Joe Biden vows ‘we will hunt you down and make you pay’ after Kabul airport attack

President Joe Biden pauses as he speaks about the bombings at the Kabul airport that killed at least 12 US service members (Picture: AP)

President Joe Biden in his first address on a terror attack outside Kabul airport that killed at least a dozen American service members said the US will ‘hunt down’ those responsible.

‘We’re outraged as well as heartbroken. To those who carried out this attack… know this: We will not forgive, we will not forget,’ Biden said, speaking from the East Room of the White House on Thursday afternoon.

‘We will hunt you down and make you pay.’

Biden called the 12 US service members who died in the terror attack on Thursday ‘heroes’.

‘The lives we lost today were lives given in the service of liberty, service of security, service of others. In the service of others,’ he said. ‘The fallen this day are part of a great, noble company of heroes.’

Biden spoke a couple hours after Marine Corps General Frank McKenzie, head of US Central Command, confirmed that 12 US service members were killed and 15 others were injured in the bombings outside Kabul airport.

The president said that the US’s evacuation mission would not be deterred by the terror attack, reiterating McKenzie’s remarks from a Pentagon briefing earlier in the day.

‘America will not be intimidated,’ Biden said.

The president recognized that ‘there are individual groups of individuals — from women’s groups, NGOs and others — who have expressly indicated they want to get out’.

Biden also appeared to, for the first time, take responsibility for the messy withdrawal and resulting crisis in Afghanistan.

‘I bear responsibility for fundamentally all that’s happened of late,’ Biden said.

However, Biden immediately after also blamed former President Donald Trump for striking a deal with the Taliban to withdraw troops by a certain date.

‘You know as well as I do that the former president made a deal with the president,’ Biden said.

Biden doubled down on sticking to the August 31 deadline to pull all US troops out of Afghanistan, which fell to the Taliban last week.

‘I have never been of the view that we should be sacrificing American lives to try to establish a democratic government in Afghanistan a country that has never once in its entire history been a united country,’ Biden said.

The president’s last words in his news conference were: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, it was time to end a 20-year war’.

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