New Military Review Denies Marine Sniper’s Claim He Could’ve Stopped Kabul Airport Suicide Bombing

Last updated on August 7th, 2024 at 04:29 pm

The ISIS suicide bombing at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan on Aug. 26, 2021, was not preventable, according to a newly completed U.S. military review.

Last September, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) ordered the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), to conduct a new supplemental review of the deadly blast, in which 170 Afghan civilians and 13 U.S. service members were killed and dozens more were injured. The new review was prompted, in part, by claims raised by Marine Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews, that he had observed a suspect in the crowd he believed matched a description of an ISIS suspect and that he’d repeatedly requested permission to shoot the suspect, but never given permission to fire.

Vargas-Andrews, a Marine Scout Sniper who was deployed with the U.S. forces that guarded the airport evacuation effort, raised his claims during a House Armed Services Committee hearing on March 8, 2023. During the hearing, Vargas-Andrews testified that U.S. troops at the airport were aware that an attack could come and had received specific description of a suspect as “clean-shaven,”wearing brown with a black vest and traveling with an older companion wearing a “black hijab that was covering his face most of the time.”

The Marine Scout Sniper said, on the day of the attack, that he and other service members repeatedly observed a man matching the suspect description and that this man was “consistently and nervously looking up at our position through the crowd.”

Vargas-Andrews was among those injured in the blast, losing his right arm above the elbow and left leg in the blast.

The new CENTCOM review concludes the suspect Vargas-Andrews and others had identified was not the individual responsible for the bombing.

The CENTCOM review team identified the bomber as Abdul Rahman al-Logari, a member of the Islamic State’s Afghanistan branch, known as ISIS-K. Al-Logari was detained in an Afghan prison near Kabul but set free by Taliban forces as they seized control of the Afghan capital city in mid-August, days before the attack.

“Positive identification of the bomber prior to the attack would have been improbable, given the timeline and the density of the crowd,” a U.S. Army member on the CENTCOM review team concluded, according to a press statement shared by the DOD.

That same review team member said the intelligence community used facial recognition technology to compare a photo of al-Logari to a photo of a “bald man in black” apparently taken at the Kabul airport on the day of the attack. The reviewer said these facial recognition results found the “strongest negative possible rating” to match al-Logari to the “bald man in black.”

While CENTCOM and the DOD both released statements about the new supplemental review, it does not appear that either office published the full supplemental report.

Though Vargas-Andrews described seeing two suspects, the DOD press statement only provides photos of al-Logari and the “bald man in black.” It’s unclear if the CENTCOM review team had additional photos from Aug. 26, 2021, showing the second individual Vargas-Andrews described.

Vargas-Andrews denounced the new CENTCOM findings in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation this week.

“For anyone to say that this wasn’t preventable when we had on the ground intel passed to us stating the threat, it’s bullshit. We were told that the bomber was headed to Abbey Gate in real time, we all knew that,” he said.

The Marine veteran questioned where other photos collected from the day of the attack might have gone. He maintains he had identified the bomber and had an opportunity to stop the attack.

“I will stand by my testimony and what we experienced till the day I die,” Vargas-Andrews told the DCNF.