Afghanistan live updates: Pentagon – drone strike kills ISIS-K planner
The U.S. military launched a drone strike against ISIS-K in retaliation for the deadly bombing at the Kabul airport, the Pentagon said Friday.
Just before the Pentagon announced the strike, the State Department issued a fresh alert, telling Americans at four Kabul airport gates to “leave immediately.”
Earlier Friday, the Pentagon warned that specific, credible terrorist threats from ISIS-K to U.S. troops and civilians fleeing Afghanistan after Thursday’s devastating Kabul airport attack, which killed 13 American service members and at least 169 Afghan civilians.
President Joe Biden has vowed retaliation against ISIS-K. “We will hunt you down and make you pay,” he said hours after Thursday’s bombing at the Kabul airport.
Details also began emerging on the 13 service members killed in Thursday’s bombing near Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, at least some of whom were only babies and toddlers on September 11, 2001. Evacuations of Americans and their allies restarted, an effort to get out as many civilians ahead of the military’s withdrawal, just four days away.
How it happened:Satellite images, graphics, and maps show how fatal airport, hotel explosions ripped through Kabul
US military strike targets ISIS-K planner
A military strike Friday targeted an ISIS-K planner in a drone attack, the first American attack on the terrorist group following Thursday’s bomb attack in Kabul, the Pentagon announced.
“U.S. military forces conducted an over-the-horizon counterterrorism operation today against an ISIS-K planner,” Navy Capt. Bill Urban, a Central Command spokesman, said in a statement. “The unmanned airstrike occurred