In April 2021, Marine Corps Maj. Tom Schueman sought support to remove his former interpreter Zainullah Zaki from Afghanistan before the impending U.S. withdrawal. While highlighting their story for the Washington Examiner, I learned of Zaki’s bravery working beside the 3rd Battalion 5th Marine Regiment in the volatile Sangin district and of Schueman’s five-year effort to help Zaki achieve a special immigrant visa. Though their story reached the New York Times, The Rachel Maddow Show, and the Senate, powerful people could not secure Zaki’s escape. Rather, as the chaos of the withdrawal roiled, several of Schueman’s contacts finally guided Zaki and his family to safety at Hamid Karzai International Airport on Aug. 18, 2021.
With a Hollywood movie in the works and a book from HarperCollins releasing on Aug. 9, one thing remains conspicuously missing from Zaki’s story: his special immigrant visa.
Several weeks ago, Schueman told me that Zaki continues to await chief of mission approval for his SIV. According to his latest denial, the State Department contends that Zaki lacks proof of the one year of service required for eligibility. Schueman is adamant that “administratively, [Zaki] has everything that’s required.”
Zaki can demonstrate nine months of service in Sangin. He is struggling to document satisfactorily the work he performed for a total of about four years on multiple U.S. bases, which Schueman says were primarily utilized by special forces and intelligence personnel. One of Zaki’s former supervisors wrote a human resources letter attesting to supervising Zaki for almost two years. The State Department does not accept his letter, likely because it was not issued by a human resources department, and the contracting agency he works for did not directly employ Zaki.
Multiple congressional inquiries have produced no breakthroughs in Zaki’s case. While Zaki could remain in the United States by filing for asylum, Schueman is adamant that Zaki is “not here seeking asylum, he’s here to get the [SIV] he rates.”
Zaki’s case acquainted me with the data that demonstrate the SIV program’s failures. For the past year, hundreds of stranded SIV applicants have shown me the unquantifiable human anguish the program has created.
Acquiring letters of recommendation remains difficult. One applicant, who performed three years of construction work for the U.S., has spent seven years searching for a letter from his former supervisors. I recently corresponded with multiple subcontractors of L3Harris, who were denied chief of mission approval due to improperly formatted recommendation letters. When I wrote about their cases in June, L3Harris issued a statement assuring they were “proactively working” on a resolution. Because desperate subcontractors continued requesting my support, I followed up with L3Harris several weeks later. They replied with the same unspecific platitudes, offering no concrete support to increasingly hopeless applicants.
Devastation has also resulted from slow SIV processing at the State Department. One applicant who worked for the U.S. for over a decade applied for his SIV in 2018. He was living in hiding when the Taliban killed his father last November because he refused to give up his son.
Such horrific deaths will likely increase as SIV processing and evacuation continue sluggishly. Fawad, whose name has been changed for his protection, is a former logistics manager from the Hazara minority. The Taliban’s brutality forced his family to live in a tent for the last 11 months. He tells his young children they are on a camping vacation.
In April, a contact in the evacuation community connected Fawad and me with his former supervisor allowing Fawad to apply to the SIV program. While awaiting processing, he was forced out of the chicken farm where he was living. Fawad fears the Taliban will find and kill him before his SIV is processed. He has told his wife, who speaks no English, that I am one of three Americans she should contact in the event of his death.
Haunting photographs of the applicants’ sick, traumatized, and hungry children, and of their bruised bodies and cracked skulls, demonstrate their dire circumstances. It is a stain on the U.S. that the program meant to protect the men and women who supported our efforts in Afghanistan has instead become a source of suffering.
Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance writer from the Detroit area.
