The Difficulty And Sometimes Violence Of Evacuations
Evacuations of American citizens from crisis countries is always difficult and dangerous, as the past fifteen days of evacuation of over 124,000 people from Afghanistan demonstrated.
I know how difficult evacuations are because twenty-five years ago, in late May 1997, I was involved in the evacuation of 2500 persons from a violent coup in the West African country of Sierra Leone.
I’m writing this detailed description of the evacuation in Sierra Leone, as it provides some context and comparisons of the challenges and dangers faced in the massive evacuation conducted in Afghanistan which we saw on August 26, 2021 at the Abby gate of the Kabul airport when an ISIS-K suicide bomber detonated a huge amount of explosives on his body that killed over 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. military.
