Muscat: The Foreign Ministry in Oman has conveyed the Sultanate’s wholehearted condemnation of the bombings that targeted Kabul Airport on Thursday. “We offer our sincere condolences and sympathy to the families of those who lost their lives, and best wishes for a speedy recovery for the injured.”
US forces helping to evacuate Afghans desperate to flee Taliban rule were on alert for more attacks on Friday after at least one IS suicide bomber killed 85 people including 13 US soldiers outside the gates of Kabul airport.
Two blasts and gunfire rocked the area outside the airport on Thursday evening, witnesses said.
Video shot by Afghan journalists showed dozens of bodies strewn around a canal on the edge of the airport.
A health official and a Taliban official said the toll of Afghans killed had risen to 72, including 28 Taliban members, although a Taliban spokesman later denied that any of their fighters guarding the airport perimeter had been killed. The U.S. military said 13 of its service members were killed in what it described as a complex attack. Islamic State (ISIS), an enemy of the Islamist Taliban as well as the West, said one of its suicide bombers targeted “translators and collaborators with the American army”.
It was not clear if suicide bombers detonated both blasts or if one was a planted bomb. It was also not clear if ISIS gunmen were involved in the attack or if the firing that followed the blasts was Taliban guards firing into the air to control crowds.
U.S. officials vowed retribution. General Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, said U.S. commanders were watching for more attacks by IS, including possible rockets or car bombs targeting the airport.
“We’re doing everything we can to be prepared,” he said, adding that some intelligence was being shared with the Taliban and that he believed “some attacks have been thwarted by them.”
U.S. forces are racing to complete their withdrawal from Afghanistan by an Aug. 31 deadline set by President Joe Biden. He says the United States long ago achieved its original rationale for invading the country in 2001: to root out al Qaeda militants and prevent a repeat of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States that year. Biden said he had ordered the Pentagon to plan how to strike ISIS-K, the IS affiliate that claimed responsibility.
“We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay,” Biden said during televised comments from the White House.
