After second US strike, a cuddle amid the carnage
Attack ‘left three children dead’, claims Afghan official
AN AMERICAN drone strike blew up ‘multiple suicide bombers’ heading for Kabul’s airport yesterday just days after more than 170 people were killed in an attack by suspected Isis-K terrorists.
But according to an Afghan official speaking on condition of anonymity, three children were also killed in the drone strike in a residential area close to the city’s airport.
Witnesses said it targeted two cars parked in a residential building near the airport and it killed and wounded several civilians.
US Navy Captain Bill Urban said the drone strike was carried out ‘to eliminate an imminent Isis-K threat’ and had ‘successfully hit its target’ of a car bomb poised to attack desperate Afghans attempting to flee the country.
He said US military would investigate whether civilians had also been killed. Last night it could not be confirmed whether the US’s intervention could have triggered an explosion in which children died.
Afghan police initially said at around the same time as the drone strike, a rocket had hit a neighbourhood near the airport. Video footage captured plumes of black smoke rising into the air above Kabul. A Taliban spokesmaterial’. man described the drone strike and the rocket attack as separate incidents, but residents said they heard only one large blast.
Capt Urban said the drone strike on the car bomb caused ‘significant secondary explosions’, which ‘indicated the presence of a substantial amount of explosive On Saturday, the US killed two ‘planners and facilitators’ from Isis-K in another drone strike on a car near the city of Jalalabad
President Joe Biden had vowed to ‘hunt down’ those responsible for Thursday’s terror atrocity at the airport, in which 13 US troops died, representing the country’s largest loss of life in Afghanistan since 2011.
At least three Britons were also among the victims.
Mr Biden promised to keep up the airstrikes, with another terror attack at the airport ‘highly likely’ before the US withdraws all remaining servicemen tomorrow.
Yesterday US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan reiterated America’s intent to use military force where necessary in the face of the terror threat.
‘The President does not intend to start a new war in Afghanistan,’ he told the American news station CBS.
‘That being said, he also is going to talk to his commanders
‘We are degrading the group Isis-K’
about whatever set of tools and capabilities they need to get the people who attacked our troops at the Kabul airport and to make sure that we are degrading and debilitating the group, Isis-K, that conducted this attack.’
He added: ‘So yes, we will continue to take the kinds of overthe-horizon [remote] strikes like we did over the weekend against the Isis-K facilitators and plotters. And yes, we will consider other operations to go after these guys, to get them and to take them off the battlefield.’
Isis-K, a regional Islamic State splinter group based in the eastern province of Nangahar, has claimed responsibility for last week’s suicide bomb attack.
Isis-K members consider the Taliban ‘apostates’ and liberals, and resent their deals with Western forces.