The majority of Afghan interpreters and other staff who applied for residency in the U.S. after working with American forces in-country have been left in Afghanistan despite the risk of retribution they face under Taliban rule, according to a State Department official cited by the Wall Street Journal.
The official further said that the U.S. authorities were not able to determine how many people are stranded in Afghanistan, though “Just based on anecdotal information about the populations we were able to support,” it seems as though most did not make it out.
Meanwhile, thousands of Afghans made it onto planes at the besieged Kabul airport, despite not having proper documentation, the official said in remarks published Wednesday, Sept. 1.
On Sept. 3, Home Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that more than 40,000 people airlifted from Afghanistan have arrived in the United States, among them around 6,000 U.S. citizens.
U.S. planes have evacuated around 120,000 people in total.
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According to a U.S. defense official who spoke with Politico, the Biden administration attempted to work with the Taliban, an extremist totalitarian regime, to help people to the Kabul airport. Washington gave the Taliban a list of individuals who were supposed to be evacuated, but the official fears that the Taliban will simply turn the information into a “kill list” instead.
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US Gave Taliban Names of American Citizens and Afghan Allies, Now It’s a ‘Kill List’
“There are a high number of individuals that are currently being targeted by the Taliban and the threat is crystal clear… It is in writing that, unless they give themselves in, the Taliban will arrest and prosecute, interrogate and punish family members on behalf of those individuals,” Christian Nellemann, who heads the group behind the report, told the BBC.
In a recorded from the Taliban obtained by The Epoch Times, a person speaking in Pashto says “we received all of their lists, those who were relying on foreign forces to evacuate them to America.”
The speaker goes on to ask permission from his superior to begin a sweep of Kandahar and Badakhshan provinces for Afghan allies of the U.S. stranded in the country.
“What is your order regarding finding and gathering all of them and kill them, hang them, or expose them to the public or stone them to death—what should we do?”
