‘Angels From The Sky’: How Americans Are Rescuing The People Biden Left Behind In Afghanistan By Jordan Davidson for The Federalist
‘After six days, somehow these people, like angels, they fall from the sky and say ‘we will do our best to get to your family here because they’re the family of the U.S. citizen.”
Names in this story were changed to protect identities.
The United States’ longest war is over, but the battle for Afghan-Americans to recover their families is just beginning.
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Henry, an Afghan-American translator, is just one of the many people still dealing with the fallout of the Biden administration’s botched withdrawal operations. After the last group of U.S. military took flight from Afghanistan to meet the president’s August 31 deadline, hundreds of Americans and Afghan allies who assisted the U.S.’s decades-long occupation in Afghanistan were left behind, including Henry’s wife, brother, and children as young as three years old.
Henry, who received his U.S. citizenship in 2020 after spending time in the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa program, lives and works in the United States, so when the Taliban advanced into Kabul and the Afghan government fled in mid-August, his first priority was getting his family, who was still tied up trying to enter the U.S. immigration process, out of the Middle East country and to safety with him.
“I received an email from the U.S. Embassy. They had a pass in the email. It said ‘please go to the airport,’ you know, ‘take your family, go to the airport,’” Henry told The Federalist.
Henry’s family rushed to pack up and travel to the Hamid Karzai International Airport airport in Kabul but when they got there, they met crowds of thousands of other Americans and Afghans hoping to reach the U.S.-controlled area where they could catch a lifeline flight out of the country. It took them two days to navigate their way through the desperate mob, which previously trampled a 2-year-old girl to death, before they reached the right gate.
Once they got inside the terminal, Henry’s family faced another crowd of people hoping to get bussed to a departure spot. There, his wife and kids sat for two more days in the heat without any supplies. At one point, Henry lost contact with his family because his wife lost her phone, her purse, and even some jewelry after being jostled by other panicked people fleeing the Taliban.
“They were not prepared,” Henry said. “They didn’t have water and no food, nothing.”
“My family and everybody else was asking about water because the kids were getting unconscious. They were asking the Marine guys to see if they can provide some water. My wife was calling me. And I was like, helpless and I was trying to see if I can talk to one of those marine soldiers out there so that he or she could provide some water to them. And they were saying they don’t even have water. Like no water, no food, so just be patient, you know, and that was a really sad moment,” Henry said.
Henry also tried calling some of his friends in the military who he used to work in Afghanistan to see if they could help his family.
