Some Afghans trying to flee country face exorbitant costs as Blinken touts
There are fewer than 100 American citizens in Afghanistan who are ready to leave, according to the State Department, and Blinken said Friday that there are a “couple hundred” more who, for now, want to stay.
But in addition to those Americans there are countless Afghans, including thousands who worked for or aided the US during the nearly 20-year war or believe they are in danger of being targeted by the Taliban, who are frantically trying to leave.
The increased sense of desperation and limited space on evacuation routes have fostered a private market with private operations demanding exorbitant amounts, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars to transport people outside the country by different means and routes, with no guarantee of success.
The operators include individuals and groups both inside and outside of Afghanistan, often contacted on social media.
In western Afghanistan, a family of 10 is hiding from the Taliban. The father, a doctor, was almost beaten to death years ago by Taliban fighters for refusing to carry out a punitive amputation, his son told CNN. His mother is a women’s rights activist who worked with the US Agency for International Development while American troops were in the country.
The 26 year-old son, who is in California, turned to Facebook and found people who said they could get the family out.
“You got to pay $10,000 per person in order to be evacuated,” the son says he was told.
“It would be like $100,000 and I cannot provide $100,000,” he added.
CNN is not naming the Afghans seeking to flee and has omitted several other details for their safety.
The Taliban have allowed a trickle of evacuation flights to take off in the past two months, but they have carried only a few hundred people at a time. Thousands more Afghans want to leave and many are turning to potentially unscrupulous operators as official efforts fall short.
‘There’s no guarantee’
“It’s getting worse because now it’s becoming normalized and desperation has grown,” says Hazami Barmada, a humanitarian aid worker who has organized flights out of Afghanistan and says people “absolutely are” making money by exploiting that desperation.
“They’re upcharging hazard pay, and I understand why there needs to be hazard pay,” Barmada added but said the guarantees being made with the high prices are impossible to rely on.
“There’s not a lot of information on these folks; they’re not being track properly,” Barmada said. “When you hear of $20,000 [per person] with a guarantee, there’s no guarantee.”
In Kabul, a father is in hiding with his wife and three young boys, changing locations every two weeks and asking others to drop off his sons at school so he’s not seen. He was a longtime contractor, working for organizations that supported US interests, including USAID, which his boss wrote in a recommendation letter included “putting himself in harm’s way to protect us.”
Last week, he says, he met with a man in Kabul who told him it would be $50,000 to get his family on a list for an evacuation flight.
The father applied for a Special Immigrant Visa in August, which would make him a higher priority for the US to try to evacuate, but he claims the regular contact he had…
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