Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Aug 28: A day after the United States president Joe Biden promised “revenge” by retaliating for the twin blasts outside the Kabul airport that was believed to have killed more than 200 persons, including 13 US soldiers, the US military claimed to have launched a drone strike killing the “planner” of the twin blasts.
The Islamic State’s Afghanistan affiliate dubbed Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), an offshoot extremist group which is an enemy both to the West and to Afghanistan’s Taliban and is known for especially lethal attacks, had claimed responsibility for Hamid Karzai International Airport attack in Kabul on Thursday.
“US military forces conducted an over-the-horizon counterterrorism operation early on Saturday morning against an ISIS-K planner. The unmanned airstrike occurred in the Nangahar Province of Afghanistan. Initial indications are that we killed the target. We know of no civilian casualties,” a statement by Central Command spokesperson Captain Bill Urban read.
The strike, launched from outside of Afghanistan, came as the airlift of evacuees from Kabul airport continued under much-heightened security after Thursday’s attack. First reports had said at least 78 people were killed, including 13 US troops, in the bomb explosion in the dense crowd in front of the airport’s Abbey Gate. Some media reported that fatalities numbered close to 200. US officials said gunmen opened fire after the explosion, adding to the carnage.
Following the attack US President Joe Biden vowed retaliation. “To those who carried out this attack as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this: We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay,” Biden said on Thursday. On Friday afternoon Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said they believe the group planned to strike the airlift again. “We still believe there are credible threats… specific, credible threats,” he said.
American forces working under heightened security and threats of another attack pressed ahead in the closing days of the US-led evacuation from Afghanistan. The US retaliation comes amid a steady flow of grim warnings from the White House and the Pentagon that there could be more extremist attacks targeting US forces ahead of President Joe Biden’s fast-approaching deadline Tuesday to end the airlift and withdraw American personnel.
Nearly 111,000 people have been evacuated from Afghanistan since the start of evacuation operations on August 14, the Pentagon said on Friday. The Taliban took control of Afghanistan on August 15. Their sudden victory, which comes as the US withdraws from the country following a 20-year-war, has sparked chaos at Kabul’s airport, from where America and allied nations are trying to safely evacuate thousands of citizens and allies. “Total eighty-nine flights yesterday flew out of Kabul, totalling approximately 12,500 evacuees now safely out of Afghanistan in a 24-hour period,” Maj Gen Hank Taylor, tasked with the responsibility of airlifting American citizens out of Afghanistan during the Taliban crisis, told reporters in Washington.
The Taliban have asked those in Kabul who have vehicles, weapons, ammunition and other government goods to hand them over to the relevant authorities within a week, TOLO news reported. According to the Afghanistan media, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said violators would be dealt with legally if the goods were not returned to the relevant authorities
Meanwhile, hundreds of Afghans desperate to flee the Taliban continued to crowd Kabul’s airport even after one of the deadliest bombings in the country’s history. British troops will end their evacuation of civilians from Afghanistan on Saturday, the armed forces chief, Gen Nick Carter, said.
“We’re reaching the end of the evacuation, which will take place during the course of today. And then it will be necessary to bring our troops out on the remaining aircraft,” he said. “We haven’t been able to bring everyone out, and that has been heart-breaking. And there have been some very challenging judgments that have had to be made on the ground. Carter said there were still some civilian evacuation flights coming from Kabul to the UK, but “very few now.”
Italy’s final evacuation flight of refugees from Afghanistan has landed at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci airport. The Italian Air Force C-130J with 58 Afghan citizens aboard arrived Saturday morning, some 17 hours after it departed from the Kabul airport and after a planned stopover. Also aboard were Italy’s consul and a NATO diplomat who had coordinated evacuations at the Kabul airport. Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio said Italy was prepared to work with the United Nations and with countries bordering Afghanistan on what he described as the “more difficult phase”.
He said that consisted of efforts to evacuate other Afghan citizens who worked with Italy’s military during its 20-year presence in Afghanistan but weren’t able to get into Kabul airport in time for the evacuation flights. He didn’t say how many still were eligible for evacuation to Italy.
A controlled detonation by American forces on Thursday that was heard throughout Kabul destroyed Eagle Base, the final CIA outpost outside the Kabul Airport, U.S. officials said on Friday. Blowing up the base was intended to ensure that any equipment or information left behind would not fall into the hands of the Taliban.
Eagle Base, first started early in the war at a former brick factory, had been used throughout the conflict and grew from a small outpost to a sprawling center that was used to train the counterterrorism forces of Afghanistan’s intelligence agencies. Those forces were some of the only ones to keep fighting as the government collapsed, sources said.
“They were an exceptional unit,” said Mick Mulroy, a former CIA officer who served in Afghanistan. “They were one of the primary means the Afghan government has used to keep the Taliban at bay over the last twenty years. They were the last ones fighting and they took heavy casualties.” Local Afghans knew little about the base. The compound was extremely secure and designed so it would be all but impossible to penetrate. Walls reaching 10 feet high surrounded the site and a thick metal gate slid open and shut quickly to allow cars inside. Once the cars got inside, they still had to clear three outer security checkpoints where the vehicle would be searched, and documents would be screened before being allowed inside the base.
The former US president Donald Trump, however, continued with criticism of the current dispensation claiming on Saturday that the US had been put in the worst position it could possibly be put in, slamming his successor Joe Biden on his Afghan policy. The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan on August 15, two weeks before the US was set to complete its troop withdrawal after a costly two-decade war. The insurgents stormed across the country, capturing all major cities in a matter of days, as Afghan security forces trained and equipped by the US and its allies melted away.
China and the U.S. discussed the rapidly evolving situation in Afghanistan during their first round of military-level talks after President Joe Biden came to power in January this year, a media report said on Saturday. The deputy director for the People’s Liberation Army Office for International Military Cooperation Major General Huang Xueping held a video conference with his US counterpart Michael Chase last week.
“Afghanistan crisis is one of the most urgent issues of risk management that needs to be discussed … Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi raised this issue in the Alaska talks [earlier this year], but his American counterpart ignored it,” the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post quoted an official of the Chinese military as saying.
Hundreds of Afghans protested outside a bank in Kabul on Saturday and others formed long lines at cash machines as a U.N. agency warned that a worsening drought could leave millions in need of humanitarian aid.
The protesters at New Kabul Bank included many civil servants demanding their salaries, which they said had not been paid for the past three to six months. They said even though banks reopened three days ago no one has been able to withdraw cash. ATM machines are still operating, but withdrawals are limited to around $200 every 24 hours, contributing to the formation of long lines.
Pakistani customs officials on Saturday claimed to have foiled a bid to smuggle arms into the country from Afghanistan by recovering foreign-made weapons used by the US and NATO forces. A Pakistan-bounded trailer truck was stopped at the Torkham border on Friday as it entered from the Afghanistan side, sources said. Officials recovered two M4A1 carbine rifles, seven Glock 9mm pistols, eight Beretta pistol barrels and ammunition from the vehicle, they said.
An Afghan national has been arrested and the vehicle has been seized, they said.
Meanwhile, a US Republican senator said any sustainable solution in Afghanistan must include Pakistan. “We all must remember (that) Pakistan is a nuclear-armed nation, and there is a Pakistan version of the Taliban who wishes to topple the Pakistani government and military,” Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted, in an apparent reference to Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan.
Even as the US intelligence agencies were near certain that an attack was imminent outside Kabul airport, triggering a State Department warning to American citizens to leave the area immediately, the suicide bomb attack within 12 hours left a gaping hole in the US intelligence network in the war-torn country.
But the swiftness with which the Taliban had run through the country is being viewed as a major boost to the extremist forces in the region and elsewhere in the world. A few days after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, a convoy of militants drove through the city of Idlib in northwestern Syria in cars bearing the group’s white-and-black flags, honking horns and firing their guns in the air.
The celebrations by an al-Qaida affiliate in a remote corner of war-torn Syria were an expression of the triumph felt by radical Islamic groups from the Gaza Strip to Pakistan and West Africa who see America’s violence-marred exit from Afghanistan an opportunity to reassert their presence. For such groups, the chaotic US departure following the collapse of security forces it had trained for two decades is a gift, underlining their message that Washington eventually abandons its allies, and that defeating powerful armies is possible with enough patience.
On the humanitarian side, a former British soldier who runs an animal shelter in Kabul was caught in the “chaos” after a series of blasts ripped through the Hamid Karzai International Airport on Thursday. Paul ‘Pen’ Farthing, who was trying to leave Afghanistan along with his staff and hundreds of dogs and cats, is now being assisted by the UK government to leave the country.
Britain’s Ministry of Defence confirmed in a statement on Friday: “Pen Farthing and his pets were assisted through the system at Kabul airport by the UK Armed Forces. They are currently being supported while he awaits transportation. On the direction of the Defence Secretary, clearance for their charter flight has been sponsored by the UK Government.”