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A view from the scene after rockets were fired at the Afghan capital Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport on Monday. Casualties are feared, but no immediate details were available.

Haroon Sabawoon/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

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Haroon Sabawoon/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

A view from the scene after rockets were fired at the Afghan capital Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport on Monday. Casualties are feared, but no immediate details were available.

Haroon Sabawoon/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

• Ten members of single Afghan family were reportedly killed in a U.S. drone strike that U.S. officials say disrupted a plot to attack the Kabul airport.
• Evacuations are stepped up ahead of Tuesday withdrawal deadline.
• Biden attended a solemn ceremony at Dover Air Force Base as bodies of 13 U.S. service members killed in Kabul airport attack return home.

As rockets apparently aimed at Kabul’s airport rained down on a nearby neighborhood, U.S. forces scrambled to evacuate thousands of Afghan trying to flee ahead of a Tuesday deadline for the withdraw of all American troops.

The attack, reportedly involving several rockets, occurred as U.S. C-17 cargo jets continued operations to evacuate people desperate to escape from an Afghanistan that is now controlled by the hard-line Taliban.

“I was inside the house with my children and other family members, suddenly there were some blasts,” said Jaiuddin Khan, who lives near where the rockets hit Kabul’s Chahr-e-Shaheed neighborhood.

“We jumped into the house compound and lay on the ground,” he told The Associated Press.

U.S. Central Command said a drone strike on Sunday destroyed an Islamic State car bomb that posed an “imminent” threat to Kabul’s airport.

Ten Afghan civilians, including several children, were also killed in the strike, family members told The Washington Post. The dead, all part of the same extended family, were reportedly getting out of a car near the targeted vehicle.

One of the relatives told the Los Angeles Times that no fewer than seven children were among the dead.

NPR has not independently confirmed the reports.

Centcom said in its statement that it was “aware of reports of civilian casualties,” adding: “We would be deeply saddened by any potential loss of innocent life.”

U.S. Central Command spokesman Bill Urban said five rockets targeted the airport Monday but were intercepted by a U.S. defensive system known as a Counter Rocket, Artillery and Mortar System, or C-RAM. He said there were no U.S. casualties, according to AP.

The Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K) later claimed responsibility for the attack. The group’s Nasher News said on its Telegram channel that “By the grace of God Almighty, the soldiers of the Caliphate targeted Kabul International Airport with six Katyusha rockets.”

The attack follows a suicide bombing at the gates of the airport last week that killed 169 Afghans and 13 U.S. service members. ISIS-K, an affiliate of the widely known extremist group, claimed that attack as well, inviting swift retaliation in the form of a U.S. drone strike that killed two “high-profile” members of group and wounded a third, according to U.S. officials.

U.S. strikes back at ISIS-K

In a U.S. drone strike on Sunday, U.S. Central Command said it disrupted an “imminent threat to the airport.”

Urban, the Centcom spokesman, described the operation as a “self-defense unmanned over-the-horizon airstrike.”

“We are confident we successfully hit the target. Significant secondary explosions from the vehicle indicated the presence of a substantial amount of explosive material,” he said.

The two drone strikes on Friday and Sunday came after President Biden last week vowed to hunt down the perpetrators of Thursday’s airport attack. A day before the second U.S. strike, Biden warned that another attack on the airport was imminent and that he had directed U.S. commanders to “take every possible measure to prioritize force protection.”

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the lead up to the Aug. 31 troop withdrawal deadline was “the most dangerous time in an already extraordinarily dangerous mission these last couple of days.”

On Sunday, the president attended a ceremony at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware in which the flag-draped caskets containing bodies of the U.S. service members killed in last week’s attack in Kabul arrived aboard a C-17 plane.

Eleven Marines, one Army soldier and one member of the Navy were among the dead. In a statement on Saturday, the president called them “heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice in service of our highest American ideals and while saving the lives of others.”

“The 13 service members that we lost were heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice in service of our highest American ideals and while saving the lives of others,” Biden said in the statement. “Their bravery and selflessness has enabled more than 117,000 people at risk to reach safety thus far.”

Evacuations continuing as deadline approaches

As airport evacuations continued on Monday, the White House said that about 1,200 people were evacuated from Kabul in the 24 hours ending at 3 a.m. ET Monday.

“After Aug. 31, any person in the country who is an American citizen or a legal permanent resident, who is an SIV holder or otherwise, we will work to ensure their safe passage out of the country to the United States,” Sullivan told CNN on Sunday.