As members of Congress pressure President Joe Biden to extend the Aug. 31 deadline for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan in order to evacuate more allies, some lawmakers are highlighting the threats that Afghan interpreters and Special Immigrant Visa applicants face.
“The Taliban will let American citizens in. But if they see Afghan interpreters that have their SIV applications, sometimes they’re turned away. Sometimes, more grimly, they are returned to their homes, where they behead their family and then behead them,” said Republican Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, at a bipartisan press conference on Wednesday.
Florida Republican Rep. Mike Waltz, a combat-decorated Green Beret, on Tuesday told a story about an interpreter whom he worked with in Afghanistan who was executed by the Taliban.
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“I had one guy who was such a fighter — we called him ‘little Spartacus.’ Spartacus was on the waiting list for the SIV program. He was found at a Taliban checkpoint with American documentation on him,” Waltz said. “You know what they did? They took him back to his village, beheaded his brothers and his cousins in front of him, and then him, to send a message.”
“That’s what thousands of American citizens — and let me use this word — stranded in Afghanistan right now are facing,” Waltz said. “We are on the cusp of the biggest mass hostage crisis this country has ever seen.”
Reports and images of the Taliban beating civilians and conducting revenge executions on Afghans have trickled out of the country since the Afghan government collapsed.
In Wednesday’s press conference, lawmakers welcomed some of the cast and crew from a CBS sitcom called United States of Al about a Marine and his Afghan interpreter adjusting to life back in the U.S.
Habib Zahori, a former Afghan interpreter-turned-writer on the sitcom, said he knows many people with documentation who cannot easily get to the Kabul airport for evacuation. One of his sisters is stuck at a gate to the airport, along with elderly people and children who had traveled from hundreds of miles away.
“The last thing that I heard from them was a picture of a baby that was beaten in that crowd,” Zahori said.
McCaul also said there were about 140 Afghan pilots who were evacuated but then sent back to Taliban-controlled territory.
“That’s a death sentence,” McCaul said.
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Actor Parker Young, who plays the U.S. Marine on the sitcom, made an appeal to Biden: “We urge you to stay as long as necessary to evacuate all of our Afghan partners and allies.”
Indiana Republican Rep. Jim Banks warned, “The blood is on Joe Biden’s hands if any American is harmed or injured or killed and not safely evacuated out of Afghanistan or if any of these weapons or this military equipment is used to harm, injure, or kill an American now or at any time in the future.”
