The Biden administration on Monday confirmed that the Afghan suicide bomber who killed more than a dozen U.S. service members at the Kabul airport in 2021 had been freed from a prison abandoned during the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul (R., Texas) in a Monday statement said a Defense Department report revealed that the suicide bomber who detonated an explosive belt at the airport’s Abbey Gate and killed 13 U.S. service members and injured 45 more in August 2021 was “Abdul Rahman al-Logari, an ISIS-K terrorist who was freed from the Bagram prison by the Taliban.”
American troops had left the Bagram Airfield just weeks before the Abbey Gate bombing, as part of the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal. Afghan officials said the American troops abandoned Bagram, Afghanistan’s largest airfield, after nearly 20 years without even notifying the base’s new Afghan commander.
McCaul in his Monday statement denounced congressional Democrats, arguing that the American public would have known what happened at the Kabul airport much sooner had the Democrats “fulfilled their constitutional obligations and conducted oversight.”
The Texas Republican also noted that the Taliban’s executions of civilians outside the airport “caused mass chaos around the airport as large and desperate crowds of civilians sought to flee, creating a deadly operating environment for U.S. service members at the gates amid significant ISIS-K threats.”
“With this report revealing the Biden administration has been sitting on critical information about what happened during the emergency evacuation from Afghanistan, it is clear there are many more questions to be answered,” McCaul added. “I am absolutely determined to see this investigation through to completion and will leave no stone unturned.”
