Taliban kill head of Islamic State cell that bombed Kabul airport

The Taliban have killed the leader of Islamic State, also known as Isis cell, responsible for the suicide bombing at the international airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, in August 2021 that killed 13 US troops and as many as 170 civilians, the White House said Tuesday.

Four senior US 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 were specifically targeting the insurgent or if he was killed in one of the increasing number of attacks between Taliban and Islamic State fighters, the officials said.

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 – most likely from informants, electronic intercepts or information from allied spy services – analysts said 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.

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The administration on Monday began calling relatives of the US troops who died in the attack to tell them that the ISIS-K leader had been killed by Taliban security forces in recent weeks.

The 2021 evacuation from Afghanistan and its aftermath continue to be a subject of heated debate on Capitol Hill, where Republicans have voiced similar demands of the Biden administration.

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 they did the best they could in a difficult situation and faulting President Joe Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, for making a deal with the Taliban that committed the United States to exit.

There is limited, if any, information sharing about the Islamic State group between the Taliban and the United States, and US officials said the United States had no involvement in the attack that killed the cell leader. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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