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The plane carrying US citizens and permanent residents had been temporarily blocked from leaving for the United States.
A group of American citizens and Afghan evacuees were allowed to travel to the United States from the United Arab Emirates after being temporarily suspended for verification, according to the Gulf State Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The 117 passengers had been stranded at Abu Dhabi International Airport after arriving from Kabul, a lawyer who was working to relocate the passengers told Al Jazeera on Wednesday.
In an email to Reuters news agency Thursday, the UAE Foreign Ministry said “the processing of these passengers has been completed and they have already left for the United States on board the aircraft. ‘a commercial plane (Etihad) this morning “.
Stan Bunner, an attorney working with the passengers, told Al Jazeera that all of the evacuees were U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents, or special immigrant visa applicants. They included 59 children under the age of 18.
Bunner, who is part of an ad hoc group of US veterans called Project Dynamo that formed to help Afghans flee after the Taliban took control of the country on August 15, said US Customs and the border patrol had repeatedly denied the aircraft permission to enter the United States. .
He said the group’s organizers believed they had all US landing clearances when the Kam Air flight they had chartered took off from Kabul.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security previously told Al Jazeera that all passenger manifests on flights to the United States “must be checked before departure to the United States to ensure that all passengers are appropriately controlled ”.
A State Department spokesperson said on Wednesday that UAE embassy staff were checking passenger documents.
United States withdrew completely his troops from Afghanistan on August 30, stepping up a chaotic evacuation operation in the final weeks after the Taliban came to power.
Defense officials have since acknowledged that the United States was surprised by the Taliban’s rapid takeover of Kabul, with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley. story In senatorial committee Tuesday, the withdrawal was a “strategic failure”.
While the United States and its allies airlifted around 120,000 people out of the country, officials acknowledged that hundreds of US citizens and permanent residence holders likely remained in Afghanistan.
Rights groups, meanwhile, say tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked for the U.S. government and who are eligible for special visas to settle in the United States, have been left behind.
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