The suicide bomber who killed nearly 200 people at the Kabul airport in August had been released by the Taliban from an Afghan prison only days earlier, according to a lawmaker.
GOP Rep. Ken Calvert said last week that U.S. national security officials confirmed to him that the bomber responsible for the Aug. 26 bombing at the gates of Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul where the United States and other allies were undergoing a massive evacuation of third-country nationals and Afghan allies had previously been detained at a Bagram prison.
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The bomber, identified by the lawmaker, was Abdul Rehman al Loghri, and he had been held at the Parwan prison at Bagram up until the Taliban, during their military offensive in which they overthrew the Afghan government, allowed the inmates there and at the Pul-e-Charkhi prison to go free.
The lawmaker said that Loghri had been imprisoned for the past four years, after being arrested before he was able to carry out a planned bombing attack in New Delhi.
“U.S. national security officials have now confirmed to me the reports that the Aug. 26 Kabul bomber was a known ISIS-K terrorist that was previously detained at the Bagram prison and was released along with thousands of others just days before the deadly attack,” Calvert said.
“Due to an ongoing investigation, we have nothing to provide at this time,” a spokesperson for CENTCOM told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday.
The U.S. launched a noncombatant evacuation operation on Aug. 14, only hours before Kabul fell to the Taliban. There were two weeks left before President Joe Biden’s Aug. 31 deadline for all troops to leave Afghanistan, and in that time, they were able to evacuate more than 110,000 people.
U.S. officials repeatedly warned about a heightened terror threat for the airport, and those fears became a reality on Aug. 26, when 13 U.S. service members and more than 170 Afghan civilians were injured by Loghri.
The U.S. handed control of Bagram Air Base over to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces on July 1, and there were approximately 5,000 prisoners at that time, a spokesperson for the Afghan Ministry of Defense told CNN.
There were a few hundred criminals among them, but the vast majority were terrorists that included members of al Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS.
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The release of the prisoners could compound the difficulties for the U.S. as it starts a new stage in the counterterrorism battle. A number of U.S. military and intelligence officials believe that terror groups could start reconstituting under the Taliban and become operational within a year.
The U.S. will be relying heavily on its “over the horizon” drone strike capabilities, though critics have expressed doubt about the likelihood of success for such a plan given the need for on-the-ground intelligence to launch such a strike.
