The Kabul Tribune (KT) — A U.S. Defense Department investigation into the 2021 suicide bombing at Kabul’s airport has uncovered classified documents that investigators say had not previously been located or disclosed, a senior adviser to the secretary of war said Wednesday.
Sean Parnell, who is leading a special review of the attack,
announced the discovery on the fifth anniversary of the bombing at Abbey Gate
outside then-Hamid Karzai International Airport. The Aug. 26, 2021, attack
killed 13 U.S. service members and about 170 Afghan civilians.
Parnell said in a social media post that his team recently
recovered “highly relevant classified documents” that had been stored in safes
where they would not be found.
He said a special review panel examined the documents and
that their contents raised questions about why they had been withheld.
Parnell did not disclose what the documents contain, saying
he did not want to release information before the investigation is complete.
“I’m not going to give you a convenient version of the
truth, nor will I give you a rushed one,” Parnell said. “We are following the
evidence to wherever it leads and to whoever it touches. We’re not accepting
incomplete or comfortable answers.”
The review panel was established last year by Secretary of
War Pete Hegseth, who selected Parnell, a veteran of the Afghanistan war, to
lead the investigation.
Hegseth announced the panel’s formation on the fourth
anniversary of the bombing while meeting with families of the U.S. service
members killed in the attack.
“America deserves answers as far as what happened in
Afghanistan,” Hegseth said at the time. “The military needs to answer for what
happened.”
Parnell said members of the panel have extensive experience
serving in Afghanistan and described them as veterans who had commanded troops,
come under fire and lost fellow service members.
The investigation follows a supplemental review conducted by
U.S. Central Command in April 2024. That review revisited the military’s
original investigation and identified the suicide bomber as a member of the
Islamic State’s Afghanistan affiliate, commonly known as ISIS-K.
The 2024 review concluded that the original investigation’s
findings remained accurate and that the bombing could not have been prevented
at the tactical level.
Parnell did not provide a timeline for completing the latest
review but pledged that investigators would continue examining the evidence.
“The American people and the families who sacrificed everything
are owed the full picture of how and why those decisions were made, and we’re
going to give it to them,” he said. “That’s a promise — not just for today, not
just for an anniversary — but until it’s done.”
