Pentagon reaffirms Kabul findings
Says US troops couldn’t have prevented attack
WASHINGTON — A new Pentagon review of the events leading up to the bombing that killed 13 US service members at the airport in Kabul in August 2021 has reaffirmed earlier findings that US troops could not have prevented the deadly violence.
The review’s conclusions focus on the final days and hours at Abbey Gate before the attack, which also killed as many as 170 civilians. The review provides new details about the Islamic State group bomber who carried out the suicide mission, including how he slipped into the crowds trying to evacuate the capital’s airport just moments before detonating explosives.
Some Marines who were at the gate have said they identified the suspected bomber — who became known to investigators as “Bald Man in Black” — in the crowds hours before the attack but were twice denied permission by their superiors to shoot him. But the review, building on a previous investigation made public in February 2022, rejected those accusations.
The narrative of missed opportunities to avert tragedy has gained momentum over the past year among conservatives and has contributed to broader Republican criticisms of the Biden administration’s troop withdrawal and evacuation from Kabul in August 2021.
The bombing was a searing experience for the military after 20 years of war in Afghanistan. Thirteen flag-draped coffins were flown to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, and funerals were held across the country for the service members, most of them younger than 25.
Military officials had stood by the conclusions of the earlier inquiry that a lone Islamic State group suicide bomber carried out the attack and was not joined by accomplices firing into the crowd.
But under mounting political pressure to address disparities in the earlier review and the accounts of the Marines at the gate — which also included reports that the Islamic State group had conducted a test run of the bombing — a team of Army and Marine Corps officers interviewed more than 50 people who were not interviewed the first time around.
One of the main issues was the identity of the bomber. Almost immediately after the attack, the Islamic State group identified him as Abdul Rahman al-Logari. US and other Western intelligence analysts later pieced together evidence that led them to the same conclusion.
US officials at the time said that al-Logari was a former engineering student who was one of several thousand militants freed from at least two high-security prisons after the Taliban seized control of Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021. The Taliban emptied the facilities indiscriminately, releasing not only their own imprisoned members but also fighters from the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate, which is the Taliban’s nemesis.
Al-Logari was not unknown to the US. In 2017, the CIA tipped off Indian intelligence agents that he was plotting a suicide bombing in New Delhi, US officials said. Indian authorities foiled the attack and turned al-Logari over to the CIA, which sent him to Afghanistan to serve time at the Parwan prison at Bagram Airfield. He remained there until he was freed amid the chaos after Kabul fell.