Trudeau Admin Prioritized Rescuing Afghan Sikhs over Canadians from Taliban, Failed Both
by John Hayward
Canada’s Globe and Mail dropped another bombshell on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s faltering government on Thursday, revealing that Trudeau’s former Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan prioritized rescuing Afghan Sikhs ahead of Canadians after the Taliban stormed Kabul in August 2021.
According to three military sources who spoke with the Globe and Mail, Sajjan intervened after the Canadian military decided its top “operational priority” was to rescue Canadian citizens from the chaos unleashed by U.S. President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The original priority list of Canadian special operators like Joint Task Force 2 (JTF-2) was to go after Canadian citizens and Afghans who worked directly for the Canadian government before the Taliban captured Kabul. “Vulnerable groups, such as feminists, human-rights activists, minorities and LGBTQ people” came next, and then anyone else who could be saved.
Sajjan stepped in and moved a group of 225 Afghan Sikhs to the top of the list and actively participated in their rescue, relaying “local information and other details about the Sikhs” to Canadian special operations forces.
“The way it was presented to us at first was: If we can do this and pay attention to it, great, but not stopping doing everything else. But a day or so later, it came back to us as a firm order. Our leadership was furious. They were very upset,” one special forces officer said of the order to rescue Sikhs first.
“There was such furious anger that the last 24 hours were solely dedicated to getting the Sikhs out. We were unsuccessful,” the officer said, adding a melancholy coda to the affair.
Other sources told the Globe and Mail that Sajjan’s effort to rescue the Sikhs failed because “the frightened Afghan Sikhs left the rendezvous point shortly before Canadian soldiers arrived to take them safely to Kabul international airport.”
Luckily for them, most of the Sikhs in question were able to survive the Taliban coup and escape to India several months later, some of them using planes chartered by the Indian government.
The Globe and Mail noted Sajjan is “an influential figure in the Sikh community whose father served on the board of the World Sikh Organization” and Trudeau’s Liberal party was desperately courting Sikh votes at the time.
Sajjan admitted all of the details of the story were correct, including his text messages to Canadian military forces in Afghanistan with information about the group of Afghan Sikhs, but he angrily denied he did anything improper by putting foreign nationals ahead of Canadian citizens on the rescue list.