„Do you believe you bear any responsibility in the way that withdrawal played out?“ Harris was asked by a moderator.
„Well, I will tell you, I agreed with President Biden‘s decision to pull out of Afghanistan.“ she said.
„Four presidents said they would and Joe Biden did.“
During the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, 13 U.S. service members were killed in a terrorist attack.
President Joe Biden is under increasing pressure to respond in a way that stops these attacks for good. Iran-backed militants have targeted US military facilities in Iraq and Syria over 160 times since October, and several Republican lawmakers have called for the US to hit inside Iran directly to send a clear message.
But the biggest challenge now for the Biden administration is how to respond to the drone strike – the deadliest attack on US forces in the region since the bombing at Abbey Gate killed 13 US service members in the closing days of the Afghanistan withdrawal – without sparking a regional war.
(Archiveinträge / archive entries)
(Feb. 4, 2022)
A total of 11 Marines, a soldier and a sailor were killed in the ISIS-K attack with a total of 45 wounded.
Contrary to first reports, it was not a complex attack. „The investigation found that a single explosive device killed at least 170 Afghan civilians and 13 U.S. service members by explosively directing ball bearings through a packed crowd into our men and women at Abbey Gate,“ McKenzie said. „The investigation found no definitive proof that anyone was ever hit or killed by gunfire either U.S. or Afghan. This conclusion was based upon the careful consideration of sworn testimony of more than 100 witnesses, and especially those witnesses and Observation Towers — both American and British — who were in locations unaffected by the blast, and that had commanding views of the scene before, during and after the explosive attack.“
(archive entries)
Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, who oversees U.S. Central Command, ordered the additional interviews “to ensure we do our due diligence” with information that came to light after the military closed its investigation of the incident, Michael Lawhorn, a Central Command spokesman, said in a statement. By itself, the move does not formally reopen the investigation, completed in November 2021, but the general could determine that doing so is necessary once the additional interviews are complete.
(…)
The attack’s suspected mastermind was killed by the Taliban earlier this year, U.S. officials disclosed in April.
Im Sondierungspapier einer möglichen künftigen Regierungskoalition von SPD, Grünen und FDP ist bereits festgehalten: Ein Parlamentarischer Untersuchungsausschuss soll im Bundestag die Geschehnisse rund um die militärische Evakuierung in Kabul durchleuchten. Und eine sogenannte Enquete-Kommission soll ergänzend die deutsche Afghanistan-Politik unter die Lupe nehmen. Braucht es da, zusätzlich, noch eine teure Ausschreibung?
It happened in my area of responsibility, so I‘m the responsible officer for that strike,” McKenzie said during a Senate hearing on Tuesday.
McKenzie said he was under “no pressure” and “no one in my chain of command below me was under any pressure to take that strike.”
Austin said military officials had discussed “a range of possibilities,” but no one planned for the possibility the Afghan government would collapse as quickly as it did.
“We certainly did not plan against a collapse of the government in 11 days,” Austin told lawmakers in response to a lawmaker question.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Joint Chiefs Chair General Mark Milley, and General Kenneth McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, testify on the Afghanistan withdrawal.
The committee‘s chair, the hawkish New Jersey Democrat Bob Menendez, pulled no punches in his opening statement, threatening to subpoena Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and other Biden officials who decline to voluntarily appear before the committee.
„Mr. Secretary, the execution of the U.S. withdrawal was clearly and fatally flawed,“ Menendez told Blinken.
(search results)
(01.09.2021)
Chris Bryant then asks about reports that British officials told people to go to the airport on the very day of the terrorist attack.
Dominic Raab says the travel advice was changed the night before the attack, and people were told not to come to the airport. The team was shifted from the Barons Hotel through to the airport to protect them.
He says he saw the report and „I need to investigate it“, but doesn‘t reject the possibility.
(01.09.2021)
The foreign secretary promised he would investigate a serious allegation that British officials told Afghans to proceed to the airport’s Abbey gate on Thursday last week, despite a specific warning that Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) was preparing a terror attack that day.
Nearly 200 people were killed in a double bombing at and near the gate used for the British evacuation – but BBC’s Newsnight has reported that Afghans were sent emails earlier that day asking, in one case, if they were “at the correct gate? Abbey gate”.
(27.08.2021)
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab confirmed the deaths on Friday. He added that a further two people were injured in the blast – an adult British national and an Afghan child with a British family.
“These were innocent people and it is a tragedy that as they sought to bring their loved ones to safety in the UK they were murdered by cowardly terrorists,” Mr Raab said.
(01.09.2021)
“Please advise that you are at the correct gate? Abbey Gate on hawa on Shawasi Street,” one UK staff member wrote to the interpreter in an email seen by the BBC.
The interpreter decided not to go to Abbey Gate because he felt the situation was becoming increasingly dangerous and said that had he followed the advice he was given, he would “be no more”.
While all-white airframes aren‘t supposed to attract much attention, that paint scheme is also synonymous with clandestine operations, including „whitewashed“ aircraft often used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) for low-profile operations abroad. With that reality in mind, keen observers keeping an eye on traffic at Hamid Karzai International rightfully started thinking this may be some CIA asset that was slipping in on a unique mission. It turns out, that wasn‘t necessarily the case.
(01.09.2021)
Emails seen by Newsnight show that even though the UK and US deemed a threat to the airport to be imminent, the British embassy told people to „use the Abbey Gate [near] to the Baron Hotel“.
Almost 200 people were killed in the explosion, including two UK citizens.
The UK government said it was investigating the emails.
It‘s been revealed the perpetrator had been in court last month for planning an attack.
Auckland mayor Phil Goff told Heather du Plessis-Allan he is frustrated about the details not able to be revealed just yet due to suppression that even the Prime Minister has to adhere by.
US-Verteidigungsminister Lloyd Austin will die Abläufe beim Truppenabzug aus Afghanistan evaluieren – aber ohne Eile. „Keine Operation ist je perfekt“, sagte Austin gestern in Washington auf die Frage, ob das US-Militär im Rückblick etwas hätte anders machen sollen.
(31.08.2021)
“We coordinated very closely with the US, in particular around the Isis-K threat, which we anticipated although tragically were not able to prevent, but it is certainly right to say we got our civilians out of the processing centre by Abbey gate, but it is just not true to suggest that other than securing our civilians inside the airport that we were pushing to leave the gate open.
“In fact, and let me just be clear about this, we were issuing changes to travel advice before the bomb attack took place and saying to people in the crowd, about which I was particularly concerned, that certainly UK nationals and anyone else should leave because of the risk.”
(30.08.2021)
The British Ministry of Defence declined to respond to allegations they were to blame for keeping the gate open, but said in a statement: ‚Throughout Operation Pitting we have worked closely with the US to ensure the safe evacuation of thousands of people.
(30.08.2021)
The Pentagon criticised the leaking of the call details reported in Politico, telling the news website: “This story is based on the unlawful disclosure of classified information and internal deliberations of a sensitive nature.
“As soon as we became aware of the material divulged to the reporter, we engaged Politico at the highest levels to prevent the publication of information that would put our troops and our operations at the airport at greater risk. We condemn the unlawful disclosure of classified information and oppose the publication of a story based on it while a dangerous operation is ongoing.”
(30.08.2021)
Commanders calling in from Kabul relayed that the Abbey Gate, where American citizens had been told to gather in order to gain entrance to the airport, was “highest risk,” and detailed their plans to protect the airport.
“I don’t believe people get the incredible amount of risk on the ground,” Austin said, according to the classified notes.
On a separate call at 4 that afternoon, or 12:30 a.m. on Thursday in Kabul, the commanders detailed a plan to close Abbey Gate by Thursday afternoon Kabul time. But the Americans decided to keep the gate open longer than they wanted in order to allow their British allies, who had accelerated their withdrawal timeline, to continue evacuating their personnel, based at the nearby Baron Hotel.
(28.08.2021)
“We‘re putting diplomacy first and seeing where that takes us,” Biden said during an Oval Office meeting that was delayed by the suicide bomb attack in Afghanistan. “But if diplomacy fails, we‘re ready to turn to other options.”
Bennett arrived at the White House aiming to dissuade Biden from returning to the Iran nuclear deal that was brokered during the Obama administration and later scrapped by President Donald Trump.
The United States’s Central Command (CENTCOM) said it was aware of “reports of civilian casualties” following the drone attack, which it said hit “multiple suicide bombers” who were preparing to attack the ongoing evacuations at the Kabul airport.
The president and the first lady left early Sunday for Dover Air Force Base, where they will meet with the families and participate in a dignified transfer.
Das US-Militär hat nach eigenen Angaben in der afghanischen Hauptstadt Kabul einen Luftangriff durchgeführt, um eine „unmittelbare Bedrohung“ für den Flughafenbetrieb durch Terroristen abzuwenden.
Luftaufnahme des US-Verteidigungsministeriums | picture alliance/dpa
Nach Anschlag in Kabul US-Drohnenangriff gegen den IS
Stand: 28.08.2021 04:30 Uhr
Die Antwort der USA kam schnell: Als Reaktion auf den Anschlag am Flughafen von Kabul hat die US-Armee einen Drohnenangriff auf einen mutmaßlich Beteiligten der Terrormiliz IS geflogen.
Capt. Bill Urban, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, said in a statement that military forces conducted an “over-the-horizon counterterrorism operation today against an ISIS-K planner” in the Nangahar Province of Afghanistan.
ISIS-K is based in the Nagarhar and Kunar provinces east of Kabul, according to NBC News.
Glenn Greenwald analyzes the reactions to the horrific terror attack in Kabul this morning, and debunks the propagandistic talking points used by Deep State operatives and their media allies to push the US into indefinite war.
(25.08.2021)
Q And you said that you still — a few days ago, you said you squarely stand by your decision to pull out.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I do. Because look at it this way, folks — and I’m going to — I have another meeting, for real. But imagine where we’d be if I had indicated, on May the 1st, I was not going to renegotiate an evacuation date; we were going to stay there.
I’d have only one alternative: Pour thousands of more troops back into Afghanistan to fight a war that we had already won, relative — is why the reason we went in the first place.
I have never been of the view that we should be sacrificing American lives to try to establish a democratic government in Afghanistan — a country that has never once in its entire history been a united country, and is made up — and I don’t mean this in a derogatory — made up of different tribes who have never, ever, ever gotten along with one another.
And so, as I said before — and this is the last comment I’ll make, but we’ll have more chance to talk about this, unfortunately, beyond, because we’re not out yet — if Osama bin Laden, as well as al Qaeda, had chosen to launch an attack — when they left Saudi Arabia — out of Yemen, would we have ever gone to Afghanistan? Even though the Taliban completely controlled Afghanistan at the time, would we have ever gone?
I know it’s not fair to ask you questions. It’s rhetorical. But raise your hand if you think we should have gone and given up thousands of lives and tens of thousands of wounded.
Our interest in going was to prevent al Qaeda from reemerging — first to get bin Laden, wipe out al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and prevent that from happening again.
As I’ve said 100 times: Terrorism has metastasized around the world; we have greater threats coming out of other countries a heck of a lot closer to the United States.
We don’t have military encampments there; we don’t keep people there. We have over-the-horizon capability to keep them from going after us.
Ladies and gentlemen, it was time to end a 20-year war.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are pressuring Biden not to withdraw until evacuations were complete
We will continue to update.
Die US-Botschaft hatte US-Bürger, die sich am Abbey Gate, East Gate oder North Gate aufhielten, in der Nacht zu Donnerstag dazu aufgerufen, das Gebiet „sofort“ zu verlassen. Großbritanniens Staatssekretär im Verteidigungsministerium, James Heappey, sprach noch am Morgen von der Drohung eines „ernsthaften, unmittelbaren, tödlichen Angriffs“ binnen Stunden auf den Flughafen oder die von westlichen Truppen genutzten Zentren.
(25.08.2021)
(26 Aug 2021)
The US Embassy in Kabul issued an alert advising US citizens to avoid travelling to the airport and said those already at the gates should leave immediately. It cited unspecified “security threats”.
The British Foreign Office issued a similar advisory, telling people in the area of the airport to “move away to a safe location”, adding, “There is an ongoing and high threat of terrorist attack.”
Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade also urged Australians and Afghans with a visa for Australia to leave the area, warning of a “very high threat of a terrorist attack” at the airport.
(August 21, 2021)
Kirby’s comments followed the disclosure that U.S. troops, traveling aboard Chinook helicopters, left the airport Thursday to retrieve 169 Americans from a nearby hotel.
(Published 4:52 PM UTC Aug. 26, 2021 Updated 8:44 PM UTC Aug. 26, 2021)
Arriving at the airport and passing through a security gate is the first step. Approaching the airport through snarled traffic and Taliban roadblocks was already difficult, but now entry may now be impossible after U.S. forces closed all gates due to an apparent attack.
American citizens who show up at the gates of Hamid Karzai International Airport would find a seat on one of the last flights out, but just about anybody else would be left behind, according to a U.S. official who is familiar with the operation but not authorized to speak publicly.
Outside the airport, desperation mounts for American citizens and Afghans who aided U.S. troops. U.S. special operators swooped into a neighborhood in Kabul to scoop up about 20 Americans unable to reach the airport, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said Wednesday.