Mohammed Sharifullah was sentenced to 20 years in prison in Kabul for providing material support tied to the Abbey Gate bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport. The case centers on the Aug. 26, 2021, attack near Abbey Gate, where a lone suicide bomber detonated an improvised explosive device during evacuation operations.
The bombing killed 13 American service members and more than 160 Afghans. Sharifullah’s sentence closes one stage of a case built around the 2021 suicide bombing at the Hamid Karzai International Airport, even though the jury deadlocked on whether any deaths at the airport resulted from the conspiracy charge.
FBI interviews and the route search
Trial evidence said Sharifullah admitted during FBI interviews that he surveilled a possible route for the suicide bomber to Abbey Gate during the last days of the United States military’s presence in Afghanistan. A separate affidavit said: “ISIS-K members provided Sharifullah with a motorcycle, funds for a cell phone and a SIM card, and instructions to open an account on a particular social media platform to communicate with them during the attack operation.”
The same affidavit said: “After making these preparations for the attack, Sharifullah was tasked with scouting a route near Hamid Karzai International Airport for an attacker.” Those details place his role before the bombing itself, not at the blast site, and they helped define the conspiracy case that reached sentencing in April.
Abbey Gate and the verdict gap
The legal outcome is narrower than the public loss tied to the attack. Sharifullah was convicted in April of a conspiracy charge in the deadly 2021 suicide bombing at the airport, but jurors did not unanimously agree on whether the deaths at the airport resulted from the conspiracy. That split mattered because Sharifullah could have faced a possible life sentence if the jury had unanimously found that point.
The sentence now leaves the airport attack with one defendant punished, but not every legal question closed. The bombing remained linked to the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was completed days after the attack, and the Taliban retook control of the country after the withdrawal.
How the case now sits
For readers tracking the case, the practical effect is straightforward: Sharifullah now has a 20-year prison term, and the sentencing stage has ended on the record available here. The unresolved part is narrower and more exacting than the headline number itself — the jury’s deadlock on death causation meant the court did not move into the higher sentencing exposure that a unanimous finding could have supported.
A five years after Kabul report has also tracked how the city’s aftermath still shapes the wider conversation, but this case now turns on what the existing verdict supports and what the sentencing record already fixed. The last confirmed development here is the 20-year term itself.
