SC Gov. McMaster says it’s ‘our duty’ to help Afghanistan allies fleeing Taliban rule
Gov. Henry McMaster said it’s “our duty” to help the Afghanistan refugees who helped Americans fight in their country and are fleeing after it largely fell into Taliban hands.
“Those people … helped protect Americans,” McMaster said, answering a reporter’s question whether, like governors in California, Maryland and Virginia, he’d welcome them to South Carolina. “Now it is our duty to help them. We need to help them.”
Afghanistan is now mainly under the control of the Taliban, after the country’s capital of Kabul fell to insurgent forces over the weekend. Ashraf Ghani, the country’s former president, has since fled and the government has collapsed in most provinces.
The situation comes ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The Columbia area has already welcomed some Afghans who were resettled through the special immigrant visa program, which admits those who have worked with U.S. forces abroad into the country.
Bedrija Jazic, the refugee and immigrant services director with Lutheran Services Carolinas, said her agency has brought at least 10 Afghan families to the Midlands in recent years, including some who fled the most recent Taliban offensive as the U.S. withdrew its forces from the country.
Jazic said other Afghans are already in the process of moving to South Carolina, and the agency expects more to come.
Despite scenes of desperate Afghans seeking to board U.S. military flights out of the Kabul airport after Taliban forces took control of the Afghan capital over the weekend, the process of obtaining a special immigrant visa can often take years before a former translator or embassy worker receives approval to come to America.
“Some people have started the process a couple years ago, and are still awaiting their visa,” Jazic said. But “the current situation has changed everything. People are fleeing for their lives, and the U.S. government is doing as much as possible to save their allies.”
Lutheran Services is one of several organizations that contracts with the U.S. government to help resettle refugees in the U.S. Those displaced by war usually seek to resettle somewhere they already have friends or family to help support them, and Columbia has grown a small Afghan community over the past two decades of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, Jazic said.
Other Afghan refugees “are well-established and have moved to other areas,” she said. “They have been going on with their lives for some time.”
This story was originally published August 17, 2021 at 11:22 AM.
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