US forces helping to evacuate Afghans desirous to flee Taliban rule were on alert for more attacks on Friday after a minimum of one Islamic State terrorist killed 85 people including 13 US soldiers outside the gates of Kabul airport.
Two blasts and gunfire rocked the realm outside the airport on Thursday evening, witnesses said. Video shot by Afghan journalists showed dozens of bodies strewn around a canal on the sting of the airport.
A health official and a Taliban official said the toll of Afghans killed had risen to 72, including 28 Taliban members, although a Taliban spokesman later denied that any of their fighters guarding the airport perimeter had been killed.
The US military said 13 of its service members were killed in what it described as a fancy attack.
Islamic State (ISIS), an enemy of the Islamist Taliban further because the West, said one in every of its suicide bombers targeted “translators and collaborators with the American army”.
It was not clear if suicide bombers detonated both blasts or if one was a planted bomb. it had been also not clear if ISIS gunmen were involved within the attack or if the firing that followed the blasts was Taliban guards firing into the air to regulate crowds.
US officials vowed retribution.
General Frank McKenzie, head folks Central Command, said US commanders were looking ahead to more attacks by Islamic State, including possibly rockets or car-bombs targeting the airport.
“We’re doing everything we are able to to be prepared,” he said, adding that some intelligence was being shared with the Taliban which he believed “some attacks are thwarted by them.”
US forces are racing to finish their withdrawal from Afghanistan by an Aug. 31 deadline set by President Joe Biden. He says the u. s. way back achieved its original rationale for invading the country in 2001: to uproot al Qaeda terrorists and forestall a repeat of the Sept. 11 attacks on the u. s. that year.
Biden said he had ordered the Pentagon to plan the way to strike ISIS-K, the Islamic State affiliate that claimed responsibility.
“We won’t forgive. we’ll not forget. we’ll hunt you down and cause you to pay,” Biden said during televised comments from the White House.
Video taken after the attack showed corpses during a waste water canal by the airport fence, some being fished out and laid in heaps while wailing civilians probe for loved ones.
“I saw bodies and body parts flying within the air sort of a tornado blowing plastic bags,” said one Afghan witness. “That little water flowing within the sewage canal had become blood.”
Several thousand people were back at the airport fence on Friday, in line with video posted on social media.
Staking A Claim
British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said the threat of attacks would increase as Western troops got closer to completing the massive airlift and leaving.
“The narrative is often visiting be, as we leave, certain groups like ISIS will want to stake a claim that they need driven out the US or the united kingdom,” Wallace told Sky News. He also vowed action against ISIS wherever it manifests itself.
A US Central Command spokesperson said 18 soldiers wounded within the attack were “in the method of being geometrically evacuated from Afghanistan on specially equipped C-17s with embarked surgical units”.
A Taliban official lamented the quantity of its members killed, saying that they had lost more men that the Americans, but Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid later said no Taliban were killed within the twin blasts.
Western countries fear that the Taliban, who once sheltered Osaka bin Laden’s al Qaeda before it had been ousted from power by the US-led 2001 invasion, will allow Afghanistan to show again into a haven for terrorists. The Taliban say they’ll not let the country be utilized by terrorists.
ISIS-K was initially confined to areas on the border with Pakistan but has established a second front within the north of the country. The Combating Terrorism Centre at military installation says ISIS-K includes Pakistanis from other terrorist groups and Uzbek extremists additionally to Afghans.
100,000 Taken get into Airlift
The u. s. will maintain with evacuations despite the threat of further attacks, McKenzie said, noting that there have been still about 1,000 US citizens in Afghanistan.
The pace of evacuation flights had accelerated on Friday and American passport holders had been allowed to enter the airport compound, consistent with a Western security official stationed inside the airport.
In the past 12 days, Western countries have evacuated nearly 100,000 people. But they acknowledge that thousands are going to be left behind when the last US troops leave at the top of the month.
The American casualties in Thursday’s attack were believed to be the foremost US troops killed in Afghanistan in a very single incident since 30 personnel died when a helicopter was shot down in 2011.
The US deaths were the primary in action in Afghanistan in 18 months, a fact likely to be cited by critics who accuse Biden of recklessly abandoning a stable and hard-won establishment by ordering an abrupt pullout.
