![]() The U.S has stopped accepting Iraqi applications, and Afghans now face stiffer requirements. With the rise of the Islamic State group, the program has seen massive backlogs. In the next five years, the Special Immigrant Visa program created tens of thousands of slots for Afghans and Iraqis, but bureaucratic bottlenecks, among other things, have left many of those slots unfilled. In 2008, in a rare display of bipartisanship, Congress created a system to bring over Iraqi and Afghan translators, office workers and other American allies. America, he felt, had a moral obligation to bring them to the States, so he started a nonprofit and began working with lawmakers. In the mid-2000s, as insurgents stepped up their attacks against "collaborators," Johnson began compiling a list of at-risk Iraqis. Agency for International Development worker in Fallujah, describes the wishful thinking and twisted logic that left so many U.S. In his book, To Be a Friend Is Fatal, Kirk Johnson, a former U.S. Gulab had saved the life of a Navy SEAL, but no one, he felt, would ever come to his rescue. So as he stood in his yard, watching the sun slowly rise, Gulab finally lost something the Taliban hadn't been able to take from him in nearly a decade of attacks-he lost hope. ![]() He had friends in the States and contacts in Kabul, but no one seemed able to help. But how? Paying smugglers was too dangerous and expensive. Gulab decided he had to flee Afghanistan, go to Europe or America. ![]() The standoff lasted for hours until, with daylight approaching, the militants retreated and Gulab and his wife climbed down, still terrified. The Taliban returned fire, but Gulab and his wife had the high ground. Under a canopy of stars, they squatted behind a barricade and fired toward the gate, their bullets sparking in the darkness when they hit stones. The blast woke his children, who ran to a neighbor's house for safety while Gulab and his wife grabbed their Kalashnikovs and climbed onto their roof. Gulab was asleep in his room when a bomb exploded by the front gate of his home. The most frightening attack came on a hot night in the fall of 2014.
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