Gunfire and beatings: Congressional offices get harrowing reports from Afghanistan evacuees and trapped citizensSeptember 02, 2021 06:30 AM
Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon's Deputy chief of staff Felix Ungerman, a retired Air Force colonel, has worked cases since Kabul fell to the Taliban. Earlier this week, he was on the phone with a U.S. citizen in Kabul reporting to a citizen's access point, which he had tried to access for days. Then, the Taliban started to fire.
"He goes, 'Oh my god, he's shooting.' And I said, 'Please get away from there, go get to safety,'" Ungerman said. "His phone cut off while I could hear gunshots going off, and I couldn't get in touch with him again. I tried calling his cellphone every couple of hours to see if I could get him, tried an email, sent him a text message. And it wasn't until [Tuesday] morning that he actually texted me back and said, 'Yeah, I'm OK, but now what do I do?' I'm like, 'You get to somewhere safe, and you stay there until we can our government can offer some solutions to help you.'"
Another citizen he worked with heeded the U.S. Embassy's recommendation earlier this year to make plans to leave the country on a commercial flight, but she booked a ticket for the first week of September not expecting the country would fall to the Taliban weeks before her departure date. She didn't think she could get to Kabul safely as a single woman. Now, she doesn't know what to do or how to leave.
California Republican Rep. Mike Garcia's office worked with an Afghan-American mother and her citizen children who were blocked at a checkpoint. She sent a video sitting in a car in the dark, holding up their four blue passports, and asking what she can do as a young child called for "mama" in the background.
"This is why you don't rely on the Taliban to be the ones monitoring the checkpoints," said Garcia, a former Navy pilot.
One Afghan-American citizen who worked with Bacon's office said the Taliban "were creating as much problem as they could." After the State Department told him to go to the Interior Ministry, he encountered a Taliban guard and explained he was told to go there.
"He told me, 'Go and tell the State Department to f*** themselves.'"
He eventually got into the Kabul airport after taking a big risk outside the gate during a firefight, in which guards shot at peoples' feet to disperse the crowd.
"Where we were successful is where we weren't necessarily beholden or waiting on the State Department," Garcia said. "In fact, all of our successes we ended up getting roughly 97 folks out successfully these were all folks that we were able to do so through our own channels and folks on the ground there that were supporting mostly American citizens and SIV's who otherwise would have been stopped by the bureaucracy, frankly, by the State Department."
"Everybody run away," he said. It was the day after the ISIS-K bombing at Abbey Gate. "I know it was stupid, but I took just my chance. I ran towards the soldiers. I had my passport in my hand shouting that I'm an American citizen."
"Where we were successful is where we weren't necessarily beholden or waiting on the State Department," Garcia said. "In fact, all of our successes we ended up getting roughly 97 folks out successfully these were all folks that we were able to do so through our own channels and folks on the ground there that were supporting mostly American citizens and SIV's who otherwise would have been stopped by the bureaucracy, frankly, by the State Department."