Zach Van Meter, a private equity investor in Naples, Florida, called on the Somaliland government last week to ask if it would host thousands of Afghan refugees.
“He called me all of a sudden,” said Bashir Goth, Washington’s representative for a region of Somalia seeking independence.
Two days later, on August 25, Somaliland’s foreign minister signed an interim agreement with charities working with Van Meter, agreeing to temporarily house up to 10,000 Afghan evacuees in Berbera, a Gulf port. Aden. It was part of an effort on the fly that Mr Van Meter said has helped some 5,000 Afghans flee their country in the past two weeks, in one of the best-known private efforts to extract Afghans.
From the Peacock Lounge, a conference room at the Willard InterContinental Hotel in Washington, Mr. Van Meter, and an ad hoc collection of war veterans, Afghan diplomats, wealthy donors, defense contractors, nonprofits, and U.S. officials off duty led a global army-style rescue operation.
The self-proclaimed commercial working group sent former commandos to Kabul to retrieve the evacuees, said Van Meter, president of New Standard Holdings, a privately held company and other members of the group. He struck a deal with the United Arab Emirates that allowed an airlift to carry Afghans from Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport to the temporary shelter in Abu Dhabi, where many of the 5,000 evacuees are waiting for permission to travel to countries willing to give them permanent refuge.