Taliban kill head of Islamic State cell that bombed Kabul airport

WASHINGTON — The Taliban have killed the leader of the Islamic State cell responsible for the suicide bombing at the international airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, in August 2021 that killed 13 U.S. troops and as many as 170 civilians, four senior U.S. officials said Tuesday.

The administration on Monday began calling relatives of the U.S. troops who died in the attack to tell them that the leader of the terrorist cell had been killed by Taliban security forces in recent weeks.

The U.S. officials said that U.S. intelligence analysts became aware in early April that the mastermind of the attack, whom they declined to identify, had died in a Taliban operation in Afghanistan. It was unclear whether the Taliban were specifically targeting the insurgent or if he was killed in one of the increasing number of attacks between Taliban and Islamic State fighters, the officials said.

The officials said that based on classified intelligence reports — most likely from informants, electronic intercepts or information from allied spy services — analysts concluded with “high confidence” that the chief plotter of the airport attack had been killed. But the officials offered no evidence to support that conclusion or other details about his purported death.

Officials were also sparing with the details they were willing to share with the families of the killed service members.

“They couldn’t give me his name; they couldn’t tell me the details of the operation,” said Darin Hoover, the father of Staff Sgt. Taylor Hoover of the Marine Corps, who was killed during the blast.

The 2021 evacuation from Afghanistan and its aftermath continue to be a subject of heated debate on Capitol Hill, where Republicans have voiced similar demands of the Biden administration.

GOP lawmakers have accused the administration of being directly responsible for the failures of the exit and condemned administration officials as inept when it comes to the future of counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan. Democrats have largely defended those officials, arguing they did the best they could in a difficult situation and faulting President Joe Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, for making a deal with the Taliban that committed the United States to exit.

There is very limited, if any, information sharing about the Islamic State group between the Taliban and the United States, and the U.S. officials said the United States had no involvement in the attack that killed the cell leader.