Families of 9/11 victims are asking President Biden to return the money that the U.S. government is holding from Afghanistan to Afghanistan.
Last year when the Taliban took over the government of Afghanistan, the Biden administration froze $7 billion in assets that were in the hands of U.S. banks. This money belonged to the Afghan government but the U.S. government didn’t want them to have it.
In February the Biden administration said that it would take that $7 billion and split it. The plan is to give Afghanistan back $3.5 billion of its own money and keep the other half to give to victims of 9/11.
This money did not initially belong to the Taliban. It belonged to the Afghan government and it includes gold and bonds and other funds that the government had saved up from humanitarian aid since the U.S. invaded over 20 years ago. This money was what experts call Afghanistan’s rainy day fund.
Children are starving in Afghanistan. The United Nations says that more than 1.1 million children under the age of 5 will face “the most severe form of malnutrition this year.”
This is why 77 families sent a letter saying that it would be “morally wrong” to take this money. They request that President Biden reverse his executive order and send the money to “the Afghanistan central bank funds [for] the Afghan people and the Afghan people alone.”
