Doha: Security officials at the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar had detained an Afghanistan national with ISIS links. A US official revealed that the US Defense Department’s Automated Biometric Identification System has flagged up to 100 of the 7,000 Afghans evacuated as prospective recipients of Special Immigration Visas as potential matches to intelligence agency watch lists.
Till now more than 6000 Afghans have been evacuated to Al Udeid and thousands more have been evacuated to other temporary staging bases throughout the Middle East and Europe by U.S. military aircraft. The US Customs and Border Patrol screeners are checking evacuees’ IDs and biometric data against law enforcement databases to detect people included in the watch lists.
A US senior administration official has said that all Afghans evacuated to third-party will be screened through robust security processing before coming to the United States. The Afghanistan nationals will be housed at several military bases in the US.
‘That process involves biometric and biographic security screenings conducted by our intelligence, law enforcement and counterterrorism professionals who are working quite literally around the clock to vet all these Afghans before they’re allowed into the United States’, the senior administration official said.
Till now, the U.S. military and chartered aircraft have flown out more than 63,000 Americans, Afghans, and allied partners fleeing the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan.
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