Oregon Republican Alek Skarlatos, a U.S. Army National Guard veteran, told Breitbart News Saturday this past week that President Joe Biden’s incompetency is what led to the deaths of 13 American service members and countless civilians in Afghanistan last year.
Speaking to Breitbart News’s Washington Bureau chief Matthew Boyle on the radio this past weekend, Skarlatos described the time he stopped a terrorist attack on a train from Amsterdam to Paris when he was vacationing after his deployment to Afghanistan.
He explained when he was traveling from Amsterdam to Paris in 2015, vacationing with his friends — one who was in the Air Force — saw an ISIS terrorist come out of the bathroom looking to shoot people. “An ISIS terrorist came out of the bathroom from behind us with an AK-47 and a handgun. Two Frenchmen tried to stop him… He ended up shooting one of them in the neck. That was what alerted us that something was wrong. And my friend Spencer, he was on the aisle seat. So I said something like, let’s go, and my friend Spencer, for whatever reason, I got up and tackled the terrorist. I followed him, and long story short, my friend choked him unconscious while I hit him over the head with his AK-47.”
Skarlatos blamed Biden’s incompetency for the deaths of 13 American service members and more than a hundred civilians in Afghanistan last year mentioned how he was in Afghanistan in 2014 and 2015. He continued to say that the United States’ military force in the country, at that point, “had pretty much gotten Afghanistan down to a science, and what I mean by that is we had the fewest number of troops there while still being able to hold the country very effectively by basically providing just air support for the Afghan army.”
“Then when it comes to our withdrawal, not only just Joe Biden telegraph our withdrawal to the Taliban, he doesn’t put up any kind of resistance whatsoever,” Skarlatos stated. “So much so that they’re basically at the gates of the airport when we’re doing our final withdrawal. And then we allow all these people past security, which we didn’t really have security was part of the problem. But we allow all of these people to get so close to American troops. I mean, they’ve never had an opportunity like that before, at least not in recent memory.”
Skarlatos, after noting that terrorists would take advantage of the situation, said, “then [terrorists] suicide bomb 13 American soldiers and countless civilians… I believe the largest loss of life from a ground attack and the entire global war on global war on terror is history… seeing something that incompetent happened when we had such a handle on the situation is absolutely heartbreaking.”
American Alek Skarlatos (C) shakes hands with Emmanuel Lebrun-Damiens, French Consul General in San Francisco, after being given his naturalization certificate during a ceremony at the Alliance Francaise in Sacramento, California, January 31, 2019. – American citizens Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos, and Spencer Stone received honorary French citizenship after foiling a terror attack in 2015 on a high-speed train en route to Paris from Amsterdam when a gunman aboard the train opened fire. (BRITTANY HOSEA-SMALL/AFP via Getty Images)
Skarlatos did confirm that he believes the United States should have withdrawn from Afghanistan but that there was enough information to do it “properly” so Americans would not have died for “basically no reason.”
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.
Jacob Bliss is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter.