WASHINGTON/KABUL: Afghan Taliban have killed an Islamic State leader who was thought to be the mastermind behind the 2021 suicide bombing at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport that had left 13 US troops and 170 Afghans dead during the evacuation of NATO and US forces prior to the Taliban takeover.
The IS leader was killed some time ago, but it took time for the officials to confirm his death, US officials told BBC news partner CBS without identifying or disclosing the name of the dead.
They said that they determined the death via intelligence gathering and monitoring of the region that the IS leader had died. The US officials did not provide further details on how they learned he was responsible for the suicide bombing.
A senior US official told CBS that experts in the government were highly confident that “this IS leader indeed was the key individual responsible for the bombing.”
According to New York Times, the US learned of the leader’s death in early April. It is unclear whether the Taliban targeted him or if he was killed during ongoing fighting between IS and the Taliban, the newspaper said.
On Monday, the US started notifying families of the soldiers killed about the death of the IS leader.
Darin Hoover, the father of Marine Staff Sergeant Taylor Hoover, who was killed in the blast, told CBS that the Marine Corps had notified him of the news. “They did not tell me any details of the operation, but they said that their sources were highly trusted, and they’ve got it from several different sources that this IS individual was indeed killed,” Hoover said on Tuesday.
The blast came hours after Western governments had warned their citizens to stay away from Kabul International Airport because of an imminent threat of an attack by ISIS-K, the Afghanistan offshoot of the Islamic State group.
The blast occured around 18:00 local time on August 26, 2021 at the Abbey Gate to the airport, when a suicide bomber intruded into the middle of families waiting outside the gate and exploded.
Huge crowds had been gathering in the area, hoping to be accepted onto an evacuation flight as US troops pulled out of Afghanistan.
