Joshua Mast
speaker
189 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Joshua Mast’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And the only reason we don't know about the DNA is because these people now won't take a DNA test. And the State Department denied taking a DNA test before. And to me, if you think that there's a valid claimant, the first thing you do is a DNA test. It's the most biometrically enrolled society on earth.
So he, so John Doe is the son of this older man.
So he, she was, you know, that's real. I believe that's real. Okay. So this older man gets her and we, um, there's a phenomenal human rights attorney named Kim Motley and she's got experience like, uh, dealing with like traffic children in Afghanistan. She finds her. That's a miracle in itself, but I'll gloss over it for time. Um,
This older man says, or we get some information that he's hired a young girl to take care of her. He's paying her a salary.
A teenager. That teenager is Jane Doe. She's like 16, I think, at the time. She's finishing up high school. But it's a war zone. We're told that it's a slum. It's in southern Afghanistan. It's so dangerous that the ICRC won't go there. And we immediately get reports that she Sparrow starts shaking at night in the day and her eyes are twitching. And so we were very concerned about her TBI. Yeah.
because like in the military community especially we're very aware like the long-term ramifications getting blown up and so we're like we were even trying to get her taken back to kandar airfield or some of our other hospitals at the time but then covet happens and everything gets like shut down and you can't even go out on the street in afghanistan and all that craziness that ensued and um we were trying to kim was trying to get her brought up to be evaluated at a hospital in kabul that had more capability um
The son of the son. And so I think it's very important for people to understand, we only spoke to this guy directly six weeks before the fall of Afghanistan. In 2021. In 2021. And Kim is an expert in Afghan culture and she's been operating there for a long time.
And she's like, look, I think this is a real possibility to send her out because of her needs, but I can't get custody of a child without a way to get her out of Afghanistan. I can't have another child in my care. And so we were just creating a path to the United States for her before the Taliban took over.
Because we were very aware that after that deadline, there's going to be a brutal civil war. And, you know, at best case scenario, maybe there's a shared government. But, you know, that's not what happened. So I talked to this guy on July 2021. First time. You, this is me. Here's who I am. Here's what I did in Afghanistan. We believe she's a foreign child. She was an orphan.
We sought, you know, legal responsibility for under U.S. law. My interpreter uses the strongest words in Pashto. Wali, Masuliat, Sarprost. And my Afghan friends will probably make fun of me because I probably butchered those. So what does it mean? It means guardian, responsible one, like the strongest legal term for a non-parent being responsible of them because they don't have adoption.
Yeah, we would say an adopted parent in the States, but they don't have a similar legal concept there. And so he's using the strongest terms and this guy's... This guy, I mean, honestly, what he first wanted was a visa. Like, hey, can you give me a visa for me and my brother-in-law? Everybody wants to go to America. I don't even blame them.
But no, there's no, like, no one could predict the evacuation. I mean, that was a historic event. So we're sitting here saying, she has everything she needs to fly out. We're legally responsible. Send her before the Taliban take over. And so this guy, this is what he tells me. He's like, I'm like, how's she doing? There's a battle going on in southern Afghanistan. There's a campaign.
There's artillery rounds going off near them. There's people getting shot around them. He's worried about his teenage wife, who's about eight months pregnant, and about the artillery rounds near their house, like, hurting their unborn child. Like, this guy's like... in a bad way. And, and he says, he's bringing tears to his eyes, how Sparrow's condition is.
And, you know, um, and so as this is all happening, I asked like, where is she? Like, that's a pretty good question. Like in a war zone. And he's like, Oh, she doesn't live with me or my family or my dad. She lives with this other family and they become like parents to her. And so like, that's what's so hilarious about not hilarious. It would be funny if it wasn't like tragic.
So tragic is that this guy tells me she doesn't even live with him. That's the first thing. Well, one of the first things he says to me, he tells me his father is responsible to the Taliban for her. And then, in fact, he's like, oh, I think she should go live with you. You know, that's so kind, that type of thing. And he's like, I have to ask my dad. He's the responsible one.
And he has to ask the Taliban. So during the middle of the war, his dad travels about 100 miles from where they live in southern Afghanistan to where she was picked up. And they talk to that Taliban commander who was responsible for those camps of whether they can send her to be evacuated because they take him a couple of weeks. And of course the Taliban says, no, like not, not a big surprise.
And so he comes back and says, uh, the Taliban said, no, they'll kill us if we disobey them. Sorry, basically. And so, you know, as we're developing, you know, as this is situation developing, there's, there's thousands of IDPs get into place by the battles. They're all centering on Kabul. Like we all know that the history now, right. It's August 16th.
When this guy comes back to me, the evacuation just started. And I had the privilege of helping a friend of mine with one of his interpreters outside the wall. And he was at the Naval War College and didn't actually have access to a lot of our systems. And I was at a special unit where we could directly call the airport. And so we got this one guy out. Like I saw it on Facebook. Hey, send me that.
I routed the request ad hoc, right? He gets out. And that hits the news. I wrote a book about it. And so he gets... My friend, who's another Marine officer, gets flooded with requests to help other Terps. And so we get sucked into all the people Mercury Run funded. It was totally ad hoc, totally heroic how these Americans pulled together. It was amazing.
Concilium, No One Left Behind, Pineapple Express, Team America. Yeah. I mean, it was... It was incredible. But as... As that's happening, I'm like, disobey the Taliban, bring her to US forces. She's viewed as a US person because of her US identity. We sent them her military ID to identify her, right?
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