Most Americans killed in Kabul airport attack were '9/11 babies'

Washington

The Pentagon released their names and biographies onSaturday. They were born within a few years of the terrorist attacks on Sept.11, 2001, which led the United States to launch two lengthy and painful wars inAfghanistan and Iraq.

"They never knew a United States that was not at war,never lived in the world before the Department of Homeland Security and theTransportation Security Administration, a country without ID checks in officebuildings, metal detectors at schools, shoes X-rayed at the airport," aWashington Post report lamented.

"Our generation of Marines has been listening to theIraq/Afghan vets tell their war stories for years," Mallory Harrison, afriend of 23-year-old Marine Corps Sgt. Nicole L. Gee, one of the 13 dead,wrote on Facebook.

"It's easy for that war &those stories to soundlike something so distant -- something that you feel like you're never going toexperience since you joined the Marine Corps during peacetime," Harrisonsaid.

ISIS-K, a radical affiliate of the Islamic State active inAfghanistan, had claimed responsibility for the deadly attack on Thursday whichalso claimed some 170 Afghan lives outside the Kabul airport.

US President Joe Biden warned on Saturday that anotherattack against the airport could be "highly likely in the next 24-36hours."

"The situation on the ground continues to be extremelydangerous, and the threat of terrorist attacks on the airport remainshigh," Biden said in a statement.

Biden set August 31 as the deadline to end the US militarymission in Afghanistan. Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said Saturday thatthe US forces on the ground had begun to withdraw from the Kabul airport.

The White House said Saturday that around 111,900 people hadleft Afghanistan since August 14.