The White House confirmed Tuesday that the Afghan Taliban forces successfully eliminated the Daesh mastermind who orchestrated the deadly suicide bombing that killed 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops at Kabul airport during the tumultuous evacuation last year.
The bomber detonated a device among packed crowds at the airport's perimeter as they tried to flee Afghanistan on Aug. 26, 2021.
It was one of the deadliest bombings in Afghanistan. Moreover, it prompted a wave of criticism of President Joe Biden for his decision to pull American forces out of the country nearly 20 years after the U.S. invasion.
Taliban authorities have since killed the leader of the Daesh cell that planned the attack, White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said.
"He was a key Daesh-K official directly involved in plotting operations like Abbey Gate, and now is no longer able to plot or conduct attacks," Kirby said, referring to the spot outside the airport where the attack took place.
Daesh-K refers to Daesh Khorasan, the group branch operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"He was killed in a Taliban operation," Kirby added without giving any details.
Taliban government officials have so far not responded to requests for comment.
The pullout, ending on Aug. 30, 2021, saw Taliban fighters sweep aside Western-trained Afghan forces in just weeks, forcing the last U.S. troops to mount the desperate evacuation from Kabul's airport.
An unprecedented military airlift operation managed to get more than 120,000 people out of the country in days.
Biden has long defended his decision to leave Afghanistan, which critics have said helped cause the catastrophic collapse of Afghan forces and paved the way for the Taliban to return to power two decades after their first government was toppled.
Nothing "would have changed the trajectory" of the exit and "ultimately, President Biden refused to send another generation of Americans to fight a war that should have ended for the United States long ago," the White House National Security Council said in a report to Congress earlier this month.
A recent Washington Post report citing leaked Pentagon documents said the U.S. believes that Afghanistan is becoming a "staging ground" for the Daesh group since the withdrawal.
In his statement, Kirby said Tuesday: "We have made clear to the Taliban that it is their responsibility to ensure that they give no safe haven to terrorists, whether al-Qaida or Daesh-K."
"We have made good on the president's pledge to establish an over-the-horizon capacity to monitor potential terrorist threats, not only from Afghanistan but elsewhere around the world where that threat has metastasized, as we have done in Somalia and Syria."
The Taliban and Daesh have long engaged in a turf war in Afghanistan. However, experts have pointed to the jihadist group as the most significant security challenge for the new Afghan government going forward.
Afghanistan's Taliban rulers insist they have complete control of security in the country, have largely eliminated any Daesh threat, and that there is no al-Qaida presence.
They have still not acknowledged the assassination of then-al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in June last year by a U.S. drone strike in Kabul.
