The Trump administration is considering a plan that would move Afghan allies and relatives of U.S. service members out of a U.S. base in Qatar to a third country, according to the U.S. government and advocates involved in the case.
The State Department said Wednesday that it is working to identify options to “voluntarily” resettle the refugees in a third country, but it did not confirm which countries were being considered. The discussions come as advocates and former officials have raised concern about the length of time many people have spent waiting at the base in Doha.
Advocates linked to Afghan resettlement efforts said the country being discussed most prominently is Congo. Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran who heads the coalition supporting Afghan resettlement called #AfghanEvac, said U.S. officials informed him and other groups about discussions between the United States and Congo to take Afghans who have been in limbo at the camp for more than a year.
VanDiver said the people waiting at Camp As-Sayliyah include interpreters and those who worked with Special Operations Forces, as well as the immediate families of more than 150 active duty U.S. military members. He also said one alternative being presented to refugees is to return to Afghanistan, where he said they face likely reprisal or even death from the Taliban for working alongside the U.S.
“You cannot call a choice voluntary when the two options are Congo and the Taliban, civil war or an oppressor who wants to kill you,” VanDiver said at a virtual press conference. He described the situation as coerced, saying the decision is “a confession extracted under duress.”
The talks were reported earlier by The New York Times and follow a pause by President Donald Trump after he returned to the White House. The pause affected his predecessor’s Afghan resettlement program and left thousands of refugees stranded at locations worldwide, including the base in Qatar.
According to an executive at a refugee resettlement agency who was briefed by U.S. officials and spoke on condition of anonymity, negotiations between the United States and other countries began months earlier, including Botswana and Malaysia. The executive said Botswana was seen by many refugee advocates as the most promising option, but that talks with Botswana’s leadership ended without a deal, and that in early April the executive was told Congo became the main option.
A person familiar with the matter, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, said State Department personnel told them the U.S. was looking at sending the Afghans at the Qatar base to countries in sub-Saharan Africa and that refugees were told Wednesday there was no final deal on where they would be sent.
Former officials and advocates who worked on the resettlement effort said the U.S. had always intended the Qatar base to be temporary. Jon Finer, who served as deputy national security adviser to then-President Joe Biden, said the Doha base “was always intended as a transit platform” and “was never designed to hold families for months or years,” adding that the approach was meant to “honor a wartime commitment.”
Finer and others warned that the risk of resettling Afghans in Congo is high. They pointed to the humanitarian crisis described by U.N. officials and to decades of fighting in the country’s eastern region, involving government forces and Rwanda-backed rebels.
Some advocates also raised concerns about Congo’s broader vulnerability to U.S. policy changes. They said Congo was among African nations that received millions in controversial deals connected to receiving migrants deported from the U.S. to third countries, and they said humanitarian aid to the country was heavily dependent on the U.S. before Trump’s second term. They added that aid workers say American aid cuts have contributed to deaths in the conflict-hit region.
Sean Jamshidi, an Afghan American who served in the U.S. military including a stint in Congo, said he was concerned about his brother potentially being sent from the Doha base to the war-torn country. He said he had seen displacement camps and places where United Nations officials counted dead and argued that the Congo is not a place to send vetted Afghan allies and their children to live.
At the camp, refugees described uncertainty about what will happen next. Negina Khalili, a former prosecutor in Afghanistan who fled after the 2021 U.S. withdrawal, said she has been waiting for months to learn the resettlement status of her father, brother and stepmother since they arrived at the Doha base in January 2025.
Khalili told The Associated Press that she spoke to her family after hearing reports they could be sent to Congo. She said the family was not given information or updates on which countries they would go to, describing stress and fear among those waiting and saying they were worried Congo would not be safe.
She said U.S. officials at the camp have been suggesting that refugees return to Afghanistan and offering them money to do so, but Khalili said many in the camp do not know whether the location in Qatar would be temporary or permanent.