by Jerry Dunleavy
It remains to be seen whether the Virginia trial will provide some justice for the victims of the Abbey Gate attack nearly five years ago.
The recorded words of the alleged co-conspirator in the deadly Abbey Gate bombing were played for hours during his federal trial this week in northern Virginia, with the jury hearing the ISIS-K terrorist confess to conducting reconnaissance ahead of the Kabul airport attack, denying foreknowledge of it occurring and raising concerns about his detention by the Pakistanis.
The defendant, Mohammad Sharifullah, also known as “Jafar," has been charged with a single count of providing and conspiring to provide material support and resources to a designated foreign terrorist organization – ISIS-K – which resulted in death. He has pleaded not guilty to the charge in the Monday through Thursday trial that also included a lengthy list of government witnesses testifying.
The FBI has said that Sharifullah confessed to being involved in “route reconnaissance” in the lead-up to the Aug. 26, 2021, Abbey Gate attack, in which a suicide bomber detonated an explosive vest, killed 11 Marines, one Army soldier, one Navy corpsman, and an estimated 170 Afghan civilians, while wounding dozens of other U.S. troops and scores of Afghans in the crowd.
The FBI has also said Sharifullah also confessed to a role in facilitating a June 2016 suicide bombing attack that killed more than 10 guards tasked with protecting the Canadian embassy. The FBI has further said Sharifullah also claimed to have trained ISIS-K gunmen for a deadly attack on a concert hall in Moscow in 2024.
The Thursday testimony of FBI Special Agent Austin Price was especially critical, as he was one of the FBI agents who interviewed Sharifullah while he was in Pakistani custody and during the flight back to the United States.
Price recounted Sharifullah’s confessions to involvement in prior ISIS-K attacks – including a recon role ahead of the Abbey Gate attack. He declined to say whether Sharifullah’s capture and detention in Pakistan had been carried out by that country’s controversial Inter-Services Intelligence, known as the ISI.
Price was questioned Thursday by Assistant U.S. Attorney John Gibbs and Federal public defender Lauren Rosen.
Sharifullah has said the Pakistanis tried to force him into a false confession of being a mastermind of the attack and said last year that his pregnant wife and kids had also been detained by the Pakistanis.
The trial began Monday with jury selection and opening arguments in which the Justice Department said Sharifullah confessed to his role while the defense team insisted the DOJ had the wrong guy – and that the Taliban may have been involved.
The Justice Department rested its case Thursday, which was followed by the defense lawyers pushing the judge to acquit their client before the jury could consider a verdict.
Many of Sharifullah’s confessions — made to FBI investigators while in Pakistan, while on an airplane on the way to the U.S., and at an FBI office in northern Virginia – were played in court Thursday morning and early afternoon. The quotations in this article are drawn from transcriptions displayed on the courthouse screens or translations provided in court testimony.
Sharifullah's capture by Pakistani intelligence, with alleged help from U.S. spy agencies, was announced by President Donald Trump at a joint session of Congress in March. Trump has thanked Pakistan for “helping arrest this monster.” Trump also called Sharifullah “the top terrorist responsible for that atrocity” at the Kabal airport in which 13 U.S. service members died.
An ISIS-K suicide bomber named Abdul Rahman al-Logari – who had been freed by the Taliban from a prison at Bagram Air Base in mid-August 2021 – mere weeks after the U.S. abandoned the base – has been identified as having carried out the suicide attack at Abbey Gate.
The Pentagon under President Joe Biden had argued that the attack was not preventable – going so far as to say it still would have occurred even if the bomber had remained behind bars rather than being freed by the Taliban – despite a host of evidence indicating that the attack did not have to happen the way it did.
The FBI has said Sharifullah was read his "Miranda rights" by the FBI in March and that he proceeded to tell them he was recruited into ISIS-K around 2016. The FBI said Sharifullah was imprisoned in Afghanistan from approximately 2019 until two weeks before the Kabul airport attack.
The bureau has said Sharifullah was contacted by another ISIS-K member upon being freed from prison and that the member connected him with the plot to attack U.S. forces at the airport. The bureau said ISIS-K members provided Sharifullah with a motorcycle, funds for a cell phone and instructions on using social media to communicate with them in the lead-up to the attack.
Sharifullah’s arrest by the Pakistanis
Sharifullah recounted last year that he had been arrested by Pakistani authorities days before the FBI showed up in Pakistan. He said that when the Pakistanis came to arrest him at his home in Balochistan, he sent a warning message to ISIS-K leaders, deleted his Telegram, and did a factory reset of his phone.
The Pakistanis eventually handed over Sharifullah’s seized phones to the FBI.
Price said, in early March last year, the FBI conducted two interviews of Sharifullah in Pakistan, two FBI interviews on the plane ride to the U.S., and one interview with the bureau in northern Virginia. The FBI repeatedly Mirandized the terrorist and stressed that it did not matter what the Pakistanis had told him, but rather that all the U.S. cared about was the truth.
Price also told the defense lawyer during questioning that, during their first interview in Pakistan, his bureau partner told Sharifullah that the FBI was working at the behest of the “detaining service” – presumably the Pakistani ISI. Price told the defense attorney that, during the second interview, his partner told Sharifullah that that had been incorrect.
The FBI stayed at a hotel near a Pakistani air base and Sharifullah appears to have been held at another nearby Pakistani military base.
The FBI agent told the defense lawyer that he did not review any statements Sharifullah gave to the Pakistanis, and that he does not know what the Pakistanis told the ISIS-K member.
While in Pakistan, Sharifullah asked the FBI for a safe place for his family. The FBI agent said Shairrifullah passed a note to the FBI agents about two hours into his first interview in Pakistan.
The note said that “these guys want to make me confess” that when he was freed by the Taliban from Pul-e-Charkhi prison in Kabul he linked up with ISIS-K leaders and “designed the attack on the Kabul airport.”
Sharifullah’s note added that “this is not true” and asked the FBI to “please help.”
He claimed the Pakistani ISI made him make a videotape and told him to say that he and Logari had drafted a suicide bombing plan in jail. But Sharifullah said Logari had previously been arrested for attempting a suicide bombing plot in India, and so he didn’t need him to come up with a suicide bombing idea.
“I’m glad I’m away from those guys … They’re not humans,” Sharifullah told the FBI of the Pakistanis on the plane ride to the U.S.
The FBI agent said Sharifullah seemed “very smart” and “very quick” during the interviews, and that “he seemed very street smart.”
“He was always trying to stay one step ahead of me regarding questions on HKIA,” Price said.
The FBI agent would not answer the defense team’s questions about whether the Pakistani ISI was involved in arresting Sharifullah. The judge told the jury that the agent could refuse to disclose classified information, but that that could give rise to an “inference” that the answer would be favorable to the defendant.
When asked by the defense lawyer if Sharifullah’s wife is still in ISI custody, Price said that the answer was both classified and that he didn’t know.
When asked whether he learned in October that Sharifullah’s wife is in ISI custody, the agent again said the answer was classified, and the judge again repeated that the jury could infer that the answer might help the defendant.
The agent told the defense lawyer that the FBI had sent requests to Pakistan in April 2025, July 2025 and October 2025, asking the Pakistani government to provide a witness to testify about Sharifullah’s confinement and treatment and that the Pakistanis had not done so.
Price said that “I have no idea” if Sharifullah’s family is still detained by the Pakistanis.
The agent also told the defense team that, while in Pakistan, Sharifullah had told the FBI agents to “help me for Allah’s sake” but that this request was never interpreted for Price, so he didn’t know Sharifullah had said that. Sharifullah had also told the FBI agents in Pakistan that he had been “hit,” but again, that was not translated for Price at the time and thus he had not been aware of it.
Sharifullah and the killing of thirteen Americans at Abbey Gate
Sharifullah admitted to a limited role in the lead up to ISIS-K’s deadly Abbey Gate attack.
“They just told me to observe and make sure there were no Taliban checkpoints,” Sharifullah said of his taking from ISIS-K.
The FBI agent asked Sharifullah to say which one, between the Americans or the Taliban, that ISIS-K would rather attack.
“Allah knows,” Sharifullah said, though likely knowing that ISIS-K would target the U.S. Marines at Abbey Gate rather than the Taliban.
Sharifullah said that “the decision is not in my hand” but rather in the hands of ISIS-K leadership, and that “both of them [the U.S. and the Talibs] to my leadership are the same.”
Sharifullah claimed his leadership did not tell him where the exact target at the Kabul airport was, who the exact target was, or how the attack would be conducted, whether a suicide vest, mines, or another method.
He claimed he was unaware of whom the target might be, suggesting he thought it might be the Taliban or the Afghan Zero Units.
“The gathering of the Taliban were there” and so he supposedly thought the Taliban might be a target, and not the Americans – which was not the case. He also claimed he didn’t think about the possibility that Americans would be killed in an ISIS-K attack.
Sharifullah was shown an aerial photo of HKIA and the surrounding neighborhood, and he described what he allegedly did for ISIS-K near the Kabul airport in the lead-up to the attack.
Sharifullah said he was on a motorcycle and drove on a road somewhat parallel to the airport until he came to a traffic circle. If he had turned left and headed north, he would have run into the Taliban and the crowds surrounding the Kabul airfield, but he says he turned right and headed south into the city instead.
He said his job was to look for checkpoints up to that traffic circle and then leave. He said that once he reached the traffic circle he talked on his phone to his boss, who told him to head away from the airport. Sharifullah said he wasn’t aware of another ISIS-K member carrying on the recon up to the gate after him.
Sharifullah acknowledged that he gave up info on fellow ISIS-K members to the Afghan National Directorate of Security while in prison at Pul-e-Charkhi near Kabul years before, and so ISIS-K leadership in 2021 was not happy with him and did not trust him much.
He said that even if ISIS-K leadership had trusted him, they would not have given him a big important job because he had just gotten out of prison. However, ISIS-K selected Logari, who had just been freed from Bagram, as the suicide bomber who struck Abbey Gate.
Sharifullah swore to Allah that he was only tasked to surveil a road near the airport, but that he didn’t know there would be an attack.
He also said that when doing recon and making sure a path is clear, an attacker often follows right behind you. He said that when making sure that there was no Taliban checkpoint, an attack should have occurred twenty minutes or so later, and so he was surprised when the bombing didn’t happen until hours later.
He suspected maybe ISIS-K had been testing him, or that ISIS-K did another follow-up recon mission after he had done his and prior to the attack.
Sharifullah also first tried to claim that he had family members killed by Marines after the Abbey Gate attack, but then claimed that it was unspecified neighbors of his who had been killed.
Sharifullah said the “emirs in Kabul” – the ISIS-K leaders in the Afghan capital – make decisions about what to strike and claimed he didn’t know who carried out the attack.
He pointed to “Engineer Shahab” and “Nawab” – ISIS-K top leader Sanaullah Ghafari and Kabul area ISIS-K commander Qari Nawab – as the men who likely made the Abbey Gate decision, saying those two “must have been aware.”
Sharifullah said in the recordings that he had met with Ghafari, also known as Shahab al-Muhajir, in the lead up to a terrorist attack back in 2016.
The State Department’s Rewards for Justice lists a reward of $10 million for information on Ghafari.
“In June 2020, ISIS core leadership appointed al-Muhajir, also known as Sanaullah Ghafari, to be the leader of ISIS-K, a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization,” the rewards page says. “An ISIS communiqué announcing his appointment described al-Muhajir as an experienced military leader and one of ISIS-K’s ‘urban lions’ in Kabul who has been involved in guerrilla operations and the planning of suicide and complex attacks.”
The State Department adds that Ghafari “is responsible for approving all ISIS-K operations throughout Afghanistan and arranging funding to conduct operations.”
Sharifullah also said that in the past he had transported multiple suicide bombers, and that he could see the bombs under their clothes and the detonators in their hands. He also acknowledged being at Pul-e-Charkhi prison at the same time as Logari, but claimed Logari was in the first ring and that he was in the second.
The defense lawyer later asked Price whether it was true that there was “no evidence presented [during the trial] that Mr. Sharifullah was a mastermind” of the Abbey Gate attack, and the agent replied, “Correct.”
The possibility of Taliban involvement in the Abbey Gate attack
Gibbs, the DOJ attorney, asked Price what credible information the FBI agent had seen that the Taliban was behind the Abbey Gate attack.
Rosen immediately objected, and Judge Anthony Trenga sustained the objection, so the agent was not able to answer.
The UN Sanctions Monitoring Team said in 2020 that some countries noted that most ISIS-K attacks include “involvement, facilitation, or the provision of technical assistance” by the Haqqani Network, and that ISIS-K “lacked the capability to launch complex attacks in Kabul on its own” without Haqqani help. The UN team also said it had “viewed communication intercepts in the wake of attacks that were claimed by ISIS-K that were traceable to known members of the Haqqani Network.”
The UN team said that “some countries have reported tactical or commander-level collaboration between ISIL-K and the Haqqani Network.” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said that “we strongly reject this propaganda” and that “we have nothing in common (and don’t operate cells) with Daesh [ISIS-K].”
The UN monitoring team said in 2021 that one nation said that Ghafari was “previously a mid-level commander in the Haqqani Network” and that he continued to maintain cooperation with the Haqqanis. One UN member state said in June 2021 that ISIS-K leader Ghafari’s ongoing relationship with the Haqqanis provided ISIS-K with “key expertise and access to [attack] networks.”
Gen. Austin Scott Miller, the commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan through July 2021, told Congress in 2024 that “I could never verify a Haqqani-ISIS nexus.”
West Point’s Counterterrorism Center published an article in 2022 stating that Ghafari had joined “Taliban factions affiliated with the Haqqani network” and “had close links to the Haqqani network’s senior commanders.”
Canadian embassy attack and Moscow concert hall mass shooting
Sharifullah said he had helped transport the suicide bomber Irfan or Irfanullah to help him target the Canadian embassy guards in 2016.
“The final decision is made by our superiors," he said. "They give us the final target."
Sharifullah said that the bus was not armored, and “when we saw that it was a soft target. ... We said that it would be effective and said let’s do it.” His ISIS-K superiors then allegedly approved it.
Sharifullah said that when he joined ISIS-K, he pledged allegiance to ISIS’s alleged caliph Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, who has since been killed by U.S. special forces, and to ISIS-K leader Dr. Naqib or Dr. Naqibullah, who “brought me under his influence.”
Sharifullah said he met with Ghafari, Naqib, and others when he and other ISIS-K members were present at a strategy meeting on targeting the bus.
“Dr. Naqib” and others in ISIS-K “leadership” had approved the bus attack, he said. Naqib was an ISIS-K deputy leader who was later eventually killed in a U.S. air strike in 2019.
Sharifullah also told FBI agents in northern Virginia that he was tasked to help with the Moscow attack in 2024. He said this included recruiting a friend to record a video firing an AK-47 on a mountain.
He said ISIS-K member Abu Manzar lived in Moscow and prepared four gunmen for the attack, and despite Sharifullah saying he helped with the attack planning, he also said he didn’t know the specifics of the attack beforehand.
DOJ called a long string of witnesses to testify against Sharifullah
The DOJ called two former Nepalese guards for the Canadian embassy to the stand, where they recounted the suicide attack against their bus in 2016.
Georgetown University professor and terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman also testified for the government and discussed the history of ISIS-K.
British Warrant Officer Benjamin Wright also testified this week, where he testified about ferrying wire twists from the Afghan National Directorate of Security to a U.S. lab at Bagram.
Luke Biggs, a longtime veteran of U.S. Special Operations Command who works on an evidence exploitation team, also testified about Sharifullah.
Marine Cpl. Kelsee Lainhart, who served at HKIA and who was friends with and worked alongside Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee — one of the thirteen Americans killed at Abbey Gate – also testified about her experiences at HKIA. Lainhart received serious spinal cord injuries from the blast, and was treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center
Other U.S. service members at Abbey Gate, along with U.S. government investigators who looked into the bombing also testified.
It was also revealed in court that Sharifullah’s business card was also found on a hard drive during a raid of an ISIS-K safehouse in 2019.
Freelance journalist Agnieszka Pikulicka-Wilczewska also testified about an interview she conducted with Sharifullah in 2020 when he was imprisoned in Afghanistan.
“As a Muslim, I was outraged when Americans were shooting the Quran in Bagram. In France, the Quran was burned many times. This is our right to fight against these people. From the very first day, I wanted to kill the Americans and the infidels,” Sharifullah told Al Jazeera in 2020.
Sharifullah had told the outlet that one of his jobs inside ISIS-K was to “transport explosives for suicide bombers on motorcycles and planting them in different places [within Kabul].”
A number of Abbey Gate Gold Star family members were present in the courtroom gallery all week to watch the trial proceedings.
Jerry Dunleavy
Source: https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/sharifullah-confessed-abbey-gate-recon-denied-foreknowledge-raised-concerns
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