WASHINGTON (Dispatches) --
American broadcaster CNN aired an interview with a “senior” Daesh commander from a Kabul hotel two weeks before the Kabul airport bombing while the U.S.-backed government was still in power in Afghanistan.
To everyone’s surprise, the Daesh commander told CNN reporter Clarissa Ward that the group was “laying low and waiting for its moment to strike,” but the broadcaster apparently did not share this vital information with U.S. authorities or maybe it did and they simply ignored it.
Daesh struck the Kabul airport on Thursday, killing at least 180 people, mostly Afghan civilians and about a dozen U.S. troops. The terrorist group claimed the responsibility for the attack.
The interview left observers and social media users wondering how the American media outlet gained access to the terrorist leader and protected his identity when the city was still under the control of the U.S.-supported government, virtually under the control of U.S. forces.
People questioned CNN’s motive behind the interview and its connection to the terrorist group, called Daesh-K, which was not known to anyone before Thursday’s deadly bombing.
The CNN reporter called the commander’s interview “eerily prophetic,” but social media users suggested that the statement was not a prophecy but a plot because the terrorist was speaking of what his group was about to carry out.
Some social media users said that CNN aided and abetted the Kabul attack by having advance knowledge of the possible bombing and apparently doing nothing to help prevent it. They also wonder that how CNN did not lead American authorities to the terrorist commander.
One commentator called CNN’s explanation of the interview “quite fishy.”
“‘Let’s fly to this place and meet with this terror group K that most people haven’t heard of and understand their intentions,’ said nobody ever. Very fishy,” he tweeted. Another said, “CIA tweets CIA interview with CIA.”
Some commentators slammed CNN for airing the interview of a terrorist
commander. “Who are they trying to protect, our people or the terrorist?” one observer asked. “These interviews seem odd to me as I think about the families of our fallen men and women.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. military this week destroyed the final CIA base in Kabul, where the agency claimed it used to train Afghan forces in counterterrorism. But the real nature of the CIA’s activities in that sprawling outpost is shrouded in mystery.
The New York Times reported on Friday that the CIA outpost, called Eagle Base, outside the Kabul airport was destroyed on Thursday, as it is preparing to leave Afghanistan after implementing a policy of death and destruction in the country for twenty years.
Meanwhile, some of the dozens of civilians who were killed in this week’s bombing at the Kabul airport may have actually been shot dead by U.S. troops amid the chaos caused by the blast, according to eyewitnesses.
Russia Today, citing eyewitnesses who talked to BBC, reported that not everyone who died on Thursday at the Kabul airport was killed at the hands of the suicide bombers.
On Thursday, two bomb attacks were carried out near the Kabul airport as scores of people, trying to leave Afghanistan, had crowded around one of the airport’s main access gates.
The brother of one of the victims, who was killed along with his wife around the airport, said the couple was killed by gunfire in the resulting “confusion” that occurred after the bombing.
Another source claimed that a civilian who had worked with U.S. forces was shot to death by the troops. He said the victim was found with a bullet hole in his head with no other injuries.
The U.S. and its NATO allies have been evacuating their citizens from Afghanistan in recent weeks. But the slow evacuation efforts have brought daily mayhem at the Kabul airport, with tens of thousands of Afghans trying to flee the country on board foreign military aircraft.
In the wake of the attack, several NATO members put their evacuation efforts on hold, admitting that thousands of desperate Afghan allies may be left behind.
The U.S. military said American forces have been compelled to forge closer security cooperation with the Taliban to prevent any repeat of such bombings, but warned that “the threat of terrorist attacks on the airport remains high.”