The Pakistan government acted on Central Intelligence Agency inputs and helped nab terrorist Sharifullah who was involved in the Abbey Gate bombing in Afghanistan during the 2021 withdrawal of American forces.
US President Donald Trump thanked Pakistan for this in his address to the United States Congress on Tuesday, March 4, 2025, night and said Sharifullah is being brought to America to face justice.
Sharifullah, also known as Jafar, is an ISIS-Khorasan member and directly responsible for the killing of 13 US soldiers and roughly 170 Afghans at the Hamid Karzai international airport's 'Abbey Gate' on August 26, 2021.
According to media reports, Sharifullah conducted surveillance on American checkpoints and passed on the information to ISIS-Khorasan.
ISIS-Khorasan, a terrorist organisation operating in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, is responsible for several terror attacks targeting civilians since 2015 and attacking US forces in Afghanistan during their occupation of the country.
A report in Axios (external link) stated, 'The CIA has been monitoring Sharifullah for some time but in recent days it received specific intelligence about his location.'
'The CIA provided the information to the Pakistani intelligence agency, which sent an elite unit that captured him near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border,' Axios reported.
According to CNN, Sharifullah is allegedly involved in two other attacks, the first being the attack on US embassy guards in Kabul in 2016 and the other one where he provided weapons and training for gunmen who carried out an attack on a Moscow club last year that killed 145 people.
Though ISIS claimed responsibility (external link) for the Moscow attack and released a statement through the ISIS affiliated news agency Amaq on Telegram, it did not provide any evidence to back its claim.
'As President Trump just announced, I can report that tonight the FBI, DoJ and CIA have extradited one of the terrorists responsible for the murder of the 13 American soldiers at Abbey Gate during the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal,' Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel posted on his X account on Tuesday night.
'One step closer to justice for these American heroes and their families.'
Axios quoting unnamed Pakistani and US officials said Sharifullah's arrest was a signal from Pakistan that it wants to engage with the Trump administration on intelligence and counterterrorism.
Ever since Donald Trump took oath as American president on January 20, 2025, there has been no direct contact with the Pakistani administration.
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