The Afghans stranded at a luxury resort
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 16 September 2022
⏱️ 50 minutes
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Summary
For 780 Afghan evacuees stuck at a beachside resort in Albania, the future is unclear. They might never make it to the U.S. All because they took the wrong plane out of Afghanistan.
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The Afghans living at the Rafaelo Resort were evacuated from Afghanistan by nonprofits and organizations that expected Albania would be a stopover — a temporary landing pad as evacuees were processed for permanent resettlement in the United States. The Biden administration, which faced intense criticism for the way it ended the U.S. war in Afghanistan and failed to evacuate many of its Afghan allies, says it never promised to provide refuge for everyone.
This year-long bureaucratic mess is only now moving toward a resolution — for some. In the meantime, day-to-day life at tThe Rafaelo has become the strangest of limbos, as senior producer Ted Muldoon reports with national security reporter Abigail Hauslohner. Surrounded by tourists on the sun-drenched coast of the Adriatic Sea, they are profoundly grateful but , and also frustrated that they can’t yet start building a new life.
“People told us about just the monotony of the same thing over and over again,” said Hauslohner, “and the uncertainty about the future kind of destroys you.”
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | More than a year after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, I still find myself thinking |
| 0:08.6 | about the people there who were trying to get out. |
| 0:11.9 | The people who were desperate to flee the Taliban, who were crowding the airport and just |
| 0:17.2 | praying for a seat on a plane that would take them away into a new life in the United |
| 0:21.6 | States. |
| 0:23.2 | What happened to those people? |
| 0:25.0 | Of course some did make it out. |
| 0:27.0 | They got to the US. |
| 0:28.8 | Many others did not. |
| 0:30.7 | And then some people ended up somewhere in between. |
| 0:34.3 | And that's our story today about a group of Afghan refugees who are very much in limbo |
| 0:39.6 | in a place that's a little surprising. |
| 0:42.6 | The next voice you'll hear is post-report senior producer Ted Maldon. |
| 0:48.1 | It was last October when Allahumuhiti first arrived in Albania. |
| 0:52.8 | She was being put up at this hotel called the Rafaello. |
| 0:55.8 | When she got there, it was already dark out, so she couldn't see much. |
| 0:59.6 | It wasn't until the next morning when she woke up, looked out the window and thought, |
| 1:04.1 | this must be a mistake. |
| 1:05.6 | The morning when I came up and just opened the ball conator and I was like, you can see, |
| 1:11.4 | it's a beach. |
| 1:12.5 | Why they gave us this much? |
| 1:19.9 | The Rafaello is a huge luxury resort right on the coast of Albania, just across the Adriatic |
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