Rockets flew across the Afghan capital on Monday as the United States raced to complete its withdrawal from Afghanistan, with the evacuation of civilians.
President Joe Biden has set a deadline of Tuesday to withdraw all US forces from Afghanistan, drawing to a close his nation’s longest military conflict, which began in retaliation for the September 11 attacks.
The return of the hardline Islamist Taliban movement, which was toppled in 2001 but took back power a fortnight ago, triggered an exodus of terrified people aboard US-led evacuation flights.
Those flights, which took more than 114,000 people out of Kabul airport, will officially end on Tuesday when the last of the thousands of American troops pull out.
The United States is investigating whether civilians may have been killed in an air strike it launched to destroy a car laden with explosives in the Afghan capital Kabul, a spokesman for US Central Command (CENTCOM) said.
The statement came after CNN reported that nine members of a family, including six children, were killed in Sunday’s air strike in the crowded capital, where thousands of Afghans are still trying to flee the Taliban.
Local media also reported that civilians were killed in the strike.
“We are aware of reports of civilian casualties following our strike on a vehicle in Kabul today,” Captain Bill Urban, a CENTCOM spokesman, said in a statement.
“We are still assessing the results of this strike, which we know disrupted an imminent ISIS-K threat to the airport,” he continued, using an acronym for the Afghan branch of the Islamic State group, which carried out a suicide attack at the airport on Thursday.