In the moments she last saw her friend alive, Marine Cpl. Kelsee Lainhart was helping an Afghan woman and her two toddler sons leave the Kabul airport.
It was Aug. 26, 2021, and thousands of desperate locals were trying to flee Afghanistan amid the Taliban’s seizure of Kabul, prompted by the White House’s decision to withdraw from the United States’ longest war. Lainhart and Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee, bunkmates and confidantes, were tasked with searching women and children at the airport — and occasionally carrying out the difficult task of turning away those without proper paperwork.
The woman and small boys were among those barred from entry, so Lainhart escorted them back across the canal from which they’d come.
“And that’s when the bomb went off,” Lainhart testified Tuesday in federal court in Alexandria, where she sat less than 10 feet away from Mohammad Sharifullah, a man who federal prosecutors say helped orchestrate that blast. Sharifullah, the Justice Department alleges, scouted a discrete route on behalf of the Islamic State-Khorasan (ISIS-K), the Afghanistan and Pakistan arm of the Islamic State, for a single suicide bomber, who set off 20 pounds of explosives at the airport’s Abbey Gate that killed 13 U.S. service members and nearly 170 Afghan civilians.
Lainhart’s service dog, Ollie, lay between her and Sharifullah in court, eyes trained on the retired Marine as she recounted from a wheelchair the chaos after the blast. Her ears rang and her body felt like a “floating torso,” she said. She took in the scene, dust and debris and Gee laying on a pile of bodies, a single stream of blood trickling down her helmeted head. Lainhart was relieved, she said, thinking her friend had only been knocked unconscious.
It wasn’t until later, while recovering from paralyzing spinal cord injuries at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, that Lainhart learned her friend’s fate: Gee, 23, was among the 13 U.S. troops killed.
Lainhart, whose testimony came on the second day of Sharifullah’s trial in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, was part of a slate of witnesses called by federal prosecutors to persuade a jury to convict Sharifullah of providing and conspiring to provide assistance to a designated foreign terrorist organization that resulted in death.
But federal public defender Geremy Kamens has argued the government “got the wrong man.” He acknowledged the tragedy of the incident during his opening statement but told jurors Sharifullah, who was captured by Pakistani authorities last year, gave false confessions about his involvement because he feared for the safety of his pregnant wife and three young children, who Kamens said had also been seized.
Sharifullah’s defense team has questioned whether the government has evidence directly tying the man to the Abbey Gate attack beyond his own admissions during five separate interviews with the FBI last year.
To bolster the statements Sharifullah made in those interviews, prosecutors Tuesday called freelance journalist Agnieszka Pikulicka-Wilczewska to testify about a separate 2020 interview she did with him when he was in prison in Afghanistan for an article she was writing about the Islamic State.
Sharifullah told her he was recruited into ISIS-K in 2016 and explained that Muslims are justified in killing nonbelievers, including Americans, because of the teachings of the Quran, she testified. He discussed a desire for revenge against U.S. personnel who had desecrated Islam’s holy book or killed Afghan civilians during drone strikes and bombings, she said.
The remainder of Tuesday’s lineup focused largely on eyewitness accounts of service members who survived the blast, as well as the FBI and military personnel who led the forensic investigations into the bomber and conducted autopsies on the 13 fallen troops.
They described a chaotic, fraught and gruesome scene: ball bearings and shrapnel from the military-grade explosive device tearing through bodies, vehicles and the thick reinforced glass in a watchtower’s windows. Cries for help. Blood soaking the dusty earth. A charred wall where officials determined the suicide bomber had stood when he detonated the explosive, facing toward the U.S. Marines assigned to help evacuating Afghans.
One explosives investigator recalled hearing the “bloodcurdling screams” of Afghans who discovered their loved ones among the dead at the blast site as night fell.
Throughout the day Tuesday, family members and friends of U.S. troops killed sat in the courtroom gallery — comforting one another and wiping tears with tissues, including during the testimony of a military medical examiner who conducted the autopsies of three of the fallen troops. He described catastrophic blast injuries, including those to Gee, who he said had a skull fracture, brain bleed and severe injuries to her lungs.
In addition to Gee, 10 other Marines were killed in the attack: Lance Cpl. David Espinoza, 20; Staff Sgt. Darin Taylor Hoover, 31; Cpl. Hunter Lopez, 22; Lance Cpl. Dylan R. Merola, 20; Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum, 20; Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui, 20; Cpl. Daegan William-Tyeler Page, 23; Sgt. Johanny Rosario Pichardo, 25; Cpl. Humberto Sanchez, 22; and Lance Cpl. Jared Schmitz, 20. Also killed were Army Staff Sgt. Ryan Knauss, 23, and Navy Hospital Corpsman Maxton Soviak, 22.
After Lainhart’s testimony, many of the victims’ loved ones surrounded her outside the courtroom, exchanging gratitude and hugs.
One woman, the mother of one of the 13 fallen service members, placed a large medal in the palm of Lainhart’s hand.
“Thank you,” she said, “for your service.”
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