Encrypted text messages between an Army colonel and a former Special Forces soldier working on a private effort to extricate stranded Americans from Afghanistan reveal that the US evacuation was anything but the ‘extraordinary success’ President Biden declared on Tuesday.
“We are fucking abandoning American citizens,” said an Army colonel assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division in an encrypted Sunday text message to Michael Yon, who revealed the message to Just the News.
Yon told Just the News that a group of Americans were abandoned at the Kabul airport, pleading for help as military officials told them they were finished with evacuations.
“We had them out there waving their passport screaming, ‘I’m American,'” Yon said Tuesday while appearing on the John Solomon Reports podcast. -Just The News
“People were turned away from the gate by our own Army,” said Yon, the former Special Forces soldier and war correspondent.
Yon’s account, which he shared with JTN’s John Solomon, is backed by three dozen text and email exchanges with frontline Army officials in Afghanistan.
The stranded Americans eventually scattered to safe houses to avoid capture by the Taliban, after which Yon wrote a ‘stinging email’ to an Army major whose team abandoned the rescue effort.
“You guys left American citizens at the gate of the Kabul airport,” wrote Yon on Tuesday. “Three empty jets paid for by volunteers were waiting for them. You and I talked on the phone. I told you where they were. Gave you their passport images. And my email and phone number. And you left them behind.”
“Great job saving yourselves. Probably get a lot of medals,” he added.
While the helper group worked frantically to get the Americans through the gate, members texted one another to say they had seen National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on CNN saying that neither he nor U.S. Central Command chief Gen. Kenneth McKenzie were told that Americans were abandoned.
“Hey did they end up just taking off?” one correspondent texted the helper group. “Because the National Security Advisor just told Tapper that neither he nor McKenzie had heard anything about Americans being left at the gates.”
The correspondent noted that the private group heard differently from a lieutenant colonel (O-5): “Given we had comms with an O-5 on the ground, that means CENTCOM C3 is s–t, or someone is lying.”
According to the private rescue effort, the US Army was told by the State Department not to rescue the Americans.
“We get them to the gate, and the U.S. Army completely fails this saying, ‘Oh, we can’t do it, because the Department of the State tells us we can’t do it,” Yon told Just the News.
Story cited here.
