The Daily - The Bombings at the Kabul Airport

Episode Date: August 27, 2021

For days, many dreaded an attack on Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, as Western forces scrambled to evacuate tens of thousands of people from Afghanistan. On Thursday, those fears were realized — amid the large crowds outside the airport, terrorists carried out two suicide bombings. The attacks killed at least 60 people, including 13 United States service members.ISIS-K, a branch of the Islamic State in Afghanistan, has claimed responsibility.Will these attacks be the effective end of the U.S. evacuation effort and where does this leave the Afghanistan mission?Guest: Matthieu Aikins, a writer based in Afghanistan for The New York Times. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: The U.S. and its allies waged war for 20 years to try to defeat terrorists in Afghanistan. A double suicide bombing demonstrated that they remain a threat.A map of where the bombers struck at the airport in Kabul.President Biden said the evacuation of U.S. citizens and allies from Afghanistan would continue, even after the attacks. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. For days, the United States had warned of a potentially devastating terror attack on the airport in Kabul that would be carried out by ISIS-K, a branch of the Islamic State in Afghanistan that is the common enemy of both the Americans and the Taliban. The Pentagon confirming there has been an explosion outside Kabul airport where thousands of people have gathered to try to evacuate the country. Yesterday, it happened. My colleague, Matthew Agans, was there. It's Friday, August 27th. Matt, are those helicopters flying above you?

No, they're C-17s. They're evacuation jets. Oh. Yeah, they go all day and night. Matt, just to start, can you tell us where you are and what time it is there? My sense is that it's very late. Yeah, it's about one in the morning. And I'm at home where I've been living since June.

And it's in the center of Kabul, which is even quieter than it normally is at night because right now you have the Taliban in the streets and people are very afraid and uncertain. Mm-hmm. Well, I wonder if you can just walk us through your day. How did your day start in Kabul? Well, this morning I went to meet up with an interpreter that I've been following and I've been in touch with. How are you? He's someone who worked for the United States. He worked for the special forces and had one of these SIV cases, was hoping to be evacuated to go to America because he's afraid. He had actually fled Kandahar before the fall of Kabul, fearing for his life,

and since then has been trying the airport basically every day without success. How long has it been since you saw your family? How many days? Almost like two months. He told me today that he was bringing his family from Kandahar, his wife and children, and that they were going to make one, you know, final attempt at the airport in the closing days of the evacuation. And so we sat and talked, and then... And so we sat and talked, and then... His family came from Kandahar.

It was an emotional moment for him. They were afraid, obviously, because they'd been seeing the news of the horrible situation at the airport, but they were determined to try. They really wanted to go. Oh, so you saw the entire family kind of reunite there? Yeah, I saw them roll up in a taxi, and he was obviously emotional.

So good! So after they had come and I had met them, I kind of left them at the place they were staying, and they told me that they were planning to try the airport that afternoon. Only one gate is open, and it's Abbey Gate. Abbey Gate. They said they were planning to try Abbey Gate.

And when you say Abbey Gate, that's a particular point of entry into the airport in Kabul? Exactly. There's several points of entry that are controlled by different groups, some by the Taliban, some by the Marines, some by a CIA-backed militia. And people are just kind of trying different gates

on different days, depending on what they've heard, whether they think they can get through. So at what point in the day, Matt, did you find out that something had happened at the airport? Well, it was sometime after five o'clock, and I was sitting at my desk in my room with the window open, and I heard this kind of pop. And when you've been living in a place

like Kabul for a while, you become attuned to certain noises. I mean, my house is more than two miles away from the airport, but still something about it made me notice it. And then I had dinner plans that night with the mayor of Kabul and he called to say that he had to cancel because something was going on. And then I got a message from someone else, another interpreter, saying that there had been a complex attack, which is like a combination of a suicide bombing and a gunfight at Abbey Gate. That same gate that the family said they were headed towards. Exactly. That same gate that the family said they were headed towards.

Exactly. So all you know at this point is that something very serious has happened at the Hamid Karzai International Airport at Abbey Gate. Yeah, and this has been something that we had been dreading now for days. There have been reports that ISIS was going to try to do a suicide attack against the airport. Right. So it was immediately the first thing that sprang to mind that this was finally happening. So I came downstairs and called my housemate, Jim Hoylebruck, who's a photographer for the Times. I was like, hey, Jim, are you hearing this? And he's like,

yeah. There's an attack at the airport. Yeah. So do you want to go check it out? Yeah. There's an attack at the airport, yeah. So do you want to go check it out? Yeah. So we jumped on my motorcycle, which is usually how we get around when these things are happening because it's much easier to get through traffic. And we started riding toward the airport. And, you know, that's a route we know quite well because we've been going there a lot in these past days.

And as we got closer, you know, we could tell that something was up. What do you mean? You could just see the way that people kind of gather in clusters inside the street talking. The traffic was kind of empty. And as we got closer to the gate, we could see the Taliban were very agitated. They were kind of beating people to clear them out of the roundabout. And we drove straight into it and said we were journalists and they actually let us through. So we got through the first checkpoint and kept driving.

And then we're driving along the airport now and we could hear the sound of gunfire from inside and sirens. There was an ambulance that came up behind us. We let the ambulance go ahead and then we want to go through this next checkpoint but the Taliban guard there is saying no, you can't go any further. guard there is saying, no, you can't go any further. So we just stayed there. Started talking to people who were coming now out of the site. And what do the people around you say had just happened?

They said that there had been a bomber. They said there had been a suicide bomber in the crowd. And that a lot of people had been killed, that some foreign soldiers had been killed, a lot of civilians had been killed. Now the area that we were at, this is where there was a canal that people were wading through. And they said there was now bodies in the canal. The thing about these airport gates is that they were designed basically to prevent car bombs and they have these really high concrete walls and like narrow lanes and when you have crowds trying to get through them which is not what they're designed for they become these kind of death traps where that funnel people in and leave no avenue for escape so even just like given the normal crowds that have been happening at the airport

over the last week or so, you've had people trampled to death and suffocating. So to have a suicide bomber go off in the middle of this intense crowd of people is just devastating. And as best you could piece together, why this location? I think the bombers wanted to get as close as they could to foreign soldiers, and this is one of

the places where Afghans were actually getting up and having their documents looked at by Americans. That's kind of the way it works, is like you spend the whole day just fighting in this queue and pushing your way to the front, and then you have a few seconds to show, you know, whatever it is that you have to these soldiers in the hopes that they'll let you through. And I mean, that's the tension that right now is that on the one hand, you have like tens of thousands of people just hoping to get out of the airport.

Many of them who don't really qualify for evacuation, just anybody who thinks there's a chance to go to the West. But on the other hand, this incredible pressure to get the right people out, to get citizens and to get green card holders and to get Afghans out within the few days remaining. Right. So as a result, I think you had this perfect recipe for disaster where you had mobs meeting foreign soldiers up close. And what do you do next? Well, at this point, we're like, well, it's dangerous to stay here because there's always the risk of a secondary attack, right? And we can't get any closer. So let's go to the hospital,

to the emergency hospital, as it's called, which is this humanitarian organization that provides trauma care and couple. This is where people go when they're hit by bombings. We'll be right back. So Matt, just to recap, you have finished your reporting at the airport, this really gruesome scene, and you decide now to head to the hospital. Yeah. So we got back on the motorcycle and drove there. And there was just a huge crowd in front of the hospital where the ambulances come in. There was Taliban guarding it.

And we stood there as ambulance after ambulance rolled up and they just were bringing people in, many of them in really bad shape, unconscious. Some of them were little kids, you know, all torn up. It was really horrible to see. I spoke to one woman named Sarguna who was weeping and weeping. I asked her why she was crying, and she said that her husband had gone that day. She had begged him not to go to the airport, but he decided to go in the hopes of getting out because he had been working for the government and was afraid. So she had gotten a call from a taxi driver who had brought him to the hospital saying, your husband's inside. And she didn't know if he was alive or dead or what had happened to him.

She told me they had four kids, and she didn't know what would happen to them next. Who else did you talk to outside the hospital? I talked to someone who had been there, who had been really close to the bombing. His name was Bharat. And he had gone with his cousin to, again, show his documents. And they'd spent all day kind of fighting their way to the front. He was about 20 feet away from the Marines. And it was this massive crush of the crowd.

And he said he actually kind of tripped and fell. And then at that moment, the blast went off. And he thinks at least four or five Marines were killed in front of him. Everyone fell to the ground, and the Marines started shooting, he said, and just complete panic. People were running over dead bodies. There's dead bodies everywhere. His cousin was wounded in the hand and foot and bleeding heavily.

So he started helping him get away from the scene. But when he realized his cousin could kind of walk on his own, then he went back for another wounded person, and they pulled them to some clinic that was nearby. And that's where an ambulance came to get them. But he was pretty shaken up and he showed me the blood that was all over his ropes from other people. So at this point, do we know how many people were hurt and were killed in this attack? So I could tell just by the volume of ambulances coming in, the number

of people who were passing through the gates of this hospital, that this was a really bad attack. And as it turned out, at least 60 people have been killed, a dozen U.S. service members. So this was a devastating attack. I mean, seemingly one of the most devastating attacks in recent memories. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, this is also the first time Americans have been killed in Afghanistan, you know, in combat since February 2020. Wow. Everyone immediately suspected that this was the work of the Islamic State in Afghanistan. Our colleagues had warned us that ISIS wanted to attack this airport, saw it as a target both because of the presence of the Taliban, which is an enemy of ISIS in Afghanistan, as well as the presence of Americans, who are,

of course, an enemy of ISIS there. And the U.S. government just 24 hours before had warned people to stay away from the airport. But has there been a formal claim of responsibility for these attacks? Yeah, the Islamic State has claimed responsibility. They have. Man, I'm curious, and I think a lot of people hearing this will be curious, about why so many people were left exposed at the airport. Civilians, U.S. Marines, if it was understood that the Islamic state wanted to inflict harm at the airport. Yeah, I mean, this airport evacuation has just been this incredible tragedy that we've seen unfolding day by day. we're all kind of locked in this nightmare where there is no way to solve this problem,

which is that on the one hand you have huge mobs, like half of Kabul trying to get into the airport because they want to leave, and at the same time the desperate necessity to get the right people out in the closing days of the evacuation. So I think they had to get the right people out you know in the closing days the evacuation so i think they had to put the marines up against the mob and that created the conditions for this kind of attack and and this is how it's ended in just you know horrible bloodshed you know while i was while i was in front of the hospital seeing all these people come in then i started to think like what had happened to my interpreter friend, the person that I had been talking to earlier, who had gone to Abbey Gate?

Like, was I going to see him and his family come in on one of these stretchers? And then once I finished doing my work there, reporting, I went home and I messaged him and a number of other people that I've been in touch with who I thought maybe would have been at the gate. And he was fine. He hadn't been far away, actually, with his family when the blast happened, but he wasn't hurt and he was still okay. Of course, now it doesn't look like he'll be able to make it out. Now it looks like he and many others will, in fact, be stuck here. What do you mean? Because I have been curious about what this attack means for the future of these evacuations. Does it mean that this process will slow down considerably? Will it be paused in

certain ways for fear of another attack at the airport? Well, I think that in the next day, they're going to wrap the evacuation and anyone who's still here is going to have to stay here. And they will have to face the new reality of the Taliban government. And hopefully, civilian flights will resume at the airport. Hopefully, they'll be able to get out in, you know, kind of regular fashion with visas.

But the fact is, we don't really know what's going to happen. Mm-hmm. It very much feels like the end of the 20-year U.S. operation in Afghanistan has been a series of competing images. in Afghanistan has been a series of competing images. Images like children and families flooding onto the tarmac and clinging to a C-17 plane, some of them being ultimately killed in the process, and scenes like tens of thousands of people being very efficiently airlifted out of Kabul

by the United States and sent to military bases to eventually be resettled. And now into this mix of images comes the carnage of this suicide bomb. And so I wonder how you're thinking about this as a final image of the U.S. operation. a final image of the U.S. operation. Yeah, it just seems like a distillation of all the hatred and fear and violence of the past 20 years. And it's ending our presence here on a note that reflects just the violence and the degradation of this war and the kind of hopeless cul-de-sac that we found ourselves in with this evacuation. It's just a coda to a tragedy, and it feels so inevitable and so horrible.

And in many ways, that's how a lot of this whole collapse is found. So Matt, it's now August 26th, and the U.S. deadline for a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan after this 20-year war is August 31st. So is what happened today how the U.S. mission in Afghanistan ends? Yes, I think it is how the mission ends

in this kind of tragedy. But the fact of the matter is that Afghanistan is not going to end. The story of the people here is not going to end. The lives of the people who stay behind are not going to end. The lives of the people who stay behind are not going to end. And most of this country of 35 million people are still going to be here.

They're going to watch that last plane leave. And then they're going to turn to each other and say, well, what's next? And a new chapter is going to begin. Matt, thank you. Hope you stay safe. We really appreciate it. Thank you. On Thursday night, the United States said that a 13th service member was also killed in the attack.

These American service members who gave their lives, it's an overused word, but it's totally appropriate here, were heroes. Heroes who've been engaged in a dangerous, selfless mission to save the lives of others. In an address to the nation, President Biden offered his condolences to the service members' families and vowed revenge against those who carried out the attack. Lord, know this. We will not forgive. We will not forget.

We will hunt you down and make you pay. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Data shows that Florida has become the epicenter of the latest phase of the pandemic. More people in Florida are catching COVID-19, being hospitalized, and dying from the virus now than at any previous point in the pandemic. Over the past week alone, Florida recorded an average of 227 deaths from COVID-19 a day, by far the most in the United States. Despite those numbers, the state's governor, Ron DeSantis,

continues to ban mandates for vaccinations and masks and says that Florida is a model for how to manage the virus. Today's episode was produced by Claire Tennisgetter, Annie Brown, Stella Tan, and Nina Potok. It was edited by Larissa Anderson and Lisa Chow, engineered by Chris Wood, and contains original music from Marion Lozano and Dan Powell. The Daily is made by Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lindsay Garrison, Annie Brown, Claire Tennesketter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon-Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Chris Wood, Jessica Chung, Stella Tan,

Alexandra Lee Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Mark George, Luke Vanderbloek, M.J. Davis-Lynn, Austin Mitchell, Nina Potok, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guimet, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoit, Liz O'Balin, Our theme music is by Special thanks to Mahima Chablani, Sophia Milan, Des Ibequa, Erica Futterman, Wendy Doerr, and Elizabeth Davis-Moore. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday. Thank you.