NEWS DESK
The U.S. military Saturday launched a drone strike targeting a member of an Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate. The Central Command said the strike was launched from Nangarhar province and its target was someone who was believed to have been behind the planning of deadly attacks against the U.S. in Kabul.
Navy Captain William Urban said one IS individual was killed in Saturday’s strike. It was not immediately clear whether the individual was involved in the attack on Kabul’s airport Thursday that killed 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. service members.
Saturday’s strike came less than 48 hours after the devastating attack outside Kabul’s airport.
The U.S. Embassy urged U.S. citizens Friday not to come to the Kabul airport because of security threats and to leave immediately if they were near any of four gates to the airport, according to a statement on the State Department’s website.
Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said at a briefing Friday the U.S. believes there are other “specific, credible” threats against the airport, noting that “we certainly are prepared and would expect future attempts.”
The security threats have made the evacuation of Americans and some Afghans more difficult.
“There doesn’t appear to be any concerted effort to get SIVs [Special Immigrant Visa holders] out at this point,” a State Department official told VOA from Hamid Karzai International Airport. But the department is still trying to evacuate local embassy staff, U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents.
Thursday’s deadly attack was carried out by a single suicide bomber, not two as previously believed, the Defense Department said Friday.
“It’s not any surprise that the confusion of very dynamic events like this can cause information sometimes to be misreported or garbled,” U.S. Army General Hank Taylor told reporters at a Pentagon media briefing.
He went on to say, “we do not believe that there was a second explosion at or near the Baron Hotel, that it was one suicide bomber.” But many witnesses reported hearing two blasts, The New York Times reported.
Despite the risks, crowds of people desperate to leave Afghanistan gathered outside Kabul’s airport early Friday as evacuation flights resumed.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the crowds dispersed later Friday amid rumors that another terror attack was imminent. A VOA reporter who visited the area late Friday morning saw mostly empty streets with Taliban security blocking access to streets near the airport.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack in a report on its news agency’s Telegram channel, hours after the blast. A suicide bomber, with about 11 kilograms of explosives containing shrapnel, U.S. officials said, struck near the Abbey Gate on the perimeter of the airport. A gunbattle occurred after the bombings, said U.S. General Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, during a Pentagon news briefing.