The Kabul airport blast killed some 170 Afghans and 13 US troops who were securing the airport for the traumatic exit. The Islamic State cell leader was killed by the Taliban, the US National Security Council said on April 25.
He was killed in southern Afghanistan in early April as the Taliban conducted a series of operations against the Islamic State group, according to one of the officials. The Taliban at the time were not aware of the identity of the person they killed.
The suicide bombing at Kabul airport, which also left 13 US service members dead in August 2021, coincided with the tumultuous American exit from Afghanistan 20 years after it invaded the South Asian nation following the 9/11 attacks.
The Biden administration did not name the ISIS-Khorasan leader killed. According to an official, US intelligence has been working to confirm the killing, and the Biden administration has held off announcing it until the families of the 13 US troops could be told.
But reports have claimed that it was Abdul Rehman Al-Loghri, the top ISIS-K figurehead who was released from a prison at Bagram airbase, only days before the Taliban replaced democratically-elected Ashraf Ghani Government from Kabul’s corridors of power.
A recent Washington Post report citing leaked Pentagon documents said the US believes that since the withdrawal, Afghanistan is becoming a “staging ground” for the Islamic State group.
The Afghan affiliate of Islamic State, known as Islamic State Khorasan or ISIS-K, after an old name of the region, is an enemy of the Taliban. Fighters loyal to Islamic State first appeared in eastern Afghanistan in 2014 and later made inroads in other areas. The group has continued to carry out attacks in Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover, especially against the country’s minority groups.
The Taliban, so far, have managed to prevent the group from seizing Afghanistan’s territory. But despite that, according to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, ISIS-K has spread out from eastern Afghanistan to all of the country’s 34 provinces.
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