A member of Afghan forces was killed at the Hamid Karzai International Airport and several were wounded during an exchange of gunfire.
The incident began when an “unknown hostile actor fired upon Afghan security forces involved in monitoring access to the gate” on Sunday night, Navy Capt. William Urban, a spokesman for U.S. CENTCOM, said in a statement.
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The wounded Afghan troops are being treated at an airfield hospital and are in stable condition.
Both U.S. and Afghan soldiers returned fire “in keeping with their right of self-defense,” though no U.S. or coalition forces were hurt during the shooting, Urban added.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, when asked about the incident at Monday’s press briefing, declined to provide additional details. He specifically declined to comment on which faction the shooter was aligned with, saying, “We cannot rule out who the hostile actor was in the shooting incident last night.”
The United States, along with other Western allies, are working to evacuate their citizens out of Afghanistan, as well as U.S.-partnered Afghans, following the Taliban’s capture of Kabul about a week ago.
President Joe Biden declared the end of August as the deadline for withdrawing America’s military presence in the country, though the Taliban’s swift and decisive conquest caught U.S. officials off guard, given military and intelligence officials said it could take months or years for it to occur.
Since Aug. 14, the U.S. has evacuated or helped facilitate the evacuation of approximately 37,000 people, and that number rises to about 42,000 people for the month of August as of Monday morning, according to a White House official. Of those evacuees, “several thousand” were Americans, Kirby said at the briefing, though he declined to get more specific.
Some Americans or U.S.-friendly Afghans have faced difficulties getting to the airport, and the U.S. has launched two rescue missions to get them, the second of which was first disclosed by Kirby at Monday’s briefing, though he didn’t provide details.
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Nearly 170 Americans were airlifted from a hotel outside of the Kabul airport last Thursday because of the large crowd outside the gate.
“The original plan was for the Americans to gather themselves up at the Baron [Hotel] and walk through the Abbey gate. The gate is right here. So, you can see from the hotel to the gate,” the Pentagon spokesman said at Friday’s briefing. “But there was a large crowd established outside the Abbey gate ― a crowd that, that not everybody had confidence in, in terms of their ability to walk through it. And so, local commanders on the scene took the initiative and flew these helicopters out there to pick them up.”
