineup last week.
In a further sign that the hard-liners had prevailed, the white Taliban flag was raised over the presidential palace, replacing the Afghan national flag.
A Taliban official said the leadership still hasn’t made a final decision on the flag, with many leaning toward eventually flying both banners side by side. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to discuss internal deliberations with the media.
The two Afghans familiar with the power struggle also spoke on condition of anonymity to protect the confidentiality of those who shared their discontent over the Cabinet lineup. They said one Cabinet minister toyed with refusing his post, angered by the all-Taliban government that shunned the country’s ethnic and religious minorities.
Read: Taliban flag rises over seat of power on fateful anniversary
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid has denied rifts in the leadership. On Tuesday, the Taliban foreign minister, Amir Khan Mutaqi, dismissed such reports as “propaganda.”
Baradar had been noticeably absent from key functions. For instance he was not at the presidential palace earlier this week to receive the deputy prime minister of Qatar, Sheikh Mohammad bin Abdur Rahman Al-Thani, who is also foreign minister and was making the highest-level foreign visit yet since the Taliban takeover. Baradar’s absence was jarring since Qatar had hosted him for years as head of the Taliban political office in the Qatari capital of Doha.
But in the interview shown Wednesday, Baradar said he did not participate in the meeting because he was not aware about the foreign minister’s visit to Kabul. “I had already left and was not able to return back,” Baradar said.
Read: Taliban name caretaker Cabinet
Several officials and Afghans who are familiar and in contact with Baradar told The Associated Press earlier that he was in the southwestern provincial capital of Kandahar for a meeting with Taliban leader Haibatullah Akhunzada. Another Taliban figure said Baradar was visiting family he had not seen in 20 years of war.
Analysts say the friction may not amount to a serious threat to the Taliban — for now.
“We’ve seen over the years that despite disputes, the Taliban largely remains a cohesive institution and that major decisions don’t get serious pushback after the fact,” said Michael Kugelman, Asia program deputy director at the Washington-based Wilson Center.
“I think the current internal dissension can be managed,” he said. “Still, the Taliban will be under a lot of pressure as it tries to consolidate its power, gain legitimacy, and address major policy challenges. If these efforts fail, a stressed organization could well see more and increasingly serious infighting.”
However, Taliban divisions today will be more difficult to resolve without the heavy-handed rule of the group’s founder, the late Mullah Omar, who demanded unquestioned loyalty.
Afghan killed by drone praised by co-workers in US aid group
The Afghan man who was killed in a U.S. drone strike last month was an enthusiastic and beloved longtime employee at an American humanitarian organization, his colleagues say, painting a stark contrast to the Pentagon’s claims that he was an Islamic State group militant about to carry out an attack on American troops.
Signs have been mounting that the U.S. military may have targeted the wrong man in the Aug. 29 strike in Kabul, with devastating consequences, killing seven children and two other adults from his family. The Pentagon says it is further investigating the strike, but it has no way to do so on the ground in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover, severely limiting its ability to gather evidence.
Accounts from the family, documents from colleagues seen by The Associated Press, and the scene at the family home — where Zemerai Ahmadi’s car was struck by a Hellfire missile just as he pulled into the driveway — all seem to sharply contradict the accounts by the U.S. military. Instead, they paint the picture of a family that had worked for Americans and were trying to gain visas to the United States, fearing for their lives under the Taliban.
At the home, the mangled, incinerated Toyota Corolla remains in the driveway. But there are no signs of large secondary blasts the Pentagon said were caused by explosives hidden in the car trunk. In the tightly cramped, walled compound, the house is undamaged except for broken glass, even a badly built wooden balcony remains in place. A brick wall immediately adjacent to the car stands intact. Trees and foliage close to the car are not burned or torn.
Read: Trump aides aim to build GOP opposition to Afghan refugees
The family wants the United States to hear their side of the story and see the facts on the ground.
“We just want that they come here. See what they did. Talk to us. Give us the proof,” Emal Ahmadi, Zemerai’s younger brother, said of the U.S. military. Near tears, he opened a photo on his phone of his 3-year-old daughter, Malika, in her favorite dress. Another photo showed her charred remains after she was killed in the strike.
On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged he did not know if the man targeted in the strike was an IS operative or an aid worker. “I don’t know because we’re reviewing it,” he said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.
The strike was carried out in the final days of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, as American troops were carrying out evacuations at Kabul’s airport. Only days earlier, an IS suicide bombers at the airport killed 169 Afghans and 13 U.S. servicemembers.
The Pentagon says the strike prevented another IS attack at the airport. Officials said the U.S. military had been observing the car for hours as it drove and saw people loading explosives into the back. Days after amid reports of the children killed, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called it a “righteous strike,” and said “at least one of the people that were killed was an ISIS facilitator,” using an acronym for the Islamic State group.
The U.S. acknowledged reports of civilian casualties and said they may have been caused by secondary explosions. The family said when the 37-year-old Zemerai, alone in his car, pulled up to the house, he honked his horn. His 11-year-old son ran out, and Zemerai let the boy get in and drive the car into the driveway. The other kids ran out to watch, and the missile incinerated the car, killing seven children and an adult son and nephew of Zemerai.
“That was my last memory, the sound of his horn,” said another of Zemerai’s brothers, Romal Ahmadi, who was inside the house at the time. His three children, aged two to seven, were killed.
Zemerai worked for 15 years for Nutrition & Education International, a California-based non-profit aimed at countering malnutrition in Afghanistan. Romal also worked briefly for NEI.
Read: UN officials says rural Afghans have critical need for aid
Only days before the strike, Zemerai and Romal applied for special visas to the U.S. for those who had worked with U.S. companies. His brother, Emal and the nephew who was killed, Ahmad Naser Haideri, had also applied for special visas because of their work for the U.S. military.
Emal provided the AP with documents including their visa applications, letters of recommendation and even a medal Haideri had received for his service with a special U.S. trained elite special force. Haideri also had a letter of reference from the U.S.-based Multi Country Security Solutions Group, where he worked as a contractor, calling him “an important part of our commitment to provide the best faithful service to the U.S. Special Forces.”
“He was an excellent employee,” the firm’s president, Timothy Williams, who wrote the letter of reference, told the AP. “I’m not going to change from that just because of the incident that happened. I’m going to stand behind my guys.”
Zemerai’s colleagues at NEI described him as a talented worker who worked his way up from a handyman to a skilled engineer and an essential employee.
Last year, when the company was unable to pay employees at full salary because of the coronavirus pandemic, employees were given the opportunity to leave their positions for better paying work elsewhere.
But Ahmadi declined, saying, “I am NEI. From beginning to end, until we accomplish our goal,” the company’s founder and president, Steven Kwon, told the AP.
Colleagues recalled him as a doting father and enthusiastic dancer who kept an optimistic spirit amid the chaos of his surroundings and was quick to comfort those around him with a joke. He had grown up poor in Kabul and maintained “such a heart for the poor,” said a co-worker who asked to be identified only as Sonia for safety reasons.
“He was definitely the best of us. Absolutely,” she said.
He also always supported the company’s efforts to hire more women and create women’s programs, which is one of many reasons that colleagues said the suggestion that he was connected to any sort of extremism seems preposterous to them.
Read: AKDN urges international community not to abandon Afghanistan
“Everything we’re hearing about him is just so disturbing and so absurd because he had such love for his people,” said Sonia. “How would he overnight turn around and start wanting to kill his own people. It makes absolutely no sense at all whatsoever.”
It seems unlikely the U.S. will send anyone to the Ahmadi home to investigate. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said he’s “not aware of any option that would put investigators on the ground in Kabul.” The U.S. Central Command said it would rely on “other means,” without elaborating but apparently meaning surveillance video and intercepts that led to the strike.
The family, grieving and furious, still wants refuge in the United States. On top of their already existing worries over their past work with the U.S., they now fear the new Taliban rulers will suspect them of being IS. The Islamic State group is a violent rival of the Taliban.
“The U.S. has accused us. They haven’t cleared our name and they won’t even talk to us, and now the suspicion is on us,” Emal said. “We are angry, but we don’t know what to do. For our safety we would go to America, but it must be all our families, not just me.”
Much to their dismay, Ahmadi’s colleagues say they haven’t been contacted by anyone from the Biden administration about what happened.
“Just talk to us because our teams are now terrified,” Sonia said. “I mean, in addition to being afraid of the Taliban and ISIS, they’re now even more afraid of the U.S. government.”
Trump aides aim to build GOP opposition to Afghan refugees
As tens of thousands of Afghan refugees fleeing the Taliban arrive in the U.S., a handful of former Trump administration officials are working to turn Republicans against them.
The former officials are writing position papers, appearing on conservative television outlets and meeting privately with GOP lawmakers — all in an effort to turn the collapse of Afghanistan into another opportunity to push a hard-line immigration agenda.
“It is a collaboration based on mutual conviction,” said Stephen Miller, the architect of President Donald Trump’s most conservative immigration policies and among those engaged on the issue. “My emphasis has been in talking to members of Congress to build support for opposing the Biden administration’s overall refugee plans.”
The approach isn’t embraced by all Republican leaders, with some calling it mean-spirited and at odds with Christian teachings that are important to the white evangelicals who play a critical role in the party’s base. The strategy relies on tactics that were commonplace during Trump’s tenure and that turned off many voters, including racist tropes, fear-mongering and false allegations.
And the hard-liners pay little heed to the human reality unfolding in Afghanistan, where those who worked with Americans during the war are desperate to flee for fear they could be killed by the new Taliban regime.
Read:California governor seeks $16.7M in aid for Afghan refugees
But the Republicans pushing the issue are betting they can open a new front in the culture wars they have been fighting since President Joe Biden’s election by combining the anti-immigrant sentiment that helped fuel Trump’s political rise with widespread dissatisfaction with the Afghan withdrawal. That, they hope, could keep GOP voters motivated heading into next year’s midterms, when control of Congress is at stake.
“From a political standpoint, cultural issues are the most important issues that are on the mind of the American people,” said Russ Vought, Trump’s former budget chief and president of the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit group that has been working on building opposition to Afghan refugee settlement in the U.S. along with other hot-button issues, like critical race theory, which considers American history through the lens of racism.
His group is working, he said, to “kind of punch through this unanimity that has existed” that the withdrawal was chaotic, but that Afghan refugees deserve to come to the U.S.
Officials insist that every Afghan headed for the country is subject to extensive vetting that includes thorough biometric and biographic screenings conducted by intelligence, law enforcement and counterterrorism personnel. At a pair of hearings this week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said those “rigorous security checks” begin in transit countries before refugees arrive in the U.S. and continue at U.S. military bases before anyone is resettled. Checks then continue as refugees await further processing.
But Trump and his allies, who worked to sharply curtain refugee admissions while they were in office, insist the refugees pose a threat.
“Who are all of the people coming into our Country?” Trump asked in a recent statement. “How many terrorists are among them?”
With the U.S. confronting a host of challenges, it’s unclear whether voters will consider immigration a leading priority next year. It was a key motivator for voters in the 2018 midterm elections, with 4 in 10 Republicans identifying it as the top issue facing the country, according to AP VoteCast data. But it became far less salient two years later, when only 3% of 2020 voters — including 5% of Republicans — named it as the No. 1 issue facing the country amid the COVID-19 pandemic and related economic woes.
Read: GOP rift widens amid growing hostility to Afghan refugees
When it comes to refugees, 68% of Americans say they support the U.S. taking in those fleeing Afghanistan after security screening, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll in late August and early September. That includes a majority — 56% — of Republicans.
The party’s leaders are far from united. Dozens of Republican lawmakers and their offices have been working tirelessly to try to help Afghans flee the country. And some, like Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., have admonished those in his party who have suggested the Afghans pose a security risk.
Some of the skepticism voiced by the right has been exacerbated by the Biden administration’s refusal to date to provide an accounting of who was able to leave Afghanistan during the U.S.’s chaotic evacuation campaign from Kabul’s airport.
The State Department has said that more than 23,800 Afghans arrived in the U.S. between Aug. 17-31. Thousands more remain at U.S. military sites overseas for screening and other processing. But officials have said they are still working to compile the breakdown of how many are applicants to the Special Immigrant Visa program designed to help Afghan interpreters and others who served side-by-side with Americans, how many are considered other “Afghans at risk,” like journalists and human rights workers, and how many fall into other categories.
The organization War Time Allies estimates as many as 20,000 special visa applicants remain in the country, not counting their families and others eligible to come to the U.S.
Ken Cuccinelli, who served as Trump’s acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and is now a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America, says he doesn’t believe the refugees have faced sufficient review.
“It’s unachievable as a simple administrative matter,” he said of the process. While Cuccinelli, like Miller, believes that SIVs should be allowed to come to the U.S., he argues that the other refugees should be resettled in the region, closer to home.
Read: Afghan refugees tell UN: 'We need peace, land to go home'
The “mass importation of potentially hundreds of thousands of people who do not share American cultural, political, or ideological commonalities poses serious risks to both national security and broader social cohesion,” he wrote in a recent position paper on the group’s website that cites Pew Research Center polling on beliefs about Sharia law and suicide bombings.
Other former administration officials strongly disagree with such inflammatory language.
“Some of the people who’ve always been immigration hard-liners are seeing this wrongly as an opportunity ahead of the midterms to, lack a better term, stoke fear of, ‘I don’t want these people in my country,’” said Alyssa Farah, a former Pentagon press secretary who also served as White House communications director under Trump.
Farah said she has been working to “politely shift Republican sentiment” away from arguments that she sees as both factually false and politically questionable. The Republican Party, she noted, includes a majority of veterans — many of whom worked closely alongside Afghans on the ground and have led the push to help their former colleagues escape — as well as evangelical Christians, who have historically welcomed refugees with open arms.
“It’s totally misreading public sentiment to think that Republicans should not be for relocating Afghan refugees who served along side the U.S.,” she said. “The Christian community is there. The veterans community is for it.”
Blinken pushes back on GOP criticism of Afghan withdrawal
Secretary of State Antony Blinken pushed back Monday against harsh Republican criticism of the handling of the military withdrawal from Afghanistan, saying the Biden administration inherited a deal with the Taliban to end the war, but no plan for carrying it out.
In a sometimes contentious hearing Monday before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Blinken sought to blunt complaints from angry GOP lawmakers about the administration’s response to the quick collapse of the Afghan government and, more specifically, the State Department’s actions to evacuate Americans and others.
Read: Blinken claims progress in effort to boost Gaza truce
Blinken echoed White House talking points blaming the Trump administration for the situation that President Joe Biden inherited in Afghanistan. “We inherited a deadline. We did not inherit a plan,” he said, maintaining that the administration had done the right thing in ending 20 years of war.
“We made the right decision in ending America’s longest-running war,” said Blinken, who will testify on Tuesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Republicans savaged the withdrawal process as “a disaster” and “a disgrace.” And while some Democrats allowed that the operation could have been handled better, many used their questions to heap criticism on former President Donald Trump.
The State Department has come under heavy criticism from both sides for not doing enough and not acting quickly enough to get American citizens, legal residents and at-risk Afghans out of the country after the Taliban took control of Kabul on Aug. 15. Some seeking to leave remain stranded there, although Blinken could not provide an exact number. He said roughly 100 U.S. citizens remain along with about “several thousand” green card holders.
Read: Blinken heads to Egypt to shore up Gaza cease-fire efforts
“This was an unmitigated disaster of epic proportions,” said Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the top Republican on the committee. He said the abrupt withdrawal along with leaving some Americans and Afghans behind had “emboldened the Taliban” and other U.S. adversaries. “I can summarize this in one word: betrayal.”
His GOP colleagues Steve Chabot of Ohio and Lee Zeldin of New York were even more blunt. “This is a disgrace,” Chabot said. “This was fatally flawed and poorly executed,” said Zeldin. “I believe that you, sir, should resign. That would be leadership.”
The chairman of the committee, New York Rep. Gregory Meeks, urged his colleagues to keep politics out of their criticism. But he acknowledged that there had been problems. “Could things have been done differently? Absolutely,” he said.