[ad_1]
WASHINGTON (AP) – Educated young women, former U.S. military translators and other Afghans most vulnerable to the Taliban appealed to the Biden administration to put them on evacuation flights as the United States struggled to bring order to the ongoing chaos on Wednesday Kabul airport.
President Joe Biden and his senior officials said the US was working to speed up the evacuation but made no promises about how long it would take or how many desperate people they would bring to a large number of people, “Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said told reporters, adding that the evacuations would continue “until the clock runs out or we run out of capacity”.
Afghans who are at risk because of their work with the US military or US organizations, and Americans trying to get them out, also pleaded with Washington to cut the red tape that they say has thousands of Afghans at risk could be stranded if US forces withdraw soon as planned.
“If we don’t fix this, we will literally sentence people to death,” said Marina Kielpinski LeGree, the American director of the non-profit organization Ascend. After days of chaos, tear gas and gunfire, the young Afghan colleagues from the organization stood in the crowd waiting for flights at the airport.
The US has rushed troops, transport planes and commanders to secure the airport, seek Taliban guarantees for safe passage and set up an airlift that can move between 5,000 and 9,000 people a day.
Assistant Secretary of State Wendy Sherman described the extensive efforts made by US officials to get Afghans and allies to safety. “This is an all-man-on-deck effort and we are not going to let up,” Sherman said at a State Department press conference.
Taliban fighters and checkpoints surrounded the airport – barriers for Afghans, who fear that their previous work with Westerners will make them the main targets of the insurgents. Afghans who had made it to the Taliban reached the Americans guarding the airport complex and shot documents to some of the 4,500 US soldiers under temporary control.
One of the last escape windows from the Taliban threatens to close if Biden’s planned withdrawal is completed by August 31.
“People are going to die,” said Air Force veteran Sam Lerman. He said he was working to help a former Afghan military contractor who received an email from the State Department telling him to go to the airport. But US forces turned the Afghan back on Wednesday at the airport entrance and told him he was missing the correct document, Lerman said.
Hundreds of Afghans who lacked papers or flight promises also gathered at the airport and contributed to the chaos. It didn’t help that many of the Taliban fighters were illiterate and unable to read the documents.
US officials say they have evacuated 4,480 people since taking control of the airport over the weekend. The unrest there has resulted in Afghans rushing across the asphalt. In one case, some apparently fell to their deaths while holding onto a departing American C-17 transport plane.
US citizens and other foreigners, Afghan allies in the Western forces, as well as women, journalists, activists and others most at risk from the fundamentalist Taliban hope to secure seats on an airlift.
The US has refused to give estimates of how many US citizens will remain in Afghanistan and have to flee.
About 100,000 Afghans sought evacuation through a U.S. visa program designed to offer refuge to Afghans who had worked with Americans as well as family members, said Rebecca Heller, director of the U.S.-based International Refugee Assistance Program. Your organization was among those urging the United States to step up visa processing as a matter of urgency.
Heller said an Afghan customer told her about five Afghan translators who had been killed by the Taliban in the past two days for their previous work with Americans.
Heller played an appeal that an Afghan client had recorded. The woman, whose name The Associated Press withheld for her safety, has been waiting for US interference for her visa application for three years.
“The only hope I have right now is the US government,” said the Afghan woman. “Please, US government … please stop promising. Please start acting. As quickly as possible.”
The Pentagon said senior U.S. military officers, including Navy Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, are speaking with Taliban commanders about Taliban checkpoints and curfews, which have limited the number of Americans and Afghans who can enter the airport.
The US government has been sending emails in the past few days urging some American citizens, green card holders and their families and others to come to the airport and prepare to wait.
Biden has defended his decision to end US combat operations in Afghanistan that began after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and denied blame for the chaos that resulted. In doing so, Biden made the Afghans themselves responsible for the Taliban’s seizure of power and for the desperate scramble to flee the country.
However, refugee groups are finding that their visa applications are years behind.
An operation to fly former Afghan translators and others whose visa procedures were closest to completion to the United States had managed to get only about half of the 4,000 Afghans predicted before the Taliban takeover.
A separate visa program designed to fly out civil society members most threatened by the Taliban has been hampered from the start, in part by the U.S. requirement that Afghans must travel outside of Afghanistan to apply – a trip the Taliban has made. Made raid impossible for most.
___
Knickmeyer reported from Oklahoma City. Contributed to this report were Associated Press Writers Matthew Lee and Robert Burns in Washington and Kathy Gannon in Guelph, Canada, and AP Broadcast Correspondent Sagar Meghani in Washington.
[ad_2]
