The mother of a U.S. soldier killed at the Kabul airport last week placed blame on the Biden administration for the deaths of her son and twelve other service members in an attack by ISIS-K.
Paula Knauss, mother of 23-year-old army staff sergeant Ryan Knauss, lamented the attack in an interview on Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle on Tuesday evening.
“There should have been a better way of helping our armed branches get those people who are American out safely, and still lose no man or woman in uniform or in Afghanistan,” Knauss said. “It should never have happened the way it did. Who is accountable for this? Who will stand up and say that they will be accountable for the death of 13 young men and women?”
Knauss also questioned why the Biden administration and military concentrated the last U.S. forces in Afghanistan at the Kabul airport, where crowds of people thronged the gates and Taliban fighters attempted to secure the area during the evacuation. In addition to the ISIS-K attack, the airport was targeted with rocket fire earlier this week, with a missile defense system shooting down incoming rockets.
“The president of the United States has the ability to help our troops,” Knauss said. “In all of our history, in all of the time that we have been fighting, where did you leave these men and women but at one airport, one location, one gate to funnel thousands through? And who did you trust? You trusted our enemy to allow who would come through.”
Knauss added, “No one has to have a military background to know that that was not going to go down well.”
Several other relatives of soldiers killed in the ISIS-K attack criticized President Biden after he met with grieving families on Sunday for the transfer of the soldiers’ remains.
“My dad and I did not want to speak to him,” the sister of one fallen Marine told the Washington Post. “You cannot kneel on our flag and pretend you care about our troops. You can’t f*** up as bad as he did and say you’re sorry.”