White House National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby claimed in a statement Tuesday that Taliban jihadists had killed a senior Islamic State official described as the “mastermind” of the 2021 Kabul airport bombing.
Kirby did not name the terrorist allegedly eliminated. Reports citing anonymous American officials say that Washington does not believe that the Taliban jihadists involved in the incident, which allegedly occurred in early April, were aware of who they had killed. The anonymous officials also denied U.S. involvement in the operation or any coordination between the United States and the Taliban.
On August 26, 2021, as thousands of Afghans desperately attempted to flee the capital via its airport in the aftermath of the Taliban’s takeover of the country, a suicide bomber detonated near the airport’s Abbey Gate, killing 170 civilians and 13 U.S. service members; the deaths were the largest loss of American soldiers in Afghanistan in a decade.
“He was a key ISIS-K official directly involved in plotting operations like Abbey Gate [the Kabul airport bombing], and now is no longer able to plot or conduct attacks,” Kirby asserted. “We have made clear to the Taliban that it is their responsibility to ensure that they give no safe haven to terrorists, whether al Qaeda or ISIS-K.”
ISIS-K is an acronym used for the Islamic State-Khorasan Province, the Afghan wing of the Sunni terrorist group.
Prior to Kirby’s confirmation, reports began circulating that authorities were notifying the families of those killed at the airport bombing of the death of the attack’s alleged mastermind.
“The account from the families to The Associated Press news agency was confirmed by three US officials and a senior congressional aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details that had not yet been made public,” Al Jazeera noted on Tuesday. These sources claimed that the Taliban were not aware of who they had eliminated.
ABC News quoted an anonymous “senior” American official who insisted that Washington played no role in the alleged terrorist’s killing.
“We did not conduct this operation directly with the Taliban. We are not partnering with the Taliban. But we do think the outcome is a significant one,” the alleged official was quoted as saying.
None of the Taliban’s top spokesmen on social media – government communications director Zabihullah Mujahid, the head of the Taliban “political office” Suhail Shaheen, and the spokesman for the Taliban Foreign Affairs Ministry Abdul Qahar Balkhi – have remarked on the alleged removal of an ISIS terrorist from the battlefield at press time. The Bakhtar News Agency, which the Taliban controls, reported the news on Tuesday, but relayed reporting in American media, without any comment from Taliban officials.
The Taliban has enthusiastically rejected any evidence that the Islamic State has a meaningful presence in Afghanistan. Most recently, Mujahid issued an enraged denial of information that surfaced in an alleged leak of classified Pentagon documents this weekend claiming that ISIS-K has become one of the most functional and dangerous wings of the terrorist group. The leak is part of a larger collection of documents, which some governments have dismissed as doctored, that emerged on the video game chat site Discord at the beginning of the year.
“Spreading irresponsible and fabricated allegations at such a time is the work of intelligence circles that do not want Afghans to live in peace,” Mujahid asserted this week. “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan [the Taliban] enjoys complete control over the country and does not allow anyone to use the territory of Afghanistan against the security of another country, especially the sedition group ISIS, which has been severely defeated and is in the process of being eliminated.”
The documents in question claimed that ISIS-K “has been developing a cost-effective model for external operations that relies on resources from outside Afghanistan, operatives in target countries, and extensive facilitation networks.”
The reports this month join other, similar assessments of Afghanistan that have surfaced in the past six months that Taliban jihadists are struggling to contain ISIS violence, particularly against Chinese interests in the country. No country formally recognizes the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan, despite its uncontested control of the country, but the Chinese Communist Party has agreed to invest in the Taliban as an “interim” government and has signed multiple trade deals with the terrorists. China borders Afghanistan and has expressed interest in expanding its “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), a debt-trap scheme that relies on predatory infrastructure loans to erode the sovereignty of participating countries, into its neighbor. In response, ISIS-K has claimed responsibility for multiple gun and bomb attacks in Kabul that it has claimed were intended to kill Chinese businessmen and government officials in town for negotiations with its Taliban rivals.
Chinese diplomats have publicly pressured the Taliban to do more to protect Chinese interests from jihadists in the country.
The Taliban – which American forces had overthrown as the Afghan government in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks – returned to power on August 15, 2021, after leftist American President Joe Biden broke an agreement with the group that would have seen American troops depart the country on May 1 of that year. Biden extended the 20-year-old Afghan war, announcing a withdrawal in September, but hastily exited the country a month early as the Taliban launched a nationwide conquest campaign that ended with then-Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fleeing the country via helicopter.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a U.S. watchdog agency, found in a report published in February that Biden had left at least $7.2 billion worth of American equipment abandoned in the country after the withdrawal. Taliban jihadists have organized several parades since their takeover featuring American hardware.
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