Military family details desperate fight to save adopted 5-year-old from Taliban's clutches on Glenn Beck's show



Joshua and Stephanie Mast adopted the orphaned daughter of Al-Qaeda foreign fighters after U.S. soldiers found her as the sole survivor of a close-combat clash in Afghanistan in 2019.

The Masts detailed their years-long, ongoing legal battle to retain custody of their 5-year-old daughter on this week's episode of "The Glenn Beck Podcast."

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The child, an infant at the time, miraculously survived a battle between Al-Qaeda foreign fighters and U.S. Army Rangers. Her suspected biological father died during the "brutal close combat" that lasted over an hour and a half, according to Joshua. The girl's suspected mother detonated explosives strapped to her chest while holding her newborn.

"[The foreign terrorists] did a series of what they call 'barricaded shooters,' so it is a suicidal terrorist who will barricade themselves in — with the presence of their family in a room — and engage whoever's coming in that room and not surrender no matter what. They will even blow up their families rather than surrender," Joshua stated.

'They were probably sent forward by the Taliban shadow government to collect her from the Americans.'

He detailed where his daughter was recovered during the battle, explaining that U.S. soldiers and an Afghan partner unit — after running out of breaching explosives — used what he stated was essentially a bazooka to "blow a hole in the final room to clear it of the remaining terrorists."

Joshua stated that the blast was believed to have killed the girl's biological father.

"The Ranger testified under oath that he observed what ended up being her biological mother run out of that hole that they created, screaming at him," he continued.

According to the testimony, Joshua stated that the mother, while holding her daughter, detonated an explosive device secured to her chest.

"She was about 6 weeks old," Joshua said, referring to the child. "She suffered a fractured skull, a fractured left femur so bad they had to put a rod in to put it back together, and second-degree burns on her face and neck."

He stated that the Afghan partner force fighting alongside the Rangers pushed for the infant to be killed, fearing she would become a terrorist.

"They sustained a casualty and were very angry about that. They literally came to our Rangers, and they're like, 'Let us shoot her in the head. ... Let's just throw her in the creek,'" Joshua told Beck. "Our guys physically resisted murdering our little girl."

The Masts fought for the child, whom they refer to as Baby Sparrow, to receive a visa and relocate to the U.S. to receive treatment for her ongoing medical needs. However, the Masts said they faced considerable opposition despite obtaining all the documentation required to secure custody.

Joshua expressed concern that the child was not an Afghan native and therefore should not have been turned over to an orphanage in Afghanistan. He was also worried that the child would be placed with relatives who would similarly bring her into a war zone.

He explained that the peace deal between the U.S. and Afghanistan "blew up" around September 2019. Amid attempts to renegotiate, the Taliban denied that the Al-Qaeda foreign fighter group to which the child's parents belonged had a presence in Afghanistan.

Joshua stated that the Taliban has a "strategic interest" in the situation, noting that several individuals came forward claiming to be related to the child but failed genetic testing.

"Two days before the peace deal's signed, the U.S. government, through the embassy's representations, turns her over to an unvetted, what's turned out to be a nonrelative, terrorist-affiliated person. The guy's got a Taliban flag on his WhatsApp profile," Joshua told Beck.

He added that the young Afghan couple who is trying to take custody of Baby Sparrow has refused to take a DNA test to prove their relation.

The Masts gained custody of the child following the Biden administration's botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 after they helped the child and the young couple escape.

Although Baby Sparrow has been with the Masts since then, the Afghan couple persists in seeking her return.

"When we did get her finally, she wasn't the same baby as she was in the hospital," Stephanie stated. "When I saw her for the first time, I actually wondered if it was the same child because her face was closed off. She was very fearful and scared. She would hardly look up."

"The fear and trauma in her face, I've never seen that in a child before," she added. "When she came home, she had lice, parasites, emotional trauma, just everything."

The Masts explained that their adoption case is before the Virginia Supreme Court as they continue to battle to maintain custody of the child.

"These are not relatives. They probably knew they were not from day one. They were probably sent forward by the Taliban shadow government to collect her from the Americans," Joshua told Beck.

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Biden wants to put a gloss on his foreign policy failures — these failures included



President Joe Biden, apparently keen to rewrite history before fading into it, will reportedly seize on the opportunity Monday to once again characterize his disastrous presidency and foreign policy blunders as successes.

According to the the Associated Press, the deeply unpopular 82-year-old Democrat is expected to claim in his capstone address regarding his foreign policy legacy that he and his administration restored American credibility on the world stage and strengthened critical alliances supposedly strained by his predecessor's prioritization of American citizens. Biden is reportedly also planning to suggest that he provided the world with a "steady hand" during his four scandal-plagued years in office.

Biden's Monday speech at the State Department's headquarters will bookend his first major foreign policy speech on-site where he suggested on Feb. 4, 2021, both that "the muscle of democratic alliances ... have atrophied over the past few years of neglect and, I would argue, abuse" and that the U.S. under President-elect Donald Trump had ceased to stand "shoulder-to-shoulder with our allies and key partners."

In addition to promising to advance the security of the American people ahead of letting well over 10 million foreign nationals steal into the homeland, Biden said that he would be effective in dealing with Russia and counter communist China's "aggressive, coercive action," as well as end the war in Yemen, which is covered in the Obama administration's fingerprints.

Biden, Democratic lawmakers, and their devotees in the liberal media emphasized at the outset of his presidency that the "adults [we]re back in charge," President-elect Donald Trump serving as the point of comparison.

Trump, embracing Ronald Reagan's "peace through strength" approach in his first term, previously

  • brokered the formal normalization of diplomatic relations between various Arab states and Israel;
  • made good on past administrations' promises to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem;
  • whacked Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi;
  • signed an executive order temporarily banning nationals from six Islamic terrorism hotbeds from traveling to the U.S.;
  • pressured NATO allies to meet their financial obligations in the way of defense spending;
  • put North Korea’s Kim Jong-un on notice with the threat of "fire and fury like the world has never seen";
  • negotiated a new trade agreement with South Korea and an updated version of NAFTA with Canada and Mexico;
  • withdrew from the 2015 Paris climate accord and United Nations Human Rights Council;
  • largely defeated ISIS in Syria;
  • pulled out of the Iran nuclear agreement;
  • reoriented the U.S. national security apparatus from a Middle Eastern focus to instead a focus on competing with communist China;
  • levied tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Chinese goods;
  • re-established the Quad partnership with Australia, India, and Japan; and
  • managed various other foreign policy successes, including breaking from his predecessor's longstanding custom of starting a new war.

With his alternatively "steady hands" on the reins, Biden steered Americans into danger and American foreign policy through embarrassment after embarrassment.

For instance, Biden botched the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Amid the confused exit during which the U.S.-backed Afghan government imploded, an Islamic terrorist — who reportedly had been released amid the chaos just days earlier from the Parwan prison at Bagram Air Base — detonated a suicide bomb on Aug. 26, 2021, at Abbey Gate, the last route open for Afghans into the Hamid Karzai International Airport, killing 11 U.S. Marines, a soldier, a sailor, and hundreds of Afghans, and leaving 45 other U.S. service members wounded.

Beside endangering service members and leaving multitudes of Americans behind, Biden also left the Taliban with over $7 billion worth of military equipment.

One intelligence assessment estimated that among the hardware left behind for the Islamic extremist regime were 2,000 armored vehicles and 40 aircraft, including UH-60 Black Hawks, scout attack helicopters, and ScanEagle military drones.

Biden proved unable or unwilling to extend a steady hand to the hundreds of thousands of Christian Armenians of the former Republic of Artsakh, also known as Nagorno-Karabakh, who were violently displaced in recent years by the Islamic Azerbaijani regime.

Azerbaijan, which the Biden administration has provided with military assistance despite its alleged war crimes and torture of Armenian prisoners, launched a blitzkrieg on the Armenian enclave in September 2023, killing hundreds of people, destroying churches, and forcing the Christian population to flee, in many cases on foot.

The apparent ethnic cleansing took place within days of a State Department official suggesting that the U.S. would not "countenance any action or effort, short-term or long-term, to ethnically cleanse or commit other atrocities against the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh."

'The United States is in a worse geopolitical position today than it was four years ago.'

Azerbaijan was not the first aggressor nation to realize that Biden was big on talk and light on action.

Despite Biden's "steady hand" and foreknowledge of an imminent "incursion," Russia invaded Ukraine under the Democratic president's watch, this time on a scale far exceeding its previous invasion of Crimea during the Obama-Biden years. Biden has slapped Russia with numerous sanctions, poured over $175 billion into the occupied nation, and risked a direct shooting war with Russia by authorizing Ukraine's use of long-range American missiles, yet an armistice in the region remains out of his reach.

During a press conference ahead of the invasion where Biden suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin "does not want any full-blown war," the Democratic president stressed that Putin "is trying to find his place in the world between China and the West." It appears that with the Biden administration's persistent nudging, Putin has found a close friend in communist China — constituting another major foreign policy blunder.

Brahma Chellaney, professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, noted last year that:

It is U.S. President Joe Biden's foreign policy that has helped turn two natural competitors into strategic collaborators. A forward-looking approach would have avoided confronting Russia and China simultaneously, lest it drive the two nuclear-armed powers into an unholy alliance. But Biden has managed to lock horns with both Moscow and Beijing simultaneously, though it should be noted that his China policy is comparatively softer and more conciliatory.

Like other critics, Chellaney noted that U.S. sanctions on Russia have effectively transformed Beijing into Moscow's banker and more than doubled trade between the two nations.

Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi said in October 2024 that Beijing's relationship with Moscow would be strengthened in the coming months, as Russian gas exports to China continue to surge and the BRICs organization continues to grow in strength relative to American-led economic organizations.

Just a year into Biden's presidency, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) noted that "the president's weakness on the world stage has only emboldened our adversaries to become more aggressive in their rhetoric and their actions."

Over the past four years, China, America's preeminent adversary, has ramped up its attacks on American cyber infrastructure and sovereignty, evidently thinking little of Biden and his occasional tough talk.

The Wall Street Journal revealed in September, for instance, that the Chinese state-sponsored hacking group Salt Typhoon compromised at least eight American telecommunications companies, including AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI said in a joint statement, "We have identified that PRC-affiliated actors have compromised networks at multiple telecommunications companies to enable the theft of customer call records data, the compromise of private communications of a limited number of individuals who are primarily involved in government or political activity, and the copying of certain information that was subject to U.S. law enforcement requests pursuant to court orders."

Chinese hackers with ties to the communist government also stole at least 60,000 emails from State Department accounts during Biden's tenure; gained access to the computer networks of a major American transportation hub; and compromised Treasury Department computers.

Brushing Biden's "steady hand" aside, Beijing has also sent spy craft over the mainland U.S.; operated illegal police stations on American soil; threatened diplomats; and dispatched agents to execute espionage and political destabilization missions.

"The United States is in a worse geopolitical position today than it was four years ago," Stephen Wertheim, a historian and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, recently told CBS News. "The United States is immersed in a massive war on the European continent with serious escalation risks; it's back to bombing the Middle East with no end in sight; and it has entered into a full-spectrum strategic rivalry with China."

"The United States cannot expect to prioritize China while remaining the leading military power in Europe and the Middle East. If the United States truly wants to prioritize China, it needs to pull back elsewhere," added Wertheim.

Biden told USA Today in an interview last week, "I hope that history says that I came in and I had a plan how to restore the economy and reestablish America's leadership in the world."

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