(Washington) A US official said Wednesday that the majority of Afghans who worked with Washington and wanted to flee to the United States could not be evacuated from Afghanistan, calling diplomats “intimidated” by the choices they would have to make during the Kabul airlift.
This can affect tens of thousands of people with their immediate families.
“I would say most of them, based on testimonies regarding the people we were able to support,” said this senior official in US diplomacy, who is on the front lines of the massive evacuation that ended on Monday. Final withdrawal of the United States.
“We intend to continue,” he assured reporters, under the guise of anonymity, “to do everything possible in the coming weeks and months to maintain this commitment to help those who want to leave Afghanistan.”
The evacuation has enabled 123,000 people to leave since August 14, a day before the Taliban reached Kabul.
The State Department has been unable to determine how many Afghans have applied for special immigrant visas they promised translators and other aides to the US military or diplomacy, threatening retaliation from the US. Part of the former rebels who are in power now.
The total number itself is still a mystery.
100,000 orders
In early August, the White House reported that about 20,000 Afghans who worked with Americans had requested to receive them in the United States, about 100,000 people with family members. But other estimates are traded higher.
“All those who lived through the ‘evacuation’ are haunted by the choices we had to make, and by the people we couldn’t help leave in this first phase of the process,” the US diplomat said.
“It involved really painful compromises and choices,” “for me in trying to communicate our priorities in the days when we had an effective system with the Taliban to make buses easier,” “to American consular officials who, heroically, were at access points with the Marines or the U.S. military.” And NATO to try to identify the people in the crowd, or those who went out and walked among the Afghans looking for people with an American passport, the American green card.”
The official described the situation as “difficult” as crowds of Afghans gathered at the entrances to Kabul airport, threatening “riots at any time”.
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