U.S. forces keep up Kabul airlift under threat of further attacks
Coming days will be ‘most dangerous period,’ White House official says
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN—U.S. forces working under heightened security and threats of another attack pressed ahead with the evacuation from Kabul’s airport Friday, the day after a deadly suicide bombing wrote a devastating closing chapter on the United States’ withdrawal from its war in Afghanistan.
The death toll rose to 169 Afghans, a number that could increase as authorities examine fragmented remains, and 13 U.S. service members, making Thursday’s one of the deadliest attacks since U.S.-led forces entered Afghanistan nearly 20 years ago.
The White House and the Pentagon warned there could be more bloodshed ahead of President Joe Biden’s fast-approaching deadline Tuesday to end the airlift and withdraw American forces. The next few days “will be our most dangerous period to date” in the evacuation, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said.
Thursday’s bombing — blamed on Afghanistan’s offshoot of the Islamic State group, an enemy of both the Taliban and the West — marked one of the most lethal terror attacks the country has seen. The U.S. said it was the deadliest day for American forces in Afghanistan since 2011.
Around the world, newly arriving Afghan evacuees, many clutching babies and bare handfuls of belongings in plastic bags, stepped off evacuation flights. In Kabul on Friday, Afghan families looked for loved ones among bodies, placed along a hospital sidewalk for identification, of bombing victims who died pleading for a seat on the U.S.-run airlifts.
As the call to prayer echoed Friday through the city along with the roar of departing planes, the anxious crowds thronging the airport in hope of escaping Taliban rule appeared as large as ever, despite the scenes of victims lying closely packed together in the aftermath of the bombing.
Afghans, American citizens and other foreigners were all acutely aware the window was closing to get out via the airlift.
Jamshad went to the airport with his wife and three small children. He clutched an invitation to a western country he didn’t want to identify.
“After the explosion I decided I would try. Because I am afraid now there will be more attacks, and I think now I have to leave,” said Jamshad, who like many Afghans uses only one name.
The Pentagon said Friday that there was just one suicide bomber — at the airport gate — not two, as U.S. officials initially said.
The officials who gave the Afghan death toll were not authorized to talk to media and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The Afghan victims included a news agency founder along with a number of impoverished Afghans who had gone to the airport in hopes of realizing a better life.
Details on the American dead — 11 Marines, a Navy sailor and an Army soldier — also began to emerge, ahead of the Pentagon’s release of their names. They included a young Marine and expectant father from Wyoming who was on his first tour of duty in Afghanistan.
British officials said two of the country’s citizens and the child of another Briton also were among those killed when the bomb exploded in the crowd.
On the morning after the attack, the Taliban used a pickup truck full of fighters and three captured Humvees to set up a barrier 500 metres from the airport, holding the crowds farther back from the U.S. troops at the gates than before.
More than 100,000 people have been safely evacuated through the Kabul airport, according to the U.S., but thousands more are struggling to leave in one of history’s biggest airlifts.