President Trump Monday honored U.S. military members killed in the Abbey Gate disaster in Kabul, Afghanistan four years ago.
Flanked by family members of 13 U.S. service members — 11 Marines, one Army psychological operations specialist and one Navy corpsman — Mr. Trump signed a proclamation paying tribute to their fallen loved ones on the anniversary of the suicide attack at Kabul Airport that also killed at least 170 Afghans and wounded another 18 American military personnel.
“This is a very special group of people. I’ve been with them from the beginning. Abbey Gate, you know, Abbey Gate. One of the dumbest days in the history of our country by a previous administration, getting out of a place that we shouldn’t have been,” Mr. Trump said.
“At a minimum, they should have been at Bagram, the big [air] field where we have hundreds of acres around it. Nobody’s going to get near it,” the president said.
Mr. Trump said the family members of the fallen have been with him and he “has been with them 100% and we meet more than once a year.”
He said, “Actually, I think our all-time meeting was in Bedminster when we played music late into the night…We were listening to music all night long, and they were all crying because they lost their loved ones.”
Mr. Trump noted he believes the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan by the Biden administration helped trigger the war between Russia and Ukraine. The suicide bomber struck as crowds of Afghans were clamoring to get into the airport, while U.S. troops were providing perimeter security in the chaotic final days of America’s withdrawal ordered by the Biden administration.
“[Vladimir Putin] saw how incompetent our military was under Biden and under [former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark] Milley and all these dopes, these dopey people, and that’s not our military. You see what our military is now, we knock the hell out of people if we have to,” Mr. Trump said.
Vice President J.D. Vance said the proclamation’s acknowledgement of the Abbey Gate slain service members is a “rectification of a wrong.”
“The fact that [President Biden] lost your loved ones through incompetence, but never acknowledged it, and your government never actually put pen to paper to say we’re grateful for your sacrifice, we correct that wrong today,” he said.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon “needs to answer” for what happened at Abbey Gate four years ago, and an investigation has been launched which showed the need for a more detailed probe than what was previously investigated during the Biden administration.
Mr. Hegseth said Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell, an Afghanistan veteran, is now spearheading the probe.
“I would anticipate [completion by the] middle of 2026, that’s how thorough of a review we’re doing, hopefully a little bit sooner, but we’re going into everything in understanding what happened,” Mr. Hegseth said.
