U.S. Bars Flight from Landing with Americans from Kabul
he Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday denied U.S. landing rights for a charter plane carrying quite 100 Americans and U.S. positive identification holders evacuated from Afghanistan, organizers of the flight said.
“They won’t allow a charter on a world flight into a U.S. port of entry,” Bryan Stern, a founding father of non-profit group Project Dynamo, said of the department’s Customs and Border Protection agency.
Stern spoke to Reuters from aboard a plane his group chartered from Kam Air, a personal Afghan airline, that he said had been sitting for 14 hours at Abu Dhabi airport after coming back from Kabul with 117 people, including 59 children.
His group is one among several that emerged from unplanned networks of U.S. military veterans, current and former U.S. officials et al. that formed to bolster last month’s U.S. evacuation operation they saw as chaotic and badly organized.
An administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they were unacquainted the matter, but that the U.S. government typically takes time to verify the manifests of charter planes before clearing them to land within the us .U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has said its top priority is repatriating Americans and positive identification holders unable to go away Afghanistan within the U.S. evacuation operation last month.
A senior State Department official on Monday said the us was conscious of about 100 americans and legal permanent residents able to leave Afghanistan.
Six Americans, 83 positive identification holders and 6 people with U.S. Special Immigration Visas granted to Afghans who worked for the U.S. government during the 20-year war in Afghanistan were aboard the Kam Air flight, Stern said.
He had planned to transfer the passengers to a chartered Ethiopian Airlines plane for an onward flight to the us that he said the Customs cleared to land at John F. Kennedy International Airport in ny City.
Customs then changed the clearance to Dulles International Airport outside Washington before denying the plane landing rights anywhere within the us , he said.
“I have an enormous , beautiful, giant, humongous Boeing 787 that I can see parked ahead folks ,” he said. “I have crew. I even have food.”
Stern said intermediaries in Kabul had obtained permission from the Taliban-run Afghan Civil Aviation Authority for the groups to send a charter flight to retrieve the passengers from Kabul airport.
