Adam Malaty-Uhr, a Jewish officer in the Army National Guard who served in Afghanistan, 2008-09, sensed something amiss one morning with Hemi, the young Afghani interpreter who worked with the US first lieutenant’s unit.
Hemi, who had requested a two-week leave to visit a distant part of the country where his family lived, was back at the US base two days later.
Left-right: Afghan combat translator, Afghan local, Adam Malaty-Uhr.
Malaty-Uhr saw fear in Hemi’s eyes.
What’s wrong?
Hemi, in his late teens, answered that old friends in his hometown had walked away, refusing to speak with him when he approached them. He quickly learned that his work with the US military was well-known back home, and he was, in the view of by-then-militant Muslims, considered traitorous.
His now-ex-friends were angry with him; his life was in danger in a culture where life was cheap.
Hemi said he heard an explosion outside his family’s home late that first night there, and found a threat against his life in a note nailed to the front door: “You work for infidels. Leave town immediately, or we will kill you.”
He didn’t need a second warning; he came right back to the US base.
“There’s nothing left in this country for me,” Hemi told Malaty-Uhr, who had become a close friend. “I need to leave.” (In time, several of Hemi’s relatives were killed by the Taliban.)
Malaty-Uhr, who earned a Bronze Star in the Army National Guard, served as a police mentor in Afghanistan, and now works in Chicago in leadership development. Following Hemi’s request, he immediately began the process to submit the required documents that would make Hemi eligible for Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) status, which allows people like Hemi, who had aided US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, to leave their homelands, where they had become targets (some mask their faces to avoid being identified by the Taliban), and come to the United States.
The SIV program, created in 2006 for translators and interpreters and other supportive personnel in the two Muslim lands, provides a path to lawful permanent residency in the US eligible for the same resettlement assistance and federal public benefits as refugees and, if they wish, US citizenship.
Employed primarily for their linguistic skills, the interpreters serve as the soldiers’ eyes and ears, working as de facto ambassadors and advisors about a foreign culture. They perform an invaluable role for the US troops, sharing their daily schedules and frequent risks.
Malaty-Uhr, whose posting in Afghanistan was about to end, promised the interpreter that when he left to return to the US, he would continue working to bring him, and Hemi’s family, to safety here. “I’ll see you in America.”
Malaty-Uhr kept his word. It took time; US bureaucracy, insufficient funding and staffing, and paperwork and apparent government indifference to the threat that Hemi faced, kept Hemi, hiding for his life, back in Afghanistan. Eventually, Malaty-Uhr’s work paid off; the pair were reunited in 2014 at O’Hare Airport in Chicago.
Hemi has since settled in an undisclosed part of this country.
He was one of the lucky ones.
18,000 Afghanis worked for the US
An estimated 18,000 Afghanis, mostly men who had worked for the US forces (for the money, or for the patriotic strengthening of democracy that the US presence brought), have applied to come to the US under the SIV rubric.
The visas will be lifesaving. As the US Army in recent weeks has speeded up its withdrawal from Afghanistan, leaving the country under the military and political control of the Taliban Islamists, the one-time interpreters face an existential threat. Considered disloyal to their faith and to their country, they are likely to be subject to the Taliban-enforced death penalty as soon as they are tracked down.
Under public pressure in the US — led by former members of the Armed Forces who, like Malaty-Uhr, have lobbied Congress and the President to speed up the vetting process — government officials have announced in recent weeks that the endangered Afghanis may be flown first to Guam, a US territory, where the lengthy interview and documentation process can take place in safety, away from the Taliban knives and rifles. A similar step was taken after the Vietnam War.
“Those who helped us are not going to be left behind,” Biden said at a recent press conference.
“Our message to those women and men is clear. There is a home for you in the United States.”
Biden did not offer a timetable or specific numbers.
The issue has remained largely off the national radar screen — although a coalition of 70 faith groups and humanitarian organizations, including HIAS and one Jewish congregation, last month signed a letter to President Biden stressing the US’ “moral imperative” to bring the Afghanis to this country. Bipartisan legislation that would speed up the immigration process for the translators has been introduced in the House and Senate. The Biden administration has approved a temporary increase in consular staffing at the Kabul embassy to facilitate the immigration process, and has requested funding for an additional Special Immigrant Visas from Congress.
Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO-District 6), a member of the House Armed Services Committee who served with the US Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, has introduced legislation that would nearly double the number of visas available this year to 8,000 and ease eligibility requirements.
“We can’t wait any longer. Every day counts,” Crow said in a New York Times interview.
‘All, not some’
Not enough, Malaty-Uhr, a native of New York State’s Westchester County, said. He will settle for no less than all of the 18,000 who have applied for SIV status. “The issue here is all, not some.
“This is our responsibility,” Malaty-Uhr said. “These people stepped up. These people gave everything.”
The total, including members of the translators’ immediate families, is estimated at 70,000).
Has the US, including the government and the Army, done enough to honor the implied or implicit pledge of protection to the translators?
No, said Malaty-Uhr, who has worked with the Association of Wartime Allies and with the Truman Center for National Policy’s Matt Zeller, founder of No One Left Behind, and established a congressional advocacy campaign to teach lobbying skills. “At this time, it’s in the hands of Biden. It’s doable.”
Malaty-Uhr credits the childhood stories he heard about his Polish-born grandmother Pauline Uhr (she came to the US shortly before the start of WW II, her parents and younger sister perished in the Holocaust) as motivation for his work on behalf of Hemi and other Afghani translators. “That stayed with me.”
His grandmother, who died in in the late 1990s, would not discuss with her family her parents’ and sister’s fate — she would break down in tears when the subject was raised.
But Malaty-Uhr, who also becomes emotional when talking about his grandmother or Hemi, said he knew that his grandmother had been fortunate to receive a US visa (“She was afraid of being turned away,” forced to return to Poland). With this in mind, he wants to make it possible for other endangered people, from other countries and ethnic-religious backgrounds, to find refuge in this country.
East Bay Jewish Family & Community Services
Though the issue of the Afghani translators is not an ostensibly a Jewish one, Malaty-Uhr, who became Bar Mitzvah at Congregation Beth Shalom in Naperville, Ill., a Chicago suburb, said his motivation is definitely Jewish.
The Jewish community “feels a responsibility to other people going through hardship,” said Fauzia Azizi, director of Refugee Services at the East Bay Jewish Family & Community Services agency in Concord, Calif.
Her agency, one of the most active Jewish ones in the country in resettling Afghani refugees, has coordinated the resettlement of some 400 refugees in the last four years, the vast majority of them Afghanis on the SIV program.
Many of the people supporting or working at the East Bay agency have backgrounds in the Shoah or the former Soviet Union, from families that have experienced persecution, said Azizi, a Muslim from Afghanistan. “They want other people to be successful. They also went through hardship.”
The agency provides “A to Z” services for the newcomers, including meeting them at the airport, finding them housing, arranging ESL classes and government benefits, and offering a wide array of necessities for people entering a new country and a new culture.
Azizi said she expects to see an increase in the number of Afghani families arriving in her area as part of the SIV program in the next few years.
No response
The Intermountain Jewish News reached out to the White House, State Dept., Dept. of Defense and several elected officials at various levels of government for comment on the issue of the Afghan translators; no one addressed the issue.
The IJN asked several national Jewish organizations whether they had issued any statements or worked on the issue. No response.
“It distresses me,” Malaty-Uhr said, “that more organizations, Jewish or otherwise, haven’t taken a stance on the fate of those who fought side-by-side with myself and countless other American service members.
“I ask that we all exercise the value of chesed, lovingkindness, for others.
“The saddest part is,” he said, “this is only the beginning of the refugee crisis in Afghanistan. The challenge for those who will seek reprieve from what will become the most brutal regime in the world is that the borders of the country are already sealed.
“We will need far more support if the Biden administration doesn’t act soon, as it is already too dangerous for many former interpreters to move to future evacuation sites.”
Would the interpreters who are still awaiting US visas die if the Taliban gets its hands on them?
“Absolutely,” Malaty-Uhr said.
A Taliban spokesman said earlier this month that the one-time interpreters will be safe in a Taliban-controlled land — the Islamist organization will not seek retribution against them.
“The Islamic Emirate [the Taliban] will not perturb them but calls them to return to their normal lives . . . to serve their country,” the Taliban stated on its website.
“They shall not be in any danger on our part.”
Does Malaty-Uhr believe the Taliban pledges?
“Lies. This is mass murder waiting to happen. They [the interpreters] are being hunted down right now.”
Does the US public understand the danger?
Hundreds of former interpreters and their family member are thought to have already died as Taliban victims; no one keeps such records, and the Taliban does not issue statistics.
Every day the US delays is a day on which another translator is likely to become a Taliban casualty, Malaty-Uhr said.
“We have a moral obligation to protect our brave allies who put their lives on the line for us, and we’ve been working for months to engage the administration and make sure there’s a plan, with few concrete results,” Republican Rep. Peter Meijer of Michigan, who served in Iraq in the Army reserves, said during a recent House hearing.
“We are processing and getting people out at a record pace,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said.
“We have not done enough” to protect the interpreters, said Nicholas Riffel, a former Marine who did two tours of duty in Afghanistan and now works as policy advisor for the American Legion’s national security division. He coordinates the American Legion’s advocacy for the translators.
“If you do for us, we should do for you,” Riffel said. “They [the interpreters] did this at great risk for their lives. “We owe them the possibility of a path to citizenship.”
Hemi speaks
Hemi agrees.
“I don’t think the [US] government is doing enough,” he said in a telephone interview. “America should not abandon their allies. Bring [his fellow translators] to the US or find another solution.”
Hemi studied English as a child in his hometown with a man who had spent time in Great Britain. When the US soldiers arrived in 2001, “I was the only one [in his city] who could speak a little English.”
The soldiers encouraged him to sign on as a translator. He agreed.
“I saw the value. I always wanted to help my country. If I did not step up, who would step up?”
He spent a decade working with the US troops, “for the most elite forces.”
Did they ever promise him that the US would take care of him, and the other translators, when the US withdrew from Afghanistan? No. “We never thought that they would leave or that the Taliban . . . the extremists . . . would come back.”
The soldiers, he said, “did not make any promise.”
Like many Afghani interpreters who have left their homeland, he declines to use his full name or reveal where he is living now.
Hemi, a US citizen for two months, is now an Uber driver.
“I’m safe,” he said.
He’s in regular touch with Malaty-Uhr. “He’s more than a brother to me.”
Does Hemi, a Muslim, find it strange that Malaty-Uhr, a Jew, took up his case so strongly? No. In Afghanistan, he said, Jews were accepted more readily than in many Muslim countries. “To me, religion wasn’t a thing. He didn’t see me as a Muslim. I never thought of him as Jewish.”
“I call him ‘brother,’” Malaty-Uhr said.
Malaty-Uhr describes Hemi, a high school dropout, as “a huge dude,” about 6’3”, with “a laugh that is infectious . . . He’s very clever,” fluent in several dialects of Afghanistan.
The ex-soldier tells of one meeting in an Afghan home where the conversation took longer than expected, as the handful of Afghani men sitting around one room all spoke different dialects.
Jim Jones, Vietnam vet, former Idaho Supreme Court Justice
“We had a moral obligation to extract as many as possible but, instead, we abandoned them [Vietnam’s supporters of the US] to a horrific fate,” Jim Jones, a Vietnam veteran and former Idaho Supreme Court chief justice, wrote in the Military Times.
“We simply cannot allow that kind of tragedy to happen again with the Afghans. I pray that this great nation does not again turn its back on beleaguered people who placed their trust in us.”
Speed is of the essence in bringing the translators out of Afghanistan, he said.
Supporters of the translators fear a repeat of the Vietnam war’s aftermath. In the chaotic final hours of the War, the US evacuated thousands of South Vietnamese who had supported the American mission and would be at risk under the communist government.
Afraid that a mass evacuation would undermine the South Vietnamese military, US policy makers waited for weeks as the North Vietnamese Army overtook South Vietnam, then started to fly out Americans and allies.
In images that have become iconic, of desperate South Vietnamese clamoring to join the departing US personnel, the effort ended with the largest helicopter evacuation in history in the final hours of the war.
In under 24 hours, Marine helicopters airlifted about 7,000 US military personnel, South Vietnamese who supported the American mission and their dependents.
But many South Vietnamese soldiers and government officials left behind were killed or held in communist “reeducation” camps, including men who had helped Jim Jones stay alive as an Army artillery officer.
Will this scenario be repeated in Afghanistan?
“The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will likely not be the final wars for the US. America is going to need local allies in future conflicts. Should we abandon these allies to the very people we ask them to help us against, we will condemn ourselves to a future in which we find we have little to no allies,” according to the Washington-based Truman Center, a security solutions research institute. “We gave our word to protect these allies.
“No one will help us in future fights if we leave them behind to be killed,” the National Commander of the American Legion advised Biden in a letter in April that urged “quick action . . . to protect the Afghanis who have risked their lives in service to this country.”
Malaty-Uhr agrees. He will begin PhD studies at Columbia University in the fall, and said he will continue to lobby on behalf of the Afghani translators.
“I will never give up.”
Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News
