A Republican congressman from Oklahoma told Breitbart over the weekend that two American toddlers have died in Afghanistan in the wake of U.S. troops completing their withdrawal from the country — and it’s all been on President Joe Biden’s watch.
Breitbart’s Hannah Bleau reports that Rep. Markwayne Mullin “is working firsthand on the ground to save stranded Americans” still in Afghanistan after U.S. troops left the area completely in late August.
Amid their efforts to evacuate Americans and others from Kabul, where the Taliban has taken control of Afghanistan’s government, the congressman’s team reportedly learned that a 2-year-old and 3-year-old, both Americans, had died in the chaos.
“We put a team together real quick,” Mullin told Breitbart News Saturday. “We had arranged to get them even outside the airport,” he said, explaining that evacuees were being forced to pay upwards of $1,500 each to pass through checkpoints to get to the airstrip in Kabul. “And you’re talking about a country that didn’t have any banking system,” he told Breitbart.
“They wouldn’t help us”
Sadly, even many who have managed to make it to the airport haven’t been able to escape the country now run by the Taliban.
“The news isn’t reporting it,” the congressman said Saturday, according to Breitbart. “For instance, we had a 3-year-old girl, that had a severe infection in her legs, and we tried to get her out. We had her in Kabul. We tried to get her out through the airport there. […] Her parents were LPRs, they’re legal permanent residents of the United States, which means they’re our responsibility.”
Mullin went on: “And when we realized they weren’t going to let her go through, we took her out on the 31st of August…and started driving her and her family across Afghanistan.”
At the Tajikistan border, however, Mullin says the family was turned away. Bleau reports that an “ambassador told [Mullin] that ‘Washington’ told him not to assist” in “any way.”
“Because they wouldn’t help us get her out, September 10, she passed away from septic,” the congressman told Breitbart. “A 3-year-old girl. That was eight days before that that we could have got her out. And she passed away from septic and her parents had to watch her while we could have got her out.”
“We could have got her out”
Of course, this isn’t the first time Mullin has spoken out against the Biden administration over the fiasco in Afghanistan. He told Fox News in early September that the White House and other officials had uttered “a bold-faced lie when they’re out there saying this was a successful evacuation. The truth is,” he said, “I wouldn’t be there if it was successful.”
Speaking Saturday, Mullin said his team is still making progress, despite the setbacks. “I mean yesterday, we got three Americans out and four Brits. The day before that, we got a couple,” he said, according to Breitbart.
Still, he doesn’t expect the 3-year-old girl’s parents to soon forget that U.S. officials abandoned them. “They feel like we abandoned their child, which we did,” the congressman told Breitbart. “Not us, not the guys down there working, but the United States because we could have got her out.”
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