Untold story revealed: Operation Bella and how KC's Jason Kander helped save 383 lives
Source: Kansas City Star
Inside the ballroom, 383 Afghan men, women and children — fake guests invited to a fake wedding — waited in anxious hope that the ruse might work and they could escape the country with their lives.
Meanwhile, just beyond their walls, armed Taliban fighters looking to kill or imprison them searched the streets of Mazar-e-Sharif. Afghanistan had fallen. It was September 2021, only three weeks after the United States military on Aug. 30 had pulled out of 20 years of war. Images of desperate citizens clinging to and falling from the wheels of planes fleeing Kabul remained indelible. The Taliban were now in control.
Seven thousand miles away in Kansas City, Jason Kander — a former Army intelligence officer and former Missouri secretary of state who had turned private citizen — sweated out what last week he called “the craziest thing, the biggest thing and the most important thing I have ever done.”
Code name: Operation Bella, a private Afghan rescue mission initiated by Kander and named after his then-infant daughter. Details of its safe houses and checkpoints, of a chartered aircraft escaping Taliban gunfire, are only now being revealed.
On Thursday evening, Kander, 42, and 36-year-old Rahim Rauffi, whose rescue triggered the operation, are scheduled to discuss the rescue at a fundraising event for Jewish Vocational Service. In June, JVS, which aided in some of the operation, relocated Rauffi, his wife, four children and eight relatives as refugees to Kansas City.
Read more: https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article285004952.html
Jason is an acquaintance of mine and a former Secretary of State of Missouri.
= new reply since forum marked as read
His leadership and articulate defense of democracy drew me. What an inspiring story! Can't wait to hear all about it.
