Tag: afghanistan

CAIR Scandal: Which Islamist Groups Received Biden Administration Funding?

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is reviewing whether the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) misused federal grants intended for Afghan refugees. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the review on June 9, 2026. It covers CAIR National and its California and Washington affiliates.

The review followed an April 27 letter from Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) and 13 other House Republicans urging HHS to suspend CAIR and begin debarment proceedings to bar it from federal grants government-wide. Under federal regulations, debarment generally lasts no more than three years, though the debarring official may impose a longer period if circumstances warrant.

CAIR describes itself as the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization. Concerns about the group stem largely from the federal prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation, a Texas charity accused of funneling more than $12 million to Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. In 2008, five former officials were convicted on 108 counts.

Prosecutors named CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator. U.S. District Judge Jorge Solis denied its request to remove its name from the list. In a July 2009 order, he wrote that the government had produced “ample evidence” establishing CAIR’s associations with the Holy Land Foundation, the Islamic Association for Palestine, and Hamas. Ghassan Elashi, a CAIR-Texas figure, was among those convicted and was sentenced to 65 years for financing terrorism.

In April 2009, the FBI said it had suspended formal contacts with CAIR and would not treat it as a liaison partner until it could resolve whether the group or its executives remained connected to Hamas. CAIR denies any ties to terrorism.

CAIR is not the only Islamist organization to receive HHS funding. A July 2026 Middle East Forum audit identified 14 organizations it describes as Islamist or terror-linked that received $79 million in HHS funding since 2010. According to the audit, 87 percent, about $68.5 million, was awarded between 2022 and 2025. Federal award records show that at least eight received funding during the Biden administration, while four foreign recipients received money through awards signed before 2021. Each of the 14 groups is examined below.

CAIR chapters received about $42.2 million in HHS-funded Afghan resettlement grants through state agencies and private organizations since July 2022. This included $40.7 million for CAIR-California and about $1.5 million for chapters in Washington and Oklahoma.

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The War on Afghanistan Was Launched 25 Years Ago. It Still Hasn’t Ended.

There were nights full of terror. Our village was bombed constantly,” says Zalmay Khan. Afterward, he goes to pray. Because of his wounds, he cannot kneel, so he prays sitting down.

Khan is in his early twenties and now works as a Taliban intelligence officer. As a boy, he says, he learned to read the sky before he learned to read words. His village in Wardak province, near Kabul, was bombed, then bombed again. First came American planes, then NATO’s, then those of the Afghan army the West had built. By night it got worse, when jets and armed foreign contractors hit villages and killed civilians seemingly at random.

“I became a Mujahed [a Taliban fighter] naturally,” Khan tells me.

He is not an outlier. In village after village on my most recent trip to Afghanistan a few weeks ago, I met men who grew up as the so-called war on terror’s raw material. Some wear the Taliban’s turbans, and some do not. Almost all of them say the same thing, with remarkable calm: The American narrative of this war belongs to the past. After two decades of war and destruction, it is their turn to control narratives and to rule the country.

October 7, 2026, marks exactly 25 years since the United States began bombing Afghanistan. The anniversary will pass in Washington with little reflection. In Afghanistan, the reality of it is lived daily.

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40 Percent Error Rate Found In Afghan Refugee Vetting Samples, Inspector General Finds

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Inspector General review has found errors in 40 percent of sampled asylum files for Afghan nationals who entered the United States under a Biden-era refugee program.

The report analyzed data from Operation Allies Welcome, which was initiated in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and aimed to resettle roughly 97,000 Afghan nationals in the United States.

The DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) analyzed a sample of 678 applications from 13,682 adjudicated applications filed by Afghan nationals resettled in the United States under the program.

The analysis identified a 40 percent error rate in adjudicating asylum files, including 303 missed aliases, 45 unresolved records, 23 missing security checks, and 115 other documentation issues, the OIG said in a Sept. 23 report.

“Most errors resulted from missed aliases or incomplete documentation, including two cases related to potential inadmissibility on terrorism-related grounds,” the report states.

One of the terrorism-related errors involved an asylum officer failing to include an applicant’s Terrorism-Related Inadmissibility Grounds worksheet in the case file. The second error involved officials failing to indicate whether they approved or disapproved an asylum officer’s analysis of an applicant subject to Terrorism-Related Inadmissibility Grounds.

In a Sept. 29 statement, DHS said that Operation Allies Welcome led to many criminal immigrants being released into the United States, including those accused of sexual battery, kidnapping, drug possession, hit-and-runs, and lewd or lascivious acts with a minor.

For instance, in November 2025, DHS assisted the FBI in arresting an Afghan national who was charged with threatening to kill Americans. He was in the United States as part of Operation Allies Welcome.

In December 2025, a member of the ISIS terrorist group’s Afghanistan affiliate who entered the United States under the operation was arrested. And in March this year, an Afghan national allowed into the country under the program who previously was convicted of indecent exposure to a minor was arrested.

In a June 2022 statement, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), under the Biden administration, had announced that Afghans who have supported and worked with the United States in Afghanistan and have undergone rigorous vetting could qualify for protection and other immigration benefits.

Then-DHS Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas said in the statement that this would “allow eligible individuals who pose no national security or public safety risk to receive asylum, refugee status, or other legal immigration status, demonstrating the United States’ continued commitment to our Afghan allies and their family members.”

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Five Years Later, Media Blame Afghans for US-Engineered Disaster 

Last month marked five years since the US withdrew its military forces from Afghanistan and the Taliban returned to power. The US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and the resultant war, directly killed more than 176,000 Afghan people, including more than 46,000 civilians. Yet major US media outlets have covered the anniversary by muddying the US’s role in the country’s hardships—writing as though Afghanistan’s history began in August 2021.

A CNN article (8/15/26) by Kara Fox offered an egregious bit of historical revisionism:

In the five years since the chaotic US withdrawal from Kabul and the Taliban’s return to power, Afghanistan has become home to one of the world’s worst human rights and humanitarian emergencies.

Afghanistan hasn’t “become” a human rights and humanitarian emergency “since” the US troop withdrawal. It was a disaster during—and in no small part because of—the US war and occupation.

For instance, in November 2019, towards the end of the US occupation, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) estimated that approximately 2.44 million Afghan were in an “emergency situation” in terms of food insecurity. The next year, Amnesty International noted that four million Afghans were internally displaced and facing widespread problems of “inadequate housing, food insecurity [and] insufficient access to sanitation.”

Both years, the International Rescue Committee put Afghanistan in its top 10 “crises the world should be watching.” Evidently such conditions don’t meet CNN’s threshold for a “humanitarian emergency.”

In terms of rights, a 2019 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report documented Afghan strike forces that were “recruited, trained, equipped and overseen by the CIA” committing

serious abuses between late 2017 and mid-2019. They are illustrative of a larger pattern of serious laws-of-war violations—some amounting to war crimes—that extends to all provinces in Afghanistan where these paramilitary forces operate with impunity.

In 2020, HRW would go on to criticize the US-installed Afghan government for “fail[ing] to prosecute senior officials responsible for sexual assault, torture and killing civilians.” One can debate what constitutes a human rights “emergency,” but it’s clear that rights violations were a defining feature of the US occupation.

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Biden’s Counterterrorism Director During Disastrous Afghanistan Withdrawal Running for NY House Seat

A national security expert is calling on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-endorsed Democrat congressional candidate Cait Conley to account for her record in the Biden administration when Iranian support for Hamas increased, terrorism intensified in the Middle East, and antisemitic incidents reached record levels in the United States.

Conley, the Democrat challenging Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) in New York’s 17th Congressional District, served as the Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council (NSC) from April 2021 to March 2023. Conley states that it was her job to “counter Middle East terrorism, and non-state actor threats.” She was also responsible for countering the “domestic and global use of emerging technologies.”

Her tenure at the NSC also coincided with the Biden administration’s August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. Fox News reported that the administration’s evacuation plan “has been faulted for failing to anticipate the swift collapse of Afghanistan’s government” and for “not ensuring adequate security precautions for U.S. service members and citizens against terror threats.”

The withdrawal culminated in a terrorist attack outside Kabul airport that killed 13 U.S. service members and more than 160 Afghans. Fox News also reported that Conley has not commented publicly on the withdrawal since launching her congressional campaign. That silence mirrors Biden’s own omission of the 13 fallen service members from his 2022 State of the Union address.

During Conley’s time at the NSC, Iranian financial support for Hamas increased.

Iran’s cash flows to Hamas spiked following the May 2021 conflict, which occurred during Conley’s tenure at the National Security Council. In early 2022, Hamas’s leader said Iran had provided the group with $70 million to develop missiles and defense systems, while Israeli sources said Iran increased its overall funding to Hamas from $100 million to $350 million per year in 2022.

Across the Middle East, there was also a “relatively steady increase in the number of incidents and fatalities” from October 2022 to October 2023, culminating with the October 7 attack which occurred shortly after Conley left her NSC post.

Antisemitic incidents in the United States also rose sharply while Conley was at the NSC.

The Anti-Defamation League recorded 3,697 antisemitic incidents in 2022, up 36 percent from 2,717 in 2021. At the time, it was the highest number recorded since the organization began tracking antisemitic incidents in 1979.

The number continued to rise in 2023 when the ADL recorded 8,873 incidents, a 140 percent increase from 2022.

Iran unveiled its Shahed-136 drone in December 2021 while Conley was serving at the NSC, where her responsibilities included countering the domestic and global use of emerging technologies.

The drone has since become a “fixture of modern warfare” and is “central to Iran’s retaliation strategy against the U.S. and its regional allies” including Israel. Despite the use of Patriot defense missiles against the drones, “many” of the Shahed drones “have still managed to hit their targets.”

The threat continued into March 2026, when Iran announced that their Shahed-136 drones destroyed a U.S. E-3 AWACS surveillance aircraft and damaged multiple refueling tankers, amounting to over $1.3 million in losses.

CNN military analyst and former U.S. Air Force Col. Cedric Leighton called the loss of the surveillance aircraft a “serious blow to [U.S.] surveillance capabilities.” A Center for a New American Security report described the AWACS as the “‘quarterback’ of the battlefield” and an “indispensable asset for U.S. military operations.”

Conley is also backed by J Street, which said following a House vote that there is “broad agreement” among Democrats that the United States should take a “fundamentally different American approach” to its relationship with Israel. J Street has expressed support for members who voted for an amendment that would cut off U.S. aid to Israel.

Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY) and democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have endorsed Conley; both representatives had voted for the amendment to halt aid to Israel.

Conley has not said whether she would have joined Ryan and Ocasio-Cortez in voting for the measure.

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Appeals Court Restores Bowe Bergdahl’s Desertion Conviction — Rules Federal Judge Had No Authority to Erase Court-Martial Judgment

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled Tuesday that a federal district court had no authority to overturn former Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s military conviction for desertion and misbehavior before the enemy.

Remember Bowe Bergdahl?

He’s the Army soldier who walked off his post in Afghanistan in 2009, left his brothers in a war zone, and triggered a desperate search that cost American lives.

Bergdahl abandoned his post in Afghanistan on June 29, 2009, without authorization. He was subsequently captured by the Taliban-linked Haqqani network and held for nearly five years.

His disappearance triggered a massive search-and-rescue operation that placed other American service members in danger and resulted in several injuries, according to the court.

The six U.S. Army soldiers commonly cited as having died during operations allegedly connected to the search for Bowe Bergdahl were:

  • Staff Sgt. Clayton P. Bowen
  • Pfc. Morris L. Walker
  • Staff Sgt. Kurt R. Curtiss
  • 2nd Lt. Darryn D. Andrews
  • Pfc. Matthew M. Martinek
  • Staff Sgt. Michael C. Murphrey

In 2014, Barack Obama approved an outrageous prisoner exchange that released five Taliban detainees from Guantanamo Bay in return for Bergdahl. Obama then staged a celebratory Rose Garden appearance with Bergdahl’s parents.

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Hidden In Safes: Pentagon Uncovers Classified Documents On 5th Anniversary Of Abbey Gate Massacre

Five years ago today, 13 American service members were killed at Abbey Gate in Kabul, Afghanistan. Now, the investigation into what really happened — and who tried to bury the truth — may finally be blowing open.

Sean Parnell, Chairman of the Afghanistan Withdrawal Special Review Panel and Senior Advisor to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, dropped a bombshell on the fifth anniversary of the August 26, 2021 attack. His team has uncovered classified documents that had been deliberately hidden — “stashed and hidden away in safes where they would not be found.” After reviewing them, Parnell said it “became clear why someone tried to hide them” — but he declined to release the contents publicly until the investigation is complete.

The 13 Americans killed at Abbey Gate gave everything. Sgt. Johanny Rosario Pichardo. Sgt. Nicole L. Gee. Staff Sgt. Darin T. Hoover. Cpl. Hunter Lopez. Cpl. Daegan W. Page. Lance Cpl. Humberto A. Sanchez. Lance Cpl. David L. Espinoza. Lance Cpl. Jared M. Schmitz. Lance Cpl. Rylee J. McCollum. Lance Cpl. Dylan R. Merola. Lance Cpl. Kareem M. Nikoui. Hospital Corpsman Maxton Soviak. Staff Sgt. Ryan C. Knauss. Their families have waited five years for answers.

Parnell made clear his panel is not interested in giving Americans a “convenient version of the truth.” The panel has already reviewed more than nine million documents — compared to roughly 3,000 documents examined under the Biden-era review. This administration is not looking the other way.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth participated in a Pentagon ceremony today to upgrade valor awards for service members who defended Abbey Gate, correcting what Parnell described as the “inappropriate downgrading” of those honors under the previous administration. These were Americans who ran toward the bomb and saved lives. They deserved better recognition then, and they are getting it now.

One of the most consequential and least-scrutinized decisions of the entire debacle was the U.S. military’s reliance on the Taliban — including the Haqqani Network — to provide perimeter security at the airport during the evacuation. The previous investigation concluded the attack “could not have been prevented at the tactical level.” The new panel is not accepting that answer on faith.

Washington made the decisions in Afghanistan. Americans carried the consequences. What is in those safes may finally tell the families — and the country — what their government chose to hide.

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Media Claim: He Fought for the U.S. in Afghanistan, and ICE Killed Him. Here’s What Really Happened

Any man who fought against the Taliban is a hero, but that alone does not mean he qualifies for a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV). On November 26, 2025, Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who had served in a CIA-backed Afghan paramilitary unit, shot two West Virginia National Guard members near the White House, killing one and critically wounding the other.

Following the shooting, President Trump ordered a “re-examination” of every Afghan national admitted to the United States under the Biden administration. An estimated 190,000 to 200,000 Afghans have been resettled in the United States since the 2021 withdrawal, most under humanitarian parole rather than the SIV program.

On March 14, 2026, Afghan national Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal died in ICE custody in Richardson, Texas. Media coverage described him as a “special forces soldier,” wording that could be interpreted to mean he served in U.S. Special Forces. However, he was not a member of the U.S. military.

AfghanEvac states that he partnered with U.S. Army Special Forces, specifically the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne), in Paktika Province beginning in 2005, rather than serving in the U.S. military.

AfghanEvac is an advocacy and volunteer coalition formed after the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan to help evacuate and resettle Afghans who worked with U.S. forces and to advocate for their immigration cases.

The phrase “worked with U.S. forces,” as used by AfghanEvac and in much of the reporting, is a broad umbrella term. It encompasses the full range of Afghan nationals who supported the U.S. mission, not just those in combat roles. This includes interpreters and translators, logistics and transportation contractors, drivers, base support personnel, including laundry, food service, construction, and maintenance workers, intelligence and cultural advisors, as well as members of partnered Afghan military or police units.

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Moscow Signs Military Partnership With Taliban In Full Circle Since CIA’s Operation Cyclone

Russia and the Taliban-led government in Afghanistan have reached a military and technical cooperation agreement, Russian news outlet Interfaxreported this week. 

The deal was concluded during the International Security Forum held in Moscow. According to the report by Interfax’s correspondent, Taliban Defense Minister Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob held talks with Secretary of Russia’s Security Council Sergei Shoigu on the sidelines of the event.

During the meeting, Yaqoob said that engagement with Russia is important for the Taliban-led administration and that both sides have been expanding their bilateral relations. He added that Afghanistan and Russia share historic ties and that Kabul aims to maintain and strengthen those relations.

Shoigu urged western countries to release Afghanistan’s frozen assets and take responsibility for the country’s reconstruction during the event.

“We are convinced that western countries must unfreeze frozen Afghan assets, fully acknowledge their full responsibility for their 20-year presence in Afghanistan, and assume the entire burden of post-conflict reconstruction of the country,” Shoigu said.

One day later, on Thursday, Russia’s Deputy Defense Minister Vasily Osmakov met with Yaqoob in Moscow to discuss regional security and potential bilateral military cooperation.

According to the ministry, the two sides addressed security issues in Central and South Asia, as well as the outlook for cooperation between their armed forces, including areas of military collaboration.

Russia was the first to recognize the Taliban-led state that assumed control in Afghanistan in 2021. The recognition took place in July 2025. 

US troops launched a hasty and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan after the Taliban’s 2021 victory and subsequent takeover of the country. 

The US military left behind large amounts of equipment. An internal State Department review from 2023 attributed the chaotic evacuation to poor planning.

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Special Forces officer who oversaw secret SAS missions ‘doctored damning document on possible war crimes’

A senior Special Forces officer responsible for overseeing secret SAS missions doctored a document about possible war crimes.

The commander deleted the most damning sentence from a report into night raids that resulted in scores of suspicious deaths.

His disturbing intervention was included in files released last night by a High Court inquiry into suspected Extra Judicial Killings.

The judge-led probe is exploring claims Special Forces executed captives in Afghanistan and destroyed evidence of wrongdoing.

At the time, the officer was working in a supervisory role at Special Forces headquarters in London.

In April 2011 he was sent a statistical analysis of SAS detention operations including, numbers of Enemies Killed in Action (EKIA) and weapons recovered.

The glaring disparity between EKIA and rifles and pistols found in suspected Taliban compounds gave rise to allegations that unarmed Afghans were being shot dead.

The analysis was due to be studied by a Senior Legal Advisor at the London HQ and the overall commander, the Director Special Forces (DSF).

It was then the officer removed the concluding paragraph that read: ‘In my view there is enough here to convince me that we are getting some things wrong right now.’ 

In a witness statement N1788 admitted deleting the sentence before the document was passed on. He said he was not ‘just gonna pass that on in an email’.

At the time the document was of vital significance as the DSF was deciding whether to alert military police to the suspicious shootings thereby triggering a murder inquiry.

In testimony, N1788 said he was not concerned that Special Forces soldiers were abandoning their Rules of Engagement and eliminating detainees.

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