Rockets Hit Near Kabul Airport A Day Before The Deadline For The Exit Of US Forces

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A view from the scene after rockets were fired at the Afghan capital Kabul's Hamid Karzai International Airport on Monday. Casualties are feared, but no immediate details were available. Haroon Sabawoon/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Haroon Sabawoon/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

As rockets apparently aimed at Kabul's airport rained down on a nearby neighborhood, U.S. forces scrambled to evacuate thousands of Afghan trying to flee ahead of a Tuesday deadline for the withdraw of all American troops.

The attack, reportedly involving several rockets, occurred as U.S. C-17 cargo jets continued operations to evacuate people desperate to escape from an Afghanistan that is now controlled by the hard-line Taliban.

"I was inside the house with my children and other family members, suddenly there were some blasts," said Jaiuddin Khan, who lives near where the rockets hit Kabul's Chahr-e-Shaheed neighborhood.

"We jumped into the house compound and lay on the ground," he told The Associated Press.

No one or group immediately claimed responsibility for the rocket attack, but it follows a suicide bombing at the gates of the airport last week that killed 169 Afghans and 13 U.S. service members. The Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), an affiliate of the widely known extremist group, claimed the earlier attack, inviting swift retaliation in the form of a U.S. drone strike that killed two "high-profile" members of group and wounded a third, according to U.S. officials.

In a U.S. drone strike on Sunday, U.S. Central Command said it disrupted an "imminent threat to the airport." It also acknowledged that there are reports that civilians were killed in the strike.

The two drone strikes came after President Biden last week vowed to hunt down the perpetrators of Thursday's airport attack. A day before the second U.S. strike, Biden warned that another attack on the airport was imminent and that he had directed U.S. commanders to "take every possible measure to prioritize force protection."

On Sunday, the president attended a ceremony at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware in which the flag-draped caskets containing bodies of the U.S. service members killed in last week's attack in Kabul arrived aboard a military plane.

As airport evacuations continued on Monday, the White House said that about 1,200 people were evacuated from Kabul in the 24 hours ending at 3 a.m. ET Monday.

"This is the result of 26 US military flights (26 C-17s) which carried approximately 1,200 evacuees, and 2 coalition flights which carried 50 people," the statement said.

The statement said that since Aug. 14, the U.S. "has evacuated and facilitated the evacuation" of some 116,700 people. It said that since the end of July, the U.S. has relocated about 122,300 people.

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