of the Badri 313 Battalion, a group of Taliban special forces fighters,
tasked with securing Hamid Karzai International Airport and the
surrounding area, perform evening prayers in Kabul, Afghanistan on
Saturday, Aug. 28, 2021. (Jim Huylebroek/The New York Times)
WASHINGTON
— On the last day of August, when President Joe Biden called the
airlift of refugees from Kabul an “extraordinary success,” senior
diplomats and military officers in Doha, Qatar, emailed out a daily
situation report marked “sensitive but unclassified.”
The
conditions in Doha, according to their description, were getting worse.
Almost 15,000 Afghan refugees were packed into airplane hangars and
wedding-style tents at al-Udeid air base, home to the 379th Air
Expeditionary Wing and nearby Camp As Sayliyah, a U.S. Army base in the
Persian Gulf nation.
Two hundred and twenty-nine unaccompanied
children were being held near the base, including many teenage boys who
repeatedly bullied younger children. There were a “large number of
pregnant women,” some of whom needed medical attention, and increasing
reports of “gastrointestinal issues” among the refugees.
The
reports were daily distillations of the complexity, chaos and humanity
behind the largest air evacuation in U.S. history, as scores of
diplomats, troops, health workers, security officials and others
scattered across the globe sought to rescue tens of thousands of
refugees. Whatever plans the Biden administration had for an orderly
evacuation unraveled when Kabul fell in a matter of days, setting off a
frenzied, last-minute global mobilization.
Biden and his aides
have insisted that the evacuation of Kabul after the Taliban seized the
city on Aug. 15 was done as efficiently as possible. But State
Department emails, documents from the Health and Human Services,
Homeland Security and Defense departments, as well as interviews with
officials and refugee advocates, suggest otherwise.
Within hours
of Biden’s speech Tuesday at the White House marking the end of
America’s two-decade war, a private charter plane from Mazar-i-Sharif,
Afghanistan’s fourth-largest city, arrived at the air base in Doha — one
of 10 way stations in eight countries — with no notice, carrying no
U.S. citizens but hundreds of Afghans. The manifest for the plane,
apparently chartered by a former Marine’s law firm, offered “no clarity”
about whether its passengers deserved special visas for helping U.S.
troops.
“There are multiple other ‘rogue’ flights that are seeking
the same permissions” to land, emails from State Department officials
sent that day said. “We have 300 people in Doha now who are basically
stateless. Most have no papers.”
Administration officials have
acknowledged the rough conditions at Doha, but say they are working to
improve them. White House officials declined to comment on the record
for this article.
The total number of evacuees, and where they are
currently waiting, is still not clear, though Biden said Tuesday that
more than 120,000 had been evacuated. As of Friday, Alejandro Mayorkas,
secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said about 40,000
people had arrived in the United States at airports near Washington,
D.C., and Philadelphia. Officials expect about 17,000 more to arrive by
next Friday and thousands more may ultimately end up living in a dozen
other countries.
U.S. officials have said the refugees are being
thoroughly vetted, with the authorities feeding fingerprints, portraits
and biographical information into federal databases to weed out
potential risks. Mayorkas said the Defense Department had sent hundreds
of biometric screening machines to 30 countries.
But unclassified
briefing documents titled “2021 Afghanistan Repatriation Mission” reveal
that in some cases, spotty information is being collected: Flight
manifests have been at times incomplete or missing, visa or citizenship
status is unknown, and there is a lack of basic demographic data.
The
documents show that the flights into the United States started as a
trickle. On Aug. 19, four days after the Taliban seized control of
Kabul, 226 people on two separate flights arrived at Dulles
International Airport. Jordan Air JAV 4825 included 44 dogs — but no
information about its 58 passengers.
Ten days later, on Sunday, 13
flights landed at Dulles carrying 3,842 people, including six refugees
who tested positive for the coronavirus and six unaccompanied boys: four
teenagers, one younger school-age boy and one toddler. Flight CMB 581,
which landed that day at 6:38 p.m., carried 240 passengers. But
government records provide few details: “about three” U.S. citizens,
including two people over 65 and one passenger who tested positive for
the virus.
Mayorkas said of the about 40,000 people who had
reached the United States from Afghanistan, about 22% were U.S. citizens
and legal permanent residents and the rest were Afghans, including many
who were at risk of retribution at the hands of the Taliban.
The
confusion about the refugees began before they left Kabul, as
overwhelmed consular officials struggled to identify and verify those
who had valid claims to be evacuated.
A senior State Department
official who was in Kabul described a desperate situation at the gates
around the city’s airport and crowds that were so frenzied that
officials worried they could slip “into a mob at any given moment.”
“Every
day was a constant improvisational effort to figure out what was going
to work that day,” he said. “And I would say, everybody who lived it is
haunted by the choices we had to make.”
As they raced to evacuate
refugees from Kabul, the most critical question facing the Biden
administration was: where to put them?
National security adviser
Jake Sullivan said the administration had anticipated needing transit
centers for an eventual evacuation. But within days of the collapse of
the Afghan government, the Pentagon and the State Department rushed to
secure more agreements with countries in Europe and the Middle East to
allow refugees to be housed temporarily at 10 U.S. bases — officially
known as lily pads because the refugees were intended to stay there only
a short time.
At the same time, military officials began “Project
Allies Welcome,” setting up temporary housing at eight military bases
in the United States.
The question of what will happen over the long term to refugees who arrive in the United States is a moving target.
Some
have arrived with completed visa applications in recognition of their
service alongside the U.S. military. Those people, and their families,
will become permanent residents and could earn citizenship.
But
the vast majority of the refugees are being granted what is known as
“humanitarian parole,” which allows them to live in the United States
for a fixed period, in most cases two years. They may be required to
apply for asylum and will get help to find a home in the United States
while they wait for their cases to be processed.
Officials said
they were considering asking Congress to pass legislation that would
provide all of the refugees with legal status, much the way lawmakers
did for Cubans in the 1960s and Vietnamese refugees in 1975.
As of
Thursday, more than 26,100 Afghans fresh off planes had been shuttled
to a cavernous room near Dulles, including 3,800 on Wednesday alone.
Officials said the arriving evacuees were usually there for less than a
day for processing — and in some cases out in an hour or two —
surrounded by the sound of crying babies and exhausted-looking people.
During
a tour Thursday evening of the hangar-size facility, Secretary of State
Antony Blinken was told that many people arrived dehydrated and in need
of medical care; several women have given birth since they arrived in
the United States, including one who had triplets Wednesday. Additional
interpreters have been sent to the center to make up for a shortage of
staff who spoke Dari or Pashto when it first opened Aug. 22.
Children
ran throughout the maze of hallways between curtained-off rooms where
people slept, covered with blue blankets. Seeing three children standing
off to one side, Blinken stopped, crouched down and introduced himself.
“Welcome to America, my name is Tony,” he said, tapping his chest. “Nice to meet you.”
© 2021 The New York Times Company
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