Biden promise to strike extremists faces new Afghan reality.
U.S. forces keep up Kabul airlift under threat of more attacks
KABUL, Afghanistan — American forces working under heightened security and the threat of another terror attack pressed ahead with the evacuation from Kabul’s airport Friday, the day after a suicide bombing at the gates wrote a devastating final chapter to the nearly 20-year 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.
The White House and the Pentagon warned there could be more bloodshed ahead of President Joe Biden’s fastapproaching 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.
As the call to prayer echoed Friday through Kabul 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 the 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 1,600 feet from the airport, holding the crowds farther back from the U.S. troops at the gates than before.
U.S. military officials said that some gates were closed and other security measures put in place. They said there were tighter restrictions at Taliban checkpoints and fewer people around the gates. The military said it had also asked the Taliban to close certain roads because of the possibility of suicide bombers in vehicles.
The Pentagon noted the airport already had defenses against rocket attacks and said the U.S. would keep up manned and unmanned flights over the airport for surveillance and protection, including the use of AC-130 gunships.
U.S. officials said evacuees with proper credentials still were being allowed through the gates. Inside, about 5,400 evacuees awaited flights.
In Washington, U.S. commanders briefed Biden on developing plans to strike back at the Islamic State and make good on the president’s vow to the attackers to “hunt you down and make you pay.”
Biden pronounced the U.S. effort to evacuate Americans, Afghan allies and others most at risk from the Taliban a “worthy mission.”
“And we will complete the mission,” he said.
The U.N. Security Council called the targeting of fleeing civilians and those trying to help them “especially abhorrent.”
The Taliban have wrested back control of Afghanistan two decades after they were ousted in a U.S.-led invasion following the 9/11 attacks. Their return to power has terrified many Afghans, who have rushed to flee the country ahead of the American withdrawal.
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.
The White House said Friday morning that 8,500 evacuees had been flown out aboard U.S. military aircraft in the previous 24 hours, along with about 4,000 people on coalition flights. That was about the same total as the day before the attack.
WASHINGTON — By promising to strike the extremists who killed 13 Americans and dozens of Afghans, President Joe Biden now confronts the reality of finding and targeting them in a country without U.S. military and intelligence teams on the ground and no help from a friendly government in Kabul.
The president was warned Friday to expect another lethal attack in the closing days of a frantic U.S.-led evacuation. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden’s national security team offered a grim outlook.
“They advised the president and vice president that another terror attack in Kabul is likely, but that they are taking maximum force protection measures at the Kabul airport,” Psaki said, echoing what the Pentagon has been saying since the bombing Thursday at Kabul airport.
Few new details about the attack emerged a day later, but the Pentagon corrected its initial report that there had been suicide bombings at two locations. It said there was just one — at or near the Abbey Gate, followed by gunfire. The report of a second bombing at the Baron Hotel proved to be false, said Maj. Gen. Hank Taylor of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff; he attributed the mistake to initial confusion.
Biden said in an address to the nation after the attack that the perpetrators cannot hide, and he vowed to strike back at the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate. “We will hunt you down and make you pay,” he said.
Taylor said the Pentagon will be prepared.
“We have options there right now” to enable whatever retaliatory action may be ordered, Taylor said.
In an Oval Office appearance Friday, Biden again expressed his condolences to victims of the attack. The return home of U.S. military members’ remains in coming days will provide painful and poignant reminders not just of the devastation at the Kabul airport but also of the costly way the war is ending. More than 2,400 U.S. service members died in the war and tens of thousands were injured over the past two decades.
The Marine Corps said 11 of the 13 Americans killed were Marines. One was a Navy sailor and one an Army soldier. Their names have not been released pending notification of their families, a sometimes-lengthy process that Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said involves “difficult conversations.”
Biden ordered U.S. flags to half-staff across the country in honor of the 13.
They were the first U.S. service members killed in Afghanistan since February 2020, the month the Trump administration struck an agreement with the Taliban that called for the militant group to halt attacks on Americans in exchange for a U.S. agreement to remove all American troops and contractors by May 2021.
The U.S. is still scrambling to establish bases closer to Afghanistan while at the same time removing people who have worked with the CIA and other intelligence agencies in the country, former officials have said.