This time, however, his connection to the airport gates was able to make it a reality.
He grabbed his daughter on top as he headed through the chaotic scrum outside and the Marines used a flashlight to scan the crowd.
They saw her.
The family got there.
“My family wouldn’t have made it at all if we hadn’t come in contact with Marines at the gates,” said the father, whose identity CNN hides for its safety. He is an American citizen who worked for years with the United States in Afghanistan.
The chaotic and dangerous scenes outside the airport have made it virtually impossible for Afghans, even those with green cards, specific instructions from the US embassy or children suffering from illness, to reach the airport grounds without any connection “inside the cable”.
Now, with the U.S. presence in Kabul rapidly beginning to wipe out Afghans and Americans (many of them military veterans), they take advantage of their networks and work 24 hours a day to organize everything from the access to the airport to charter flights to make Afghans vulnerable. to Taliban reprisals outside Afghanistan.
#DunkerDigital
Some call their efforts a “#DigitalDunkirk,” a World War II evacuation gesture that commissioned civilian ships to rescue Allied troops; one of the umbrella efforts is titled and others call it #AfghanEvac.
At least one coalition has set up a joint command center for a Washington, DC hotel to coordinate efforts.
The #AfghanEvac effort hosts phone calls twice a day with dozens of different organizations involved and have chats in various groups, conducted through the signal of the secret messaging app, to connect people who are in contact with Afghans who need help from those who can prove it. to find them the help they need. Chatting is also a place to brainstorm and share good practices, such as tying balloons to children so that U.S. officials can easily identify them when they look for them from the doors.
“We started bringing everyone together under the nickname #AfghanEvac because everyone was doing a lot of different and often duplicative things. We didn’t need more groups, we needed to add capacity and streamline efforts to get everyone working from the same sheet of music,” he said. say Shawn VanDiver, who served in the Navy for 12 years and founded the San Diego Chapter of the Truman National Security Project. “We needed to work hard to make everyone’s efforts safer and more efficient.”
VanDiver says his ad hoc network receives many calls from Congress and even from people in the executive branch asking for help.
“The U.S. government has no work structure at the moment. It is the ad hoc effort that is yielding real results,” a Capitol Hill member explained.
Volunteers and staff from various advocacy groups and veterans are working at a hotel in the country’s capital to “connect all the points we’re taking,” said Lexie Rock, communications director for The Independence Fund.
“I would say there are probably, at some point, 20 to 25 people, mostly volunteers apart from their daily work. They’ve been working all day and haven’t slept for hours, getting these charter flights and just connecting all points. So it is an impressive operation as this is a territory unknown to all of us, “he said.
The administration has evacuated 82,300 people on U.S. military and coalition flights since Aug. 14, the White House said Wednesday morning. The State Department set up a working group to work on it, and they also work closely with the Pentagon.
Thousands of fears will be left behind
However, Afghans destined for these flights have yet to make the dangerous journey to the airport, around the Taliban checkpoints and through the crowd.
In addition, many of those involved say that the fact that their efforts are even necessary points to a profound failure of the U.S. government, and they fear that the imminent departure of U.S. troops could mean they will be left behind by dozens of thousands.
“The fact that you need several hundred people to do it all day of their own free will (with some even taking free time to do so) means there is absolute logistical failure on behalf of the U.S. government.” Said Erik Edstrom, a veteran who has been involved in the efforts.
“The Biden administration and the government in general should have seen this. They should have done capacity planning and adequately anticipated what would have been needed to evacuate all U.S. and Afghan allies by location,” he said.
A State Department spokesman told CNN, “The U.S. government has no role in organizing private charter evacuation flights.”
For many of the veterans involved in the effort, work feels like a moral imperative.
“Our work will not make up for the failure of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, but there is something redemptive and humane about this mission: alleviating suffering rather than provoking it,” Edstrom said. “Some people in this group have cited that this is one of the best jobs they’ve done in their lives. And doing that feels a lot more related to helping people than what I was doing on the ground when I was deployed as an officer. of infantry. “
“This is so deeply personal to us because those of us who served with the Afghans, lived among them and were welcomed into their homes and their culture: for us it’s not us and they, it’s just us,” he said. Zeller wrote. “It’s us. Leaving one of them is similar to leaving an American behind.”