It started with a good intention. On August 17, after seeing the chaotic scenes of the first Kabul airport evacuations, Tommy Marcus, an American Instagram influencer known as “Quentin Quarantino”, asks his then 690,000 followers (they are 825,000 today) to help and participate in “Flyaway”.
This operation is intended to evacuate some 300 Afghans, “human rights lawyers, champions of women’s rights and the LGBTQ community, journalists, government liaison personnel, artists and performers”, presented as “targets” of the Taliban.
Tommy Marcus plans a budget of 550,000 dollars (about 475,000 euros), or 1,500 dollars (1,300 euros) per passenger, enough to charter two flights to Kabul. But the GoFundMe page he created exploded the counters and quickly reached the sum of 7.2 million dollars (6.2 million euros). On August 25, he wrote:
“I’m happy (and relieved) to tell you: Operation Flyaway has evacuated 350 Afghans in the past few hours. »
Façade of an operation mounted by others
It’s almost too good. So much so that the Washington Post – which also struggled with the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to evacuate collaborators and their families from Kabul – ended up taking an interest, at the end of September, in Tommy’s exploits. Marcus and “Flyaway”. First discovery: Tommy Marcus is only the tip of the cake. The operation was imagined by two former soldiers, Sheffield Ford and Karen Kraft. The first runs Raven Advisory, a security company, and the second is the president of Veterans in Media and Entertainment (VME), a network of veterans who work in media and entertainment.
Faced with the advance of the Taliban and the collapse of Afghanistan, the two former soldiers want to participate in the airlift. They call on Tommy Marcus, a celebrity who has come forward to save threatened Afghans. Faced with record donations collected by Flyaway, GoFundMe advises Flyaway to get in touch with an NGO, in this case the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF), based in Washington.
Difficulties at the end of the trail
But quickly, the operation will be confronted with a series of hassles. Flyaway charters two aircraft that remain stranded in Europe because they are uninsured to fly to Afghanistan. Operations are further hampered when IWMF is not authorized to access the sums collected on GoFundMe, this time to pay for two flights departing from Kabul. Finally, it is Brandee Barker, a former Facebook executive who advances some 545,000 dollars. But when, on August 24, the organizers finally manage to get an aircraft off the ground, it carries only 51 people and leaves with 300 empty seats, some of the passengers having been unable to pass the security checks.
According to the Washington Post, Flyaway spent 3.3 million dollars (2.8 million euros)… for flights that were ultimately canceled and for which the organization did not receive a refund. According to the former military Sheffield Ford, however, Flyaway has credit for future flights. Most of the money – $2.8 million (€2.4 million) – went to Kiwijet, an aircraft leasing company run by a New Zealand businessman, that US authorities suspect of fraud.
Finally, Flyaway spent more than 5.2 million dollars (4.5 million euros) to manage to evacuate only… 435 Afghans. And organizers acknowledge that most of those helped left on flights paid for by US taxpayers or other organizations. The gigantic airlift set up by the United States and its allies has in all made it possible to evacuate more than 120,000 foreigners and Afghans wishing to flee the new regime.
“Wild West charity”
Nearly 770,000 dollars (666,000 euros) collected for the “Flyaway” operation must however be used for other evacuation operations and the organization has donated 1.2 million dollars (1.04 million euros ) at the IWMF.
For her part, Laurie Styron, executive director of the American Institute of Philanthropy, compares crowdfunding campaigns like Flyway’s to a “wild west charity,” and adds that influencers should instead encourage their followers to support NGOs whose c is the job.
Regardless, since the departure of the last American soldiers on the night of August 30, Flyaway claims to have allowed 84 Afghans to leave Afghanistan on two flights in September. In an interview with the Washington Post, Tommy Marcus explains that the organization continues to help Afghans to leave: “People are alive thanks to Flyaway. … Despite the chaos that surrounded [the operation], there are no regrets. He closed the GoFundMe page on August 29.
