The terrorist who conducted a suicide bombing in the final chaotic days of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan not only killed 13 American military personnel, but closed the gates of Kabul’s airport on some of his former Afghan jailers.
“They were standing there outside of the airport, waiting for somebody [to] come out and help them to get in, inside of the airport,” Abdul-Jamil Raoufi, 30, an Afghan national who came to the United States in 2019, told the Washington Examiner. “That day was [of] the evacuation process [when] they said we will take out some military police and some commandos from Afghanistan. So, when the suicide attack happened, it was canceled, unfortunately.”
The explosion scattered the Afghans desperate for a seat on the planes that evacuated more than 120,000 people through Hamid Karzai International Airport. It also cast the military police into a bureaucratic maze that had led Raoufi to a special immigrant visa and a job in Virginia, but left others — including an Afghan National Army sergeant major who says he oversaw the detention of now-empowered Haqqani leaders — to face an apparent dead end in a miasma of Taliban threats.
“I was working at Bagram Prison, and those who were prisoners in Bagram Prison, they know me well, so it’s really hard for me to go out and work somewhere,” SGM Baki, as he opted to be identified, told the Washington Examiner during a phone call from Afghanistan.
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“So, he’s not really in a good situation,” added Raoufi, who interpreted the conversation. “He says he’s staying at home because of this restriction.”
An Afghan master sergeant major who goes by Shuja and insists on referring to his interlocutors as “sir” offered a similar report. “The Taliban search[ed] my home some days [ago], sir,” Shuja wrote in a message to the Washington Examiner. “The current situation is very bloody in Afghanistan . . . the forces of the former regime are being killed in Nangarhar and Kabul province in the name of ISIS. I cannot work for being caught. And [the] Taliban have biometric [data] of [the] army.”
They have received little support or guidance beyond that which can be orchestrated by an American contractor who worked at Bagram Air Base, Todd Schoonover, a retired Air Force reservist who worked as chief of strategic movements for the logistics directorate of the forces at Bagram — a stint that ended just months prior to the U.S. withdrawal. He has kept in touch with SGM Baki, Shuja, and another Afghan officer whom he knew at the base, only to realize that the coordination of their escape from Afghanistan is one of the most fraught and “convoluted” logistical projects he has undertaken.
“The goal is to try to find a way to get them to safety, to get them to a place that’s accepting refugees from this place that we abandoned, and get them to safety,” said Schoonover, who has continued to help them even as he travels around the world supporting U.S. military operations in other hots pots. “They want to be a part of the Western way of life and democracy. And they fought for it. And they want to try to pursue it. And they need some assistance for this.”
That help is hard to come by due to a mix of factors, not least the inherent difficulty of fleeing a country dominated by terrorists who regard those Afghans who worked with NATO forces as “collaborators” and who want to stop the brain drain initiated by their reconquest of the country. Furthermore, SGM Baki and his colleagues are not eligible for the special immigrant visa that the U.S. government provides to Afghans who can prove that they “have provided faithful and valuable service to the U.S. government,” such as Raoufi, who received his visa by virtue of two years’ employment by the State Department. SGM Baki spent several years working in close proximity with U.S. forces, but he did so as an Afghan service member. That’s a crucial distinction for the U.S. government but not, the brothers say, for the Taliban.
“They don’t care about what these programs are,” Raoufi said. “They’re like, ‘Oh, you were working with these people once, and then, now you just want to escape from the country. And we are looking also for you.’ So yeah, this thing will happen.”
Their plight is emblematic of the wider crisis and confusion about access to the United States. About 75,000 Afghans had applied for the special immigrant visa as of July, according to State Department data, but U.S. officials estimate that half of those applications — each of which typically represents a large family — will be rejected for lack of eligibility.
“The evacuation itself last summer and early fall, and, of course, our ongoing efforts, were, frankly enormous and historic, but not sufficient, frankly, yet, for the number of people that are interested in getting out,” a State Department official acknowledged. “To that point, the administration has made a longer-term commitment to continuing to move people out of Kabul, mainly to Qatar for onward processing to the U.S. But again, because the scale and the aperture of that is limited, not everybody, obviously, can be received.”
In Schoonover’s experience, lawmakers have proven largely unresponsive to requests for help, but there is a bipartisan bloc in the House and the Senate that proposes to widen the path for Afghans seeking access to the United States, including by conferring eligibility for the SIV program upon some groups of the Afghan military.
“This legislation starts us down a road of creating a strong vetting program to protect our national security while allowing for Afghans who risked their lives for America to move forward in the process, and while determining what to do with other parolees we brought to the U.S. after our hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said when the bill was released last week. “Most have no place to go, and it is imperative that we protect our own nation while also not abandoning those who were there for us in the fight.”
President Joe Biden’s team is broadly supportive of such proposals, according to a Navy veteran who credited the White House National Security Council’s Curtis Ried, a career foreign service officer assigned to focus on Afghan resettlement problems, as “an American hero” for his approach to the problem-set.
“What we are hearing from them is that they are interested in making sure that the categories are more reflective of the risk and the obligation that we have,” said #AfghanEvac founder Shawn VanDiver. “It’s really hard to get policy 100% right, but our experience has been both that the administration has been — actually shockingly to me — willing to hear us out and listen and work with us.”
In the meantime, the path forward for those rejected applicants, or people such as SGM Baki and Shuja, is even fraught with complication and perplexity. Biden’s administration has created a referral-based “point of entry” into the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program specifically for Afghan nationals who are not eligible for the special immigrant visa but meet other qualifications, such as working on projects backed by the U.S. government or by American non-profits and media outlets. This designation (known as P-2, because there is a preexisting Priority 1 referral process available to refugees from around the world) is not an easy one to obtain.
“You cannot self-apply,” the State Department official emphasized, explaining that the process requires “a government official at a senior level . . . to basically vouch that these people actually worked for them, because we also were trying to mitigate against a lot of fraud, which, frankly, is a possibility in this case.”
That’s an aggravating thought for Schoonover, who has conducted his own letter-writing campaign to various members of Congress on their behalf, to no avail. “I knew them from the base . . . They lived on the base, so they were approved by the U.S. government,” he said. “And they communicated with me, ‘Todd, what do we do? We’ve been abandoned here now . . . we need somebody to attest for us to be able to qualify for a visa and immigration authorization to get out of here, get to safety, get our family and us to safety.'”
In the meantime, even if Schoonover could find someone to write an acceptable letter, they would still face the daunting task of acquiring a legal passport from the Afghan government, and then moving to another country where they could make contact with a U.S. Embassy to proceed with the full P-2 process. The assembly of that paperwork is as dangerous as it is expensive — about $10,000 per principal applicant.
“If it’s a family, right, I think you can go $5,000 to $15,000 — just again, it depends on what documents they need,” said Dominic Rondinelli, an Army officer and founder of the S2S Project, a team of “veterans, doctors, lawyers, and aid workers dedicated to helping brave Afghans who worked with us for two decades” of war.
Raoufi, the brother in Virginia, said that the price of a passport has soared to $2,000 on account of officials “taking the bribe.” A substantial percentage of that money, unavoidably, goes to the Taliban figures who control the passport offices. “I would assume based on the price of things that somebody’s getting paid, but, they invoice us,” said a crisis specialist who works with Rondinelli and spoke to the Washington Examiner on condition of anonymity.
Yet that documentation is necessary both for the refugee admissions process and, the volunteers say, to ensure that they are not moving people illegally, which they fear might leave the supporters vulnerable to allegations of human trafficking. But their work doesn’t stop when they get the people out of Afghanistan, according to Rondinelli.
“It’s like $30,000-$35,000, for a family of five for a year,” he said, estimating the cost to support a family relocated to Canada. “It’s really cheap. But that’s not to get in there and all that.”
For Schoonover, dubbed “Brother Todd” by the Afghans he supports, success will depend on their ability to find “some subject-matter expert to help them navigate this system,” and also turn “some millionaires’ and billionaires’ hearts” to donate to organizations such as S2S Project.
“I pray that this appeals to one or more of your listeners to sponsor these people, generate awareness for others to sponsor and possibly . . . increase the SIV process to afford some of our Freedom Fighters the opportunity for the life they desire,” Schoonover, who describes himself as a non-denominational Christian, wrote in an email.
As it stands, the State Department’s guidance — for people who judge that they need to escape Afghanistan but do not qualify for special immigrant visas — is as straightforward as it will be unsatisfying: if they can get themselves to another country, they should register with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in that country, and apply for U.N. “protection,” before pursuing the very remote chance of resettlement in the United States.
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“Less than 1% of the world’s refugees are ever resettled,” the State Department official said. “The unfortunate situation is that people end up in a place and they basically are relocated there temporarily, they have some kind of temporary status, and that status becomes extended and extended and extended. They’re safe, but it’s not really a fully durable solution, because they’re probably not going to be citizens of that new country . . . we don’t consider it a durable status. And I know those people don’t either.”
