Washington: The White House reported on Tuesday that the Taliban government had executed the alleged mastermind of a devastating suicide bombing at the Kabul airport during the tumultuous withdrawal of US forces in 2021.

On August 26, 2021, the bomber exploded among dense crowds at the airport's perimeter as they attempted to flee Afghanistan. 13 US soldiers and 170 Afghans who were securing the airport for the traumatic exit were also killed in the explosion.

It was one of the deadliest bombings in recent memory in Afghanistan, and it led to a flurry of criticism of President Joe Biden's choice to withdraw American forces from the nation nearly 20 years after the US invasion.

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According to a statement from White House national security spokesman John Kirby, the Taliban authorities killed the head of the Daesh cell that orchestrated the attack.

He was a key Daesh-K official who was directly involved in planning operations like Abbey Gate, but he is no longer able to plan or carry out attacks, according to Kirby, who was referring to the location where the attacks were carried out outside the airport.
ISIS-K stands for Daesh Khorasan, a division of the organisation that operates in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Kirby only said, "He was killed in a Taliban operation," without going into further detail.The Taliban fighters quickly defeated Afghan forces that had received Western training during the US military's withdrawal, which ended on August 30, 2021, forcing the final US troops to mount a desperate evacuation from Kabul's airport.

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In a matter of days, an unprecedented military airlift operation was able to evacuate more than 120,000 people.

Longtime critics of Biden's decision to leave Afghanistan, which they claim contributed to the catastrophic defeat of Afghan forces and allowed the Taliban to retake power two decades after their first government was overthrown, have defended Biden's action.

Nothing "would have changed the trajectory" of the withdrawal and "ultimately, President Biden refused to send another generation of Americans to fight a war that should have ended for the United States long ago," the White House National Security Council stated in a report to Congress earlier this month.

According to a recent Washington Post article citing stolen Pentagon papers, the US thinks that since the withdrawal, Afghanistan has turned into a "staging ground" for the Daesh organisation.

In a statement released on Tuesday, Kirby stated, "We have made clear to the Taliban that it is their responsibility to ensure that they give no safe haven to terrorists, whether Al-Qaeda or Daesh-K."

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We have fulfilled the President's promise to set up an over-the-horizon capability to monitor potential terrorist threats, not just from Afghanistan but also from other parts of the world where that threat has spread, as we have done in Somalia and Syria, the official continued.

Daesh has long waged a territorial conflict with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and experts have identified the jihadist organisation as the future's greatest security threat to the country's newly elected government.