THE US military has said that it carried out a drone strike in Afghanistan, killing two high-profile “planners and facilitators” of the Islamic State, hours after President Joe Biden promised to retaliate for the twin blasts at the Kabul airport that killed 169 Afghans and 13 American soldiers. The Islamic State’s Afghanistan affiliate, dubbed Islamic State Khorasan or ISIS-K, had claimed responsibility for the attack at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Thursday. “Two high-profile ISIS targets were killed, and one was wounded.

 

And we know of zero civilian casualties,” Maj Gen Hank Taylor, deputy director of the Joint Staff For Regional Operations, told reporters on Saturday. “Without specifying any future plans, I will say that we will continue to have the ability to defend ourselves and to leverage over the horizon capability to conduct counter-terrorism operations as needed,” he added. The unmanned airstrike occurred in the Nangahar province of Afghanistan,” Capt Bill Urban, spokesperson of US Central Command, said. He declined to provide any further details about the planners and facilitators of ISIS-K who were killed in the drone strike. It wasn’t immediately known if the ISIS-K planners targeted in the drone strike were involved specifically in Thursday’s Kabul airport attack.