Four months after an Islamic State suicide bomber killed a number of individuals, together with 13 US service members, exterior an airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, US and international intelligence officers have pieced collectively a profile of the attacker.
Military commanders say they’re utilizing that info to focus the Islamic State group Cell, which they consider was concerned within the assault, together with its management and squaddies. Cell members may very well be among the many first insurgents killed by an armed MQ-9 Reaper drone flight mission over Afghanistan from a base within the Persian Gulf. The United States has not performed any air raids on the nation for the reason that final US troops left on August 30.
The assault on the airport’s Abbey Gate befell 4 days earlier, throughout the frenzied ultimate days of the most important non-combatant evacuation ever undertaken by the US navy. It was one of many deadliest assaults of the 20-year warfare in Afghanistan.
The Islamic State group has recognized the suicide bomber as Abdul Rahman al-Logri. US officers stated he was a former engineering pupil who was one in every of a number of thousand militants free of no less than two high-security prisons after the Taliban took management of Kabul on August 15. The Taliban indiscriminately evacuated the amenities, releasing not solely their very own imprisoned members but in addition the Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-Okay, the group’s department in Afghanistan and the Taliban’s enslaved fighters.
Al-Logari was not unknown to the Americans. US officers stated that in 2017, the CIA had knowledgeable Indian intelligence brokers that it was plotting a suicide bombing in New Delhi. Indian officers thwarted the assault and handed al-Logari over to the CIA.
Parwan Jail at Bagram Airfield and Pul-e-Charkhi Prison close to Kabul had been the 2 principal high-security prisons of the Afghan authorities. Al-Logari hung out in each prisons, US officers stated, however it isn’t clear how he related with the ISIS-Okay assault cell in Kabul, or why and the way he got here throughout the AB Gate bomber.
In the months following the assault, US intelligence analysts and navy officers say they’ve centered on studying extra about ISIS-Okay strike cells and any future assaults they could be plotting in opposition to the West.
This article initially appeared in The New York Times.
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With inputs from TheIndianEXPRESS
