In the quiet hours after iftar, as families across Afghanistan sipped tea, rested and scrolled through social media — a lifeline for news in a country where electricity to power TVs and radios is in short supply — a photo began to ripple through Facebook and X. The image, blurred yet visceral, showed a man in a light-blue medical gown, hands cuffed, flanked by two armed officers. Their tactical gear bore FBI patches; their faces were masked by balaclavas and camouflage. The detainee’s disheveled hair and hollow eyes hinted at exhaustion.
The caption identified him as Afghan national Mohammad Sharifullah (also known as Jafar), arrested in Pakistan and handed over to the U.S. as a “top terrorist” mastermind behind the August 2021 Kabul airport bombing that killed more than 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops. But here, in the alleys of Kabul where the attack’s scars still gape, the narrative unravels.
“This is a show,” a well-placed source who requested anonymity told New Lines. “The real architects of that bombing were a team, not a man, and most of them were killed in Taliban raids in south and western Afghanistan.”
During the chaotic U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan, I navigated the airport’s gates, trying to help a relative on the evacuation list. A day before the attack, I joined thousands of Afghans camped overnight outside the abandoned NATO military gate at Kabul International Airport, hoping for entry. By dawn, we shifted to the Abbey Gate, clutching backpacks and a young child, inching through suffocating crowds. Families collapsed in exhaustion; others clawed forward. Trapped in the madness, I retreated, desperate to find another way out. Hours later, at dusk, an Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISKP) bomber, who was freed from jail days before, detonated himself in the heart of a crowd pressed against the airport fence.
The next morning, a taxi driver warned me against visiting the site. “The flashes of bodies … backpacks torn open,” he muttered, steering away. “No ambulances. No government. Just gunfire and more deaths.”
At the time, ISKP operated under a shadowy leadership council, not a single military leader, according to a well-placed source. Two of its top military commanders, who were central to planning the airport attack, were later eliminated by the Taliban in Herat and Nimroz provinces in April 2023. The White House confirmed their deaths, calling them the masterminds of the Abbey Gate bombing, as the August 2021 Kabul airport attack came to be known. The news came as rumors were circulating that the Taliban lacked the intelligence capacity to hunt down top ISKP leaders. Suspicions about potential U.S. involvement in the Herat and Nimroz operations emerged following the April 2023 operation.
These doubts were fueled by analysts and regional experts who questioned the Taliban’s independent capacity to target high-profile ISKP figures, given the group’s limited technical and intelligence infrastructure. U.S. officials were “confident of the mastermind’s identity and death,” as White House national security spokesperson John Kirby put it to reporters. “We didn’t have anything to do with this,” he added, denying that Washington had supplied any information or other assistance, directly or indirectly, to the Taliban to undertake the operation.
Jafar, an ethnic Tajik from central Afghanistan also known by the alias Engineer Ajmal, was a low-level ISKP operative with no formal education, either in schools or madrassas. He joined the group in 2016 as it was losing territorial ground in eastern Afghanistan. His role remained minor — not a strategist or bomb-maker, but a courier, shuffling messages and propaganda materials for the Kabul-based cells.
In 2019, he was arrested by the U.S.-backed Afghan government and jailed until the Taliban’s swift takeover of Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021 — which triggered a chaotic collapse of governance and mass panic in the city — when he was freed along with thousands of prisoners. “If you asked him to lead a prayer, he couldn’t even stand as an imam,” a second well-placed source told New Lines. “Pakistan needed a favor from Washington,” the source claimed, while Trump needed something to take credit for at his forthcoming congressional address. This implied, according to the source, that Islamabad, grappling with surging unrest from Baloch separatists and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan — also known as the Pakistani Taliban, armed factions aiming to destabilize the Pakistani state — sought U.S. financial backing and diplomatic leverage to stabilize its institutions amid political, social and economic crises.
As the Taliban intensified its crackdown on ISKP, launching raids across Afghanistan — including Kabul, Herat, Nimroz and northern Mazar-e-Sharif — the group’s fighters scattered. Many, including Jafar, fled to Pakistan’s Balochistan province. There, according to local reports, he lived until mid-February 2025, when Pakistani forces detained him in a raid.
His transfer to U.S. custody early this month was swift, timed conspicuously to precede President Donald Trump’s March 4 address to Congress, where it was hailed as a major victory. Analysts and regional observers noted the proximity between the handover and Trump’s speech, speculating that the timing was politically strategic — a claim reinforced by the absence of prior public U.S. demands for Jafar’s extradition. The Biden White House had already confirmed nearly a year earlier, in April 2023, that the bombing’s true architects had been killed in a Taliban operation.
The case of Jafar reveals how political convenience often overrides real accountability. For the U.S., his arrest offered a tidy headline to soften the humiliation of withdrawal; for Pakistan, it was a bargaining chip to secure aid amid its own crises. Meanwhile, Afghans sift through the rubble of shifting narratives — where today’s “mastermind” becomes tomorrow’s footnote, and the deadliest single attack of the war fades into a script written by distant powers.
The reduction of the Abbey Gate bombing to a diplomatic prop reflects a broader reality: Decades of foreign interventions in Afghanistan have relied on fragile alliances with local actors, only to see those partnerships unravel. While the Taliban now claim to fight ISKP and U.S. leaders tout symbolic victories, ordinary Afghans are caught between an isolated regime — unrecognized by the international community and strained by Western sanctions — and ISKP’s relentless violence. The unresolved legacies of a war that promised stability and left only instability weigh most heavily on those who remain and whose survival hinges on navigating the agendas of powers near and far.
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