‘That was a red line for me. I got angry,’ Bryan Stern said of his reaction to images of Afghans falling from planes.
Bryan Stern was watching the evacuation of Afghanistan from his Tampa home in August when he saw the footage of two people who’d clung to a U.S. military plane falling to their deaths.
For Stern, who had been at Ground Zero in New York on 9/11 as a young military service member, it was all too reminiscent of scenes he’d witnessed 20 years earlier of people falling from the World Trade Center. For those unlucky souls, he said, jumping to their deaths was a better option than remaining trapped inside the burning towers, which would soon fall. People in Afghanistan were making a similar calculation in mid-August, once again prompted by Islamic radicals, Stern said.
“It’s a better option for me to hold on to the nose wheel of a jet, that’s a better choice, a better option, than to stay where I am,” he said of their choice at the time. “That was a red line for me. I got angry.”
Stern, 41, who served tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq, now works as an international security consultant. He said he’s made a career out of not being a spectator. He didn’t want to be a spectator now. He called up a few friends with similar mindsets. He wanted to make a play, head to the Middle East to help. It might not work, he said, but he wanted to try.
“Just like at Ground Zero, we dug in the rubble looking for survivors,” Stern said. “I didn’t find any. But we still dug. It was still worth trying.”
Within days Project Dynamo was born, christened after Operation Dynamo, the codename for the British evacuation of Dunkirk during World War II.
Project Dynamo is one of likely dozens of civilian groups that emerged during the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan with the goal of helping to rescue American citizens and allies from the chaos and from a new reign of Taliban barbarism. Groups with names such as Team America, Pineapple Express, and Commercial Task Force organized to help get people out, according to news reports. Some sent in commandos and military veterans, while some worked statewide. Mercury One, radio host Glenn Beck’s charity, organized a mission to rescue Christians, but the Taliban grounded six of their planes in northern Afghanistan earlier this month. Other groups that lack quirky monikers also have been operating quietly, typically out of sight of the public. New groups pop up daily.
It’s not just Americans. Civilians from Australia, Great Britain, and Canada have joined the effort. It’s been described as a “digital Dunkirk,” because for the most part it involves coordinating the movement of people around Afghanistan using chat rooms, social media, and publicly available encrypted messaging services. It’s ad hoc and decentralized, though many of the groups work together when they can. They’ve become a key lifeline for tens of thousands of people still hoping to escape the country.
But in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal on August 31, these civilian groups have been forced to adapt to the new Taliban-controlled reality on the ground. Opportunities to get people out of Afghanistan have dwindled. Taliban leaders aren’t allowing planes to fly. Borders are closed. And even if they could get refugees out, they need somewhere to get them out to.
Over the past few weeks, the effort has shifted away from moving people around and getting them on airplanes to tracking threats and keeping people safe until conditions change.
“That game that we’re in today is going to be a long one. It’s a marathon. The sprint is over,” said Jack Britton, a Texas-based security consultant who is working with one of those unnamed rescue groups. “Now we want to keep people, friendlies, kind of low-visibility and ensure that they don’t get exposed to the Taliban.”
Before the American withdrawal, the U.S. military evacuated more than 123,000 people from Afghanistan, including more than 6,000 American citizens. But thousands were left behind.
To some in Washington, D.C., the mere presence of the civilian rescue groups was seen as egg on the face of the Department of Defense and the State Department. The federal government often ignored the private groups, and there was chatter among some groups about quiet threats of repercussions for people acting of their own accord. But leaders of the rescue groups don’t want to make an enemy of the government, and they want to work with military leaders.
Politico reported last week that Joint Chiefs Chair General Mark Milley met with representatives from some of the groups and discussed a proposal that would have the Pentagon and the State Department acting as a so-called fusion center, a central point of contact for the groups coordinating rescues. Nothing has been finalized.
Changing Plans
After a quick trip to REI for supplies, Stern and two of his friends, Matthew Herring and Sean Patrick, traveled to the Middle East in late August, a little more than a week before the August 31 withdrawal deadline. Another member of Project Dynamo, Stan Bunner, a multi-tour combat veteran in the War on Terror, helped coordinate the group’s efforts from his home in Naples, Fla., where he is a lawyer.
Stern said that while serving in Afghanistan he developed a soft spot in his heart for the Afghan people, whom he described as resilient, but with a simplicity and clarity of thought that comes with living in a culture that has essentially been stuck in time for 2,000 years. “There are some really, really terrible, bad, blood-thirsty, horribly evil people in Afghanistan – noted.” But most Afghans are not evil, he added, noting that the U.S. has produced its fair share of villains.
“Your average Afghan wants exactly what your average American wants, which is exactly what your average Chinese guy wants, which is exactly what your average dude in Nigeria wants,” Stern said. “He wants to make a family, get married, hopefully his wife doesn’t beat him up too much, make enough money so he doesn’t starve to death, live a good life, not get hurt too bad, and die not too miserable.”
In late August, Stern, Herring, and Patrick flew into Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, where Stern said he has a friend, a commanding general of a squadron of Afghan helicopter pilots. The original plan was to arrange for the pilots to fly into northern Afghanistan and pull people out, opening a northern corridor for future evacuation efforts.
“This was all about getting people who couldn’t get to Kabul, who were stuck in the north, getting them out,” Stern said. “It was banking on the idea that once Kabul closes, the north becomes the only option, so we’re there before everybody. That was the idea.”
But, Stern said, politics got in the way. The Uzbekistan government, which has its own problems with Islamic terror groups, put the kibosh on the plan, and then closed its land border. “Now you’re in Afghanistan going through the Taliban in the middle of who knows how that’s going to be, looking at Uzbeks with machine guns who are saying ‘No vacancy.’ That didn’t work,” he said.
The group then traveled to Tajikistan, a country typically more sympathetic to Afghans, Stern said, but they ran into different challenges there.
That’s when Stern’s group became part of the digital army making phone calls, communicating on chat rooms, and facilitating the movement of people to the airport in Kabul. More than 20,000 people have reached out for help on Project Dynamo’s website, Stern said. He estimates that his group, which is completely donor-funded, has played some part, big or small, in getting 3,000 to 5,000 people out of the Afghanistan.
Bunner, 57, said the entire effort has been organized privately so far.
“There are people, just regular civilians, I don’t know what they do for a living, but they’ve dropped everything, and they’re working 24/7 on this stuff, just in their living rooms and what not,” Bunner said. “They’re basically travel agents, for lack of a better term. They’re finding people and they’re trying to connect them with flights or trucks. It’s amazing.”
Bunner said he’s still getting 40 to 50 messages on his channels a day detailing granular movements of people throughout the country. And people are still reaching out for help.
“Just this morning, I think it was two or three Americans in a small family just reached out for the first time on the website, and said, ‘Look, we’re in Afghanistan. We need to get the heck out,’” Bunner said on Thursday. “They hadn’t contacted anybody, as far as we can tell. Nobody was even tracking these people, to my knowledge.”
Uncertainty and Chaos
In the weeks before the U.S. withdrawal, the private rescue groups were effective at moving people to Kabul, determining their status – American citizen, Green Card holder, holder of a Special Immigrant Visa – getting them on flight manifests, and finding them safe houses, said Britton, the security consultant working with an unnamed rescue group. They often were able to coordinate with military members who had some control of the environment and who could communicate with friendlies on the ground.
But when that last U.S. plane left Afghanistan, “the atmospherics changed,” Britton said.
“When that plane left, there was a lot of uncertainty, and that chaos continued. People needed to stop and bunker down,” he said, though he noted that some did not.
The Taliban has grounded most flights. Qatar has been negotiating to take operational responsibility for the Kabul airport, but there’s no deal yet. Qatar Airways got one flight out with about 200 people on September 9. The general guidance most rescue groups are giving to Americans and American allies in Afghanistan is to blend in, become a gray man – grow a beard, put on a burqa, and don’t get caught by the Taliban moving around with U.S. documents or an unsecured phone. Conditions on the ground change day to day.
“The Taliban is not a legitimate government. They’re a bunch of thugs,” Bunner said. “One day to the next, you don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Stern said Project Dynamo’s primary focus now is U.S. passport or Green Card holders, who already have been vetted. “Non-passport holders are completely shut right now. We’re trying,” he said. “A lot of them have SIV visas, and all kinds of other stuff. But right now none of those people can travel. If they get caught by the Taliban, they’re going to get arrested or jammed up or otherwise have a bad day.”
Bunner said he’s frustrated that flights aren’t leaving. Because of that, there’s little reason to move people from one place to another. “It’s not a small thing in Afghanistan to tell somebody, go from place X to place Y, because obviously they’re exposed,” he said.
Then there is, as Bunner described it, a “lilypad problem.” Even if they can get people out of Afghanistan, there needs to be a place to put them, a “lilypad,” so to speak. Neighboring countries are reluctant to take in the Afghan refugees.
Britton agreed that the lack of diplomatic support is making their efforts harder.
“The issue is, once you get them to Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, you get them to Pakistan, then what?” he said. “If you don’t have diplomatic support, or if there’s not a policy that gives them some safe haven so they can apply for a visa, apply for a way out of the country, then they just get exposed.”
Britton said there has been good and bad that has come from the private rescue efforts. The good, he said, is that lots of people with varying skills have come together to help with the mission. On the other hand, with no centralized coordination and so many people with varying levels of expertise involved in the rescue effort, it’s sometimes hard to know whom to trust, or to verify that someone actually knows what they’re doing.
“On the bad side, there are people who see that as an opportunity,” he said. “There are a lot of pirates out there. People should be aware of that.”
In the coming days, weeks, and months, the various rescue groups need to come out of their silos and work together to better understand what they each are qualified to do, he said. Some groups that have expertise with moving people on the ground might not have the same level of expertise when it comes to flying people out or resettling them in another country.
Britton said the groups with real capabilities are finding one another, working with governments, and beginning to develop end-to-end solutions to get people out.
“What we need to do is we need to understand each other’s capabilities,” he said, “and live within the constraints that our diplomatic policies allow us to live within.”