Taliban kills head of Islamic State cell that bombed Kabul Airport

WASHINGTON – The Taliban has killed the leader of the Islamic State cell responsible for

the suicide bombing at the international airport in Kabul,

Afghanistan, in August 2021 that killed 13 United States soldiers and as many as 170 civilians, the White House said on Tuesday.

Four senior United States officials said that US intelligence analysts became aware in early April that the mastermind of the attack, whom they declined to identify, had died in a Taliban operation in Afghanistan.

It was unclear whether the Taliban was specifically targeting the insurgent or if he was killed in one of the increasing number of attacks between the Taliban and Islamic State fighters, the officials said.

Mr John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, called the Taliban operation “another in a series of high-profile leadership losses” that the Islamic State cell, known as Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K, had suffered this year.

The officials said that based on classified intelligence reports, analysts concluded with “high confidence” that the chief plotter of the airport attack had been killed.

But the officials offered no evidence to support that conclusion or other details about his purported death.

The administration on Monday began calling relatives of the US soldiers who died in the attack to tell them that the ISIS-K leader had been killed by Taliban security forces in recent weeks. Officials were sparing with the details they were willing to share with the families of the killed service members.

“They couldn’t give me his name; they couldn’t tell me the details of the operation,” said Mr Darin Hoover, the father of Staff Sergeant Taylor Hoover of the Marine Corps, who was killed in the blast.

The 2021 evacuation from Afghanistan and its aftermath continue to be a subject of heated debate on Capitol Hill.

Republican lawmakers have accused the administration of being directly responsible for the failures of the exit and condemned administration officials as inept when it comes to the future of counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan.

Democrats have largely defended those officials, arguing that they did the best they could in a difficult situation and faulting US President Joe Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, for making a deal with the Taliban that committed the US to exit.

There is very limited, if any, information sharing about the Islamic State group between the Taliban and the US, and the US officials said that the US had no involvement in the attack that killed the cell leader. NYTIMES