A US Army colonel blocked at least four bus-loads of Americans, friendly Afghans, and 300 orphans, apparently pushing them into the killing zones during the country's hasty evacuation from Kabul Airport in August 2021, a new documentary has revealed.
The documentary, “Send Me”, which is now streaming on Amazon Prime and being shown at select theaters, reveals that the order from the unnamed colonel to turn away the busses was delivered on August 25, less than a week before the last US troops were pulled out of Afghanistan.
A witness, whose identity was concealed in the documentary, claimed that “there was a colonel who came out and wanted to show that essentially he was the one that could decide whether or not somebody could get on a plane or not.”
The claims about the US colonel’s actions came from members of a high-level special operations volunteer team, including ex-recon Marine Chad Robichaux, who argued that “Whoever just made the decision to turn this bus around essentially just killed – just murdered – these people.”
“And by the way, some of those people are children. And some of these people were women. But some of these people are Americans, that we just sent back to the Taliban,” he added.
A separate claim came from Tim Kennedy, a former MMA fighter turned soldier, who was among those who witnessed the incident and was also shown in the documentary.
“(We) asked if people holding up blue passports and SIVs [Special Immigrant Visas] could get through. He answered: ‘No, I don’t care who they are, those people get back on those buses and they go back into Kabul. Get em off this base’,” Kennedy said.
He added that “There’s not enough capacity” in his soul “to be able to mourn four busloads of people that are about to die because the time spend on anguish and mourning could have been spent saving other people.”
US Evacuation From Afghanistan
More than 120,000 people, including Afghans and foreigners, were frantically evacuated from Kabul International Airport after the Taliban* regained their full control of Afghanistan in August 2021.
Many Afghans who collaborated with the US forces and feared retribution from the Taliban were left behind in the hasty evacuation, which was praised by President Biden as “one of the biggest airlifts in history.” During the evacuation, between 100 and 200 Americans remained in Afghanistan, despite wanting to get out.
On August 26, thirteen US troops were killed in a suicide bomb attack blamed on an Afghan offshoot of Daesh**. In another deadly incident that marred the withdrawal, a botched US drone strike killed 10 civilians - seven of them children - on August 29.The last US aircraft left Kabul on August 30, 2021.
* The Taliban is an organization under UN sanctions over terrorist activities
** Daesh (ISIL/ISIS/IS/Islamic State) a terrorist group banned in Russia and a number of other countries