The suicide bombing killed 170 Afghans and 13 US service members during the messy US withdrawal in August 2021.
The US military has announced it will conduct interviews with service members about the events leading up to a deadly suicide bombing near Kabul airport in August 2021, as the country withdrew its troops from Afghanistan.
On Friday, the Pentagon’s Central Command said it would interview about 20 people about the explosion that killed 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. service members. But it stressed it would not reopen its investigation into the bombing.
“The purpose of these interviews is to ensure that we do our due diligence on the new information that has come to light, that the relevant voices are fully heard and that we investigate those stories seriously and thoroughly so that the facts are exposed become. Central Command spokesman Michael Lawhorn said in a statement.
The bombings caused widespread bloodshed during the final days of the US withdrawal, which marked the end of the long-running war in Afghanistan.
Crowds of Afghans had gathered at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport in an attempt to leave the country after the Taliban overthrew the US-backed government and took over the city.
But on the afternoon of August 26, 2021, as civilians crowded around the airport’s Abbey Gate, a suicide bomber reportedly detonated a belt of explosives.
The bombings – and the military’s response to them – have increased criticism that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan was chaotic and haphazard. Questions have also been raised about whether the US could have done more to prevent the bombings.
At least one former soldier injured in the blast has previously stated that the military never interviewed him about the day’s events, and he expressed his belief that the bombing was preventable.
Others have pointed to the botched US response to the bombing: a US drone strike in Kabul several days later also killed ten innocent people, including seven children.
An investigation by U.S. Central Command concluded in November 2021 that the airport attack “could not have been prevented at the tactical level without downgrading the mission of maximizing the number of evacuees.”
However, former Marine Sergeant Tyler Vargas-Andrews told a congressional hearing in March that members of the military had been given a description of a group of men planning to launch an attack but had received no response from above.
More than two years after the withdrawal, many Afghans seeking refuge from the Taliban remain in limbo, with few options for escape.
Afghans who have helped the U.S. military may be eligible for special immigrant visas in the U.S., but the system for processing applications has suffered serious backlogs. Critics also say there are too few immigration options for Afghans who have cooperated with the US in other ways, a fact that could endanger them under Taliban rule.