The Betrayal of the Afghan Translators - and How They Were Rescued: Charmaine Hedding

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-shabab 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 sharmain heading is the founder and president of the shy 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 Kabal airport before moving to mazara shareif and we succeeded in evacuating over 9,000 people at RIS 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 Hing was born and raised in South Africa where father and grandfather were outspoken anti-apartheid activists because of their activism they were eventually forced to flee to Jerusalem when Hing 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 y Kell Charmaine heading such a pleasure to have you on American thought leaders it's great 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 plain loads of Nova fesal survivors out of Israel after October 7th shortly after tell me about some of your most recent activities yeah we you have condition 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-shabab 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 realize that what we're up against is a very Tech Sav 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-shabab come and say and ask questions where are they who who are they at the same time they were Plastering um pictures of people with noes 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 some of the Afghanistan airlifts I understand you were involved in those um a little bit of work even in Syria now so tell me about that yeah I mean 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 uh the Taliban believes um we knew that they were going to be in immediate danger especially uh the Christians who were all converts from Islam because under their understanding it's apostasy and the the rule the Sharia law that they were imposing across uh 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 were being hunted down and they knew their homes they knew their telephone numbers they knew where they they worked and that's when we understood that the social security database had been given to the 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 m and of course when it was handed over to the Taliban they could immediately pull up who these Christians were where they lived what they phone that buiz 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 and uh who were judges and lawyers and they had been put in place as a 40% s 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 amadea 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 carbal airport and in the end we were able to uh pull out eight planes from caral airport before moving to mazara Sharif and we succeeded in evacuating over 9,000 people at RIS which also included Americans and of course people who had served with the US government and the governments right we heard about you know some of these translators the various people that were um say just very friendly with the Americans were not seen very positively yes M 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 knew 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 SOA is very interesting because we do hear many things and I think the the main thing that we need to understand is the there were two groups both funded by turkey and Qatar it funded financially and also trained and also given arms um and they were uh soxy militias that had been in ad 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 hisbah they understood that the Assad regime with is ala shiat could no longer have hisbah it's shiat 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 um militants and then also HTS now HDs under alar or jalani he was in idb and what we saw in Le 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 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 idb and idb was under alar or galan'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 3 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 it Le 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 jabat NRA and Al-Qaeda understanding of the world I didn'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 Hing president and founder of the shy fund you know the question is what do you do it's not like the Assad regime was a decent not at all government no I mean you know I always say we're intelligent human beings hopefully we can hold two thoughts in our head Asad was horrendous he killed you know 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 NeverEnding Wars then we need to make sure that there's an inclusive government that has all the components and representation in Syria including including the ethn 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 HTS 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 of 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 this self autonomous administration of Northeast Syria and that's why today we have US 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 um tell me about this evacuation of the Nova Festival survivors yeah you know the 7th of October I was in Jerusalem and uh we woke up very early in the morning it was 6:00 to air just after 6:00 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 you know there's Christians there's Jews there's Muslims it's it's a you know in incredible interesting city of all the great Fates and and so we have this Iron Dome going off and we 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 Tred to understand what was happening and those of us who work a lot l in the Arab speaking world we a lot of us got onto telegram channels which started to upload the images so whereas the Nazis hid what they did to the Jews and they 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 1200 people that single day they took 250 hostages 252 hostages from over 30 five nations there were Thai workers that were working in Israel they took them there was bedin 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 Tire 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 AIDS islands are just almost continuous at the same time you've got the ISL this radical Islamic group Hamas terrorist organization flooding into the Gaza Strip and into Israel proper 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 his balas starts attacking us from the north so now we've got missiles in coming from the north nor missiles Inc coming 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 St all over the ground um 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 took took months and then we found the tunnels you know there were more tunnels that were found underground in Gaza than they 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 of our population squeezed into the middle balt of Israel we 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 the safe rooms while the Hamas terrorists Rome 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 but you've got constant Airway Sirens triggering them and many of them who 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 um 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 um get the airspace open when we could and literally we were bringing the people into the airport there were Sirens going off from 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 them here one some of them in Europe and one of them we landed here in the United States of America and Nashville the SC 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 you probably know there's a you know 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 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 flat 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 in the airport and get them out because the crowds were so incensed with anti semitism and it's back to front here's Kamas who attacks a civilian population Jewish state of the Jewish state of Israel because they hate Jews and they want to eradicate this Jewish State and they kill 1200 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 that was not something I was expecting that the day after October 7th that that the response would be increased anti-Semitism I was expecting the opposite and where can people learn more about the sh shy fund you can go on to our website you can read the stories and the people we've helped at www.th shy fund.org and shy is spelled sh AI well 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 I'm your host Yan Kell [Music]