Three years later, the US is still hunting the attackers who killed Americans during the withdrawal from Afghanistan

Three years after the suicide attack on the Afghan Abbey Gate, in which 13 US soldiers and around 170 Afghan civilians were killed, the network behind the perpetrator has been “quite weakened” but not eliminated, said the head of the civil command at the Pentagon.

“Numerous disruptions of the ISIS-K network by allies and partners” have “reduced its ability to carry out such an attack,” said Christopher Maier, deputy assistant secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict, in a brief interview after a breakfast meeting with reporters on Friday.

President Joe Biden promised on the day of the attack outside Hamid Karzai International Airport: “We will not forgive, we will not forget, we will hunt you down and make you pay.” Maier said: “We are in the process of doing that” and “we have inflicted significant damage on the network that carried out the Abbey Gate attack.”

The attack three years ago next Monday marked a devastating low point in an operation that critics called chaotic, even as 124,000 Afghans were evacuated as the US withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban took power.

Republicans have used the attack to criticize Biden's foreign policy. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in July, former President Donald Trump said the U.S.'s standing in the world “began to crumble with the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the worst humiliation in our country's history.”

Trump reached an agreement with the Taliban, but not with the Afghan government, in February 2020 that set an initial timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, which Biden modified. Trump and the Republican Party blame Biden – and now Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee to succeed him – for the manner of the withdrawal.

During breakfast with reporters, Maier said, “We continue to believe that Abbey Gate” was the work of “multiple individuals” who benefited from ISIS-K infrastructure. Since then, he said, the U.S. and its partners have “had clear cases where we were able to disrupt the network associated with Abbey Gate.”

“One of the things we have benefited from is that the Central Asian countries are better prepared to deal with the threat from Afghanistan,” he said. “Some of the recent foiled attacks indicate direct support from some of these partners,” he said, without naming the countries involved.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee plans to release its analysis of the withdrawal from Afghanistan early next month.

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