The group includes U.S. Army interpreters, former commandos and family members of Afghan-American soldiers.
They are being held at Camp al-Sailiya, a former U.S. military base in Qatar. The Biden administration brought the men there after the fall of Kabul and promised that they would be transferred to the United States once the investigations were completed.
The Trump administration announced in January last year that it would close the camp, without elaborating on the fate of the refugees.
Sean Vandiver, the head of the Afghan Awac organization, said that he has been informed about the plan to transfer Afghan refugees to Congo from the officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Afghan refugees in Qatar are given two options: return to Afghanistan under Taliban rule or transfer to the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country experiencing one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, he added.
“I think they want to send these people back to Afghanistan, where they know they’re going to face certain death,” Vandiver told the New York Times about the Trump administration’s choice of the African country. “They know that Afghans are avoiding going to the Democratic Republic of Congo.”
Reports indicate that after months of talks with Congo, the Trump administration recently signed an agreement with the country to accept refugees deported from the United States. The agreement also includes $50 million in aid to the UN refugee agency.
Earlier, the Wall Street Journal reported that the United States has held talks with two African countries and an Asian country to transfer Afghan refugees to Qatar.
The Wall Street Journal has seen a document that shows that each Afghan refugee in Qatar has been offered between $1,200 and $4,500 to return to Afghanistan.
According to the United Nations, more than 600,000 refugees, mainly from Central Africa and Rwanda, are currently in the Republic of Congo.
Meanwhile, human rights activists stress that the country does not have enough capacity to take in more refugees.
A spokesperson for the US State Department accused the Biden administration of rushing the process of transferring Afghan refugees to the United States and said the Trump administration is trying to find other options for Afghan refugees remaining outside the United States.
“The American people have had to pay the price for an irresponsible approach in which hundreds of thousands of Afghans were transferred to the United States,” he added.
