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While private teams of military veterans are expending efforts to rescue Americans stranded in Afghanistan, the State Department is claiming credit for evacuation achievements without actually having the credit.
This Monday, September 6, State Department officials announced that the United States facilitated “the safe departure of four US citizens by overland route from Afghanistan. Embassy staff was present upon their arrival”; however, private services would be responsible for this rescue and not Joe Biden’s administration.
Cory Mills and a private team working with donor funds, including the Sentinel Foundation, say they led the evacuation efforts for Mariam and her three children who were in Afghanistan and could not be evacuated by the U.S. government.
“Mills and his team worked for weeks to get Mariam’s family out of Afghanistan after Republican Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson alerted him to the family’s plight,” Fox News notes.
How did the extraction go?
Mills told Fox News that the extraction of Mariam and her children occurred after the Taliban prevented them from reaching the airport to board one of the last government flights; in fact, on one of the attempts to get there, a Taliban fighter held a gun to her head and warned her not to return.
After learning that the Taliban began asking for her, Mills rushed to rescue them, got them out of the city and then sheltered them in a safe house.
Mills eventually noted that after the family was unable to board a private charter flight, they sought to have Mariam and her children travel overland and cross the border before the Taliban closed the checkpoint preventing Americans from leaving Afghanistan.
“The fact that they’re spinning this, trying to take 100% credit when they didn’t track this family, when they placated this family, when the mother, who was under extreme stress and extreme pressure, reached out to the State Department multiple times and got no help,” Mills told Fox News.
The veteran noted that the State Department had little to do with the rescue, until the most dangerous part was completed which was getting the family across the border.
” This is an attempt to save face by the administration for the Americans they left behind. This is a woman with three children from age 15 all the way down to two-years-old. And they did nothing to try to expedite this… But at the very last minute you have these ‘senior officials’ at the State Department trying to claim credit for this like ‘oh yeah look what we’ve done,” Mills said.
But Mills is not alone in condemning the State Department for seeking to “steal credit”; Republican Rep. Ronny Jackson also echoed, “The only thing the Biden Administration seems to be good at is patting itself on the back for a job horribly done. This administration left my constituents behind in Afghanistan and now they’re lying about their role in getting these four American citizens out,” he said.
“The State Department didn’t do anything for two weeks except put my constituents in danger and leave them stranded. I know this for a fact because my office has been working around the clock to get our people home with no legitimate support from State. Only after Cory Mills and his team got them into the third country did State offer support by securing tourist visas,” the congressman continued.
Representatives lead missions to rescue Americans stranded in Afghanistan
Various reports reveal that U.S. lawmakers have managed to circumvent State Department “red tape” to rescue American citizens stranded in Afghanistan.
According to Washington Examiner the office of California Republican Representative Mike Garcia had the most success in helping extract Americans from Afghanistan.
“We ended up getting roughly 97 folks out successfully — these were all folks that we were able to do so through our own channels and folks on the ground there that were supporting mostly American citizens and SIV’s who otherwise would have been stopped by the bureaucracy, frankly, by the State Department,” he said.
Likewise, Republican Representative Darrell Issa was also involved in the extraction of seven families from California who were in Kabul at the time of the U.S. troop withdrawal.
According to Biden there are between 100 and 200 Americans who were left behind when the troops completed their withdrawal on August 31, many of them dual citizens.
The State Department has not yet given an estimate of the number of green card holders or Afghans who helped the U.S. during the war and who received a special immigrant visa to live in the United States.
Sabrina Martín Rondon is a Venezuelan journalist. Her source is politics and economics. She is a specialist in corporate communications and is committed to the task of dismantling the supposed benefits of socialism // Sabrina Martín Rondon es periodista venezolana. Su fuente es la política y economía. Es especialista en comunicaciones corporativas y se ha comprometido con la tarea de desmontar las supuestas bondades del socialismo