The Islamic State leader behind the 2021 Kabul airport suicide bombing that killed about 180 people including 13 US service members has been killed by the Taliban, according to US officials.
The IS leader, whose identity has not yet been released, was killed in southern Afghanistan in early April as the Taliban conducted a series of operations against the Islamic State group, according to one of the officials. The Taliban at the time were not aware of the identity of the person they killed, the official added.
The US military has informed families of the 11 marines, one sailor and one soldier killed in the blast during the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Darin Hoover, the father of SSgt Darin Taylor Hoover, said the US Marines provided only limited information to him and did not identify the Islamic State leader or give the circumstances of his death.
Hoover is among a group of families that have kept in touch since the bombing, supporting one another and sharing information through a private group messaging chat.
Cheryl Rex, the mother of Marine L/Cpl Dylan Merola, who died in the blast, said it was through the chat group that they were informed late on Monday about the killing as they awaited official confirmation from US military officials.
Hoover said he and his son’s mother, Kelly Henson, have spent the past year and a half grieving the death of the 31-year-old US Marine Corps staff sergeant and praying for accountability from the Biden administration for the handling of the withdrawal.
The killing of the unidentified Islamic State group leader, Hoover said, does nothing to help them.
“Whatever happens, it’s not going to bring Taylor back and I understand that,” he said in a phone call. “About the only thing his mom and I can do now is be an advocate for him. All we want is the truth. And we’re not getting it. That’s the frustrating part.”
His son and the other fallen service members were among those screening the thousands of Afghans frantically trying on 26 August 2021 to get on to one of the crowded flights out of the country after the Taliban takeover.
The blast at Abbey Gate came hours after western officials warned of a major attack, urging people to leave the airport. But that advice went largely unheeded by Afghans desperate to escape the country in the last few days of an American-led evacuation before the US officially ended its 20-year presence.
The Afghanistan-based offshoot of the Islamic State, with up to 4,000 members, is the Taliban’s most bitter enemy and top threat militarily.
After the Trump administration reached a 2020 deal with the Taliban to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan and the Biden administration followed through on that agreement in 2021, there had been hope in Washington that the Taliban’s desire for international recognition and assistance for the country’s impoverished population might moderate their behavior.
But relations between the US and the Taliban have deteriorated significantly since they imposed draconian new measures banning girls from school and excluding women from working for international aid and health agencies.
The August 2021 pullout of US troops led to the swift collapse of the Afghan government and military, which the US had supported for nearly two decades, and the return to power of the Taliban. A review of the chaotic withdrawal released earlier this month largely laid blame on Trump, saying President Joe Biden was “severely constrained” by the decisions of his predecessor.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
After U.S. officials learned of the Taliban operation, the intelligence community worked with the military in recent days to independently confirm the terrorist’s death with “a high level of confidence,” the official said. The Biden administration is holding off on announcing the news until the family members of the victims of the Abbey Gate attack have been notified.
“We are not partnering with the Taliban, but we do think the outcome is a significant one,” the senior official said.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have criticized the chaotic withdrawal after the rapid collapse of the Afghan government in August, 2021. They have also questioned whether the Biden administration has the ability to prevent another terrorist attack on the homeland without a presence on the ground in Afghanistan.
But the senior administration official noted that the Taliban operation validates Biden’s decision to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan.
It “reflects moreover the president’s judgment that we did not need to remain on the ground, in harm’s way, in Afghanistan in perpetuity in order to effectively address any threat that might emanate from Afghanistan,” the official said.
Kirby said the Biden administration has “made clear to the Taliban that it is their responsibility to ensure that they give no safe haven to terrorists, whether al Qa’ida or ISIS-K.”
The U.S. government has been hunting the Islamic State member responsible for the attack since Aug. 26, 2021, when a suicide bomber detonated an explosive device outside of the Abbey Gate at Hamid Karzai International Airport where U.S. service members were working to evacuate American citizens and at-risk Afghans. In addition to the service members killed, at least 170 Afghans also died in the attack.
At the time, ISIS-K claimed responsibility for the bombing. After an investigation, the Pentagon concluded that it was the result of a single bomber, not the “complex” attack U.S. officials initially described.
Since the U.S. military withdrew from Afghanistan on Aug. 31, 2021, Pentagon officials have warned that ISIS-K is becoming an increasing threat. In October of that year, Colin Kahl, the undersecretary for policy, told lawmakers that the group could be able to launch attacks on the West and its allies within six months to two years.
Although the U.S. military no longer has a presence on the ground in Afghanistan, the U.S. still maintains an “over-the-horizon” capability to hunt terrorists there, military leaders have said. The Pentagon has conducted a number of operations in the country since August 2021, including one that resulted in the death of 9/11 architect and al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in August of 2022.
In January, the military took out Bilal al-Sudani, a financial facilitator for ISIS and ISIS-K, who was hiding in Somalia, Kirby said. The U.S. and its partners have also killed many ISIS leaders in Syria in recent years, he added.
“We have made good on the president’s pledge to establish an over-the-horizon capacity to monitor potential terrorist threats, not only from in Afghanistan but elsewhere around the world where that threat has metastasized as we have done in Somalia and Syria,” Kirby said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
The Kremlin didn’t waste time blaming Ukraine for orchestrating the weekend bombing of a cafe in St. Petersburg, leaving what they claimed was 40 injured and high-profile ultranationalist military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky dead.
And Ukrainian officials were no less firm batting away the charge.
They blamed an “internal political fight” for the blast just a mile from where Vladimir Putin’s ex-wife lives in the historic heart of the Russian president’s hometown.
“Spiders are eating each other in a jar,” tweeted Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak.
Who should one believe?
“Every day in Russia, it’s a thriller series,” noted Ksenia Sobchak on her Telegram channel. The former Russian presidential candidate and self-exiled daughter of Putin’s onetime patron, Anatoly Sobchak, St. Petersburg’s first post-Soviet mayor, understands better than most that things are seldom as they seem in Putin’s Russia — if ever.
As in any good thriller, the assassination of Tatarsky boasts a cast of colorful characters, an enigmatic figure at the center, rollercoaster twists and turns, as well as distracting sub-plots delaying the denouement.
But in this whodunnit — as with so many in Russia — in the end we’re unlikely to discover the real identity of the murderer or their motives.
Like with the car bombing in August on the outskirts of Moscow of commentator Darya Dugina, daughter of Alexander Dugin, an ultranationalist ideologue, the list of possible perps is long. But that aside, little is certain or reliable — despite the wealth of CCTV footage that’s been released and the surprisingly quick arrest of a 26-year-old, Darya Trepova, until recently an assistant at a vintage clothing store.
She was seen giving Tatarsky a plaster figurine, which Russian investigators say was packed with TNT. In a video released by Russian authorities, Trepova is heard saying she “brought a statuette” inside the cafe, which “later exploded,” adding she would prefer to say later who asked her to give the blogger the gift. It is unclear whether Trepova was making her remarks under duress.
Last year, Trepova, who is married but separated from her husband according to two friends who spoke with POLITICO, was jailed for 10 days for protesting against Russia’s war on Ukraine. But for many reasons, she seems an unlikely bomber and was pictured leaving the cafe, Street Food Bar No 1 — once owned by Wagner paramilitary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin and now run by his former son-in-law — as shocked and dazed as others caught in the blast.
Her friends, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing they could be ensnared in the anti-terrorist investigation, say they find it unlikely she knew about the bomb, and her estranged husband, Dmitry Rylov, told a Russian media outlet that killing is just not in her character. “I am fully confident that she never could have done something like that willingly,” he said. “My wife was set up because she would never kill anyone.”
Darya Trepova, charged with terrorism over the April 2 bomb blast | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
But that isn’t stopping Kremlin officials from painting her as a killer doing the bidding of Ukrainians in league with Russia’s anti-Putin opposition.
“The Kyiv regime supports terrorist actions,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow just hours after the dust had settled on the second assassination on Russian soil of a prominent advocate of the war on Ukraine.
And Russia’s National Anti-Terrorist Committee said the bombing was “planned by Ukrainian special services,” noting Trepova was an “active supporter” of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Opposition activist Ivan Zhdanov has warned that Russian authorities are likely to push the “Navalny narrative” to discredit dissidents and set the stage for show trials, including another one against the imprisoned opposition leader with the goal of extending his nine-year prison sentence.
Mysterious group claims responsibility
Amid all the speculation and counter-narratives being hurled around, things are getting very murky.
Midweek, Ilya Ponomarev, a former Russian lawmaker turned dissident who lives in Kyiv, posted a statement from a mysterious group, the National Republican Army, saying it was responsible for the bombing of Trepova, “the well-known warmonger and war propagandist.”
The NRA, which also claimed responsibility for Dugina’s assassination, said: “This action was prepared and carried out by us autonomously, and we have no connection and have not received assistance from any foreign structures, let alone special services.”
But as with the Dugina bombing, the group offered nothing concrete to prove they were behind Tatarsky’s killing, and the claim is being greeted with skepticism by security experts.
The famed blogger was assassinated while giving a talk at the cafe on how Russian war correspondents and bloggers should write about the conflict. The event was hosted by the ultranationalist group Cyber Front Z, which said it had hired the cafe for the evening. “There was a terrorist attack. We took certain security measures but unfortunately, they were not enough,” the group said on Telegram.
Maxim Fomin, who was born into a miner’s family in Donetsk in 1982, chose to write under a nom de plume — Vladlen Tatarsky is a character in a novel by Victor Pelevin. He worked a variety of jobs, including in the mines, before being arrested for bank robbery. His nine-year prison sentence was curtailed when he was pardoned in 2014 by the self-styled head of the separatist “Donetsk Republic,” Alexander Zakharchenko. Tatarsky then enlisted in a local pro-Russia militia.
By 2016 he was blogging a thuggish but supercharged Russian nationalistic take on what it was like to fight in Donbas, relishing the violence, looting and drinking while cautioning would-be volunteers, “before you go to war, ask yourself if you really want to look into the abyss.”
Last year Tatarsky clocked up more than half a million subscribers to his Telegram channel. There they could read his gung-ho, macho chronicles of war, including his own experiences fighting, and rants against Ukraine. “Ukrainians should be cured of their Russophobia and nationalism, as our own forefathers once cured the excellent country called Germany of its mad Führer and his ideas,” he wrote.
A portrait of Russian military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, whose real name is Maxim Fomin | Olga Maltseva/AFP via Getty Images
Tatarsky became a star draw on Russia’s state television and last year he attended a Kremlin ceremony marking the illegal annexation of seized Ukrainian territory. In a video he posted from the event, he announced: “We’ll triumph over everyone, kill everyone, loot everything we want.”
While backing wholeheartedly the war on Ukraine, Tatarsky was, like other ultranationalists, increasingly vitriolic about the poor tactics of Russia’s generals, labeling them “idiots” and backing Prigozhin in the war of words between the Wagner boss and the country’s defense chiefs.
Some local media reports suggest Prigozhin was due to attend Tatarsky’s talk on Sunday, although the paramilitary leader made no mention of that on his Telegram channel when lamenting Tatarsky’s death.
Prigozhin also dismissed the idea that Ukraine had a hand in the killing of the solider-cum-blogger, saying, “I would not blame the Kyiv regime for these actions.” He suggested the killing was carried out by “a group of radicals,” but enigmatically added they’re “hardly related to the government,” as in the Russian government, leaving it hanging as to whether they had any such ties.
His remark has fueled speculation that the FSB or another Russian intelligence service may have had a hand in the blast, either tricking anti-Putin activists into a so-called false flag operation or partnering with some others in the fratricidal world of Russian ultranationalism to kill Tatarsky and blame it on Kyiv and Navalny. According to this theory, the FSB has a vested interest in disciplining Prigozhin — bombing the cafe associated with him sends a warning not to step too far out of line with his attacks on defense chiefs.
Conned into a bombing?
So how does Trepova fit into all of this? The very few friends willing to talk with the media say she could well have been conned into taking the figurine into the cafe. Some analysts agree. “It cannot be excluded that she did not know about the bomb,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, founder and head of R.Politik, a think tank. “Her subsequent actions suggest that no one had prepared her for a quick escape after the attack, which means she may have been used unwittingly.”
The video of Trepova looking as stunned as others struggling away from the bombed cafe goes some way to supporting that idea. She also hardly fits the profile of a determined bomber or even much of a radical, reading through her social media posts before many were expunged since she was detained very quickly after the bombing.
According to the Telegram-based independent news site Baza, she was known in St. Petersburg as a feminist and activist. But her posts on Vkontakte, or VK, a Russian equivalent of Facebook, included mainly selfies and angst-ridden remarks about her life and very little on social or political issues. She comes across as much younger than a twenty-something, more like a teenager.
The two friends who spoke to POLITICO agree, saying she was mainly interested in fashion and the cinema, could be flighty and entered lightly into her marriage, which fell apart quickly. A month ago, she abruptly decided to give up her job and move to Moscow, mentioning some kind of lucrative job. She only returned to St. Petersburg a few days before the bombing and stayed at a friend’s apartment. Her mother told reporters she saw her daughter just hours before the blast and she seemed her normal self.
There are also some suspicious anomalies, including the quickness of her identification, the speedy interrogations of her mother and sister, and her own arrest — all in a matter of hours after the bombing.
Russian security sources told RBC that they aren’t ruling out Trepova was manipulated. Nonetheless, on Tuesday she was charged with carrying out a terror attack and illegally carrying an explosive device for an organized group.
That still leaves a question: Who was this group? And then we go back into the dizzying narratives.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Russian law enforcement on Monday detained a young woman suspected of bombing a St. Petersburg cafe, in which a pro-Kremlin military blogger was killed and dozens injured on Sunday, according to media reports.
In a video from the interior ministry published by state news agency TASS, a woman presented as Darya Trepova can be heard saying she “brought a statuette” inside the cafe, which “later exploded.”
She said she had been arrested for “being present at the place” where the bombing occurred.
POLITICO was not able to independently verify whether Trepova’s statement was made under duress.
Trepova was reportedly detained for several days last year for taking part in a protest against the war in Ukraine on the day Russia’s full-scale invasion started.
Russian military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky was killed by the St. Petersburg cafe blast, which also injured 25 people according to Reuters.
Tatarsky — whose real name was Maxim Fomin — was part of a group of high-profile influencers filing reports on the Ukraine war. He had more than half a million followers on Telegram.
According to AP, Tatarsky utilized “ardent pro-war rhetoric” in favor of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Russia’s top investigative body announced Monday it had opened a probe into the bombing, which it labeled a “high-profile murder.”
The state-controlled Russian National Anti-Terrorism Committee called the bombing a “terrorist act” and accused Ukraine’s special service of planning the attack.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office, tweeted that Russia had “returned to the Soviet classics: isolation … espionage … political repression.”
This is the second time a pro-Kremlin media figure has been killed on Russian soil since the invasion began.
Last August, Darya Dugina — who was under U.S. sanctions for spreading misinformation about the war — was killed in a car bombing.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Islamabad: With the recovery of nine more bodies on Tuesday , the death toll in the suicide bombing in a mosque in Police Lines in Peshawar mounted to 72.
The explosion occurred in the central hall of the mosque leading to roof of the place of worship crashing down when devotees were offering prayers on Monday, Geo News quoted police as saying.
The suicide bomber who blew himself up was present in the first row, police said.
Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has taken the responsibility for the attack.
