About 10,000 out of the 30,000 people who were evacuated to the US needed some additional scrutiny once they arrived. At least two of those people have now been flown out of the US out of an abundance of caution:
The U.S. plans to send at least two Afghan evacuees back out of the country to Kosovo because of security concerns raised after they arrived at a U.S. airport, said two sources familiar with the U.S. evacuation…
“A lot of people were moved very quickly and the intelligence community has been working hard to evaluate whether any of them pose a threat,” said a senior federal law enforcement official. “Some of the vetting occurs while they are overseas, and some of it occurs here … We are not going to allow people to intentionally be released into the community if they have unresolved derogatory information.”…
Of more than 30,000 evacuees from Afghanistan to the U.S., about 10,000 needed additional screening as of Friday, said the sources, and of those about 100 were flagged for possible ties to the Taliban or terror groups. Two of those 100 raised enough concern for additional review.
In addition to the two people who were sent out of the country, US officials have discovered other individuals who had previously been deported because of “criminal offenses.” The wording is a little vague. Are these people who were convicted of offenses in Afghanistan or were they people deported because they committed crimes here? It’s also not clear how many of these previously deported individuals there were. Either way, NBC News reports the Biden administration hasn’t decided what to do with them yet.
That’s not the only potential problem with the hasty evacuation being reported today. The Associated Press says there are “numerous” reports of possible child brides or even victims forced into marriage to escape the country.
An Aug. 27 situation report sent to all U.S. embassies and consulates abroad as well as military command centers in Florida points to potential issues involving young girls and older men, some of whom claim to have more than one wife at Fort McCoy, a sprawling 60,000-acre (243-square-kilometer) Army base in Wisconsin…
“Intake staff at Fort McCoy reported multiple cases of minor females who presented as ‘married’ to adult Afghan men, as well as polygamous families,” the document says. “Department of State has requested urgent guidance.”…
At the same time, U.S. officials in the United Arab Emirates have expressed similar concerns, sending a diplomatic cable to Washington warning that some young Afghan girls had been forced into marriages in order to escape Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover.
So it sounds like in some cases older men and younger girls were allowed on flights with the assumption they were father and daughter only to discover once they had escaped Afghanistan that some of these girls were the “brides” of the older men. This obviously isn’t as dangerous as, potentially, allowing criminals or members of the Taliban into the country but it is disgusting. Anyone with a child bride probably deserves to be back in Afghanistan where that kind of thing is considered normal by the Taliban. Of course we should not send the girls who had no choice in the matter back with them.
The overall impression is that Joe Biden’s greatest airlift ever was exactly the mess you’d imagine it would be. These are the kind of problems that could have been avoided if we’d had a better plan for getting people out of the country in an orderly fashion.
Via Hot Air