Ambassador Elizabeth Jones was selected to lead the Biden administration’s efforts to relocate and resettle Afghan evacuees.
State Department spokesman Ned Price announced Jones’s appointment to take over for Ambassador John Bass, who had been in the position, on Tuesday afternoon.
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Jones, who served as the ambassador to Kazakhstan and as deputy special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, “will assume oversight of the entire Afghanistan relocation effort, from our ongoing efforts to facilitate the departure of individuals from Afghanistan to their onward relocation and resettlement from the United States.”
She was the ambassador to Kazakhstan from 1995-98 before serving as the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia from 2001-05, according to the State Department website.
The U.S. has tapped eight military bases to house Afghan refugees. They will be able to hold 50,000 people once they’re operating at full capacity. The U.S. temporarily halted inbound flights of Afghan refugees at the direction of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after there were more than a dozen cases of measles and a handful of cases of mumps.
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Bass, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2017 to 2020, had temporarily been in the position of coordinator for Afghan relocation efforts while his nomination to be the undersecretary of state for management is still pending with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
