The 13 U.S. troops killed at Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate in August 2021 were there to help save lives.
It had been four months since then-President Joe Biden ordered the Pentagon to plan for a complete withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan, and 11 days since Kabul had fallen to the Taliban — a devastating blow to the 20-year U.S. war effort. American troops were helping evacuate tens of thousands of locals, many of whom had been U.S. allies during the war.
On Aug. 26, 2021, Afghans desperately seeking safety had flooded Abbey Gate, a key entrance at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. Just after 5:30 p.m., a catastrophic blast ripped through the area from a single suicide bomber, officials said, leaving about 170 Afghans and those 13 American troops dead.
On Monday, nearly five years since that deadly day, the trial for the only person charged so far with helping to carry out the bombing began in federal court in Virginia, with federal prosecutors offering a starkly different narrative of events than the defense team for Mohammad Sharifullah.
The government told jurors that Sharifullah — also known as “Jafar” — said during interviews with FBI agents in early 2025, after he’d been captured by Pakistani authorities and turned over to the United States, that he had conducted surveillance for the Islamic State-Khorasan (ISIS-K) terrorist group ahead of the Abbey Gate attack. The prosecution’s case, as outlined in court documents, relies largely on statements about that bombing, and other terrorist attacks, that the FBI said he provided during five interviews.
Justice Department prosecutor John Gibbs told the jury Sharifullah was angry at the United States for invading Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and once had referred to “killing crusaders” in an interview with a reporter.
“The defendant’s words encapsulate more than anything else what this trial is about,” Gibbs said.
But Geremy Kamens, the federal public defender for the Eastern District of Virginia, called the prosecution’s evidence thin and said Sharifullah’s admission was a false confession given under duress. His pregnant wife and three young children had also been seized, Kamens said, and Sharifullah feared they would be tortured by Pakistani authorities if he did not do as they instructed: take responsibility for Abbey Gate.
“The question in this case is not really about what happened, but who is responsible,” Kamens said. “The U.S. government got the wrong man.”
Sharifullah is charged with one count of providing and conspiring to provide assistance to a designated foreign terrorist organization that resulted in death. If convicted, he faces life in prison. The proceedings, before Judge Anthony J. Trenga in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, are expected to last at least a week and include testimony from U.S. and Afghan officials as well as American troops who survived the bombing but were left with devastating injuries.
The aftermath of the fall of Afghanistan, and the carnage at Abbey Gate in particular, became an enduring sore spot for the Biden administration, which had followed through on a deal President Donald Trump struck with the Taliban during his first term that called for the removal of all U.S. troops — undermining the U.S.-backed Afghan government.
Trump campaigned on the issue repeatedly during his 2024 reelection campaign, backed by family members of some of the U.S. troops killed in the bombing who organized on his behalf with the help of Republican officials. When Trump announced Sharifullah’s capture last year, he thanked the government of Pakistan for “helping arrest this monster” and called the detained man “the top terrorist responsible for that atrocity.”
But during opening statements Monday, Kamens told jurors that “not even the prosecutors say that now.” He argued that the terrorists responsible for the Abbey Gate attack “should be brought to justice” but that Sharifullah should not be among them. The federal defender said there is “absolutely nothing to support” Sharifullah’s involvement.
The Biden administration said in April 2023 that the mastermind of the Abbey Gate bombing had been killed by the Taliban in a raid in Afghanistan.
In Gibbs’s preview of the government’s case to jurors, he did not detail evidence federal law enforcement had linking Sharifullah to the attack, beyond the man’s own alleged confessions.
During those interviews, prosecutors wrote in court documents, Sharifullah said he was recruited into ISIS-K in 2016 and had aided the group in carrying out other deadly attacks.
According to the prosecution, Sharifullah told agents he had helped prepare and transport an ISIS-K suicide bomber who detonated explosives in June 2016, at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, killing more than 10 embassy guards and Afghan civilians and wounding others guarding the Canadian embassy. Separately, prosecutors allege he told the FBI that he had taught ISIS-K gunmen how to use AK-style rifles and other weapons before they attacked a concert venue near Moscow in March 2024, killing approximately 130 people and injuring numerous others.
Prosecutors alleged in court documents that Sharifullah also revealed to FBI agents that he’d been released from prison in Afghanistan just two weeks before the Abbey Gate bombing and was asked by an ISIS-K member to help with the planned attack. The terrorist group gave him a motorcycle, paid for a cellphone and SIM card and established a line of communication on social media, according to court documents.
The government alleges that Sharifullah then scouted a transportation route for the suicide bomber — later identified by U.S. officials as Abdul Rahman al-Logari — that avoided Taliban and U.S. checkpoints and other law enforcement.
Kamens offered an alternate culprit for the Abbey Gate bombing: a radical arm of the Taliban itself, which the U.S. government had allowed to help facilitate crowd control around the airport amid the chaotic evacuations. “It is extremely likely this was an inside job,” Kamens said, without saying what evidence he had for that possibility.
Some have questioned whether it was wise for the U.S. to trust the Taliban with airport security, but U.S. officials have said that without doing so, the Pentagon would have needed to deploy thousands of additional troops to Kabul.
U.S. investigations have found that deaths were caused by al-Logari, the single suicide bomber, who officials said arrived at Abbey Gate shortly before the bombing occurred. U.S. troops faced numerous reports of potential bombings in the days leading up to the attack and mostly worked through them.
In 2024, the 13 American Abbey Gate victims were posthumously presented the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian award that lawmakers can approve. Killed in the attack were 11 Marines: Lance Cpl. David Espinoza, 20; Sgt. Nicole Gee, 23; 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.
In 2023, an independent assessment by a U.S. inspector general concluded that both Trump’s decision to cut a unilateral deal with the Taliban and Biden’s choice to follow through with it despite disintegrating security played key roles in the disintegration of the Afghan security forces with whom the U.S. military had partnered for a generation. Those two actions, the watchdog said, “fundamentally altered every subsequent decision” by the U.S. government, the Afghan government and the Taliban, and “destroyed the morale of Afghan soldiers and police” because they relied so heavily on U.S. air power to stop the militant group.
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