Now that the Biden Afghan Evacuation Airbridge is over and Biden take beatdowns that have hurt his poll numbers and generate negative and doubling media?
We are getting media stories about individual ‘get outs’ and US and NATO countries Special Operations ‘get out’ efforts….
A effort to show more that the media narrative and maybe a way to help Biden’s image?
It certainly helps the military grunts (State Dept. and CIA) point of view that they didn’t just stay by…
But went as far as they could under the radar in efforts they could to get people out….
An initial group of Afghan pilots who flew themselves and their family members to safety in Uzbekistan aboard Afghan Air Force aircraft were transferred to a U.S. military base in the United Arab Emirates on Sunday, according to the office of Representative August Pfluger, which has been in contact with one of the pilots and his wife.
Two other groups of Afghan pilots and their relatives are expected to fly out in the next day or so under an arrangement the United States negotiated with Uzbekistan to move more than 450 Afghans.
The Afghan pilots, whom the Taliban consider among the most reviled members of the Afghan military for their role in conducting airstrikes against Taliban fighters, have been caught in a delicate diplomatic tug of war since fleeing their country as the government in Kabul was collapsing last month….
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Former American service members, many of whom trained and served with the Afghan pilots and their maintenance crews, as well as members of Congress, have been working closely with the State Department to arrange the transfers to U.S. bases in the Middle East and, ultimately, to the United States…..
The story of an Afghan-American plucked out of Kubal….
After some trepidation and encouragement from a friend who had already gone through the process, she accepted. That night, dressed in a flowing abaya that concealed a backpack stuffed with clean clothes, Birashk, 37, nervously walked past the Taliban guards who had taken over security at her building and climbed into the back seat of a green Toyota Corolla, hopeful it would lead to her freedom.
“We were driving against the traffic,” she recalled in an interview. “You would see male and female, young and old, all walks of life, just walking toward the airport.”…
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Birashk did not know it at the time, but her rescue had been orchestrated in part by the CIA, which played a pivotal role — alongside elite U.S. troops and Afghan counterterrorism forces — in the dangerous extraction of Americans, Afghans and foreign nationals facing threats of reprisal from the Taliban due to their affiliation with the U.S. government. A spokeswoman for the agency, Tammy Thorp, declined to detail the operation, saying only that CIA personnel, in concert with other U.S. agencies, supported the broader evacuation effort “in various ways.”….
Update on some legal reviews by the FBI of Afghan private evacuation efforts ….
The FBI has been reaching out to members of the veterans’ groups working to evacuate American citizens and at-risk Afghans and inquiring about their activities, in at least one case visiting a group leader at his home…
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Since the American military operation officially ended on Aug. 31, the groups have continued the evacuation work, mobilizing resources and chartering aircraft to help the remaining American citizens and at-risk Afghans escape the country….
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But some of the groups and individuals working on evacuation efforts are wading into potentially muddy legal waters, for instance hiring for-profit contractors for security and escort services..
More…