troops pretty quickly. there are other marines as part of the special purpose marine air ground task force, they can go in, many are trained for embassy security and kinds of situations they might be facing at the airport. could get people in quickly. i have to stress, at this point we are not hearing indications that s in the works. of course. i just we know they re working through different scenarios, and obviously that would be something that would be a bit of a tell if we saw it there. courtney, thank you. let s go over to andrea mitchell, among her beats, the state department. hang on, andrea. kelly, you have a news update for us. i don t mean to step on our colleagues at the pentagon. john kirby now says we can confirm a number of u.s. service members were killed in today s complex attack at kabul airport. a number of others are being treated for wounds. we also know that a number of
department is dealing with it, the way the white house is dealing with it. this is a mess and it is a terrible resurgence of terror from groups like al qaeda and parts of hakani. americans were told, the state department put out a briefing, do not go to these gates. they put out that warning. clearly they were worried. i guess one up side is our intelligence was pretty sound on this. what are americans being told to do now? just shelter in place until they hear from the state department or somebody else in government about where to go and when to go and how to go? precisely. and what we know is these were service members. we don t know about american civilians that may have been injured or killed in the terrible attacks today, but there were plenty of afghan civilians, saw that from videos earlier. they were desperate afghans trying to get to the airport. why they didn t know of state
seeing on social media are tough to watch. seems as if these are two large explosions, one at the abbey gate, and one at the nearby baron hotel, a hotel frequented by westerners, particularly americans and british for a long time, and even after the taliban took over kabul. we know there were at least two explosions. the u.s. was concerned about the potential for suicide attacks at that location and other gates around the airport, particularly there was a threat, a specific intelligence stream that warned about isis-k, isis khorasan, that they were trying to carry out attacks at the airport. everything is pointing that direction at this point, chuck. courtney, if the president made the decision he needed more reinforcements to finish the
charge of security closer to the hotel. reporter: the taliban do all of the security, they control afghanistan. it is now the islamic emrat of afghanistan. it is a taliban country except for a mountainous area putting up some say heroic, some say a doomed resistance movement, but the taliban control the country. they are patrolling the outer perimeter, they re controlling check points throughout the city, they re limiting people to get to the airport, they are trying to find isis fighters because they don t want this kind of thing to happen because they want the process to move smoothly and americans to leave. at the gate itself, there is a hand over. i saw that earlier this morning. you drive and it is a bizarre thing to witness. we saw taliban fighters and their guns and traditional dress, some in american style uniforms, you pass them, a few
we re not talking about a nation state or leader somewhere, in fact, they re part of the population. the worst terrorists in the world. some of them were in those prisons throughout afghanistan that the taliban released at bagram and kabul. who are the leaders of isis-k, what about hakani walking in plain sight, who are you taking out, how do you determine responsibility? none of that has been accomplished as far as we know. i was talking to intelligence officials earlier today, they were saying we re not going to ascribe responsibility except that we knew there was this threat, level of threat from isis-k that started on saturday, accelerated, and was announced dramatically last night with alert for all americans to get away from the airport. times the last few days, you recall where evacuations were halted, telling americans not to come, just come if we call you.