Category Archives: Department of Homeland Security

Brazil/Olympics Under Islamic State Threat

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Brazil threat

 

TRAC: South America has not historically been considered a high priority target for Islamic State for reasons ranging from practical to ideological. It has instead been used for remote finance and small-scale recruitment operations by Shia groups and IS’ predecessor, al-Qaeda. It would appear, however, that Islamic State has recognized that political and economic turmoil in countries like Brazil, Venezuela, and Mexico have presented opportunity in the Western Hemisphere.

A sample of recent activity documented by TRAC includes:

Image: A map of the particularly vulnerable border region referred to as the Triple Frontier.

All of this activity, combined with the backdrop of border insecurity at the Triple Frontier, IS recruitment in Mexico, and an active cell in São Paulo present terrorists with copious soft targets in South America, highlighted by the 2016 Olympics.

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Threat Assessment

Based on the information currently available, the threat of an IS-directed attack on the Olympics remains low, though the possibility of an IS-inspired small scale assault always looms. Preventing such an attack will rely on security arrangements at the venue, hotels, and transportation facilities where crime has already been listed as a high risk concern.

Never a High Priority Target

South America has not historically been considered a high priority target for Islamic State or other Sunni jihadist groups for many reasons, ranging from the practical to the ideological. Unlike many European nations, some of whom have a long history of interests in in the Middle East, South American countries are not typically viewed by Sunni militants as potent allies of the US. Instead, Brazil (among others) has served as a place to base remote finance and small-scale recruitment operations.

Outside Historical Caliphate Lands

Central and South America are not part of the lands claimed by historic Islamic conquest and thus fall outside the scope of Islamic State’s ideological priority of extending the Caliphate to the lands that at one time or another were considered belonging to the Umma. (Even the world maps created for Islamic State propaganda don’t bother to identify South America.)

New Focus on Portuguese & Spanish Speakers

This de-emphasis of targets south of the US may be coming to an end, however, on the part of Islamic State. ISIS has recognized the importance of shifting focus from its loses and struggles to new frontiers and opening linguistic doors to recruitment candidates. Following the 11/13 Paris Attacks a tweet attributed to Maxime Hauchard named Brazil as “our next target,” although TRAC has not been able to find a primary source record of this threat. In Spring 2016, Dabiq announced ISIS’ desire to proselytize Mayas with an “anti-colonial” message. Additionally, the approaching 2016 Olympics present an opportunity for Islamic State focus its narrative in a South American nation where it has already seen some support: Brazil.

Images: Jihadi Jean Luc identified as Steve Duarte. A Luxemburger of Portuguese descent, Duarte was featured in major Islamic State video release as a French-Speaking executioner.  In the video he refers to Andalusia and its Muslim cities, threatening Spain.  For More on (Video) Islamic State : Filtering Apostates – Five Simultaneous Executions Featuring French Speaking Executioner Wilayat Nineveh

Political Context

  • In the final week of February 2016, Brazil’s legislature approved a controversial anti-terrorism law after months of debate.
  • President Rousseff signed to enact the law in the final week of March 2016.
  • Allows for sentences of 12-30 years.
  • Opponents consider it a tool for restraining and silencing Brazil’s political dissident movements.
  • With Brazil’s corruption rankings plummeting and successful Olympics on the line, there is reason to believe some in power seek to silence opposition groups.
  • The law’s advocates, however, seek not only to avoid sanction but to have additional tools ready to combat global jihad.
  • Specific wording: “the practice by one or more individuals of acts for the reason of xenophobia, discrimination or prejudice of race, color, ethnic group or religion with the aim to generate social or generalized terror, endangering people, assets, the public peace or safety.”
  • Israeli officials heralded the law citing years of exploitation of Brazil by Iran and Iranian proxy Hezbollah

Recruitment of Portuguese Speakers

Islamic State Messaging

On 03 June 2016 Telegram IS affiliated channel “Online Dawah Operations” shared a general post in English calling for Spanish and Portuguese speakers:

Reads: “Dear brothers and sisters, we are in need of brothers and sisters who can speak either Portuguese or Spanish to help us on our project in’shaa Allah. If you speak one of those languages and you are willing to join our translation team please Wickr me: ismailbrazili.”

Islamic State Nashir channel in Portuguese appeared on Telegram 29 May 2016:

Five days before Islamic State member Ismail Brazili called for Portuguese speakers on a general Telegram channel, a Nashir Portuguese channel appeared on Telegram. It was created 29 May 2016 but did not make its first post until 02 June 2016.  Though the posts are merely reprints of the main Nashir Arabic Channel,  its important to recognize the out-reach to get news from IS controlled areas and IS Wilayats to Portuguese speakers.

Important Hashtags

Islamic State relies on hashtags to spread news on both Telegram and Twitter.  In almost all the Portuguese Telegram posts the following hashtags are used to spread the propaganda:

#ReportagemFotográfica
#EstadoIslâmico
#CalifadoPT

Plus the hashtag of the specific Wilayat that is being propagated.

Examples of Portuguese claims of credit

Posted 19 June 2016

Posted 20 June 2016

Posed 08 June 2016

The red over blue claims of credit (as well as light blue over darker blue) are very typical of traditional Islamic State claims, however the Portuguese are slightly different:  the Wilayat appears to the left (opposed to the right) and each are marked “Urgente” which the Islamic State does not print on the claims of credit in Arabic or other languages.

Former GITMO detainee latest Lebanese immigrant to raise alarm in Brazil

The announcement that former Guantanamo detainee Jihad Ahmed Mustafa Dhiab may have legally traveled to Brazil has recently recast Brazil into the spotlight for concerns of jihadist activity. After being transferred to Uruguay in December 2014, Dhiab — whose mother is Argentine –reportedly attempted to travel legally to Brazil, but was denied entrance, according to the statement of an official in Uruguay. Contrary to these reports, another official responsible for working with the Uruguay resettlement, Christian Mirza, said Dhiab traveled legally first to Argentina (in 2015) and then to Brazil, but that his whereabouts are unknown. Dhiab also apparently walks with crutches as a result of poor health, making an undocumented, illegal border crossing more difficult, but not impossible with assistance. On the other hand, Uruguay did not agree to the US request to retain for two years the six resettled detainees.

 Jihad Ahmed Mustafa Dhiab.

Dhiab is not the fist Lebanese Sunni to make headlines in Brazil. A suspected ISIS-finance cell associated with an Egyptian jihadist in São Paulo has been profiled by TRAC and is available here:

Islamic State Brazil : São Paulo Cell — (Islamic State / ISIS) — CELL PROFILE

In an operation called Menzad, 18 search warrants were issued to halt the Alameddine family’s fraudulent activity in money transfers suspected of supporting ISIS. It included the arrest of Egyptian Hesham Eltrabily, accused by Egypt of involvement in the 1997 Luxor Massacre.

Khaled Hussein Ali is yet another Lebanese transplant to Brazil of great concern in light of Islamic State’s growing influence. Although his affiliation with Al Qaeda reaches high into the organization, it is likely that his role in spreading propaganda and operating internet cafes in Vila Matilde has created fallow ground for Islamic State’s message in São Paulo and beyond.

Border Security and Soft Targets Concern

Border security has long been problematic for Brazil and its neighbors dealing with drug trafficking and militias. Additionally, the Rio Olympics present copious soft target opportunities for jihadist and other groups. Below are a map of the particularly vulnerable border region referred to as the Triple Frontier:

This area is relatively under-policed and concerns are that exploitation by Sunni jihadists would create fall-out with the Shia community, whose large mosques dot the Brazilian border facing Paraguay.

WH: Ben Rhodes is to Iran Deal ~ Valerie Jarrett is to Gun Control

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Ban the AR-15….heh….right Val Gal…. This is a White House full of ahem….experts that think AR stands for Automatic Rifle…sheesh…The Federal ‘Assault’ Weapons ban happened in 1994.

   

Valerie Jarrett’s war on guns

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Politico: Valerie Jarrett is increasingly asserting control of the administration’s campaign to curtail gun violence — and she’s not afraid of burning White House bridges with firearm manufacturers as she does it.

Even before the latest massacre in Orlando, it was Jarrett who used her influence with President Barack Obama to resurrect the push for new regulations, gun control advocates say. But since that shooting, she’s employed a more aggressive strategy than did Vice President Joe Biden, whose consensus-building efforts failed to produce new laws three years ago.

Take a recent White House bid to collaborate with weapons manufactures on so-called “smart guns,” which make it impossible for anyone other than an authorized user to fire a weapon — and should be fertile ground for a relatively non-controversial compromise.

But after 30 industry executives refused to show up for a meeting last Friday, Jarrett decided to mobilize nearly 200,000 supporters behind a new assault weapons ban, which industry vehemently opposes and would take a bestseller off the shelves. While it didn’t slam the door on further negotiations, it’s the kind of move that would make any future talks much more difficult.

With Biden dispatched in search of a cure for cancer, and Obama demanding an end to the bloodshed, Jarrett — Obama’s closest friend and conscience in the West Wing — is not just focused on measures like background checks that are much easier to sell to Congress, at least compared to an assault weapons ban. Instead, Jarrett is executing Obama’s call to “politicize” the issue during his last year in office and crank up the pressure on reluctant lawmakers.

“Please keep making your voices heard. Raise them over and over and over and over and over again,” Jarrett said on Monday in an unusual conference call, which was intended for the people who signed a “We the People” petition to ban the AR-15, but was broadcast live on YouTube for anyone to listen.

“I’ve had people say to me, ‘Well I enjoy gong to the firing range and using the assault weapons,’” Jarrett said. “But the pleasure derived from that compared to the horrendous damage that it can do, we believe that the damage warrants banning assault weapons.”

In the wake of the Orlando massacre, which involved a Sig Sauer MCX semiautomatic rifle, both Obama and Biden have made clear that, as Biden put it in his written response to the AR-15 petition, assault weapons “should be banned from civilian ownership.” But Biden focused his message to Congress on passing the background check and terror watch list bills that failed in the Senate on Monday.

Jarrett went further: “There’s no reason why Congress could not reauthorize legislation that would call for that ban.” And stoking support for the assault weapons ban with activists will likely intensify the political fight ahead of the 2016 elections.

Previously, Obama put Biden in charge of crafting the administration’s response to the December 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary shootings, and the vice president still serves a prominent role as sympathizer-in-chief. But since his effort ran aground, gun control advocates say, it’s been Jarrett who’s pushed for action over the last year despite congressional gridlock.

“As the months went by and ideas were discussed and priorities came and went, she was a constant source of influence in the building making sure that the process was moving forward,” said Peter Ambler, director at Americans for Responsible Solutions. When the group’s co-founders, former Rep. Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly, proposed new executive actions during a January 2015 meeting with Obama and Jarrett in Phoenix, Ambler recalled, the president turned to his senior adviser to make them happen. He announced new directives to expand background checks a year later.

“I don’t think that there is an individual at the White House except for the president who can claim more responsibility for the successes of the executive actions than Valerie Jarrett,” Ambler said.

Biden isn’t completely out of the picture, though he’s increasingly turned his attention to his “Cancer Moonshot.” As the architect of the now-expired 1994 assault weapons ban and original background check bill, he’s got substantial credibility with activists, especially those driven by grief.

“I refuse to give up, we refuse to give up,” Biden said on Wednesday at a Washington fundraiser for Sandy Hook Promise, a gun violence prevention group founded by parents of the first-graders gunned down at the elementary school.

“It took me seven years to get the first ban put in place,” said Biden, who had argued that the administration should prioritize guns even before the Newtown shooting. “We should not stop.”

But as the audience waited for Biden to come to the podium, Jarrett was in the back of the room, deep in conversation, as her top aides — Paulette Aniskoff, Bess Evans and Yohannes Abraham — circulated through the crowd. It was those aides, in Jarrett’s Office of Public Engagement, who have gradually taken on the bulk of the gun portfolio over the past three years, even as they continue to collaborate with Biden’s staff.

The portfolio has been something of an orphan in the Obama administration, with no obvious point person, particularly after the legislation Biden was working on failed in April 2013, and Bruce Reed, who had run an exhaustive series of outreach and strategy sessions with gun control advocates in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, stepped down as Biden’s chief of staff in late 2013.

Jarrett brought it back into the West Wing — and out to the statehouses, advocates said, by making it a priority for the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. In May, for example, Jarrett presided over a White House strategy session on enacting local laws to expand background checks and promote gun safety technology with elected officials from 48 states.

In his search for progress after Newtown, Biden and his staff famously met with, as he put it, “every possible stakeholder in this debate; 229 separate groups,” in just a few months. They settled on expanding background checks, a measure that’s hovered above 80 percent public approval since 2013. The bill failed in the Senate then, and an updated version failed on Monday, 56 to 44.

Meeting with ‘stakeholders’ is also a raison d’etre of Jarrett’s office.

“Part of the Valerie Jarrett portfolio is working with the many constituencies that have a stake in the issues that matter most, and one of those has become the family members of victims of shootings,” said Arkadi Gerney, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who works on gun policy.

Jarrett herself is in that category: she’s recounted how her grandfather was killed with his own gun when burglars broke into his office.

She was trying the outreach approach before a gunman killed 49 people in Orlando, when her focus was on smart guns. The administration is working to get buy-in from police for the technology, in hopes of creating a new market; earlier this month, the Department of Justice hosted law enforcement officials to talk about how smart guns might work for their departments.

Manufacturers have expressed some openness to smart guns — they could be a whole new sales category, after all — but they fear any sort of government mandate, as well as backlash from gun rights groups.

So weeks before the Orlando shooting, Jarrett and Chief of Staff Denis McDonough invited executives from about 30 gun-makers to the White House. They declined, according to an industry executive, because they perceived the invitation as “disingenuous.”

Jarrett lashed out at the gun lobby in her call.

“The NRA over the past seven and a half years has never been willing to come to the table and work with us,” she said. (Incidentally, both the industry and the NRA met with Biden and his staff in 2013, but there was no detente.)

And there’s some appetite for action on the Democratic side of the campaign trail: Hillary Clinton wants to take “weapons of war” off the streets.

But despite Jarrett’s call to resurrect a bill banning assault weapons, there’s little appetite for it in Congress. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who wrote the White House’s preferred version in 2013, hasn’t even decided to reintroduce it.

 

 

 

 

Exemptions and Waivers Rubber Stamped in DC

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Anyone remember Richard Windsor…ooops Lisa Jackson at the EPA? By the way, lil miss Lisa is a Board member of the Clinton Foundation.

New Homeland Security Records Reveal Top Officials Were Exempted from Strict Ban Placed on Web-Based Personal Email Accounts Despite Heightened Security Concerns

Jeh Johnson granted special waiver on first day of official ban.
Practice Continued Even After Clinton Email Revelations.

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today announced it obtained 693 pages of Department of Homeland Security records revealing that Secretary Jeh Johnson and 28 other agency officials used government computers to access personal web-based email accounts despite an agency-wide ban due to heightened security concerns.  The documents also reveal that Homeland Security officials misled Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) when Perry specifically asked whether personal accounts were being used for official government business.

The records were obtained in response to a February 2016 court order by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia following a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. Department of Homeland Security (No. 1:15-cv-01772)).

The Judicial Watch lawsuit was filed in October 2015 after the Department of Homeland Security failed to comply with a July 2015 FOIA request seeking the following:

  • All requests (in any form) submitted by senior DHS officials for waivers to use personal Web-based email accounts on government-owned computers.
  • Copies of all waivers granted to senior DHS officials to use personal Web-based email accounts on government-owned computers.

Judicial Watch sought the documents following a Bloomberg News report revealing that 29 high-level Homeland Security officials, including Johnson, obtained exemptions from a February 2014 agency-wide ban on the use of web-based email systems due to increased security concerns.  The waivers were granted despite security officials’ warning of the risks of malicious attacks and data exfiltration from webmail use.

Included among the records is a February 19, 2014 memorandum from security officials at the Department of Homeland Security strongly warning: “According to the Office of the Chief Information Officer, access to webmail using DHS networks is responsible for almost half of all attempts to compromise DHS network security.”  The memo explains that webmail use resulted in 14 Trojan-Horse attacks in August 2013 and 25 attacks in December 2013 on Homeland Security computer networks.

As a result, in the same memo, Department of Homeland Security officials imposed a total ban on employee use of web-based email systems:

New restrictions are being implemented that will no longer allow employee access to personal webmail sites from government computers [Emphasis added].  This action is being taken to strengthen cybersecurity and enhance protection of the Department’s computer networks.  Effective tonight, access to webmail sites like AOL, Hotmail, Comcast, Gmail, Yahoo, and other email services will be prohibited.

The records reveal that despite this strict prohibition, Johnson was given an exemption from the ban on the first day of its implementation simply because he liked to check his personal email from the office everyday.  In an April 7, 2014 email, DHS Deputy Director for Scheduling and Protocol Mary Ellen Brown wrote to DHS Chief of Staff for the Under Secretary for Management Vincent Micone: “Hi Vince – I wanted to flag that S1 [Secretary Johnson] accesses his [redacted] account every day and I didn’t know if we could add his computer to the waiver list? Let us know at your convenience. Thanks! ME”

Micone responds several minutes later: “ME, This will be done… no problem. Thanks, Vince”

The documents also reveal that on April 29, 2014, Connie LaRossa, then- director of legislative affairs for Homeland Security, was granted a waiver to use her web-based email account for official government business. The justification LaRossa used for requesting access to Yahoo email was that some congressional staffers wanted to send her “political information” that they “do not want to transmit via government mail.”

Despite LaRossa’s waiver, in an April 7, 2014, seems to contradict answers prepared Rep. Scott Perry in response to his query about the use of personal email accounts for official business, Homeland Security explicitly denied it was being done. In one question, Rep. Perry asked: “Are DHS officials permitted to maintain private email accounts that are used to conduct official business? If so, who and under what circumstances?”

Homeland Security officially responded: “To date, no requests have been approved to use a private email account for official business.”

Others Homeland Security officials included among those receiving waivers permitting them to use personal, web-based email on government computers despite the official ban included:

ANMS2 [Alejandro N. Mayorkas, deputy secretary]
Bunnell, Stevan E. [general counsel]
Chavez, Richard [director of the Office of Operations Coordination]
Gottfried, Jordan [Chief of Staff]
JCJ [Jeh Charles Johnson, secretary of Homeland Security]
Kronisch, Matthew [associate general counsel (Intelligence)]
Marrone, Christian [chief of staff]
Meyer, Jonathan [deputy general counsel]
Rosen, Paul [deputy chief of staff]
Shahoulian, David [deputy general counsel]
Silvers, Robert [deputy chief of staff]
Taylor, Francis X [undersecretary for intelligence and analysis]
Veitch, Alenandra [acting deputy assistant secretary]
Waters, Erin [director of strategic communication]

The use of personal email accounts on Homeland Security computers continued for more than a year after the official ban was put in place in April 2014, until July 2015 – over four months after revelations about Hillary Clinton’s controversial email practices.  In a July 20, 2015 email, Luke McCormack, then-Chief Information Officer of the Justice Department, ordered Jeanne Etzel, Executive Director of Homeland Security’s Next Generation Program, to “pull down” the personal “webmail” email accounts of the 29 Department of Homeland Security executives previously approved to use personal email accounts, except for that of Secretary Jeh Johnson [“S1”].

McCormack ordered this at the “DUSM’s direction.” (Deputy Undersecretary for Management, Charles Fulghum.)  This order came the same day a Bloomberg story was published regarding Homeland Security officials’ “bending the rules” on personal email use on government computers.  The next day, Secretary Johnson’s webmail access also was blocked.

“Jeh Johnson and top officials at Homeland Security put the nation’s security at risk by using personal email despite significant security issues,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “And we know now security rules were bent and broken to allow many these top Homeland officials to use ‘personal’ emails to conduct government business.  This new Obama administration email scandal is just getting started.  If the waivers were appropriate, then they wouldn’t have been dropped like a hot potato as soon as they were discovered by the media.”

Obama’s Retribution Against Florida, Orlando Terror Attack

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Shameful…yet this administration knows no shame. Reprehensible….

      

FEMA denies request for emergency declaration following Pulse shooting

OrlandoSentinel: A request to the federal government to declare an emergency for the state of Florida following the Pulse nightclub shooting was denied today, according to statement from Gov. Rick Scott‘s office.

“Because your request did not demonstrate how the emergency response associated with this situation is beyond the capability of the State and affected local governments… your request for an emergency declaration is denied,” W. Craig Fugate, administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said in a letter to Scott.

On Twitter, Scott called the denial “disappointing” and “unthinkable.”

If grated, the formal declaration of emergency would have made available $5 million in federal funding.

Scott said the money would have been used to cover the expense of provisions for health and safety measures and managing, controlling and reducing the immediate threat to public health and safety.

“It is incredibly disappointing that the Obama Administration denied our request for an Emergency Declaration,” Scott said on Twitter. “It is unthinkable that (the president) does not define the Orlando terror attack, the deadliest shooting in U.S. history, as an emergency.

“We’re committing every state resource possible to help the victims and the community heal and we expect the same from the federal government.”

Scott’s office has 30 days to appeal the denial.

Despite the denial, the federal government will allocate $253,000 to pay for overtime for the first responders who assisted the victims of the Pulse shooting, Scott’s office said.

FEMA Letter

 

 

Here is One That Should Have Received a Visa, But…

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Athens, Greece – Working for the US Army in Afghanistan can get you killed, but there’s a silver lining.

  

The US Army offers its Afghan translators the right to request the Special Immigration Visa (SIV). It’s a program initiated by the US to help certain foreign employees leave their home countries and get on a path to permanent residency in the states—usually for protection from groups like the Taliban. For the last four years, the program has been renewed in the National Defense Authorization Act. This year, however, both the House of Representatives and the Senate failed to vote for the allocation of more visas, which could imperil remaining applicants.

Through that program, Muhammad, a former US Army translator in Afghanistan that I met in the port of Piraeus, Greece, should already be in the US. But like several other forgotten Afghan translators who served the United States, his visa has not come through. After being laid off by his army base in 2014, Muhammad fell into a bureaucratic gap between the United States’ promises to its employees in Afghanistan, and its rocky attempt to withdraw from the country.

Muhammad applied for the SIV in 2014. He was rejected in May 2015. According to the rejection email, his application was ruled invalid on the grounds of “Lack of faithful and valuable service.” Muhammad says that’s because he was fired—but not for lack of faithfulness or value. 2014 was simply the year that the Obama administration started closing army bases, in an early phase of withdrawal from Afghanistan. With fewer bases and fewer troops, fewer translators were needed. Muhammad was downsized by government contractor Mission Essential.

So in January 2016, he decided to make a go of it on his own. He paid $5,500 in smuggling fees to be trafficked from Afghanistan to Iran, from Iran to Turkey, and then from Turkey to Greece. By the time he arrived in the port of Piraeus in March, the 22-year-old’s life had been reduced to the phone in his pocket, the clothes on his back, and a sheaf of papers from his job with the United States Army.

His service and his perfect English together, in theory, put him in a better position than most refugees, but because he is Afghan, he isn’t even eligible for any of the expedited European relocation measures that the Syrian and Iraqi refugees sheltering in the port can claim.

Today he lives in limbo in a tent outside the port’s E1 terminal, where he can watch the Greek ferries come and go, bearing tourists to their summer holidays.

A life-threatening profession

Muhammad says that he was well aware his job translating between US and Afghan forces in the city of Khost came with a death sentence from Taliban insurgents, who oppose the current government and US intervention. He never told anyone, not even his family, what he did for a living.

“I was trying to keep a low profile,” he says, sitting cross-legged next to a ship bollard in the port. He forks a clump of rice from crinkled plastic tray on the ground in front of him. If anyone asked about his work in Afghanistan, he says, he told them he was going to school. These days, he’ll tell anyone who’ll listen.

In an Oct. 2014 episode of Last Week Tonight, US comedian John Oliver highlighted the bureaucratic nightmare that Iraqi and Afghan translators have to deal with in applying for an SIV—and the US system’s inability to take into account individual circumstances and dangers. One Afghan translator interviewed by Oliver had to wait three years and four  months between applying for his SIV and arriving in the United States. In that time, the Taliban killed his father and kidnapped his younger brother.

In April 2016, Muhammad met someone who nearly met a similar fate: another former Afghan translator for the US army named Ahmad. Until Jan. this year, 25-year-old Ahmad worked for the US army in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. Knowing the dangers of his job, he applied for his SIV in 2014, but the paperwork moved slowly. He went back to work on the base.

In Dec. 2015, Ahmad’s family in Kabul received a letter from the Taliban, which threatened to kill his parents if he kept working for American troops. The next month, in January 2016, Ahmad decided he could not wait for a visa any longer, and decided to flee Afghanistan with his younger brother. They paid smugglers nearly $11,000, and got as far as Piraeus. Like Muhammad, the two brothers now camp in the port. Ahmad has not yet tried to restart his visa application process.

The SIV process has five basic steps, which include several phases of petition and permission before actually applying for the visa. The State Department estimates that this entire process takes 357 business days—but clearly, it can also take much longer.

“The single biggest cause for delay is security checks,” says Betsy Fisher, policy director at the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), which provides legal assistance to refugees. A puzzling problem, considering that anyone who has worked as a translator on a US army base in a conflict zone, has already undergone extensive security checks, including periodic polygraph tests.

Those who make it to the United States…

With patience, some Afghan translators do make it to the United States. Hamed, who asked to go by his first name only, is a former translator who worked for the US Army in the provinces of Khost and Paktika between 2010 and 2015. He began his SIV application in 2012. His application was approved the next year, but he did not receive his visa until early 2015. Luckily, he and his family survived the wait.

“I told them I want to leave as quick as possible,” Hamed told Quartz about the sense of urgency he felt after multiple threats due to his work for the Army. When he got word one night that he was finally cleared to leave, he says, he was so overcome with joy that he couldn’t sleep. In May 2015, he and his family boarded a plane to the United States.

But their departure has not had an entirely happy ending. In Afghanistan, Hamed’s wife was in her last semester of law school in Afghanistan, but they left before she could finish. Hamed has a degree in information technology, but in Woodbridge, Virginia, where they now reside, he has only been able to find a job in fast food.

…and those who don’t

Today, fewer than 4,000 SIV visas are still available, according to Fisher. Roughly 10,000 SIV applicants are currently waiting for a decision.

With the Balkan route that saw a million refugees work their way into Europe in 2015 effectively shut down, Muhammad and Ahmad’s only options are to wait, apply for asylum in Greece, or go home again. Asylum in Greece is not an option, says Muhammad. “This is not a country which can bear refugees,” he says of its record-high unemployment and the economically paralyzing effects of austerity. “Greeks already have too many problems.”

Despite being stonewalled by US immigration authorities, he carries with him at all times proof of his years of army service: copies of letters of recommendation from two sergeants he worked for, as well as certificates commending his work—just in case they might come in handy.

“I have no idea what to do,” he says.