Afghan would-be Evacuees plead for action: 'We are in some kind of jail'

Taliban leaders have said they will allow people with proper documents to leave the country but the evacuees said they were being blocked from entering the airport

The Americans trying to evacuate hundreds of Afghans and American citizens - including one Afghan who worked as a U.S. military translator and said he is anticipating his beheading by the Taliban - pleaded for action from the Biden administration to get the would-be evacuees aboard charter flights that are standing by to fly them from Afghanistan. “Unfortunately we are left behind now," the former translator said quietly in the pre-dawn darkness on Wednesday in Afghanistan. “No one heard our voice.” The man, whose identity The Associated Press withheld for his security, said he was running out of money to keep his family housed in a hotel in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif, after waiting a week for Taliban permission for the chartered evacuation flights to leave the airport there. U.S. Army veterans working to help the man, an interpreter for U.S. forces for 15 years, called the effort more grinding than their months of deployment in Afghanistan. They tried and failed to get their old interpreter on the earlier airlifts that ended with the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan Aug. 30.