The girl, just four years old, had been traveling and waiting in lines for hours, if not days, by the time she stepped off the bus at a Camden, N.J., temporary facility to rest. She was tired and hungry and, as Capt. Dan Powell of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers puts it, “she was bawling her face off.”
The child was one of the thousands of Afghan evacuees arriving in the U.S. on Aug. 31 after the U.S. departed Afghanistan. After landing at Philadelphia International Airport, she was brought to the processing facility the Corps had set up for them to rest and eat while waiting to make the final leg of their journey to new homes as part of Operation Allies Welcome—the stateside continuation of the operation to evacuate U.S. allies from the now Taliban-run country as the U.S. military was withdrawing.