VIDEO The recording casts doubt on what the Pentagon has repeatedly claimed for two years. New evidence presented by CNN about the attack with hundreds of victims during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan

New video evidence uncovered by CNN significantly contradicts two Pentagon investigations, the latest of which was released last week, into an ISIS suicide attack outside Kabul airport during the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, US television revealed Thursday.

The incident resulted in the deaths of 13 American soldiers and about 170 Afghans who were desperately seeking US help to flee the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul, the TV channel writes.

For two years, the US military has insisted that the casualties were caused by a single blast and that troops who reported coming under fire and fighting back were likely confused by the chaos.

But a video captured by a Marine’s GoPro camera, which has never been seen publicly in its entirety until now, shows that there was far more gunfire than the Pentagon has ever acknowledged. A dozen US military personnel, who were at the scene and spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, described the gunfire in detail.

One of them told CNN that he heard the first big volley of gunfire coming from where the US Marines were near the blast site. “There was no open fire,” the Marine said. “There was a massive volume of gunfire.”

An Afghan doctor who spoke to CNN officially for the first time said he personally removed bullets from the wounded and, along with his hospital staff, counted dozens of Afghans who died of gunshot wounds.

Combined, the new evidence calls into question the credibility of the two US military investigations and raises serious questions for the Pentagon, which has continued to reject mounting evidence that civilians were fatally shot.

The worst incident in the last 10 years

The explosion occurred at 17:36 on August 26, 2021, in front of Hamid Karzai International Airport and marked the worst casualty incident for Afghan civilians and US troops in Afghanistan in ten years.

Here for days, hundreds of desperate Afghans – elderly soldiers – men, women, children and old men – stood in the sweltering heat, hoping to get into the airport and board the American cargo planes that carried over a hundred thousands of people safe.

The scene outside the airport’s Abbey Gate, where the crowd was the thickest, was grim even before the explosion. Former translators and other Afghans who have witnessed NATO’s presence for nearly 20 years stood in the garbage and sewage that filled a concrete drainage channel.

When an ISIS kamikaze detonated a knapsack device just above the densely populated concrete canal, the evacuation was drastically reduced.

The Pentagon insisted that all of the deaths and injuries were caused by the explosive device and the balls scattered into the crowd. Although he acknowledged that there was gunfire from American and British forces, he stated that it was limited to three near-simultaneous bursts of gunfire – a burst of 25-30 warning shots by British troops and two bursts of gunfire by American troops directed at the alleged militants, which did not hit anyone.

US Central Command ordered a further review of the incident in September 2023 after criticism of its investigation’s findings, particularly over the possibility that the attack could have been prevented.

Those results, which were released on April 15, 2024, reaffirmed that a lone ISIS bomber carried out the attack and found that “new information obtained during the review did not significantly impact the findings of the November 2021 investigation,” and the review “recommended no change to these findings.” The investigation did not follow up on numerous reports by Afghan survivors of significant gunfire following the blast.

What appears in the recording

Except the footage on the Marine’s camera shows otherwise.

The GoPro footage flows almost continuously for several minutes before and after the explosion. It shows 11 episodes of gunfire after the explosion over the course of nearly four minutes. That’s significantly more than the three “near-simultaneous” bursts of gunfire that Pentagon investigations claimed took place.

A sustained burst of about 17 gunshots occurs just over 30 seconds after the bomb detonated, according to the video, and the other 10 bursts have two to three shots each. At no point are Marines seen firing on camera, and no one is visibly hit by gunfire. It is not clear where the attackers are or what they are shooting at.

Footage shows Marines, some on their first deployment in a war zone, running for cover from gunfire and suffocating from CS gas released when the explosion ripped a canister from a Marine’s bulletproof vest marine.

The television station verified the authenticity of the images with several experts, who concluded that they had not been edited. Contacted by CNN, Pentagon representatives said they would return with reactions after analyzing the images.