Gold Star father says Afghan suicide bombing that killed 13 service members could have been prevented, demands 'justice'

Newly released documents show that the suicide bombing at the Kabul, Afghanistan, airport two years ago during the disastrous US withdrawal from Afghanistan that killed 13 US service members may have been preventable.

Documents obtained by NewsNation showed that before the attack, the Pentagon knew the location where ISIS-K terrorists were stationed, and according to one US servicemember, “Intelligence officers at the Kabul Airport knew that ISIS-K was staging in a hotel 2-3 kilometers west of the airport.”

According to the documents, Lt. Gen. Chris Donahue asked the Taliban to attack the ISIS targets at the hotel, but they chose not to comply, despite the Pentagon claiming that the attack at Abbey Gate was unavoidable.

A former Marine sniper injured in the attack previously testified at a Congressional hearing that his team believed they had identified the suicide bomber earlier that day before the deadly attack.

Darin Hoover, a Gold Star father whose son Staff Sgt. Darin Taylor Hoover was killed in the attack, says it’s “infuriating” to discover there could have been chances to eliminate the terrorist cell that had carried out the deadly attack.

 

Hoover said Monday on Elizabeth Vargas Reports, “That’s the frustrating part: We’re finding out all of these different tidbits of information, and it’s coming out in a slow, drip drip kind of way. It’s infuriating, frankly, that they actually had three opportunities to take out that bomber, or the cell that was working on it, and didn’t take the opportunity to do it.”

In March, Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that his team wasn’t authorized to eliminate the suspected threat due to military leadership’s uncertainty as to who had the authority to give the go order.

Now, Hoover and other Gold Star families of those killed in the attack are pressing the Pentagon for more transparency. Hoover stated, “We’re looking for justice — absolute justice. The things we’re looking for is where the breakdown was, who was in charge. Was it the Department of Defense, was it the State Department, was it the White House? We’ve got boots on the ground telling them exactly what’s going on, and it’s being denied at whatever level it was.”