A person evacuated from Afghanistan to a U.S. military base in Germany is being held after a security check failed, but is not believed to be a “major threat,” the top U.S. general in Europe said Thursday.
Speaking via video conference to Pentagon reporters, U.S. European Command General Tod Wolters did not want to delve into the detained man, saying that this information is “protected.”
But the general said that “it is currently in the proper custody of US inter-agency officials and Germany has been very, very cooperative, and we are still working on its background research.”
In addition to the detainee, 58 Afghans have been marked for needing additional control, but Wolters said he hopes “probably all 58 will be cleared.”
“If an individual comes out red, we quietly take them out of the normal processing line and put them in a different place so we can have some isolation and have a little extra time to make sure everyone is as safe and as safe as possible. sure possible, ”he said.
Wolters spoke days after U.S. forces completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan, ending military evacuation operations and the 20-year war in the United States.
Since Kabul fell to the Taliban last month, thousands of Afghans have been evacuated to U.S. military bases around the world to wait for new background before being allowed to enter the United States.
In Europe, these bases include the Ramstein air base and the Rhin Ordnance barracks in Germany, the Sigonella Naval Air Station in Italy and the Rota Naval Station in Spain.
Since evacuation operations began in August, U.S. bases in Europe have received 38,000 Afghans and shipped 16,000 to the United States after processing them, Wolters said.
While thousands of Afghans were evacuated, State Department officials have acknowledged very few applicants for special immigrant visas (SIVs) who left Afghanistan, raising questions about who Afghans were. evacuated. The SIVs are reserved for Afghans who helped the U.S. government during the war.
Wolters said Thursday that the processing includes an initial examination of biometric and biographical information in the databases of the Department of Defense, Customs and Border Protection and the FBI, so that we “thoroughly examine its background” before that the evacuees be sent to the dormitories.
There is also another biometric and biographical control before individuals leave the bases to make sure evacuees “continue to stay in the green,” Wolters said.
“We have refined this process over the last ten days,” he said. “As you can well imagine, if we end up in situations where we are protected by evacuees in certain places, if the detection process is too exorbitant and too slow, we could end up having serious problems. When we initially started operating here in Europe, our “Average waiting time on the processing line put us in a position where we could process about 60 people per hour. Today we have the capacity to process 250 people per hour.”