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March 17, 2025 - Epoch Times
23:08
How Biden Betrayed the Afghan Translators - and How They Were Rescued: Charmaine Hedding
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We had a case of a little cell of Christian believers who were all converts from Islam, and they were meeting secretly, and they were infiltrated by a radical terrorist group called Al-Shabaab.
And they burnt down the house, they captured some of them, and only two of them managed to survive because they killed the rest of them.
Charmaine Heading is the founder and president of the Shai Fund, a humanitarian organization that aids...
Protects and even rescues persecuted minorities throughout the Middle East and Africa.
We were able to pull out eight planes from Kabul airport before moving to Mazar-e-Sharif.
And we succeeded in evacuating over 9,000 people at risk.
And so I can't tell you how many American veterans contacted me and said, please save my translator.
He's going to die.
We have to get his family out.
We did.
Heading was born and raised in South Africa.
Where her father and grandfather were outspoken anti-apartheid activists.
Because of their activism, they were eventually forced to flee to Jerusalem when Heading was a child.
The greatest struggle in the Middle East and in Africa at the moment is this concept of freedom of religion and belief.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Charmaine Heading, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
It's great to be here with you.
So you pull people out of some of the worst places where religious persecution is happening, mainly in the Middle East.
You pulled two plane loads of Nova Festival survivors out of Israel after October 7th, shortly after.
Tell me about some of your most recent activities.
You have conditions in the world where there's no freedom of religion and belief.
People aren't able, for example, in East Africa and some countries there, to change their religion or to have no religion.
And we had a case of a little cell of Christian believers who were all converts from Islam, and they were meeting secretly, and they were infiltrated by a radical terrorist group called Al-Shabaab.
And they burnt down the house.
They captured some of them.
They took them onto the beach.
And only two of them managed to survive because they killed the rest of them on that beach.
And when I was contacted, the two of them were on the run.
It was a woman and a man.
And I was asked, can you help them?
And can we get them to safety?
And we managed to pull them out the country, get them into another country, and that's when we realized that what we're up against is a very tech-savvy, organized terrorist organization that was able to continue hunting them down throughout this East African country.
And so we played this game of cat and mouse, where we would move them to one safe house, have security.
As we left, the previous safe house would have al-Shabaab come and say and ask questions.
Where are they?
Who are they?
At the same time, they were plastering pictures of people with nooses around their neck on Facebook and on Instagram, brazenly saying, we're going to kill you because you converted.
From Islam to Christianity.
And thank God we were able to get them out and they're now safe in Europe.
So you do this at a very, very small scale where there's one or two people.
But you also do this at a very large scale.
For example, you know, at some of the Afghanistan airlifts, I understand you were involved in those.
A little bit of work even in Syria now.
So tell me about that.
We all know what happened with the disaster in August of 2021 when we understood that the Biden administration was just going to pull out of Afghanistan.
And for those of us who are involved with freedom of religion, we understand that there's multiple minority groups that don't necessarily believe what the Taliban believes.
We knew that they were going to be in immediate danger, especially The Christians who were all converts from Islam because under their understanding, it's apostasy.
And the rule, the Sharia law that they were imposing across Afghanistan was that you would be killed for converting or leaving Islam.
At the same time, we couldn't understand why all of these young believers We're being hunted down, and they knew their homes, they knew their telephone numbers, they knew where they worked.
And that's when we understood that the Social Security database had been given to the Taliban.
And some of these Christians, when this database had been made electronic and into a biometric system, had not wanted to deny Jesus.
And so what they did is they wrote, we are Christian.
And of course, when it was handed over to the Taliban, they could immediately pull up who these Christians were, where they lived, what their phone numbers were, and they started hunting them down.
And so I was contacted and asked if we can evacuate and help save some of these lives of these Christians now on the run.
Also, there were women who were judges and lawyers, and they had been put in place as a 40% quota by the Europeans and had adjudicated many cases of Taliban violations, human rights violations.
So when the Taliban took over, these were the kinds of people that they immediately started to hunt down.
The Ahmadiyya Muslims, who is a form of Islam that the Taliban doesn't agree with.
Their leadership was taken and they had young boys tortured and forced to sign false confessions.
And they contacted me and said, can you get us out?
And so we then worked to find a solution on how do you evacuate planes from Kabul airport.
And in the end, we were able to...
Pull out eight planes from Kabul airport before moving to Mazar-e-Sharif, and we succeeded in evacuating over 9,000 people at risk, which also included Americans and, of course, people who had served with the U.S. government and other governments.
Right.
We heard about some of these translators, the various people that were...
Well, let's say just very friendly with the Americans, we're not seen very positively.
Yes.
Yeah, because they had seen them as local translators that had worked with the Americans to translate or to do logistics or forward running for them, and they were seen as traders now.
And so these were the first people that they went after.
And so I can't tell you how many American veterans contacted me and said, please, save my translator.
He's being hunted down.
He's going to die.
We have to get his family out.
We did.
And tell me, before we continue further, just about the situation in Syria right now, because we hear many things.
Yeah, so it's very interesting because we do hear many things.
And I think the main thing that we need to understand is there were two groups, both funded by Turkey and Qatar.
It funded financially and also trained and also given arms.
And they were proxy militias that had been in Idlib and other areas that Turkey had used in order to infiltrate and to try and take over parts of Syria.
And as soon as Israel...
declared the ceasefire with Hezbollah.
That the Assad regime, which is Alawat Shiite, could no longer have Hezbollah, it's a Shiite, Iranian-funded militia or terrorist organization, to come in and support the Assad regime.
And we immediately started seeing troop movements of various factions, which then gathered under the Syrian National Army, which is actually a Turkish proxy militia, mostly consisting of ISIS. Militants.
And then also HTS. Now HTS under Al-Sharah or Jolani, he was in Idlib.
And what we saw in Idlib and understood from his style of governance, it's classic Sharia law.
We saw the beheading and stonings of women and anyone who didn't disagree with them.
The population in the government had about 10,000 Christians due to the persecution.
Less than 400 are able to live there.
In fact, in the news just in the last couple of weeks, the release of Yazidi sex slaves, so these are Yazidi women that ISIS took and then gave to fighters fighting for the Islamic State.
They were released and found in Israel.
Idlib.
And Idlib was under al-Sharah or Jelani's control.
So when he takes over, or we allow him to take over Syria, we are giving a Sunni Islamist party control over Syria.
And the dangerous thing is that just last week, he dissolved the constitution.
And he's basically said that he can't rewrite the Constitution for another three to four years, and there won't be elections.
So basically we have an autocrat that's taken over Syria, who doesn't believe in the inclusion of women, who doesn't believe in the inclusion of any of the religious minorities or components of Syria, and for sure has not included them in his government.
So we are seeing this government with officials that belong to HDS or who helped manage Idlib now be put in governance over all of Syria.
So if we in the West support that, we are supporting a radical Sunni Islamist group that's come out of Jabhat al-Nusra and al-Qaeda understanding of the world.
I don't think we want to do that.
Charmaine, quick sec, we're going to take a break, and we'll be right back.
And we're back with Charmaine Heading, president and founder of the Chi Fund.
You know, the question is, what do you do?
It's not like the Assad regime was a decent government.
Not at all.
No.
I mean, you know, I always say we're intelligent human beings.
Hopefully we can hold two thoughts in our head.
Assad was horrendous.
He killed...
Hundreds of thousands of people tortured them in the most horrendous way, and it's fabulous that we've got rid of him.
But if we want to stop these never-ending wars, then we need to make sure that there's an inclusive government that has all the components and representation in Syria, including the ethno-religious minorities.
All citizens of Syria should have the ability to contribute and to...
Take part, not just people who come out of al-Qaeda or al-Nusra and were supportive of HDS. And that's the difference.
And there is already an existing model in northeast Syria of exactly that.
Northeast Syria since 2012 has had a social contract which includes religious freedom, the inclusiveness and good governance of all participating components of that area, which is Kurdish, some Jews, Yazidi, Christian.
And they designed this amazing contract all on their own.
And then when the Islamic State rose and started taking over parts of Syria and Iraq, we in the West looked around for how and who would be our partner.
We asked Turkey.
Turkey refused.
So who did we go to?
We went to this...
Self-autonomous administration of northeast Syria.
And that's why today we have U.S. forces there, because they were our partners on the ground who fought ISIS, fought for freedom of religion, fought for democracy, and fought for an inclusive style of governance.
These are the people we need to support, and these are the people that can show the rest of Syria how it's done.
Tell me about this evacuation of the NOVA festival survivors.
The 7th of October I was in Jerusalem, and we wake up very early in the morning.
It was just after 6 o'clock to air raid sirens.
And we knew that something was drastically wrong, because living in Jerusalem...
We have the Dome of the Rock there, and it's very unusual to have air raid sirens in Jerusalem because they can hit the Dome of the Rock.
And so here we have a Jewish state protecting the Dome of the Rock with the Iron Dome and protecting all of us with the Iron Dome.
And in Jerusalem, as you know, it's split.
There's Christians, there's Jews, there's Muslims.
Incredible, interesting city of all the great fates.
And so we have this Iron Dome going off and we're running into our shelters and we can hear the missiles popping above our homes as the Iron Dome takes out all of these missiles that were incoming from Gaza.
And, of course, we got on our phones and tried to understand what was happening.
And those of us who work a lot in the Arab-speaking world, a lot of us got onto the Telegram channels, which started to upload the images.
So whereas the Nazis hid what they did to the Jews, and they hid the Holocaust and the gas chambers.
It was absolutely remarkable.
It was the opposite with the Nova Festival and the Gaza envelope, which is what we call the area next to Gaza.
They uploaded it with GoPros and with cameras straight up onto the internet and for the whole world to see how they raped, pillaged, burnt.
And killed every Jew that they could find.
They killed over 1,200 people that single day.
They took 250 hostages, 252 hostages from over 35 nations.
There were Thai workers that were working in Israel.
They took them.
There was Bedouins, Muslims living in Israel.
They took them as hostages as well.
And so they took anyone that...
They saw supporting the Jewish state.
And just this weekend, five of those Thai hostages have got out alongside a number of our other hostages.
We have 79 hostages left in the Gaza Strip, and we know that 35 of those hostages are dead.
Why was some kind of airlift needed in that situation?
You can imagine the situation.
We've got thousands of missiles.
Coming in from the Gaza Strip into Israel, into Jerusalem, across Tel Aviv, and the air raids islands are just almost continuous.
At the same time, you've got this radical Islamic group, Hamas terrorist organization, flooding into the Gaza Strip and into Israel proper.
And we immediately had to close our airspace because what commercial flight or any plane can fly where you've got so much missile movement?
And so with everything closed and locked down, there was no flights going out and there was no flights coming into Israel while we tried to fight back.
Hamas terrorists.
The next day, Hezbollah starts attacking us from the north.
So now we've got missiles incoming from the north, missiles incoming from the south.
And you've got people in the Gaza envelope area and the Nova Party area who are hiding in their shelters.
There's bodies strewn all over the ground.
People are dead.
People are wounded.
They're dying because they can't get medical assistance in.
And as Hamas is moving through this area, they're burning it.
There's cells that are hiding.
And so as Israel starts to regain control over the area and bring the people out, we have to clear the area and push them back.
Well, that took days.
It took months.
And then we found the tunnels.
You know, there were more tunnels that were found underground in Gaza than there are in the great city of London.
And so they'd spent all that money building an underground terror infrastructure so that they could hide, they could stash weapons, and they could pop up and attack us, and also that they could take hostages into those tunnels.
And so there was no way that we could keep...
Any of our civilians anywhere near that area.
Same thing happened in the north.
We found tunnels from Lebanon into Israel, and we found documents that proved that they wanted to do the same thing, so we had to evacuate our people from those areas as well.
So now the north is evacuated, the south is evacuated, our airspace is closed, and you've got all the...
Our population is squeezed into the middle belt of Israel.
We're fighting a war on multiple sides and the people are traumatized.
Rape victims, Holocaust survivors that lost all of their family, and they can't go back to their homes.
And they've lived through this horrendous experience of spending hours and hours waiting in their safe rooms while the Hamas terrorists roam outside trying to find Jews to shoot and kill them.
And so they come out, and they've got nowhere to go.
They are displaced.
And Israel starts putting them in hotels.
You've got constant airwaves sirens triggering them, and many of them who had homes or had relatives outside the country and felt that they needed, after what they'd seen and experienced, to leave the country and be able to recuperate before they could come back, had no way of getting out.
Or maybe they had, like the two Holocaust survivors, had their family had all been killed, and so they needed to go to...
America, where they had some family left, they could look after them after what they'd been through.
So we decided to charter private planes, got the permission to Get the airspace open when we could.
And literally, we were bringing the people into the airport.
There were sirens going off in the airport.
The Iron Dome was taking out the missiles, and we waited for a moment where there was relative peace, and then we were able to take those planes out.
And we landed some of them in Europe, and one of them we landed here in the United States of America in Nashville.
The scary thing at that point...
For us and also for the people on the plane, was what would be the reception when they came and they landed in Nashville?
Because as you probably know, there's over a 500% increase in anti-Semitism.
Which is the age-old hatred of Jews because they are Jewish and because of what they believe in.
So it's persecution at the root of that and the lack of understanding of freedom of religion and belief.
And so these people that had survived were asking me at the airport, what's going to happen when we arrive in Nashville?
And at the same time, there was a plane that landed in Russia.
You might have heard about it.
And as they landed in Russia, they understood from the flight origin that it came from Tel Aviv.
And there were immediately masses of crowds that started to hunt down the Jews that got off that plane in that airport in Russia.
And they had to hide them in back tunnels in the airport and get them out because the crowds were so incensed with anti-Semitism.
And it's back to front.
Here's Hamas who attacks a civilian population of the Jewish state of Israel because they hate Jews and they want to eradicate this Jewish state.
And they kill 1,200 of them.
They take 252 hostages and they launch through funding from Iran and weapons from Iran a seven-front war on that Jewish state.
Yet the world wants to kill and lynch Jews.
I was going to say that that was not something I was expecting, that the day after October 7th, the response would be increased anti-Semitism.
I was expecting the opposite.
And where can people learn more about the Chi Fund?
You can go onto our website, you can read the stories and the people we've helped at www.theshyfund.org.
And Chi is spelled S-H-A-I. Oh, Charmaine Heading, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
It's been amazing to talk with you.
Thank you.
Thank you all for joining Charmaine Heading and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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