An Afghan interpreter who asked US President Joe Biden for help in late August after being stranded in Kabul has left Afghanistan safely with his family.
The US State Department announced this on Monday. Aman Khalili went into hiding in the Afghan capital for weeks with his wife and five children for fear of the Taliban. They were looking for him because he worked for the US Army. The interpreter and his family managed to reach neighboring Pakistan by road. From there, they flew a US government jet to Qatar, where they await their immigration to the United States with thousands of other Afghan refugees, a ministry spokesman told The Wall Street Journal.
Khalili asked Biden for help through the same newspaper at the end of August. “Hello Mr. President, help my family and me,” he said in an interview after US troops left Afghanistan and the airlift for some 120,000 evacuees was halted. “We will get you out and honor your 20 years of commitment to our country,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said.
snow storm
The Afghan interpreter saved Biden in 2008 during a visit to Afghanistan from a possible Taliban attack. The helicopter with the then US senator and his party colleagues John Kerry and Chuck Hagel had to make an emergency landing in a remote area because of a snow storm. At the time, Khalili joined a small military intervention team that drove into the mountains from Bagram Air Force Base to rescue the three.
Thirteen years later, the interpreter couldn’t complete his family’s application for emigration to the United States fast enough to be able to join one of the evacuation flights. With the help of Afghan Americans and American veterans, the Khalilis went into hiding in Kabul. Unable to board a refugee flight from Mazar-i-Sharif, partly due to lack of Afghan passports, Khalili and his family secretly traveled overland for two days to the border with Pakistan, crossing the seven on October 5.
The US State Department is in the process of speeding up the immigration process for the family and granting them special visas to enter the US, according to the paper.
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