Groups Claim State Department Hampering Afghanistan Rescue Efforts

Drew Angerer/Pool via AP

I could paraphrase a must-see Wednesday investigatory piece by National Review reporter Ryan Mills, but reading his scoop on your own is probably best.

During the course of nearly 3,000 words about the Americans and allies left behind in Afghanistan — including exclusive quotes — Mills comes to the disappointing conclusion that Antony Blinken’s State Department is actually hindering rescue efforts four months after President Joe Biden’s catastrophic blunder.

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“Efforts by dozens of private rescue groups who have focused their energy on saving other American allies in the 20-year war — people who typically don’t have the paperwork for a direct path into the U.S. — have slowed to a crawl,” a crucial portion reads. “Leaders of some of those groups who spoke to National Review are pointing fingers at the U.S. Department of State. They say the State Department is doing little to help them rescue American allies, and in some cases it is actively blocking their efforts. They’re calling on President Joe Biden’s administration to do more to help them save the people they once served with.”

As I wrote earlier this month, our inept State Department claims that very few Americans remain in Afghanistan, and it is continuing to relocate U.S. citizens and Afghan allies. Blinken recently said the international coalition has evacuated more than 120,000 people from Afghanistan.

Leaders of the private rescue groups, however, argue that there’s “little evidence of a plan to rescue…allies with Special Immigrant Visas and soldiers who fought alongside Americans.”

“I don’t think the current administration has any intentions of ever evacuating the men that fought and bled next to us, and their families,” Ben Owen, chief executive of the veterans’ group Flanders Fields, who’s joined the Afghanistan relief efforts, told National Review.

Related: Left-wing Senator Excoriates Biden Over Afghanistan

Owen estimated there are more than 100,000 American allies still trapped in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

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“They get nothing. The U.S. government doesn’t see any duty to evacuate these guys. And they are dead. They are dead. They are dead if they get caught,” Owen also explained to Mills. “I’ve had three executed in the last two weeks, one in front of his wife and children.”

Not to be redundant, but none of these tragedies and atrocities needed to happen. It is another sordid chapter in the anti-war movement’s appalling history. Legacy media also disgraced itself by ignoring abandoned Americans and our allies rather than holding a president accountable for his immoral decisions.

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